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In this episode of the Pluralist Points podcast, Ben Klutsey, the executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, speaks with Ilana Redstone, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about her new book, “The Certainty Trap: Why We Need To Question Ourselves More—and How We Can Judge Others Less.” They discuss why we ascribe ill intent to others, shortcomings of the term “critical thinking,” the role of education in escaping the certainty trap and much more.
BENJAMIN KLUTSEY: Thank you for joining Pluralist Points [ [link removed] ]. Today we have Ilana Redstone [ [link removed] ]. She’s our second-time guest [ [link removed] ] today. She’s a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, co-founder of the Mill Institute [ [link removed] ] at UATX, formerly a fellow in our Pluralism and Civil Exchange program [ [link removed] ] at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She’s creator of Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes [ [link removed] ], a video series. She’s also the author of the book “The Certainty Trap: Why We Need To Question Ourselves More—and How We Can Judge Others Less [ [link removed] ],” which is the subject of our conversation today.
Thanks, Ilana, for joining us.
ILANA REDSTONE: Oh, thanks so much for having me, Ben. It’s a pleasure.
Understanding Complexity
KLUTSEY: Now, before we get into what the certainty trap is, you spend a bit of time in the book reflecting on the complexity of life and the idea that many things aren’t as simple as we might think, which in some ways is the first proposition to begin with in order to start uncovering the certainty trap.
For you, where did this appreciation come from? Was that from your time as a Peace Corps volunteer? Talk a little bit about that.
REDSTONE: Yes. It’s an interesting question. I think it probably is a combination of things. I think to some extent it’s probably just how I’m wired. We all vary in different ways in that respect. I think to some extent it’s how I was wired; I think to some extent it’s probably childhood stuff, which I will spare this audience. And I think there’s a big piece of it that, like what you said, is about Peace Corps.
Peace Corps—that’s obviously a significant experience, as well as other traveling. Because traveling and living outside of your own country, living outside of your own—it may be the case it doesn’t even have to be outside your own country, but just outside your own culture—and understanding that the world is really full of people just trying to do the best they can. And that applies to people that you hate politically, too.
KLUTSEY: [laughs] That’s right, that’s right.
Now, is complexity uncomfortable? When politicians serve up simple answers, those things seem to resonate with people a lot. It just makes me wonder about people’s level of comfort with complexity.
REDSTONE: It’s a good question. I think that to some extent, yes, complexity—we seek patterns. We have this very strong instinct to both seek patterns, to simplify information, and—sort of the corollary to what you’re saying—is to be tribal and to divide. Those are all different either inputs or consequences of oversimplification.
I do think it’s uncomfortable. I was giving a talk yesterday morning and a similar point came up. Basically, what I’m asking people to do in “The Certainty Trap” and question and clarify our thinking—it goes against a pretty strong and basic human instinct to not do that, to categorize people, to generalize, to make assumptions.
This is why in the book I say, at some level, in order for this to matter, you have to care about something more than you care about being right. There’s really two main candidates for that. One is you just really want to understand as best you can, or as best we can, what’s true about the world. The other is (and I’m sure we’ll talk about this) is because it has all kinds of implications for democracy and our ability to self-govern.
Philosophy in Practice
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, I came away from the book seeing this as a book of practical philosophy.
REDSTONE: I love it.
KLUTSEY: I don’t know if you’ve gotten this kind of feedback, but your Ph.D. is in demography and sociology. Is philosophy part of your background?
REDSTONE: No, it’s not. And I don’t have any of the bona fides to prove myself as a philosopher. But I think I have philosophy—
KLUTSEY: You’re a natural philosopher.
REDSTONE: I have philosophy envy. No, that’s a compliment, so thank you.
There’s a huge part—this is the practical implication. What I see the book as, in some ways, is connecting these different parts, because you’re right that there are some very philosophically interesting places that you can go when you start to challenge certainty.
Just going back to this example that I mentioned about this person yesterday who said this: “We’re going against this very basic instinct.” Which—he’s right; he was right to bring up the point. I was like, “If you follow that thread, it raises some very interesting questions about, OK, if we can’t overcome this instinct to be tribal, to see things categorically, then is democracy actually sustainable in the long term?” That’s not a question I try to answer in the book. I don’t think I could, but it does raise questions.
Similarly, if you raise questions about certainty, you can—a lot of what I talk about in the book is treating our knowledge as provisional rather than definitive. Again, you can get into some very philosophically interesting places about the nature of reality and what we understand about the world.
I find that stuff really interesting. I also understand that there are some people who will be interested in the book really because of what it means for our political discourse. If the question is, Are there philosophical questions that are raised? Absolutely. I think they’re fascinating. Even if they’re not interesting to you, to a reader, you could be drawn to the book simply because of the implications for how we think and communicate with other people.
KLUTSEY: Yes. As someone who studied philosophy in college, I enjoyed it—
REDSTONE: Oh, I didn’t realize that. OK.
KLUTSEY: [laughs] I enjoyed it thoroughly.
REDSTONE: Do you think I could be an honorary member?
KLUTSEY: Of course, of course. [laughs]
REDSTONE: Nice.
Defining the Certainty Trap
KLUTSEY: Now, what is the certainty trap?
REDSTONE: The best way to describe the certainty trap, I think, is by—and I’ve given this a lot of thought in terms of the simplest way to describe it—is, I think, how it feels when we’re in it. When we’re in the certainty trap, we tend to demonize, dismiss and become contemptuous of people who disagree. Again, this is the philosophical piece. You could make a more general claim, but I’m mostly focusing on particularly around heated and contentious issues.
A couple of these things I’ve already said: We tend to treat our knowledge as definitive instead of provisional, which leads us to draw conclusions and then judge people who disagree, judge harshly people who disagree. The other thing that certainty does: There’s two arguments or two—maybe not arguments, but two concerns that I’ll often hear. One is, “Oh, well, if you’re saying that we have to leave certainty behind, does that then mean that any explanation is as good as any other?” In other words, if I’m going to avoid the certainty trap, I have to go join the flat-earthers over there or something. (Again, I’m able to go into this in a lot more detail in the book.) That’s not what this is saying.
What this is saying is that what we understand about the world is actually in the space of confidence and not certainty. You can and should have a conversation about what moves us along a spectrum of confidence in what we understand about the world. But it’s not the same thing as saying everything that we know—whether the earth is flat or spheroid—is a coin flip. That’s not what it’s saying.
Then the other thing that certainty does is, it leads us to be really sloppy in our thinking. One concern that I often get is, “Does this mean I have to believe really weird things?” The answer’s no. The other concern that I often get is, “If you’re saying that certainty is a trap—” (And also in the book I get to go into more detail: Not all certainty is considered a trap, at least in my definition.) The concern is, “Can we then not say this is good, this is bad; this is right, this is wrong?” That’s the other concern that I often get. The answer to that is also no, because fundamentally the book is not making a moral argument.
What I’m saying in the book is, all of those claims that we make about “this is good, this is bad”: Those are all based on assumptions and values and beliefs and principles that what certainty does is, it keeps us from making them explicit. Nobody else gets to question them. We don’t get to have a conversation about them.
An easy example would be (and I think I use this example in the book) if I’m looking out the window and I see someone stealing a car, and Ben, you’re standing next to me looking out the window, and let’s say I have reason to believe that this person is stealing a car—it’s not theirs. I say, “My God. Ben, can you believe that guy?” My expectation is that you’re going to have the same sort of “holy crap” reaction as I do because you share my value that stealing is wrong. Now, with something like stealing, that’s sufficiently universal that it’s probably not a bad assumption. When it comes to issues around race, gender, immigration, abortion, gun control, etc., we make those same assumptions, and we don’t make our thinking clear.
Part of avoiding certainty isn’t saying that we can’t declare this bad and this good. We absolutely can. What we need to do is to be really clear about what our standards are, what we’re trying to optimize for, what our goals are and what our values are. Understanding that someone else gets to challenge those and criticize them, even though you don’t have to let them go, but other people get to question and challenge them.
Knowledge and Doubt
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, one of the things I was thinking about too is that certainty doesn’t get you to truth. So are you helping people understand that, if you really want to know, you should be more doubtful? Or maybe have some level of skepticism? Which is also, maybe, I guess a bit of a paradox.
REDSTONE: Yes: I think there’s always value in doubting our knowledge. In fact, I was writing this in a graph yesterday, where if you think of a—sometimes I find these visual aids really helpful. If you think of just the upper-right quadrant of a Cartesian plane [ [link removed] ], and on the y-axis, you have—what was it? It was how much we still don’t understand about the world. The wording’s a little weird because it’s in the negative, but how much we still don’t understand about the world. The lower you are on the y-axis, the more we actually know—the less we don’t understand. Does that make sense?
KLUTSEY: Yes.
REDSTONE: On the x-axis is time. What you get is this curve that goes like this [a downward-sloping curve]. This is coming to your question about truth. That’s an asymptote. What you still don’t understand about the world never gets to zero. If getting to that line would be Truth with a capital T, you can get closer and closer, but you never actually get there.
There’s no point when we are trying to understand the world where—it’s not a soccer game where there’s a final whistle, the ref blows the whistle three times at the end of the game and then you’re done. And everybody walks off the field and we’re like, “Well, that was great.” It doesn’t end. There can always be something that we learn tomorrow that upends everything that we think we know today.
Three Fallacies
KLUTSEY: Really interesting.
Now, drilling a little bit deeper, you touch on three fallacies that help you slip further and further into the certainty trap. The first one is the settled-question fallacy. Can you unpack that for us?
REDSTONE: Yes, so the settled-question fallacy is the first place that we end up. The way I put it before was treating our knowledge as definitive rather than provisional. That’s the one big subcategory of the settled-question fallacy. In terms of contentious issues, it might be the conclusions that we draw about the relationship between gender and biology or the causes of and solutions to inequality—something like that. These might be examples.
The settled-question fallacy can also look like treating our preferred solution as though it’s all upsides and no downsides—there are no costs to it. That can be also treating something as settled. Treating a question about a heated issue as though the answers are obvious and clear. That’s part of the settled-question fallacy. That’s oftentimes the first place where we get into trouble.
KLUTSEY: Then the other one is the fallacy of equal knowledge. Help us understand that.
REDSTONE: Yes. Once we start treating something as certain, or once we let certainty make our thinking sloppy, and then when we encounter disagreement, if we’re feeling charitable—which we don’t always feel charitable (God knows I don’t)—if we’re feeling charitable, a lot of times what we’ll say is something like, “Well, that other person, they have the wrong opinion—” That’s because, let’s say, it’s some opinion I object to— “because they have the wrong information. If they just knew what I knew and/or if they just had the right information, they would have the right opinion.”
I want to be really clear that pointing that out is not the same thing as saying that information doesn’t matter, that education doesn’t matter. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m making a narrower claim, which is this assumption that if we all had the same information about … policing, that we would all be of the same opinion. It’s simply not true. That’s what the fallacy of equal knowledge is pointing to.
KLUTSEY: Yes. Then, finally, the fallacy of known intent.
REDSTONE: Yes. The third one is the fallacy of known intent. The fallacy of known intent is where we end up. Sometimes we can go straight there. It’s also where we end up when the fallacy of equal knowledge, when that sort of falls apart. The reason the fallacy of equal knowledge can fall apart—there’s two main reasons. One is, let’s say I’m having a conversation with somebody about, I don’t know, let’s say gun control, and they have, in my view, the wrong opinion. There’s two ways that this can fall apart.
One is they demonstrate an adequate command of whatever the information is about gun control. In other words, they know what they’re talking about. They’ve done some reading, whatever. They demonstrate some level of being informed. I can’t then say, “Well, your problem is that you don’t have the right information.” That’s one possibility. The other is that as I’m talking to this person, I spend whatever—15, 20, 30 minutes—unloading my wisdom on them, and they still don’t change their mind.
Now, the fallacy of known intent is one of these things has happened, or I’ve bypassed the fallacy of equal knowledge altogether, and now I’m just going to draw a conclusion about your intent. This is what certainty does, is if there’s no other possible explanation for something, then why would anyone disagree? That comes from certainty. What we didn’t talk about is that certainty drives—it’s the thing that drives our sense of moral outrage and righteous indignation and, by extension, contempt. That all has implications for how we communicate with one another.
Assuming Bad Intentions
KLUTSEY: Yes. Is that where some of the cancel culture issues come from? Where someone would say, “Your intent—it couldn’t possibly be a positive one because you hold this view, so you just should be canceled or ostracized,” or what have you.
REDSTONE: Yes. The certainty trap, the problem of certainty—whether you want to use my name or whether you want to call it something else—you can trace problems of cancel culture, concerns over free speech, lack of viewpoint diversity in higher education, “indoctrination” in K‑12 schools. I’m not saying it’s the single explanation, but it can all be traced to certainty—all of it. And it has implications for how we solve that as well, for how we address those problems.
With respect to cancel culture, it’s interesting: One of the questions that I often hear come up when people talk about cancel culture is this question of like, “Well, is it real? Is it really a problem, or is it just that people are being held accountable for bad behavior?” Relatedly, “Does anyone ever really get hurt by it?” We’ll see these examples of this famous person or that famous person who gets canceled, and then they have their own Netflix special 10 months later. They’re clearly doing fine. This becomes an argument about, like, “Well, is it a problem? Is it something that we should be concerned about, or is this just a bunch of tempest in a teapot, made up?”
Coming at this through the lens of the certainty trap, I’m asking a really different question, which is, “OK—” And we’d have to talk about specific instances, but in many of the cases where we talk about people being canceled, “did the person actually do anything wrong in the first place?” How do we think about those social transgressions in the first place? I’m not focused on, like, “Is it bad enough? Did this person get their $10 million or $20 million for the next Netflix special—” Whatever; I don’t care. It’s a different question about how are we even coming to judgments about these things. Especially when there’s another possible way to see it.
Ultimately, avoiding the certainty trap, you have two choices. One is commitment to thinking through. Much of the time, particularly with heated issues, when we commit to thinking through, asking ourselves the question, “Is there a version of this position that I object to that would make sense to me?” By “make sense,” I mean that would avoid all of the fallacies we just described: the settled-question fallacy, fallacy of equal knowledge and the fallacy of known intent. Is there a version?
Much of the time, the answer is yes. Much of the time—I don’t know percentages, but a lot of the time, the answer is yes. In a second I’ll get to what happens when the answer is no. When the answer is yes—let’s say there’s this opinion that I object to. Let’s say it’s somebody who’s opposed to affirmative action. Let’s say I have, in my mind, different explanations for why this person might be opposed to affirmative action. One of them is they’re racist. (I’m just going to use two explanations.) One of them is they’re racist, and the other one is this other explanation that I’ve come up with in my mind about why someone could be opposed to affirmative action. I’m making this up—they could think that it’s not the right way to allocate resources based on race, that it leads to more problems that it creates, whatever.
It’s not about whether I necessarily agree with it or not. I’m just thinking through, is there a version of this argument? Now I have multiple possible explanations. It’s a separate question about how likely, for any given person who, in this example, is opposed to affirmative action, how likely is this explanation versus this explanation? That’s a totally separate question. But now that I have multiple possibilities on the table, it’s very hard for me to say, “Well, there’s no chance—the probability is zero—that it’s this principled explanation over here.” If there’s some chance that it’s not the hate-filled explanation (which is also on the table), then it becomes much harder to become contemptuous, to view that person as harshly, because you know there’s another possible way to see it.
In the case where there’s no possible way to see the thing—a lot of times I’ll get examples like slavery or the Holocaust. Actually, someone used—again, this talk yesterday morning used the example of pedophilia. These things where there’s no version of it that would make sense to you by the definition of making sense. Then what you’re doing is, your commitment in the interest of avoiding the certainty trap is to be really clear about what principle or what value—you’re bumping up against something. If there’s no version that you can come up with that makes sense to you, it’s because you’re bumping up against something that you hit bedrock on. Your commitment then is to be really clear about naming that and letting someone else question it, but partly just naming it.
Does that make sense?
KLUTSEY: Yes, it does, it does.
What Is Critical Thinking?
KLUTSEY: The set of items you’ve laid out and the fallacies that you’ve laid out—in the book, you mentioned that these things—you would previously consider these things as part of critical thinking, but you have since moved away from describing these things as critical thinking. Can you talk about why that is the case?
REDSTONE: Yes: I don’t have anything against critical thinking; I just think it’s really poorly defined. It’s one of these things—like, if you ask educators or anyone—ask parents, ask educators, ask students (if they’re old enough to understand what the question means), no one says that, “You know, what the world really needs is less critical thinking.” In that sense, I would put it in the similar category: critical thinking, intellectual humility and curiosity. All of these things are important. I would say all of them—again, assuming we can define them in a way that’s clear.
The problem becomes that we’re not very good at recognizing when we’re not doing these things. None of us are. By the time you realize—for any of us, we realize that, “Wow, are we thinking critically about this? Are we challenging our own thinking? Are we being intellectually humble? Are we being sufficiently curious?” By the time you’re asking yourself that question, you’re halfway there. By thinking in terms of certainty and the certainty trap, what I’m saying is, “Nope, you can’t wait for your own sense that you’re lacking these things.” We’re just not good at it.
You can pay attention to that sense that the answers are easy, that the other person’s an idiot, a bigot, a snowflake, whatever. That’s the thing that you’re paying attention to. That’s why this work, avoiding the certainty trap, is just as relevant—it’s not actually about interactions; it’s about thinking. It’s just as relevant if you’re in a room by yourself as it is if you are talking to someone else. The interactions matter—the idea here is that they are the outgrowth. They will improve when we transform the thinking.
Civil Discourse Work
KLUTSEY: Yes. That was actually a great segue to my next question, which is that interactions—because I think of this work as a partial critique of a lot of this civil discourse work, which we are a part of. We have the Pluralist Lab [ [link removed] ] and things that we do to facilitate conversations across divides and differences. I think in the book, you mentioned that this is more aesthetic, but the certainty trap goes beyond that. I guess that’s where the difference is—
REDSTONE: Yes. I’m obviously a huge supporter of the Pluralist Lab and Mercatus. What I would say is that the work on civil discourse—it’s necessary but not sufficient, in the sense that you could have a roomful of people following the norms of civil discourse and still (sorry to use my language)—and still stuck in the certainty trap.
Let me give you one way to think about it in terms of how we think about democracy and social stability, particularly as we go towards an election. (But this is true generally; it’s not just true in an election year.) We tend to think about … Let me just back up. This is going to sound like I’m going off on a tangent, but I’m going to bring it back right to where we were.
KLUTSEY: Go for it.
REDSTONE: We tend to think about threats to democracy as coming from the left or the right politically, which leads to things like, if you’re on the left, then you see the threats to democracy as largely embodied in Donald Trump—but more specifically election denial or the refusal to peacefully transfer power or whatever gets put on that list. If you’re on the right, you tend to see it as wokeness, censorship, free speech—all of the concerns that get brought up around wokeness. (Again, that’s another poorly defined term, but it’s a convenient shorthand.) That’s how we tend to see threats to democracy.
That does two things. One of the things that it does is, it leads us to forget or not pay attention to the fact that in a democracy, all of these are intertwined, and that the parties are intertwined and that there are feedback loops, which is related to the second thing that that framing does, is it allows us to ignore our own role in creating the situation that we’re in. Neither of those things are good.
So we need a model (and this is where we’re getting back to the certainty trap stuff)—we need a model that actually reflects the situation that we’re in and reflects how a stable democracy actually needs to function. That model—this is going to be in the next book; it wasn’t in the “Certainty Trap” book. If you think of three blocks forming a tower, if any of the blocks—if the integrity is disrupted or destroyed on any of the blocks, the whole thing can come down. The tower is the democratic stability. The block at the top is what you might think of as the machinery of democracy. We’re talking about free and fair elections; we’re talking about limits on executive power, the separation of powers, all of these things that make a democracy a democracy in an almost mechanical sense. (I don’t mean that in any minimizing way.)
Right below that is a commitment to political pluralism. None of the stuff at the top matters if we don’t have a commitment to political pluralism. Why should I care about your free speech rights if I have no commitment to political pluralism? A lot of organizations and a lot of the work on civil discourse, viewpoint diversity, etc. is focused on reinvigorating that middle level, that level about renewing and reinvigorating our commitment to political pluralism. That clearly matters.
There’s one block underneath it. The block underneath it is the absence of contempt for people who disagree. You might think of it as neutrality. You might think of it as tolerance. Tolerance, especially, tends to be a loaded word. For lack of a better word, the way I think of it is the lack of contempt for people who disagree. That’s where the certainty trap is focused, is on that bottom block.
I told you it was going to seem like a tangent and I was going to bring it back. That’s how I think about those differences.
Escaping the Trap
KLUTSEY: Excellent, excellent. Thank you for going through that.
So what happens when we’re no longer in the certainty trap? Are we a less polarized nation as a result?
REDSTONE: Yes, it’s an interesting question. If I could wave my magic wand, what would that look like? Would it be just a bunch of people wandering around in total paralysis, unable to make a decision?
KLUTSEY: [laughs]
REDSTONE: No.
KLUTSEY: Hope not.
REDSTONE: I don’t think—not that that’s what you’re saying.
It’s an interesting question. I have probably only half of an answer. I’m under no illusion that this book is going to come out on September 2, and 340 million or 330 million people (whatever we are right now), it’s like, oh, great, done. I don’t think that’s actually necessary to end up in a better place than we are now, fortunately. This is where my answer is probably only half of an answer. There’s some critical mass. I don’t know what the number is. I don’t know what the percentage is.
Maybe it’s not a straight-up percentage; maybe it’s primarily about higher education and the media. I’m not totally sure because we’re not there yet. I heard someone talk the other day—I heard someone use this comparison [ [link removed] ] about when people would worry about things that are too far down the road, it was like worrying about overpopulation on Mars. I don’t know who said that. It sounds like an Elon Musk thing, but I don’t know if it was him.
A critical mass of shifting out of the problem of certainty: Clearly, the way we are now—there’s a whole chapter in the book, as you know, about institutions and what the certainty trap means in institutions and what that means for trust in institutions, where it’s not—if our goal is to have a strong and sustainable democracy, it is not going to help us get to that goal. We are undoing our own efforts to have a strong democracy. Insofar as that’s still our goal, there is some critical mass that needs to avoid this …
I do think that there’s reasons to think that education and the media, for probably reasons that are obvious, are particularly important, that could really change things. I think that in a world after I waved my magic wand, I think it’s just less. I think it’s a lot less of what we’re seeing now. I don’t think that it’s gone. By “it,” I mean the contempt, the hostility, the viewing things as simple. I think it’s a lot less, if that makes sense. That’s why I said it was half an answer.
KLUTSEY: Yes, no—it does. It does. It just got me thinking about how we also teach this across the board. I know you’ve done some work at the K‑12 level and in your own courses as a professor. I know you try to incorporate some of these things, but isn’t this what a liberal arts education is supposed to do? [laughs]
REDSTONE: It is. It is, and this is how far we’ve drifted. There’s so many reasons for it. But it is, I think—I guess I have this one idea that “The Certainty Trap” book will permeate its way through our educational system and that it would really bring some changes in education, at K‑12 and higher education. Because I think it would address a lot of the problems. Again, I don’t mean to say it’s the one magic bullet, but I think getting people to think about this—there’s a world where it makes an enormous difference in terms of how we think about education. Yes.
Challenge Yourself
KLUTSEY: Great. Now, for the listeners, what’s your call to action? What is the thing that you think people should go out and do after reading this book?
REDSTONE: It’s an interesting question. They should read the book. I think you have to start—I don’t know how to say this without sounding self-helpy, which makes me want to gag a little bit, but it is about changing the way …
You can’t change what other people are doing. You can model it, and you can change yourself. You can change the way you’re thinking and interacting with the world. In every chapter, at the end of every chapter, there’s some little exercises, like “try this; try this.” You can use those. You can come up with your own. But to challenge your own thinking—I think that’s where it starts, because you can’t tell other people what to do.
You can model it, though. People will see that. It’s not so much modeling a behavior because the behavior—it sounds like, “Well, I’m going to do these things and say these things with the goal of having a better interaction.” That’s fine. That’s nice. But the call to action is really about analyzing and questioning your own thinking.
A lot of what’s in “The Certainty Trap” book—and I try to make this point—is that you can ignore all of it. That this idea that certainty fuels moral outrage, that certainty fuels righteous indignation, that this has implications for democracy: You can ignore it all, but it’s the way it is. I didn’t create it that way. That’s the way it is. So if you ignore it—because you think that the stakes are too high, because you think that I’m being naive in my assessment, whatever it is that you think—that’s fine. But then you don’t really have grounds to come and say that what you’re concerned about is political polarization.
KLUTSEY: Yes. Thanks for that.
Now, final question: What’s your next book?
REDSTONE: The next book—the idea is it’s going to be about the politics of shame. I reserve the right to change my mind and the title, but “How the Idea That Intent Doesn’t Matter Divided a Town and a Nation.” That is what I’ve been working on when I get the time.
KLUTSEY: [laughs] That’s excellent.
Thank you so much, Ilana, for taking the time to talk to us—
REDSTONE: Thanks so much for having me.
KLUTSEY: We appreciate it. I want to encourage folks to check out the book. It’s called “The Certainty Trap: Why We Need To Question Ourselves More—and How We Can Judge Others Less [ [link removed] ].”
Thank you.
REDSTONE: Thanks so much.

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