What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

by Tim Urban

Technology is a multiplier of both good and bad. More technology means better good times, but it also means badder bad times.

As great as civilization may be, 500 generations isn’t enough time for evolution to take a shit. So now we’re all here living in this fancy new habitat, using brain software optimized to our old habitat.

moths have used moonlight as a beacon for nocturnal navigation—which works great until a bunch of people start turning lights on at night that aren’t the moon. The moth’s brain software hasn’t had time to update itself to the new situation, and now millions of moths are wasting their lives flapping around streetlights.

In a lot of ways, modern humans are like modern moths, running on a well-intentioned Primitive Mind that’s constantly misinterpreting the weird world we’ve built for ourselves.

When we slip down to the Ladder’s low rungs, we’re short-sighted and small-minded, thinking and acting with our pettiest emotions. We’re low on self-awareness and high on hypocrisy. We’re our worst selves.

So the Higher Mind’s goal is to get to the truth, while the Primitive Mind’s goal is confirmation of its existing beliefs.

That’s why perhaps the most important skill of a skilled thinker is knowing when to trust.

When your Primitive Mind infiltrates your reasoning process, you start thinking the same way. You still believe you’re starting at Point A, and you still want Point B to be the truth. But you’re not exactly objective about it.

We can define “culture” as the unwritten rules regarding “how we do things here.”

Human society is a rich tapestry of overlapping and sometimes sharply contradictory cultures, and each of us lives at our own unique cultural intersection.

Do we navigate our lives to seek out external cultures that match our own values and minimize friction? Or do we surround ourselves with a range of conflicting cultures to put some pressure on our inner minds to learn and grow?

To straw man your opponent, you invent a weak counterargument to your position and pretend that it’s your opponent’s position, even though it’s not.

Philosopher Nicholas Shackel popularized the motte-and-bailey as a metaphor for a cheap argument tactic, whereby someone holding a convenient but not-very-defensible “bailey” viewpoint could, when facing dissent to that viewpoint, quickly run up the motte and swap out the viewpoint with a far stronger “motte” position.

The Echo Chamber environment makes confirmation bias easy. The “bandwagon effect” describes our tendency to feel that “if everyone else believes it, it must be true.”

McGuire found that people’s beliefs worked in a similar way: being repeatedly exposed to weak arguments for a particular position makes people dismissive of all arguments for that position.

When people are surrounded by ideologically homogeneous groups, their views become more extreme.

When an algorithm is jibing with your Higher Mind, it’s your friend. When it’s luring in your Primitive Mind against your Higher Mind’s will, the relationship is parasitic.

Scientists use the term “behavioral immune system” to describe the theory that disgust in humans is linked to xenophobia and discomfort with practices and rituals (especially sexual) that seem foreign or different to us—an ancient impulse we developed long ago, when contact with foreign people and practices often did put you at risk of disease.

Human environments are made up of a complex fabric of culture, norms, values, laws, and prevailing beliefs.

critical race theory, developed what he called the “interest conversion principle.”14 Bell believed that progress for Black Americans happened only when the progress served white interests, and that the progress would be taken away as soon as it no longer fit with the self-interested white agenda.

The notion of privilege draws on the idea of false consciousness—that people born into a country of systemic imbalance may have their “scale calibrated” such that the status quo feels normal and fair, even when it’s not. As such, those privileged by the only system they’ve ever known, as well as those disadvantaged by it, may fail to recognize anything is wrong.

Queer theorists like Judith Butler, for example, believe that most of what we think of as gendered behaviors are actually social performances that serve to reinforce the dominance of men over women.29 In SJF, it’s as if society is a play, people the actors, and the Force the playwright.

Imagining a different struggle than your own is an exercise in extrapolation—it’s an educated guess. But it’s not knowledge. At the humility sweet spot, a person gives themselves the right amount of credit for what they do know about someone else and also the proper level of respect for what they don’t know.

Throughout human history, clever opportunists have discovered that if you could control what people say, you could write the story people believed. You could dictate the values, the morals, and the customs. You could decide who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. You could create the laws, dole out the rewards, and inflict the penalties. If you could write the narrative, the group became your marionette.