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

by Tim Urban

The jump in technology from page 1,000 to 1,001 should prove to be even more extreme than the jump from 999 to 1,000—maybe many times more so. This could be unfathomably awesome. We could conquer every problem that ails us today—disease, poverty, climate change, maybe even mortality itself. But if the catastrophes of page 1,000 were the most devastating yet, what does that mean about catastrophes on page 1,001? The same technology that has made our world magical has also opened a large number of Pandora’s boxes: rapidly advancing AI, cyber warfare, autonomous weapons, and bioweapons, to name a few.

The infrequency of these updates means an animal’s software is actually optimized for the environment of its ancestors.

Humans are so complicated because we’re all a mixture of both “high-rung” and “low-rung” psychology. When the Higher Mind is winning the tug-of-war, its staff illuminates our minds with clarity, including awareness of the Primitive Mind and what it’s up to. The Higher Mind understands that primitive pleasures like sex, food, and all-in-good-fun tribalism like sports fandom are enjoyable, and often necessary, parts of a human life. And like a good pet owner, the Higher Mind is more than happy to let the Primitive Mind have its fun. Primitive bliss is great, as long as it’s managed by the Higher Mind, who makes sure it’s done in moderation, it’s done for the right reasons, and no one gets hurt. In short, when we’re up on the high rungs, we act like grown-ups. But when something riles up the Primitive Mind, it gets bigger and stronger. Its torch—which bears the primal fires of our genes’ will for survival—grows as well, filling our minds with smoky fog. This fog dulls our consciousness, so when we’re most under the spell of our Primitive Mind, we don’t even realize it’s happening. The Higher Mind, unable to think clearly, begins directing its efforts toward supporting whatever the Primitive Mind wants to do, whether it makes sense or not. 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. We all have our own Ladder struggle...

If the Idea Spectrum is a “what you think” axis, we can use the Ladder as a “how you think” axis.

So the Higher Mind’s goal is to get to the truth, while the Primitive Mind’s goal is confirmation of its existing beliefs. These two very different types of intellectual motivation exist simultaneously in our heads. This means that our driving intellectual motivation—and, in turn, our thinking process—varies depending on where we are on the Ladder at any given moment.

when there’s no amount of evidence that will change your mind about something, it means that idea is your boss. On the low rungs, you’re working to dutifully serve your ideas, not the other way around.

Each of us is a work in progress. We’ll never rid our lives of low-rung thinking, but the more we evolve psychologically, the more time we spend thinking from the high rungs and the less time we spend down below. Improving this ratio is a good intellectual goal for all of us.

The Sports Fan rung alone isn’t a problem. The problem is that inviting some bias into the equation is a bit like closing your eyes for just another minute after you’ve shut your alarm off for good—it’s riskier than it feels. Getting a little attached to an idea is a small step away from drifting unconsciously into Unconvinceable Land and the oblivion of the rungs down below. We’re pre-programmed to be low-rung thinkers, so our intellects are always fighting against gravity.

Idea Labs are devoted to a kind of thinking, Echo Chambers are devoted to a set of beliefs the culture deems to be sacred.

Humans do emergence too—and like all things human, it’s complicated. First, in the same way we bounce up and down the Ladder, we’re all over the place on the Emergence Tower.

Second, humans form weird giants.

When you take the already impressive power of human cognition and combine it with the capability of mass cooperation, you have a species with superpowers.

people in a genie get the best of all emergence worlds: they can simultaneously thrive as free individuals and as smaller pieces of a larger system.

If the genie is the product of human collaboration, the golem is the emergent property of human obedience. Golems are what happen when humans act like ants.

Golems scale up too, but in a very different way—based on conflict. Golems don’t just prefer the Us vs. Them mindset, they rely on it. The presence of a rival golem is a critical part of what holds them together. The way golems combine forces is by sharing a common enemy. If a group of golems vanquishes their common enemy, the alliance will often fracture into smaller rival golems to maintain the Us vs. Them structure.

It’s the great catch-22 of our species: the biggest threat to humanity is low-rung humanity, and low-rung humanity persists because it has often been the best defense against this very threat.

Low-rung thinking, low-rung morality, and low-rung tactics all stem from the same concept: When the Primitive Mind is running the show, our minds are in ancient survival mode, and politics becomes a vehicle for tribalism.

A common practice is what we might call trend-anecdote swapping. It’s simple: If you come across an anecdote that supports the narrative, you frame it as evidence of a larger trend to make it seem representative of broader reality. Meanwhile, if there’s an actual trend happening that really is representative of broader reality—but it’s a trend that makes your narrative look bad—you frame it as nothing more than a handful of freak anecdotes.

In high-rung politics, when people come across a correlation, they dig deeper to explore which of the above is actually going on. But in Political Disney World, people believe whichever explanation best supports the narrative. Let’s imagine there’s a political tribe whose narrative says that dogs are almost always good boys (and anyone who says otherwise is a bigot), while most raccoons are dangerous, vile creatures (and anyone who says otherwise is a bigot). Now imagine that one week, these six news stories happen: The actual information at hand here suggests that both animals can be good sometimes and bad sometimes. But the required narrative leaves no room for mixed messages. Dogs are good. Raccoons are bad. Period. So the pro-dog media starts twisting things. The anecdotes that align with the narrative (say, “racoon found in trash can”) can be reframed as trends (“yet another racoon found in trash can”). Pro-dog media could use the correlation/causation fallacy to further nudge the day’s news in their favor by fiddling with blame in two of the stories: “Dog bites racoon in parking lot” places the blame on the dog, which conflicts with the pro-dog narrative, so it could be adjusted to the more neutral “dog and racoon get in parking lot skirmish.” The headline about dogs shitting on the sidewalk could be rewritten in a way that implies it’s not caused by dogs at all: “With the city continuing to neglect dog park conditions, more dogs resort to shitting on the sidewalk.” ...

“motte-and-bailey” fallacy

The bailey was an area of land that was desirable and economically productive to live on but vulnerable to attack and hard to defend. When the bailey was threatened, inhabitants would run up the motte and into the tower. The motte, unlike the bailey, was easy to defend and nearly impossible to conquer—so invaders who captured the bailey would be unable to conquer the whole fortification. Eventually, with arrows raining down on them from the motte’s tower, the attackers would give up and leave, at which point the inhabitants could resume life in the pleasant, profitable bailey.

if an opposing candidate has mostly mainstream views but holds a few extreme positions, people tend to assume that the candidate’s supporters voted for them because of, not in spite of, the candidate’s extreme positions—despite no evidence that this is true.

There’s also the “inoculation effect,” a term coined by social psychologist William McGuire in 1961.

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 we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human history—an anomaly held up only by trust, cultural norms, and shared assumptions. It’s easy to become overconfident in the stability and permanence of that environment and forget that the natural human habitat—the Power Games—is always lurking just beneath the surface.

affective polarization, i.e., people not trusting or liking those from the other party.

In the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma, computer scientist Jaron Lanier uses Wikipedia as an example to highlight the craziness of this situation: When you go to a [Wikipedia] page, you’re seeing the same thing as other people. So it’s one of the few things online that we at least hold in common. Now, just imagine for a second that Wikipedia said, “We’re gonna give each person a different customized definition, and we’re gonna be paid by people for that.” So, Wikipedia would be spying on you. Wikipedia would calculate, “What’s the thing I can do to get this person to change a little bit on behalf of some commercial interest?” Right? And then it would change the entry. Can you imagine that? Well, you should be able to, ‘cause that’s exactly what’s happening on Facebook. It’s exactly what’s happening in your YouTube feed.21

When we hear about growing political division, most of us assume it means citizens are divided in their values—that people are unable to agree about What Should Be. But take another look at the ten questions from Pew. There’s an element of What Should Be embedded in some of the questions—but mostly, they are questions about What Is. Many are statements about the status quo that the two political sides do not agree on.

1) Stand firm on your positions and try to use persuasion to start a mind-changing movement that pulls public opinion toward you. If it catches on, your marginalized position can become mainstream. 2) Compromise on your positions to move yourself close to mainstream opinion. But in the realm of low-rung politics, there’s also a third option: Change the rules of the game to a different one that you can win. If your ideas can’t win a fair fight in the boxing ring, start taking cheap shots and see if you can get away with it.

even movements that start out on the highest rungs tend to develop a dark shadow—a low-rung counterpart riding along in parallel, like two trains riding side by side. When the movement is in the early stages and on the way up, the distinction between the trains can be masked by the exhilaration of change. The question is what happens when that phase dies down and the two trains start to diverge on where they want the movement to go. It’s only a matter of time before most movements hit that fork in the road.

Crenshaw uses Black women as her primary example, but she points out that the idea of intersectionality could be applied to two or more social justice movements of any kind. Taken to its full extent, intersectionality can be used to arrange every demographic group in society into a hierarchy of oppression, which she explains with this metaphor: Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked—feet standing on shoulders—with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside.18 Crenshaw’s basement concept was a way of binding the various arenas of social justice into a single, vertical power hierarchy. We can think of it as the Intersectional Stack.⬥

Standpoint theory, a concept that emerged from Marxist theory and has since been adopted more broadly by Social Justice Fundamentalism, argues that different identity groups have special access to different kinds of knowledge. The idea is that if society is a river and the Force is the current, oppressed groups, who spend their lives swimming against the current, develop intimate knowledge of the current that privileged people, always swimming with the current, can’t access. Put another way: The dominant perspective is understood by everyone, because it’s everywhere, all the time, while the oppressed perspective is only understood by the oppressed. So the words of people from oppressed groups should carry extra weight, because they carry more knowledge.39 Standpoint theory is the philosophical backdrop behind the popular four-word SJF reprimand: stay in your lane.

To use myself as an example, having a major procrastination/perfectionist problem opens an empathy window to anyone with any form of self-defeating tendency. When I see someone who struggles with their diet, I don’t think, “Why don’t they just eat healthier? It’s not that hard.” I think, “This is their version of procrastination.” Without having experienced their specific struggle, I can appreciate just how awful and difficult it must be.

Most of the people speaking with authority about how members of privileged groups should take a backseat on issues of oppression are members of privileged groups. Standpoint theory is supposed to invalidate what these mostly white scholars have to say about a topic like racism. But for their own ideas, these scholars make an exception.

Rather than Karen engaging with Joan’s ideas the way she would with anyone else’s, DiAngelo wants Karen to see a Black woman and think, “okay, it’s a Black woman, don’t interrupt her, don’t disagree with her, don’t make her feel uncomfortable in any way.” In other words, don’t be herself when interacting with her. It feels a bit like how you treat a kid playing Pictionary.

While all Americans live in a free speech country, not all Americans enjoy the full benefits of free speech. Laws like the First Amendment make free speech possible, but only within the right culture does the freedom come to fruition. What’s needed is an environment where open discourse is “how we do things here.” Idea Lab culture is the critical second piece that completes the free speech puzzle.

In countries like the U.S., you’re so free that you’re free to be unfree, if you so choose.