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

by Tim Urban

It’s natural to assume that the world we grew up in is normal. But nothing about our current world is normal. Because technology is exponential. More advanced societies make progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies—because they’re more advanced. People in the 19th century knew more and had better technology than people in the 16th century, so it’s no surprise that there were more advances on page 1,000 than on page 999. Over the centuries, this builds upon itself, leading to increasingly rapid progress.

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

Page 1,000, a time of unprecedented life expectancy, wealth, and political freedom, also saw the two most catastrophic wars in history followed by existential threats with the invention of nuclear and biological weapons and the onset of climate change. As the times get better, they also get more dangerous. More technology makes our species more powerful, which increases risk. And the scary thing is, if the good and bad keep exponentially growing, it doesn’t matter how great the good times become. If the bad gets to a certain level of bad, it’s all over for us.

Humans are supposed to mature as they age—but the giant human I live in has been getting more childish each year. Tribalism and political division are on the rise. False narratives and outlandish conspiracy theories are flourishing. Major institutions are floundering. Medieval-style public shaming is suddenly back in fashion. Trust, the critical currency of a healthy society, is disintegrating. And these trends seem to be happening in lots of societies, not just my own. So what’s our problem? Why, in a time so prosperous, with the stakes so high, would we be going backward in wisdom?

George Santayana

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

When we learn a technology lesson, we tend not to forget it. The invention of the integrated circuit in 1959 was a breakthrough that launched a new paradigm in modern computing. This isn’t the kind of thing we later forget, finding ourselves accidentally going back to making computers with vacuum tubes. But wisdom lessons don’t always seem to stick. Unlike technological growth, wisdom seems to oscillate up and down, leading societies to repeat age-old mistakes.

The higher we go, the more deadly a fall we risk.

If you were reading The Story of Us and turned the page to 1,001, everything would seem to be coming to a head, with many storylines suddenly converging. You’d be glued to the book, needing to find out what happens to this species. Except we’re not reading The Story of Us—we’re living inside of it, as its characters. We’re also its authors, writing the story as we go along.

Our responsibility is immense. If we can figure out how to get page 1,001 right, Future Us and trillions of our descendants could live high up on that mountain in what would seem like a magical utopia to Today Us. If we get page 1,001 wrong and stumble off those steep cliffs, this might be the last page of the story.

The Primitive Mind is a set of coded instructions for how to be a successful animal in the animal’s natural habitat. The coder is natural selection, which develops the software using a pretty simple process: Software that’s good at making its animal pass on its genes stays around, and the less successful software is discontinued. Genetic mutation is like a bug appearing in the software from time to time, and every once in a while, a certain bug makes the software better—an accidental software update. It’s a slow way to code, but over millions of generations, it gets the job done.

humans are strange animals. A handful of cognitive superpowers, like symbolic language, abstract thinking, complex social relationships, and long-term planning, have allowed humans to take their environment into their own hands in a way no other animal can. In the blink of an eye—around 12,000 years, or 500 generations—humans have crafted a totally novel environment for themselves called civilization.

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.

You know how moths inanely fly toward light and you’re not really sure why they do this or what their angle is? It turns out that for millions of years, 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...

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.

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

the most important skill of a skilled thinker is knowing when to trust.

skilled thinkers work hard to master the art of skepticism. A thinker who believes everything they hear is too gullible, and their beliefs become packed with a jumble of falsehoods, misconceptions, and contradictions. Someone who trusts no one is overly cynical, even paranoid, and limited to gaining new information only by direct experience. Neither of these fosters much learning.

I’ve noticed a paradox in great scientists and superforecasters: the reason they’re so comfortable being wrong is that they’re terrified of being wrong. What sets them apart is the time horizon. They’re determined to reach the correct answer in the long run, and they know that means they have to be open to stumbling, backtracking, and rerouting in the short run. They shun rose-colored glasses in favor of a sturdy mirror.

As the 6th century Chinese Zen master Seng-ts’an explains: If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.2 When you’re thinking like a Sports Fan, Seng-ts’an and his apostrophe and his hyphen are all mad at you, because they know what they’re about to see—the Scientist’s rigorous thinking process corrupted by the truth-seeker’s most treacherous obstacle: Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the invisible hand of the Primitive Mind that tries to push you toward confirming your existing beliefs and pull you away from changing your mind. You still gather information, but you may cherry-pick sources that seem to support your ideas. With the Primitive Mind affecting your emotions, it just feels good to have your views confirmed, while hearing dissent feels irritating. You still evaluate information, but instead of defaulting to the trust filter’s middle setting, you find yourself flip-flopping on either side of it, depending less on the proven track record of the source than on how much the source seems to agree with you:

When it’s time to test the hypothesis, the Sports Fan’s bias again rears its head. If you were thinking like a Scientist, you’d feel very little attachment to your hypothesis. But now you watch your little machine box as a fan, wearing its jersey. It’s Your Guy in the ring. And if it wins an argument, you might even catch yourself thinking, “We won!” When a good punch is landed on your hypothesis, you’re likely to see it as a cheap shot or a lucky swing or something else that’s not really legit. And when your hypothesis lands a punch, you may have a tendency to overrate the magnitude of the blow or the high level of skill it involved. Being biased skews your assessment of other people’s thinking too. You believe you’re unbiased, so someone actually being neutral appears to you to be biased in the other direction, while someone who shares your bias appears to be neutral.

Unconvinceable⬥ Land is a world of green grass, blue sky, and a bunch of people whose beliefs can’t be swayed by any amount of evidence. When you end up here, it means you’ve become a disciple of some line of thinking—a religion, a political ideology, the dogma of a subculture. Either way, your intellectual integrity has taken a backseat to intellectual loyalty.

the cognitive Attorney’s head is like a courtroom with only one side represented—in other words, a corrupt courtroom where the ruling is predetermined.

When Zealots argue, things can quickly get heated, because for someone who identifies with their ideas, a challenge to those ideas feels like an insult. It feels personally invalidating. A punch landed on a Zealot’s idea is a punch landed on their baby.

We all spend time on the low rungs,⬥ and when we’re thinking this way, we don’t realize we’re doing it. We believe our conviction has been hard-earned. We believe our viewpoints are original and based on knowledge. Because as the Primitive Mind’s influence grows in our heads, so does the fog that clouds our consciousness. This is how low-rung thinking persists.

People in an Idea Lab don’t usually take arguments personally because Idea Lab culture is built around the core notion that people and ideas are separate things. People are meant to be respected, ideas are meant to be batted around and picked apart.

An Echo Chamber is what happens when a group’s intellectual culture slips down to the low rungs: collaborative low-rung thinking. While Idea Labs are cultures of critical thinking and debate, Echo Chambers are cultures of groupthink and conformity. Because while Idea Labs are devoted to a kind of thinking, Echo Chambers are devoted to a set of beliefs the culture deems to be sacred.

Humility is looked down upon in an Echo Chamber, where saying “I don’t know” just makes you sound ignorant and changing your mind makes you seem wishy-washy. And conviction, used sparingly in an Idea Lab, is social currency in an Echo Chamber. The more conviction you speak with, the more knowledgeable, intelligent, and righteous you seem. Idea Labs can simultaneously respect a person and disrespect the person’s ideas. But Echo Chambers equate a person’s ideas with their identity, so respecting a person and respecting their ideas are one and the same. Disagreeing with someone in an Echo Chamber is seen not as intellectual exploration but as rudeness, making an argument about ideas indistinguishable from a fight.

This moral component provides Echo Chambers with a powerful tool for cultural law enforcement: taboo. Those who challenge the sacred ideas are seen not just as wrong but as bad people. As such, violators are slapped with the social fines of status reduction or reputation damage, the social jail time of ostracism, and even the social death penalty of permanent excommunication. Express the wrong opinion on God, abortion, patriotism, immigration, race, or capitalism in the wrong group and you may be met with an explosive negative reaction. Echo Chambers are places where you must watch what you say.

This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can visualize it using an Emergence Tower.

in the same way we bounce up and down the Ladder, we’re all over the place on the Emergence Tower.

Depending on the situation, we can act like spiders or ants, and everything in between.7 It’s as if there’s an elevator in the Emergence Tower, and our minds take regular trips up and down.

Early humans were similar to other complex animals—limited to small, tightly knit tribes. But at some point along the way, we figured out how to hack the system. By uniting through shared beliefs, shared culture, shared values, or shared interests, we shattered the previous ceiling on giant size and achieved something other complex animals couldn’t: mass cooperation.

the human Higher Mind and Primitive Mind each have their own way of doing emergence. Idea Labs and Echo Chambers are more than just group cultures—they’re two very different ways to build a human giant.

Your brain is a giant of its own, made up of a network of 86 billion neurons.10 An isolated neuron is pretty useless. But by communicating with one another, a group of neurons can move upward on the Emergence Tower and combine into a single thinking system that’s far more powerful than the sum of its parts: the brain.

A parallel phenomenon happens a few floors up the tower, on the human level. A bunch of people together, but not communicating, is just a bunch of individual brains in the same place. Language is so important because it allows individual brains to connect, like neurons, to form a larger thinking system: a communal brain.

In his book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about how group communal brains work: If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others … you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth.12 This is the magic of Idea Lab culture. While individual thinking suffers from bias, a diversity of biases helps the communal brain reduce blind spots. In a culture where changing your mind is encouraged, new findings spread quickly through the system, and all it takes is one member discovering a falsehood for the whole group to reject it. When disagreement is encouraged, new ideas can be tested as they’re being formed, in real-time, combining the knowledge-building efforts of each person into a single, dynamic process. The result is a multi-mind thinking system that’s superior to any of its individual members at learning new things and separating truth from fiction. Let’s call this thinking system a genie.

In mythology, a golem is a big dumb-looking monster, which makes it a perfect representation of the low-rung giant. 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. Ant behavior has two components: strict conformity within the colony and total ruthlessness when dealing with other colonies.

I use the Mongols as an example because they’re the extreme version of a human golem. But golems are everywhere. When a group of people exhibits a combination of strict conformity internally and an Us vs. Them mindset externally—militaries marching in unison, activists chanting a slogan, citizens raising a fist or saluting en masse, or just a group of people being super Echo-Chamber-y—that’s a group of people in golem mode.

The human cognitive weaknesses a genie tries to mitigate are the golem’s strengths. Confirmation bias tricks like cherry-picking, motivated skepticism, and motivated reasoning benefit hugely from economies of scale, as the snappiest and most convincing articulations of the sacred ideas spread quickly through the system. Individual biases, all pointing in the same direction in an Echo Chamber, scale up to make the golem’s ultra-biased macro-mind. And while individual minds inside a golem may have doubts about the sacred ideas, the social pressure of Echo Chamber culture keeps the giant as a whole steadfast in its beliefs. If the genie is the ultimate Scientist, the golem is the ultimate Zealot—a giant that’s totally certain of itself, totally unable to learn or change its mind, and worse at thinking than the average human.

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.

On the high rungs, individuals can thrive and grow, and human intelligence and knowledge can scale up exponentially. The low rungs squash individuality, breed delusion, and sacrifice group intelligence in favor of brute strength and large-scale conflict.

why are we so inclined to be down on the shitty low rungs? It’s what our Primitive Minds are programmed to do because it was the best way to survive in our distant past. Low-rung thinking, low-rung culture, and low-rung giant-building are all ancient survival behavior—behavior that was necessary a long time ago but today seems a lot like moths flying toward streetlights.

When I look out at the world today, I see a rising epidemic of low-rung thinking and behavior. Too many of the Ladder struggles that exist in our heads, in our communities, in our political parties, and in our societies are slipping in the wrong direction.

In case you’re thinking, “I’m a really smart person, so I’m safe from the low rungs,” Adam Grant has bad news for you: “Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.”