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

by Tim Urban

Say we went back to page 760 of The Story of Us, kidnapped someone, and transported them a few centuries forward to page 761. Other than having to find new friends and make some cultural adjustments, they’d probably get along fine, because the worlds of pages 760 and 761 were pretty much the same.

At least that's what we want to think.

Trust, the critical currency of a healthy society, is disintegrating.

Is it the critical currency?

Your Higher Mind is aware that humans are often delusional, and it wants you to be not delusional. It sees beliefs as the most recent draft of a work in progress, and as it lives more and learns more, the Higher Mind is always happy to make a revision. Because when beliefs are revised, it’s a signal of progress—of becoming less ignorant, less foolish, less wrong. Your Primitive Mind disagrees. For your genes, what’s important is holding beliefs that generate the best kinds of survival behavior—whether or not those beliefs are actually true.

The Scientist’s default position on any topic is “I don’t know.” To advance beyond Point A, they have to put in effort,

Trust, when assigned wisely, is an efficient knowledge-acquisition trick. If you can trust a person who actually speaks the truth, you can take the knowledge that person worked hard for—either through primary research or indirectly, using their own diligent trust criteria—and “photocopy” it into your own brain.

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.

But when there’s no amount of evidence that will change your mind about something, it means that idea is your boss.

An Idea Lab is an environment of collaborative high-rung thinking. People in an Idea Lab see one another as experimenters and their ideas as experiments. Idea Labs value independent thinking and viewpoint diversity. This combination leads to the richest and most interesting conversations and maximizes the scope of group discussions. Idea Labs place a high regard on humility, and saying “I don’t know” usually wins trust and respect. When someone who often says “I don’t know” does express conviction about a viewpoint, it really means something,

people and ideas are separate things.

We are free to abandon them when they stop making sense or discover new information. The ideas... sometimes the people too...

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,

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.

No. It’s just that spiders stop doing the emergence thing at the individual organism level, while ants go up a level higher—to the ant colony.

The ant colony is really the “independent life form” of the ant world. If we look at how ant colonies treat other ant colonies,6 it’s a lot like the way one spider treats another.

Simple creatures like ants and bees achieve cooperation on a mass scale, which comes at the expense of individual autonomy.8 Complex animals like wolves, lions, and dolphins are more individually independent, but they also have smaller families, which typically limits the size of the “giant” they can make.

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.

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.

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.

A 44-year-old George Washington found himself in charge of fending them off—which, hilariously, his mom apparently hated.

⬥ The U.S. has long been embroiled in conflict about how well the country has actually lived up to its promises. In some obvious ways—like the fact that the country’s full set of human rights initially applied only to white men—it certainly has not. We’ll get into all that later in the book. The first step, though, is to brush up on what the country’s promises even are. That’s what we’re doing in this chapter. America’s founders formalized this with the U.S. Constitution: a set of rules that, rather than serving any particular goal or outcome, would be sacred in themselves.

define sacred

That’s why Liberal Games freedom isn’t really freedom as much as it’s a freedom-safety compromise. What matters is harm: if an action is harmful, citizens must be protected from it; if it’s not harmful, it’s a right that must itself be protected.

Mmm... I don't like this, harmful shouldn't automatically mean illegal.Specially if towards yourself

Enforcing equality of outcome, or an equal distribution of resources, would require a controlling government and a large sacrifice of individual freedom—which fundamentally conflicted with the Founders’ vision and the spirit behind the Liberal Games. Instead, they aimed for another compromise, this one between freedom and equality: U.S. citizens would be equal under the law and enjoy equality of opportunity. (The extent to which this is actually what happens in the U.S. is, of course, another story.)

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

principle of free speech. America’s free speech laws would open the gates to another Liberal Games market: the marketplace of ideas,

“the written U.S. Constitution is only words on paper; the real Constitution is a dense system of explicit and implicit social rules, many of which are not written down.”

No matter how many written rules there are, it is the citizens’ ability to uphold liberal norms that determines the fate of the country.

People who try to refer to our concept of high-rung political thinking often use the term “center.” But center is a What You Think word. It refers to the middle parts of the x-axis—as if holding viewpoints in those areas is the mark of a good thinker. Likewise, people often use “far” as a proxy for “low-rung,” calling, say, an uncompromising, progressive zealot part of the “far left.” This is a misnomer because A) there are plenty of uncompromising, progressive people whose views are mainstream, and B) there are plenty of people who hold radical left views who are well informed and open-minded. Vertical terms like “high-rung” and “low-rung” make our discussions less constrained and allow us to better express what we’re actually trying to say.

Not crazy about his words but we do need better terms overall.

You’ll also find some hopelessly partisan people mired in the low rungs, in Unconvinceable Land. But the prevailing culture is high rung, and the culture stands up for itself in the face of inevitable challenges from the low-rung mentality, both

this whole paragraph says nothing.

people are great at being empathetic toward members of their group, seeing the best in their intentions, and forgiving their mistakes. But we treat members of the out-group the opposite way, labeling them with dehumanizing stereotypes, assuming the worst about their intentions, and viewing any moral failing as an exposure of permanent moral bankruptcy.

“democracy is only working when my candidate wins.”

what matters isn’t what its members are actually thinking but that they’re all outwardly saying the right thing. Doubt in an individual’s head is mostly harmless—only when they express that doubt does it become a danger to the system.

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.

SO... cherry picking data.

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.

that people are highly uncharitable in their assumptions about those in their political out-group.

It’s hard living in an Echo Chamber community if you don’t believe the community’s narrative.

An Echo Chamber makes its members feel perfectly informed while crippling them as intellectuals. It teaches them that knowledge is easy and gets them hooked on the feeling of knowing the truth about everything without having to work for it.

In his “Manual of Parliamentary Practice,” Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure.

bad system. No goodwill can be expected.

One telling situation is the party factions. In Congress, one of the largest Democratic factions is a caucus called the New Democrats—as of December 2022, 99 of 218 (45%) House Democrats were members.50 Their core values statement is one of moderation. They say they’re “committed to pro-economic growth, pro-innovation, and fiscally responsible policies,” that they’re “a solutions-oriented coalition seeking to bridge the gap between left and right by challenging outmoded partisan approaches to governing,” and that the challenges ahead are too great “to refuse to cooperate purely out of partisanship.” The largest faction of the Republican Congress, by far, is the Republican Study Committee (RSC), with 143 of 213 House Republicans as members (67%) in 2022.51 The faction’s stated mission is “to bring like-minded House members together to promote a strong, principled legislative agenda that will limit government, strengthen our national defense, boost America’s economy, preserve traditional values and balance our budget.” Nothing about cooperation with Democrats or bridging the gap between left and right.

How do we know is just not better propaganda, hopefully he will show data...

“We don’t look out at the world and say, ‘Where’s the weight of the evidence?’ We start with an original supposition and we say, ‘Can I believe it?’ If I want to believe something, I ask: Can I believe it? Can I find the justification? But if I don’t want to believe it, I say: Must I believe it? Am I forced to believe it? Or can I escape?”