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

by Tim Urban

The problem with people is that they're only human. – Bill Watterson

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

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.

Unlike technological growth, wisdom seems to oscillate up and down, leading societies to repeat age-old mistakes.

There is a great deal of human nature in people. – Mark Twain

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

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.

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.

Your Higher Mind knows better. If it holds the reins of your mind, it’ll either skip the Skittles or have just a few, as a little treat for its primitive roommate. But sometimes, there you are, 80 Skittles into your binge, hating yourself—because your Primitive Mind has hijacked the cockpit.

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.

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.

When you’re thinking like an Attorney, you don’t start at Point A at all. You start at Point B. The client is not guilty. Now let’s figure out why.

Someone working at a tech startup in the Bay Area is simultaneously living within the global Western community, the American community, the West Coast community, the San Francisco community, the tech industry community, the startup community, the community of their workplace, the community of their college alumni, the community of their extended family, the community of their group of friends, and a few other bizarre SF-y situations.

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 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.

Thinkers of the Enlightenment believed that the Liberal Games combination of freedom, safety, and equal opportunity would go beyond satisfying core philosophical tenets and generate a brilliant side effect: fantastic productivity.

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.

Even when high-rung thinkers agree about What Is and What Should Be, they often disagree about the best way to get there. Two people who agree that the middle class should be larger than it is can completely disagree about which tax structure will best achieve the goal.

For the golem’s immune system, 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.

The real test of any argument is how well it stands up to rigorous criticism. When you’re confident in your viewpoint, you love a chance to throw it into the ring with other arguments and show off its strength. It works like boxing: the stronger the opponents you’ve beaten, the better your ranking. That’s why a strong college paper always includes a strong “grizzly bear” counterargument—it lets the thesis “show off” in front of the professor.

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.

After the body defeats the weak version of the virus, it develops an immunity against all versions of the virus, including the strong ones. 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.

But when many of us talk about how politically polarized America seems to be today, we’re talking about something different: affective polarization, i.e., people not trusting or liking those from the other party. This has been on the rise—and this is the phenomenon we’re mostly exploring in this chapter.

Neutrality doesn’t mean portraying both political sides as equally good or equally right. It means portraying them as they are. Sometimes both sides deserve an equal share of praise or blame, in which case neutral media would report on that parallel. But when one side is behaving worse than the other side, neutral coverage portrays exactly that. Depicting both sides as equal when they’re not (aka “bothsidesism”) is not neutral, but is biased toward “presenting the sides as equal.”

News media is infamous for what we could call “destructive cherry-picking”—a selection bias that sees negative stories as the most newsworthy, because they draw the most interest. It’s why, for example, Americans surveyed by Gallup since 1990 consistently think crime is increasing, even though in almost every one of those years, it decreased from the year before.

In 1960, only 4% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans were opposed to the prospect of their child marrying a supporter of the other party. By 2018, those numbers had skyrocketed to 45% of Democrats and 35% of Republicans. A striking trend during the same period that many other forms of bigotry waned in the U.S.

Here's my plea: Make this an exercise in open-mindedness. Read the rest of this book in Idea Lab mode, asking yourself, “What if I’m wrong about some of what I think?” Hopefully, this process can help open some closed doors in your mind and leave you a little more clearheaded than you were before. Writing this book has certainly done that for me.

I wanted to be a cool, nuanced Independent, who understood that both sides of the political aisle had pros and cons. But the Republicans continually made this impossible. I had watched Bush, Cheney, and Co. start a ridiculous war in Iraq for what seemed like dishonest political motives. I had watched John McCain select the proudly anti-intellectual Sarah Palin as his presidential running mate. I had watched the Tea Party surge to prominence, with a willingness to damage the country’s credit rating to maintain an incredibly rigid tax policy. I had watched the entire 2016 Republican presidential field share a near unanimous1 conviction that climate change was not something to be concerned about. Out of that group, I watched Donald Trump win the nomination on a platform built on some of the lowest forms of demagoguery.

His description of the “moderate” way—sophisticated, open to compromise, and intent on effective governance—fits perfectly with our definition of high-rung politics, and it could pertain to people anywhere along the horizontal axis. Likewise, the author’s “extremist”—someone whose worldview is rigid, simplistic, and morally binary—is a great description of a low-rung political thinker.

In office, Reagan typically governed the high-rung way: steadfast about principles but flexible about policies. He compromised with progressives on many occasions and in doing so, was able to enact a huge amount of change.

I mistakenly thought that what I objected to was “the Right.” But the Right wasn’t the problem. The problem was the Lower Right. The problem wasn’t too much conservatism, it was too little conservatism. I hadn’t understood that high-rung conservatism is a critical part of a healthy country and that the Republican Party I knew was actually depriving my country of it.

While liberals see instances of oppression as shameful flaws in an otherwise noble project, Critical Theorists see instances of oppression as evidence of the country’s true nature and founding purpose. Derrick Bell, a former Harvard legal scholar and a key figure in the formation of 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.

Postmodernists are radical skeptics who see nearly all beliefs as false consciousness. They believe that power is exerted not only through economic oppression or cultural brainwashing but through every element of a society—through all layers of the pyramid. The whole society is permeated with a “metanarrative” that’s so well embedded in the minds of citizens that it feels like the natural order of things.

SJF proponents argue that concepts like the scientific method, hard work, a respect for authority, planning for the future, private property, competition, and politeness are all oppressive systems through which the Force exerts itself.

Affirmative action or positive discrimination is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who are perceived to suffer from discrimination within a culture … intended to promote the opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give them equal access to that of the privileged majority population.

SJF activists look at societal institutions through a zero-sum lens. Groups that are overrepresented got there by oppressing those who are underrepresented, and the only way to help those at the bottom is to take from those at the top. Ensuring equal outcomes trumps individual rights. The tricky thing about this kind of reasoning is that society is full of disparities of every kind.

For disparities that go in the other direction (say, Asian Americans outperforming white Americans on standardized tests, or women being more likely than men to attend college), correlation no longer implies causation, and no equity boxes are warranted.38 Certain disparities may be more likely than others to be a sign of underlying injustice, but a hard rule about which must and must not be injustice is dogma more than analysis.

But to the liberal mindset, specific life experience is only one form of knowledge, alongside another: the universal experience of being human. When trying to understand another person’s point of view, a liberal thinker aims for the humility sweet spot that acknowledges both each person’s uniqueness and all people’s shared humanness.

I’m not Black, but when I hear people talk about what it’s like to be Black in America, I don’t think, “I can’t imagine what that must be like!” I can imagine it. Because I remember what it was like when, as a Jewish kid, I first learned that antisemitism was a thing. It was scary and upsetting and infuriating.

While it’s certainly admirable to have been ahead of your time on a moral issue, punishing or disgracing someone for saying or doing something in the past that was prevalent at that time but considered taboo today makes little sense. As an example, it’s easy to imagine a future in which eating animals is widely considered an unspeakably vile act.

My big problem with Social Justice Fundamentalism isn’t the ideology itself. It’s what its scholars and activists started to do sometime around 2013—when they began to wield a cudgel that’s not supposed to have any place in a country like the U.S.

We think of censorship as control over what people can say. But the concept of emergence reminds us that human giants only “think” by way of conversation—which means that censorship is really control over what the giant can think. For a giant, censorship is mind control.

A phenomenon that psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance” begins to set in: when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes. Over time, hearing everyone expressing the same viewpoint, people start to doubt their own beliefs and assume that if everyone is saying it, there must be something to it.

The mainstream ideas are taught in schools, dictate broad cultural norms, and show up as slogans in political campaigns. Even though plenty of individual citizens will disagree with them, the ideas at the top of the Thought Pile are what the big communal brain “thinks” at any given point in time.

The Overton window is a newish term—named after late political scientist Joseph Overton—but it’s a concept as old as democracy itself: that for any political issue at any given time, there’s a range of ideas the public will accept as politically reasonable. Positions outside of that range will be considered by most voters to be too radical or too backward to be held by a serious candidate.

Truth is the primary value of high-rung intellectual culture, so a veritas campus should function like High-Rung Heidi’s dinner table: an Idea Lab full of open discourse, vigorous debate, and a wide variety of viewpoints. This applies to two core purposes: knowledge discovery, and education.

Victimhood culture “rejects one of dignity culture’s main injunctions—to ignore insults and slights—and instead encourages at least some people to take notice of them and take action against them. The idea is that such offenses do cause harm, just like violence.”

In 2018, a group of scientists led by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert found that “people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it.” As a consequence, “social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.”