More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Urban
Read between
February 25 - March 6, 2023
Fact 1: Technology is exponential
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.
Fact 2: More technology means higher stakes
Technology is a multiplier of both good and bad.
As the times get better, they also get more dangerous. More technology makes our species more powerful, which increases risk.
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.
Fact 3: My society is currently acting like a poopy-pantsed four-year-old who dropped its ice cream
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.
And these trends seem to be happening in lots of societies,
Unlike technological growth, wisdom seems to oscillate up and down, leading societies to repeat age-old mistakes.
If we can all get just a little wiser, together, it may be enough
a framework that I’ve spent the past six years developing, testing, and refining. I call it the Ladder. The Ladder is a thinking lens—a pair of glasses for the brain to help us better understand the world and ourselves.
In Chapter 2, we’ll look at the familiar subject of politics
In Chapter 3, we’ll examine the story of our regression: how and why I believe we’ve been slipping down the Ladder as a society.
world of trillions of strands of genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality. Most gene strands don’t last very long, and those still on Earth today are the miracle outliers, such incredible survival specialists that they’re hundreds of millions of years old and counting.
Genes can’t talk to their animals, so they control them by having them run on specialized survival software I call the Primitive Mind:
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. The
...more
But 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.
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.
the Higher Mind can look around and see the world for what it really is. It can see that you live in an advanced civilization and it wants to think and behave accordingly.
When the Primitive Mind wants you to think and behave in a way that doesn’t map onto reality, the Higher Mind tries to override the software, keeping you within the “makes sense” circle on the right:
Humans are so complicated because we’re all a mixture of both “high-rung” and “low-rung” psychology.
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.
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.
What’s our problem? The first stop on our journey will be our own heads, where we’ll use the Ladder to help us make sense of a key process: how we form our beliefs.
Our beliefs make up our perception of reality, drive our behavior, and shape our life stories.
Important
History happened the way it did because of what people believed in the past, and what we believe today will write the story of our future.
QOTD
For most beliefs, we’re so concerned with where people stand that we often forget the most important thing about what someone thinks: how they arrived at what they think.
If the Idea Spectrum is a “what you think” axis, we can use the Ladder as a “how you think” axis.
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.
The Primitive Mind’s beliefs are usually installed early on in life, often based on the prevailing beliefs of your family, peer group, or broader community. The Primitive Mind sees those beliefs as a fundamental part of your identity and a key to remaining in good standing with the community around you.
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.
Rung 1: Thinking like a Scientist
The Scientist’s default position on any topic is “I don’t know.”
Hypothesis formation
Rather than adopt the beliefs and assumptions of conventional wisdom, you puzzle together your own ideas, from scratch.
The Scientist seeks out ideas across the Idea Spectrum, even those that seem likely to be wrong—because knowing the range of viewpoints that exist about the topic is a key facet of understanding the topic.
That’s why perhaps the most important skill of a skilled thinker is knowing when to trust.
When people trust information to be true that isn’t, they end up with the illusion of knowledge—which is worse than having no knowledge at all.
Important
an opinion that has never stepped into the ring. Scientists know that an untested belief is only a hypothesis—a
In the world of ideas, boxing opponents come in the form of dissent
Biased reasoning, oversimplification, logical fallacies, and questionable statistics are the weak spots that feisty dissenters look for, and every effective blow landed on the hypothesis helps the Scientist improve their ideas. This is why Scientists actively seek out dissent.
The more boxing matches the Scientist puts their hypothesis through, the more they’re able to explore the edges of their conclusions and tweak their ideas into crisper and more confident beliefs.
It’s a long road to knowledge for the Scientist because truth is hard.
QOTD
Thinking like a Scientist isn’t about knowing a lot, it’s about being aware of what you do and don’t know—about staying close to this dotted line as you learn:
Rung 2: Thinking like a Sports Fan
Weird things happen to your thinking when the drive for truth is infected by some ulterior motive. Psychologists call it “motivated reasoning.”
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.
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.
