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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Urban
Read between
February 25 - March 6, 2023
Sports Fans are stubborn, but they’re not hopeless. The Higher Mind is still a strong presence in their head, and if dissenting evidence is strong enough, the Sports Fan will grudgingly change their mind. Underneath all the haze of cognitive bias, Sports Fans still care most about finding the truth.
Rung 3: Thinking like an Attorney
Real-world attorneys know that the best way for the system to yield truth is for them to make the best possible case for one side of the story.
The Attorney treats their preferred beliefs not like an experiment that can be revised, or even a favorite sports team, but like a client.
For the Attorney, the hypothesis formation stage is really a belief-strengthening process.
If there’s anything you can say about Attorney thinking, it’s that it at least acknowledges the concept of the knowledge-building process.
Rung 4: Thinking like a Zealot
Zealots have with their sacred ideas:
the Zealot doesn’t have to go from A to B to know their viewpoints are correct—they just know they are. With 100% conviction.⬥
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.
High-rung thinking is independent thinking, leaving you free to revise your ideas or even discard them altogether.
On the low rungs, you’re working to dutifully serve your ideas, not the other way around.
Intellectual Cultures We can define “culture” as the unwritten rules regarding “how we do things here.”
Human society is a rich tapestry of overlapping and sometimes sharply contradictory cultures, and each of us lives at our own unique cultural intersection.
Important
Going against the current of all these larger communities combined tends to be easier than violating the unwritten rules of our most intimate micro-cultures, made up of our immediate family, closest friends, and romantic relationships.
In the same way the two aspects of your mind compete for control over how you think, a similar struggle happens on a larger scale over how the group thinks.
We’re pre-programmed to be low-rung thinkers, so our intellects are always fighting against gravity.
Echo Chambers
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.
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
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An Echo Chamber can be the product of a bunch of people who all hold certain ideas to be sacred.
Other times, it can be the product of one or a few “intellectual bullies” who everyone else is scared to defy.
Echo Chamber culture discourages new ideas, curbs intellectual innovation, and removes knowledge-acquisition tools like debate—all of which repress growth.
Spending too much time in an Echo Chamber makes people feel less humble and more sure of themselves, all while limiting actual learning and causing thinking skills to atrophy.
why do our Primitive Minds want us to build Echo Chambers?
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.9
High-Rung Giants: Genies
Language is so important because it allows individual brains to connect, like neurons, to form a larger thinking system: a communal brain.
Important
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.
While individual thinking suffers from bias, a diversity of biases helps the communal brain reduce blind spots.
Because genies convert disagreement into higher-level collaboration, there’s nothing stopping them from endlessly scaling up. For example, a research institution is an official Idea Lab, where practices like peer review generate a hyper-efficient genie.
Low-Rung Giants: Golems
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.
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.
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.
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.
Critical point
Everyone can do whatever they want, if they have the power to do so.
The civilization you’re living in today, with all of its incredible technology, wasn’t created by humans. Humans aren’t nearly smart enough to do that. The amazing world around you was created by genies.
For most of our history, the only way to defend yourself against the world’s golems was to be able to form an even bigger, fiercer golem yourself. Which is why much of the past 10,000 years was golems fighting other golems, with the biggest, meanest golems ruling the day.
The Primitive Mind was programmed for survival in the Power Games, and this is why we all come programmed to snap into golem mode at the drop of a hat. 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.
During the Enlightenment, philosophers in parts of Europe had started talking about a new story. The story, building on ideas that had been kicking around Western countries ever since ancient Greece, explored concepts like human rights, legal equality, tolerance, and freedom. The Power Games, the story went, were unpleasant, unfair, unproductive, and unnecessary—and they were fundamentally immoral, violating the most sacred elements of being a human.
Human nature is a constant, and when you put that constant into different environments, it produces different behavior. That makes environment the independent variable. And human environments are complicated—they include the physical environment, the surrounding people and cultures, the prevailing beliefs and belief systems, and the laws and rules.
Thinkers of the Enlightenment believed they could improve upon this. They believed the same good behavior could be generated with a gentler, fairer, more hands-off form of government. I call this system the Liberal Games.
See footnote
Everyone can do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.
This compromise has two points baked into it. The first point—everyone can do whatever they want—describes what citizens can do. Their rights. The second point—as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else—describes what citizens cannot do. Their restrictions.
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.
The specific definition of the harm line has been articulated by decades of judicial rulings, but at its core is the Enlightenment philosophy that individuals have a fundamental right to life, liberty, and property.
Removing the cudgel from the game-playing options (or, rather, adding in harsh-enough penalties for it that coercion becomes an undesirable game-playing strategy) changes the game from a contest of who can be the scariest, the most dangerous, and the most intimidating, to a contest of who can provide the most value to their fellow citizens.
