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

by Tim Urban

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

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.

Your right to swing your arms ends just where another person’s nose begins.

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. Kind of like in 2003, during the arguments about whether to invade Iraq.

There’s also the “inoculation effect,” a term coined by social psychologist William McGuire in 1961. The trick of many of our vaccines is to expose a person’s immune system to a weak version of a dangerous virus. 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. In other words, if straw man arguments are repeated enough inside a political Echo Chamber, people come to believe they are representative of what the opposition thinks. After enough of this, any version of dissenting arguments—even the strong ones—will be disregarded as nothing more than better-worded versions of the well-known absurd arguments. People will have become “immune” to changing their mind. The same goes for motte-and-baileys—when people continually hear their own views reframed as ironclad mottes, it can make them feel so overconfident in their beliefs they become immune to self-doubt.

Me against my brothers; my brothers and me against my cousins; my cousins, my brothers, and me against strangers.

“Small individual bias can lead to large collective bias.”

When you go to a [Wikipedia] page, you’re seeing the same thing as other people. So it’s one of the few things online that we at least hold in common. Now, just imagine for a second that Wikipedia said, “We’re gonna give each person a different customized definition, and we’re gonna be paid by people for that.” So, Wikipedia would be spying on you. Wikipedia would calculate, “What’s the thing I can do to get this person to change a little bit on behalf of some commercial interest?” Right? And then it would change the entry. Can you imagine that? Well, you should be able to, ‘cause that’s exactly what’s happening on Facebook. It’s exactly what’s happening in your YouTube feed.

“A shortcut to newsworthiness,” he says, “has always been whether other news organizations are covering a story—if they are, then it’s newsworthy by definition.”

Disgust fills our mind with a special kind of primitive fog—one that turns ordinary humans into psychopaths who can commit or condone unthinkable harm without remorse. Scary shit.

The worst thing that our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most to fear from their activities, is that we should become like them.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. … The philosopher in one country sees not an enemy in the philosopher of another: he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.

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.

Controlling what people can say controls what the giant can think—which eventually leads to controlling what individuals think. Over time, a superintelligent genie turns into a mindless golem.

Oppression has been a regular feature of human societies since the dawn of time, and in the Power Games, the primary tool to fight oppression has been violence. Free speech offers a better way. The rich are protected and empowered by their money, the elite by their connections, the majority by their vote, while minority views often end up left out. But free speech gives the powerless a voice—the ability to spark a mind-changing movement that gains so much momentum, it moves our beliefs and our cultural norms, which in turn moves the Overton window, which moves policy, and then law.

“sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”—an

Children today have far more restricted childhoods, on average, than those enjoyed by their parents, who grew up in far more dangerous times and yet had many more opportunities to develop their intrinsic antifragility. Compared with previous generations, younger Millennials and especially members of iGen (born in and after 1995) have been deprived of unsupervised time for play and exploration. They have missed out on many of the challenges, negative experiences, and minor risks that help children develop into strong, competent, and independent adults.

As journalist Coleman Hughes put it, “We’re operating on like, five or ten different definitions of racism simultaneously at the moment as a society. And yet the word ‘racist’ carries a severe stigma. So the stigma is very precise, but the definition is very vague.”

And in a 2020 survey of over 20,000 students at 55 top U.S. colleges, FIRE found that 60% of self-identified “extreme liberals” believe it is acceptable to shout down a controversial speaker on campus, compared with 15% of “extreme conservative” students.

Steven Pinker lists some more: “Men are, on average, better at mental rotation and mathematical word problems; women are better at remembering locations and at mathematical calculation. Women match shapes more quickly, are better at reading faces, are better spellers, retrieve words more fluently, and have a better memory for verbal material. Men take greater risks and place a higher premium on status; women are more solicitous to their children.”

They’ve wrapped up something that is quite ugly in a very pretty box and put a name on it that sounds beautiful. And it’s the wrong name, and it’s the wrong wrapping, and it’s ugly inside.

Universities are society’s primary mechanism of knowledge discovery.

As Ronson puts it: “The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.”

In the world of Social Justice Fundamentalism, there’s no use-mention distinction, and no forgiveness for well-intentioned mistakes.

Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

I read papers about men being more interested in things and women more interested in people, on average.34 I read about how talented female engineers were likely to be more versatile than talented male engineers and thus have more options in other fields.

Many of these voices argued that the body of data would predictably yield the gender imbalance at Google,36 as well as the gender disparity in other high-paying fields that are dominated by women, like psychology, pediatrics, veterinary medicine, and physical therapy.

The incident: Someone writes or says something that’s acceptable to most of society but blasphemy within SJF. The backlash: A major protest occurs both within the institution and on social media, often equating the offender’s words with harm and demanding punishment in the name of safety. The moment of truth: Leadership within the institution—in each case, an institution specifically built to play by liberal rules—is forced to either stand up for its liberal ideals or cede to mob demands. Leadership cedes to SJF: In many cases, leadership initially stands up for liberal values. But when the backlash persists, to avoid being guilty by association, leadership fires the target or retracts their words. Leadership affirms allegiance to SJF: Public statements say something like, “The incident is antithetical to our values. We vow that it will not happen again. We reaffirm our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

George Orwell called this “the sinister fact” about censorship: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”

“The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive.”

Popper’s Paradox In his 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper describes a “Paradox of Tolerance” like this: If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. This is only part of Popper’s Paradox, but it’s the part that’s most widely referenced—often quoted more colloquially as, “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”

Popper believed that liberal societies have to be intolerant when people impede the workings of the marketplace of ideas. Not only is SJF idea supremacy not justified by Popper’s Paradox, it is exactly what Popper was warning about. This highlights the massive difference between criticism and cancel culture. Criticism attacks ideas, cancel culture punishes people. Criticism enriches discussion, cancel culture shuts down discussion. Criticism helps lift up the best ideas, cancel culture protects the ideas of the culturally powerful. Criticism is a staple of liberalism, cancel culture is the epitome of illiberalism. To be a good liberal means to criticize, not cancel. But it also means that you stand up for liberalism—when you see cancel culture happening, you try to stop it. This is what Popper’s Paradox calls for.

Rather than training people to avoid conflict—by teaching members of minority groups to be extra sensitive to perceived slights and leaving members of privileged groups walking on eggshells—trainings should teach people how to manage conflict. While conflict can bring people together and drive innovation when managed constructively, trying to rid the workplace of conflict is not only futile, it stifles creativity.

the essence of secularism like this: I don’t believe what you believe, and I don’t have to. I defend your right to hold, express and live by your own belief system, but you have no right to impose any of it on me.

The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life... the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living”.

the school’s physics classes no longer use the term “Newton’s laws,” opting instead for “the three fundamental laws of physics” in order to “decenter whiteness.”

The problem in all these cases is not the inclusion of SJF ideas in a student’s education—it’s the teaching of those ideas as if they’re Bible verses in a religious school, not to be challenged or questioned.

Ideas in the marketplace do not talk directly to each other, and for the most part neither do individuals. Rather, our conversations are mediated through institutions like journals and newspapers and social-media platforms; and they rely on a dense network of norms and rules, like truthfulness and fact-checking; and they depend on the expertise of professionals, like peer reviewers and editors—and the entire system rests on a foundation of values: a shared understanding that there are right and wrong ways to make knowledge. Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: they create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways.

When the big brain isn’t working correctly, zealotry can look like righteousness. Nuance can look like bigotry. Free speech can look like violence, and violence can look like free speech. Fairness can look like discrimination, and discrimination can look like fairness. Anecdotes look like trends and trends look like anecdotes. Bullying can look like self-defense. And censorship can look like civility.

Recall these two quotes from Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist: A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. In 2020, The New York Times published an article arguing that orchestras should end blind auditions, because they produced orchestras that were not diverse enough, with too many Asian and white musicians. The writer was adhering to Kendi’s definition of an antiracist. The policy of auditioning musicians without seeing who they were was producing an outcome with a racial disparity—and was therefore a racist policy. The proposed solution—to get rid of blind auditions to ensure proportional racial representation among orchestra musicians—would inherently discriminate against some Asian and white musicians who would have made the cut under blind auditions. This is, according to SJF, the antiracist way. This was just an op-ed, and it was just about orchestras. But the same logic has in recent years informed actual government policy.

In 2021, PayPal partnered with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism on a new initiative “to fight extremism and hate through the financial industry and across at-risk communities.” Specifically, the initiative would target “racism, hate and extremism across its platforms and the industry.” That sounds reasonable, but consider the fact that a year earlier, in 2020, the Anti-Defamation League deleted from their website the widely held definition of racism— Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics. —and replaced it with the SJF definition of racism: Racism: the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.

Having read about this, I wasn’t surprised by a June 2022 article in Quillette, when evolutionary biologist Colin Wright explained that PayPal, out of the blue, blocked him from his account and restricted his ability to access the funds in it for 180 days. PayPal’s reasoning was vague (“after a review, we decided to permanently limit your account, as there was a change in your business model or your business was considered risky”), but Wright just happens to write articles about biological sex that conflict with the SJF narrative on transgenderism. For example, in 2020 he criticized the rising concept that sex is “assigned,” rather than observed, at birth (check out this endnote153 for more about this). I encourage you to read Wright’s articles and tweets.