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

by Tim Urban

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.

Trust, the critical currency of a healthy society, is disintegrating. And these trends seem to be happening in lots of societies, not just my own.

In 1905, philosopher George Santayana issued a warning to humanity: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat

wisdom lessons don’t always seem to stick. Unlike technological growth, wisdom seems to oscillate up and down, leading societies to repeat age-old mistakes.

The issue is that the animal world isn’t really an animal world—it’s a world of trillions of strands of genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality.

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.

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.

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 Primitive Mind, at its core, just wants to survive and reproduce and help its offspring reproduce—all things the Higher Mind is totally on board with when it makes sense.

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 last thing the Primitive Mind wants is for you to feel humble about your beliefs or interested in revising them. It wants you to treat your beliefs as sacred objects and believe them with conviction.

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.

The Scientist’s default position on any topic is “I don’t know.”

knowing the range of viewpoints that exist about the topic is a key facet of understanding the topic.

If gathering info is about quantity, evaluating info is all about quality.

most of the info we use to inform ourselves is indirect knowledge: knowledge accumulated by others that we import into our minds and adopt as our own.

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.

Scientists know that an untested belief is only a hypothesis—a boxer with potential, but not a champion of anything.

But the thing is—it’s hard to think like a Scientist, and most of us are bad at it most of the time.

Weird things happen to your thinking when the drive for truth is infected by some ulterior motive. Psychologists call it “motivated reasoning.” I like to think of it as Reasoning While Motivated—the thinking equivalent of drunk driving.

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.

If someone really wants to believe something—that the Earth is flat, that 9/11 was orchestrated by Americans, that the CIA is after them—the human brain will find a way to make that belief seem perfectly clear and irrefutable.

The result of thinking like an Attorney is that your brain’s incredible ability to learn new things is mostly shut down. Even worse, your determination to confirm your existing beliefs leaves you confident about a bunch of things that aren’t true. Your efforts only make you more delusional.

While the Scientist’s clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Zealot’s foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions. When you’re thinking like a Zealot, you end up in a totally alternative reality, feeling like you’re an omniscient being in total possession of the truth.

Each of us is a work in progress. We’ll never rid our lives of low-rung thinking, but the more we evolve psychologically, the more time we spend thinking from the high rungs and the less time we spend down below. Improving this ratio is a good intellectual goal for all of us.

We're social creatures, and as with most things, the way we think is often intertwined with the people we surround ourselves with.

When someone who often says “I don’t know” does express conviction about a viewpoint, it really means something, and others will take it to heart without too much skepticism needed—which saves the listener time and effort.

someone with a reputation for bias or arrogance or dishonesty will be met with a high degree of skepticism, no matter how much conviction they express.

People are meant to be respected, ideas are meant to be batted around and picked apart.

an Idea Lab helps its members stay high up on the Ladder. No one thinks like pure top-rung Scientists all the time. More often, after a brief stint on the top rung during an especially lucid and humble period, we start to like the new epiphanies we gleaned up there a little too much, and we quickly drop down to the Sports Fan rung. And that’s okay. It might even be optimal to be a little over-confident in our intellectual lives. Rooting for our ideas—a new philosophy, a new lifestyle choice, a new business strategy—allows us to really give them a try, somewhat liberated from the constant “but are we really sure about this?” nag from the Higher Mind.

We’re pre-programmed to be low-rung thinkers, so our intellects are always fighting against gravity.

Even in the smallest group—a married couple, say—if one person knows that it’s never worth the fight to challenge their spouse’s strongly held viewpoints, the spouse is effectively imposing Echo Chamber culture on the marriage.

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.

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.

Confirmation bias tricks like cherry-picking, motivated skepticism, and motivated reasoning benefit hugely from economies of scale, as the snappiest and most convincing articulations of the sacred ideas spread quickly through the system.

given that the high rungs are so awesome, 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.

Thinking like a Zealot leaves someone low on the knowledge axis because it means their knowledge-acquisition mechanism isn’t working correctly. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong about every opinion—just that when they’re right, it’s a credit to luck more than their own reasoning abilities.

“Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.”

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.

The Liberal Games are driven by human nature, just like the Power Games are. But in the Liberal Games, a key limitation is added into the environment: You can’t use physical force to get what you want. Where the Power Games did business by way of the cudgel, the Liberal Games would be all about persuasion.

when you’re dealing with humans, nothing is ever easy.

Disney movies simplify the world into a binary digital code of 1s and 0s. There’s pure good (1), pure bad (0), and rarely anything in between. Real people are complex and flawed, full of faults but almost always worthy of compassion.

Going full binary makes sense in Disney movies. Their core audience is little kids, who aren’t ready to sort through too much

When a bunch of adults are pretty sure that they live in a Disney movie, it’s usually a sign that primitive psychology has taken over and we’re dealing with golems.

When judging members of their own group, people will condone and even applaud the same behavior they see as morally reprehensible when done by their opponents.

In Political Disney World, people who claim to hold liberal values won’t hesitate to go illiberal if it helps their team win. When they’re unhappy with the result of an election, they insist that they’re disenfranchised, that the system must be broken, that the election was manipulated by foreign powers or rigged by the opposition. When their candidate wins, they say things like, “faith in democracy restored!” which translates to “democracy is only working when my candidate wins.”

Like the human hand or the human eye, the human brain is a tool developed by evolution for a specific set of purposes. Truth wasn’t one of those purposes.

In high-rung politics, when people come across a correlation, they dig deeper to explore which of the above is actually going on. But in Political Disney World, people believe whichever explanation best supports the narrative.