#742 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 17 Shocking Lessons About Human Psychology
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What's happening? People, welcome back to the show. What my guess today is grinder bogu. He's a programmer and a writer. He also happens to be one of my favorite twitter follows.

He's written yet another mega thread expLoring human nature, cognitive biases, mental model, status games, crowd behavior and social media. And it's fantastic. So today we get to go through a turn of my favorites. Expect to learn whether cynical people are actually smarter, why people tend to find certain outcomes so intolerable, whether you would rather lie than say what you really think, why people would rather be hated than unknown, why appearing to do good has become more important than actually doing good and much more. This guy is so great.

I've this must be as six or seven episode I think he's had on the show now and he's just so indecisive and interesting and unique with the way that he goes about things you should check out with substance subsides. Great, phenomenal writer, great speaker. And yeah, I can't get enough of these ones.

I hope that you take turns away from this because I had an awful lot of fun recording IT also this monday. Doctor makers retail, one of the best, if not the best, evidence based training coaches on the planet. Doctor of exercise science.

He is a professor at leaming college in the bronx, and he's gone to teach us over the space of two hours how to build muscle using science and research. And none of that is, bro science. So yeah, the huge few weeks coming up, including some massive, massive guests next month as well. So get ready for those ones.

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Awkward isn't IT. Most papes contains seriously addictive levels of nicotine and disappointment know .

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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome go in the bogle.

Every single time do you keep releasing these mega threads with cool ideas. I keep loving going through them. So today, we're going to go through as many of your ideas and some of mine that i've already made from home, and we will see what we can get to first. One, cynical genius illusion. Cynical people, as seen as smarter but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be dumb cynisca, not a sign of intelligence, but a substitute for IT, a way to shield oneself from betrayal and disappointment without having to actually think.

Yeah, so this is actually based on a pretty large study which was conducted in twenty eight a by staff rover at all. And it's basically what they did was they did a series of surveys to test the hypothesis that cynical people are more intelligent, because a lot of sort of TV popular culture portrays cynical people as intelligence. So you see characters like doctor house, played by q li in that show, sheldon, from big bang theory.

A lot of these characters tend to be very cynical, very pessimistic, but but also genius. So it's become a bit mysterious type. So these researchers decided to test this by actually doing a massive study which involved about two hundred thousand people in thirty different countries. And IT was a series of surveys, first way to test uh the the cynics and second way to test their competence, that that sort of something something that I can and IT was interesting because they actually found the opposite of what a lot of people believe, which is that cynical people actually tend to be lower IQ, or at least lower in their performance of cognitive tests.

And it's actually very interesting because they sort posit the as an explanation for this, the idea that cynicism is basically a evolutionary horrifi C2Basically sav e peo ple fro m hav ing to thi nk it' s bas ically a w ay to a p ro tect you rself aga inst bet rayal, to protect yourself against any form of kind of treachery, including treachery of your own expectations. Uh and I can see how this would have probably been a useful horis tics, say, about a hundred thousand years ago. Um they they in the study they describe IT as the Better safe than sorry, horrible.

So it's this idea that, for instance, if you are out there and you're in a low information environment, so let's go let's go hundred thousand years back into the past, right? So we don't have the internet, we don't have TV, we don't have books, we don't have real knowledge. We're in a low information environment.

We're in the middle forest, and we see this aliens looking fruit on a tree. And we have the choice whether we can eat IT or not eat. And we don't know what this fruit is.

We've never ve got no books. We've to no understanding of IT. We never seen that before. So in that situation, the best thing to do is to default to believe ing that is dangerous uh because obviously one fit if you eat IT and IT turns out to be harmless is not going to benefit you that much. But if you eat that food and IT turns out to be poisonous, that's the end.

So obviously, from that point of view, that makes sense to have this kind of pessimistic, risk averse sort of approach to life. Now the figures is obviously the world now is very, very different from the world that we had. And yet we retain the same basic psychology, the same kind of biology. We are averse to risk, and that involves being disgusting of other human beings because we don't know these.

The one thing i'm trying to buy, vocable here wants the difference between cynisca conservatism or risk aversion or something like that.

So cynical m is a kind of pessimism, but it's a pessimism with respect to other people's intentions. So it's believing that people are always doing things for the worst possible reasons is usually you can summize is saying that people are only any for themselves, you know. So basically you can trust people basically.

So honest, sly could some conservatives could be a function of cynics. But I I think that obvious ly conservatives much more broader than that. And IT takes into account many other different horridus. So the thing with cynical m is it's very low cognitive effort IT doesn't require you to really expand much mental effort, do anything all you going to do is not for something you know you and to basically just say IT itself oh wo you know um I don't I don't I shouldn't do this because something bad might happen and our brains are very, very good at finding reasons not to do something so you know this this idea where if you have a hole in your roof, you could reason to yourself um on a Sunny day you don't need to repair that hole in your roof so you just not do IT IT below what's the point I don't need to do IT Sunny outside.

It's just letting sunshine into my house is actually a good thing on the hand, if it's raining, you could also say, oh well, it's raining, so I don't, anna, get wet so I will go out. I might slip from the larger and four, you know. So your brain is very good at inventing reasons not to do things.

And so we we have this natural kind of sync ism. And IT actually takes mental effort to overcome that. IT actually takes mental effort. In the study, they actually found that people with higher IQ actually tend to be more trusting, which is quite a unusual thing you would expect you to give you the way around. You'd expect high intelligent people to be less trusting, but they're actually more trusting. And this is because they tend to be they are not necessarily Better at determining whether they should trust someone enough, but they are they're Better at determining whether cynical m is warranted or not.

which is slightly why does this sort of presumption that hoping for the best, or that believing in people is naive and smart people would never be naive? One of the worst things that you could do is have the world pulled over by your eyes, had seen as kind of juvenile or innocent or unsophisticated? And the converse of that is, you know sync ism or skepticism is more mature intellectually in some way yeah I mean.

this is sort of like a very popular miss conception, I think. And that's why cynical m is is very popular because IT IT has the illusion because obviously, if if you take no risks in life, then you're not going to fail ever are anything because you didn't go out, you need put yourself out there.

Um you know you have this idea that i've heard you you speak about call the synonym safety blanket, which I think really sort of drives with this very well because obviously sinister is is a form of protection is is a song about this front that you put up which protects you from any risk taking um if you don't take any risks, if you don't go out there, if you don't try to succeed anything, then you won't failure anything. So you know it's basically like a way to guard yourself against any former failure. And that's why I think people who maybe don't want to expand mental effort or emotional effort because as emotional aspect to this as well, they will instead just choose not to take the risk, is much easier to to say, oh, i'm not gonna a risk because everything's gone to share.

Everybody's out for themselves. I'm not gona trust this person, and i'm gonna love this person because, you know, they might betray me. They might, they might not return the affection.

I'm not going to go out and try this new thing because I might fail. It's much easier just to not do any of that stuff. And then you can just say yourself up when i've never failed.

You know, it's it's like a kind of ego trip that you put yourself on. But the thing is, is the truly sort of intelligent people who say themselves, well, look, yeah, I might fail. But at the end of the day, it's worth it's worth trying because at me of the day, if you don't try, you'll never achieve anything.

You're not actually going to Better yourself. You're just onna remain in the same situation what so ever. And even failure can be good if you're intelligent.

Failure can be good because you learn from failure. In fact, failure is pretty the only thing we learn from, you know, is the only lesson that we learn from. We don't learn when we succeed. We don't learn when we're happy. So intelligent people will tend to put themselves out there. They will risk um engaging in ambitious h endeavors because they know that at the other day, even if they fail at that endeavor, they are actually still improving the station because they are improving their knowledge. They are learning from IT.

So I think that's ultimately what IT comes down to is if you're not if you don't have hi I Q, you can fain a high I Q by criticizing other people, their efforts and saying, look at this fully fail you know whether you'll never fail so you say, oh, you will always have that you know, i've never failed, but then you have never actually succeeded either. So I think it's it's, it's a guard. It's an emotional guard, and it's an intellectual guard.

Sea gos law, a man with a watch knows what time IT is. A man with two watches is never sure. Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are co phonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn't make more informed but more confused.

Yeah so if you talk to um a lot of these sort of disinformation academics, people who study this this information and stuff, they often say that there's A A problem of people not getting enough information. There is whole idea of low information voters and stuff, you know, that's what people tend to call you for mac ally call people that they regard as stupid low information.

But the thing is, is the problem in society at the moment is not actually a lack of information. It's a lack of trust. That's the botnet that is stopping progress because what we have we have more information than we've ever had in a whole of human history. Um I think I read somewhere that sort of every year, more information is produced than in all of the proceedings years of human history. That's how much information is .

exploding the most financial exponentials yeah yeah.

And so information is not the problem. We have more than enough information. The thing that's holding people back is a lack of trust. And I think it's got particularly bad since sort of the pandemic because you know, obviously, main institutions, which we sort of rely on to navigate the world for us, they showed that they were flawed during the pandemic. You know, for instance, at the beginning of the pandemic, the world health organization said that cover a is not airborn.

And if you go on twitter and you look at that page, the tweet still up, you know, which says that cover is not airborn. But we've very quickly found out that covered was airborne and IT was actually disastrous because people obviously were loaded into a false sense of security. So that was obvious ly a big problem.

And then we also have the problem with the masks, uh, you know how how unification are they um then there was a problem of a vaccine, what halifax of vaccine, what's what of the side effect? And then of course, there was the lability hypothesis, and you know, that was instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theory, despite the fact that there is at least as good an argument that that covered escape from a lab as that IT was naturally, that IT was resolve a natural spill level. So these events, I think, really destroyed trust in institutions.

But I mean, obviously, this problem began before covered IT, just covered excepted IT a lot. And obviously, things have not gotten any Better since then. You we've seen, for instance, the whole harvard scandal, the pleasing scandal this year we've seen many big academic studies which have been shown to be completely bunk um those is A A famous face of his name escapes me but he do a series of studies about systemic racism in which he basically showed that systemic racism is a thing.

This was picked up by the york times, washington post to basic say, hey, look, systemic raising is a real thing. Look at these disparities, treatment of White people and black people. That was all shown to be complete nonsense.

IT was all fabricated, all the data fabricated. And dad, who's a famous psychologist, his work was also found to be fabricated. And ironically, there was a harvard professor who was studying um faking of information who ended up her own work was was fake.

So you know so that this year has been really bad for academic. There's been a lot of there's been a massive drop interest. And if you look at any poll regarding trust in the media, you see a gradual slope. You see people, you see decline.

And on both sides, they are, but particularly amongst people on the right because obviously, you know, this is sort of idea that that most of the mainstream institutions in the west lean left, but even the left, even the left, have less trust over time in institutions. And obvious ly, this has gotten a lot with a lot worse over the the the past few years. So the problem with trust is it's like, it's like a tree where IT takes a long period time of nourishment and like seeing what's going on to actually grow IT.

But I can be chopped down in like a deke. IT takes years for a tree to grow, but IT could be shocked down in a single day. And institutions over many years, they try to build trust with the public.

But a few real bad instances of betrayal of that trust have now caused to to trust, to to a nose dive. And what's interesting here is this details with what we talking about previously about the cynical genius illusion, because a lack of trust leads to more cynicism. And the cynical m stops people from, you know, doing things that people become more risk of.

They become less slightly to to form partnerships with people, even to form relationships with people. And so there's a lot less sort of innovation in a sense because people distrust a lot of things you know um you see in in our daily lives with the ways again, this is i'm not saying that this this trust is unwarranted. A lot of IT is warranted.

I me if you look at what's going on in in american science in places like that way, you see um you know that the government in sanctis co. Had an opportunity to clean up the streets, to take the fentener users off the streets to house the minute in a decent place in, you know, to try and give them help, and to just clean up the streets generally. And they didn't do IT. They only did IT when the premier of china, jian pin cape. Now, you know, so okay, now we've definitely got to do something about IT, so that just show that they just didn't care.

Obviously you know when when there's a foreign leader coming to visit, then they suddenly clean at the streets so this is obviously you know this is this distrust isn't necessarily unwarranted um but what's happen is to the result of this is that people tend to no matter how much information you give them, no matter how much how much information the world held organization or you know governments or corporations even try to give people the fact is, is that there's this position of trust and I don't to be um I don't think that this trust is ever gonna be fully restored. I personally don't trust institutions anymore. Um I I find that is easier to trust individuals now that's what I do.

I don't really trust institutions. And the reason for this is, although there are a lot of low integrity individuals, there are also a lot of extremely high integrity individuals, and it's much easier to gage whether an individual is high integrity than whether an institution is high integrity. In fact, most institutions tend to fall to the level of their lowest integrity members.

This is because crut people obviously tend to rise high institutions, because they tend be more ruthless, they tend to be more dishonest. They tend to play the game. And so they, the, the dishonest people rise to the talk and institutions.

people who are people who are trustworthy on their own in solitude, also become untrustworthy due to negligence or fear or compliance or the above paradox. All of that, all of those things happen so you get honest individuals and untrustworthy, uh, highly falsified groups, even if they made, even if constituent parts are trustworthy yeah that said.

yeah IT all comes down to the sort of perverse incentive structures that institutions have you. They tend to be the sort of close systems of status games. They also tend to be chasing money.

And a lot of the time these people are playing against each other for status. So you leads the purity spirals for stance. And uh, a lot of these perverse incentives ensure that institutions can never really rise above their worst members, whether individuals they are a lot more variable. Not every individualist is more trust wordy than every institution, but of the hired integrity individuals, there are a lot more trustworthy than high integrity institutions. And so I tend to trust individuals a lot more in the ways that I learn whether I can trust someone or not. I have a few horrific, but, you know, for since one of them would be, are they willing to publicly admit when they get things wrong because you know, IT takes IT takes integrity to admit you're wrong, but IT takes a huge amount of integrity to do IT publicly. And if you can do that, and that's a very red red skill A A very IT takes a huge amount strength to be able to go out there and say, okay, I was wrong and so bad for me is a very good indicate that somebody y's high integrity IT shows that they value the truth more than the road ego.

Do you know one of my, one of my favorite is tics. For this is, when was the last time that the person you're thinking about surprised you with one of that takes, if they are very predictable with the things that they do, if if you know one of their views and from IT, you can accurate predict everything else that they believe that probably not a serious thinker, they've just absorbed some ideology wholesale.

What you want is someone who you don't always necessarily agree with, but definitely you can't predict. Like obviously, most people do fall in some sort of grouping of of ideologies. That's why we tend to have people, the birds of the father. But yeah, one was the last time time that this person surprised you with something that they commented about. Yeah.

that definitely one of mine as well because IT IT shows that somebody y's willing to sort of think for themselves rather than some of subscribe to her, uh, uh, a total package ideology which just gives you everything you know, tells you what to think about abortion, tells you what to think about gun control, tells you what to think about freezing. Know, all of these things are generally unrelated, but if somebody y's got all of these predictable opinions, that shows you that that kind of getting at all wholesale is something .

that I think is, uh, associated with this. Another one of your ambiguity of version, people tend to find uncertain outcomes less to tolerable than bad outcomes. The burker at two thousand sixteen found the test participants who were told they had a small chance of receiving electric shock exhibited much highest stress levels than those who knew they're certainly received an electric shock.

Yeah, I mean, this, this explains so much, I mean everything from sort of the world of investing, you know, he explains market volatility, you know. But IT also explains things at a personal level, where one thing i've found in my personal life is that things are never as bad as I think that they gonna be. Pretty much, no, this is a very simple thing.

But, but I find that the sort of the anxiety of expecting what, what, or trying to expect what's going to happen is often worse than the actual, any, even the worst eventuality. So, you know, from things, if I were, if I were one of my old cells, you know, from, say, ten years ago, I might be nervous having this conversation with you right now, knowing that a lot of people are listening. And I would probably be playing in my head a lot of times where I could go wrong.

I might say the wrong word, you know, I might say something really bad, might say the end way to do something. I said that either, you know, and I think about the worst possible scenario, right? And that would really like, you know, give me nightmares.

But then I would find that even if the worst did happen IT, probably we wouldn't actually beat up. Not that i'm actually going to say, but like just it's things are always worse in your mind because your mind is is more terrifying than reality. Your imagination is more terrifying than reality is a more skilled um sort of scare monger than reality you know because I can IT knows your west fears.

And so I think when you're uncertain you can often imagine extremely bad outcomes uh because you're in that uncertainty that's where your your imagination runs riot. That's one aspect of IT with regards to um the ambiguity aversion that you talk about with the with the electric shocks. Again, it's managing the anxiety of uncertainty that takes a bigger toll on somebody that actually just resigning themselves to the worst outcome.

I found that this is, again, you know, if I just, if I know that something is gonna en, something bad is going to happen IT gives me a sense of piece of mind because I I know what to predict, I know what to expect. And so I don't need to expand stress and mental effort in trying to a find a way out of IT, trying to h trying to sort of, uh uh predict what's onna happen. Because trying to predict gonna happen is a very stressful sort of thing to do IT IT basically requires you to consider a an extremely wide sway of of possibilities.

And our minds are just not very good at doing that. If we have just one path ahead of this, even if that's a bad a bad path, even if it's got to ditch at the end of IT, it's much easier to just continue along that part and say, okay. So when IT happens, i'll deal with IT, you know then IT is to say, okay.

Which of these parts has got ditch at the end? You know what? How many steps away is IT? You know that bears every step you take. You have to be worried that you might fall on that ditch. So IT is the stress of having to navigate possibility, which ends up causing more mental discomfort than the actual bad outcome itself.

Do you think that ambiguity aversion explains some of the, uh, conspiratorial thinking? Domes stay cultish like, uh, fads that we've seen that they actually closes down the potential optionality of the world to one thing, one bad thing but IT gives you a sense of certainty as opposed to leaving you open to ambiguity.

Yeah absolutely one hundred percent um because I think there is one thing that scarier than a conspiracy of people plotting everything and that is no conspiracy of people plotting everything, that everything is just redness, that society is redness basically nobody knows what they're doing, you know everybody. He's just kind of trying to navigate the world as best as they can.

Um there is no overarching plan that scary also and so IT leads to uncertainty when you don't know what to expect, when you can't blame your problems on a single thing, when you know that leaves again IT leaves so many paths ahead of you that you just become overwhelmed and you just kind of like the stress of trying to work out which path is the true, true one that is an underrated form of stress. Where is the stress of knowing that there is a bad there is a group of bad people out there who are playing everything that actually isn't really stressful. Oh, in fact, it's actually quite interesting because then you want to go .

online and you want to more certainty about IT. Yeah, I came up with this idea called anxious cost. So in the same way as you have opportunity cost, the amount of time that you spend thinking about the thing that you could have gotten rid of, ve had, you have just done the thing.

When you wake up in the morning, you need to meditate, walk the dog, go to work. The longer that IT takes to meditate, the more times you have to have the thought. I still need to meditate today.

That is a very effortful thing to do. And this is like a protracted version of that. There was this a from matthei de in the time.

This is back in two thousand and twenty. Psychologists have conducted experiments to shed light on why people lose, or at least to spend, rationality. One experiment, people to imagine going to a doctor to hear an uncertain medical diagnosis.

Such people were significantly more likely to express the belief that god was in control of their lives. Another asked participants to imagine a time of deeper uncertainty when they feed for their jobs or the health of their children. They were far more likely to see a pattern in meaningless static, or to infer the two random events were connected.

This is such a common finding that psychologists have given IT a name, compensatory control. When we feel uncertain, when randomness and true upon our lives, we respond by reintroducing order in some other way. Superstitions and theory speak to this need. IT is not easy to accept the important events of shape by random forces. This is why, for some, IT makes more sense to believe that we are threatened by the grand plans of malyn scientists than the transmutation of a silly little microbe.

Yeah, absolutely. I think IT explains so much about why we dramatize reality. We tend to sort of turn events into stories because it's much more orderly. Um you know, if you try to comprehend the world as IT actually is, your mind will be overwhelmed. You know there's just so many variables going on all over the world like that. We have to reduce things down to simple patterns which we call stories um in which we basically we have simple we would collapse the sort of web, of course, analyses to a single thread. And that makes life a lot easier to sort of comprehend even if it's it's not sort of it's not uh, completely true what we believe, but it's true enough that we can get on with our lives and just kind of you know not have to worry about IT so much of our brains.

What you're looking for with with any kind of set of sense making, truth making system is I want to be able to move through the world with reliable predictive accuracy of what's going to happen. But really, what's deeper than that is I just don't want to expand that much. Left are trying to work out what's going to happen.

And the difference between those two allows this to slip in, which is what mono thinking is, right? If if every single problem in the world is because of capitalism or the climate change, or you the live tods or the whatever, if every single problem is due to the same solution, that because the demand for answers outstrips your ability to supply them. So you just retrofit one answer to all questions .

yeah absolutely. Again, it's it's a cogniac sort of a it's an energy saving a mechanism that were people in engaging and I think yeah IT explains so much of the current landscape, the current sort of online landscape and particularly explains tribalism. There is much easier just to um for a since I saw this really could tweet um by Michael mice I think he's been on this shirt on your shirt .

many times is unfortunately .

yeah yeah and he said, got in front me but he wrote something like in terms he said people don't see the world, including sorry, most people don't navigate the world by a true and false filter but by an us and them filter and so it's like this true and fall is too much of a cognitive demand. They are trying to work out what's true and false. It's just way too much effort for most people and IT IT IT requires statistical analysis.

IT requires um looking at hard data IT requires uh of suppressing your own emotions. There's so much that you need to do in order to actually work out what's true, whether if you just adopt a very simple asperse stem, horrible, it's so much easier and you can still get on in your life. Because if you have enough ur system sort of strategy, then you're gonna in the same boat with a group of other people who will help you.

You enough gave the world and they become your allies. So it's just so less compatibly demanding to do that. And pretty much everything about our sort of mental architecture is configured to this sort of system because that's how we evolved.

Now when we were hunt together as we we lived in tribes and we um we sort of engaged in tribal warfare. So everything that we've just been talking about, this patent matching and everything is all in the service of tribal ism ultimately. So we will see the best in what I I say, and we will see the worst in what our enemy say, interpret in the worst possible way.

We will see signs in the clouds that sort of pretend that god is on outside, or whatever you he's on outside and know he hates to the enemies, you know, whatever IT is, you will find patterns that justify and exposes them sort of attitude naturally. You know, that's what comes nursing to us. And IT also explains why we see things in terms of drama rather than data.

Um yeah the thing is one of my those of concepts does talking about compassion vade this idea that sort of, uh there were experiments that were conducted in which people are they based engaged in sort of um these appeals for charity so uh what they did is is like a sort of campaign for for funding for charity and they have two different ways of doing IT one way was based on presenting famines statistics and hard data and the other was based on presenting the story of a single starving girl and the people tended to donate a lot more to the girl. And the reason for this is that the hard data is alien to the human brain and statistics is to something that we're not it's not our brains are not formatted for that kind of data analysis, which is not, you know, is too much effort IT requires too many calories and too much time. So what our brains do is we again, we not we collapse the web, of course, other, we collapse all the variables into a single thread, a single line, single linear sort of vector, which just has a beginning, a middle man.

So, you know, the girl is starving. SHE needs your help. You give her your help. SHE is no larger, starving, and therefore you've saved if you saved to get ill with IT and then that's IT and then you're a good person, you know.

So that's how we ve we we collapse the whole world down to the single narrative threats. And that just makes because obviously we think in the language of story, if you want to to convince people, that's how you've got to appeal with people, you've got to statistics, are you going to help you? You can write a love, all the numbers you want, you know, the glow they are, the more alien they are and the less we'll be believe, the less i'll be really comprehended. You get the story of a single girl, and you present her story in a narrative sequence, in in the way that people tell stories. You know, uh, you could use the three act structure, you could use the heroes journey, whatever system you want, but as long as it's A A narrative thread, single nation tive thread, you'll reach a lot more people um so yeah .

we're not donating a million times more money or feeling a million times worse when we hear the story of a million kids compared with the one of the single kids. In fact, it's probably the opposite that that pulls on our heartstrings. He had the personification of of data and stories.

And you can see this, the charity examples perfectly right? They are split testing into a vision what the most effective way to poland people's heart strings is like they know. So if you want to find out how to motivate people's behavior, just watch a charity advert.

Because they're not doing the thing that doesn't motivate behavior. There's doing precisely the thing that motivates behavior. They have had behavioral scientists, behavioral economic guys that i've had growing sutherland, i'll be in there and the copyright is no arrest of its split testing everything.

That's what they're arrived at, right? Next one, preference falsification. If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie, therefore punishing speech, whether by taking offence or by threatning censorship, is ultimately a request to be deceived.

Yeah I mean so this, I think is another reason why that's actually a discust in institutions because theyve tended to react to criticism by essentially censoring people. Um but its sensus censorship is based on a very outdated way of Operating based on A A very outdated information architecture.

So censorship would have work very well uh hundred years ago when there was a centralized authority which passed information down to everybody, whether IT was via printed leaflets or television. Screens, information was very central. IT was very centralized.

But that system no longer works because the reason that worked in the past was because since the authorities provided a single system of information, so for instance, think about the T V. right? The T V tend to in the U.

K, the T V tended to only have uh, four channels originally when I was a Young, very long, and most four channels all tended to have the same of narrative. So if you wanted to sensor certain information, you could just basically, uh, you could pass a law because this was broadcast media so they were behold, into government intervention. So you could pass a law saying that, you know, oh, the four channels are not allowed to talk about this.

So therefore, now none of that information is going to get beamed into people's homes. So now nobody can ever know what what that information was. But that kind of sort of centralized information structure no longer exists. All information in the west at least is decentralized or or or its decentralized um in the sense that somebody can pick up on anything now and make a go viral um so now censorship doesn't work.

Now what happens if people are well aware of what's being sensitive and you have this thing obviously destroyed on the effect where when people learn what's being sensitive, then they want to know what that thing is. Even more, you know, in the past, like fer the back into the past, we go, the less likely this, the strike sand effect was because people wouldn't even know what was being sensitive information. Alist, but now, because information is everywhere, there's that information is gonna AK leak out.

People are going to know what's doing. Sensitive people going to know, even if they don't know the precise thing that's being censored, they're going to know what kind of information is being censored from them because somebody who's going to spill to be in somewhere because of how interconnected everything is, you know, all that takes us just one person to spill the beans. And then that's gonna.

Why are everybody is going to find out about IT? And we see this repeatedly, you know, not, for instance, with the leg lab bly going Better, lovely hypotheses immediately as soon as facebook, uh, and twitter and everybody else tried to stifle that story, IT went virtually everybody was talking about IT because isn't possible yeah, hand to buy IT. That's another perfect example.

There's many other examples. You know, IT as soon as one organization tries to sense of take, other individuals will immediately raise the alarm. And as soon as that happens, everybody now wants to know what that thing was. sense. They won't know why I was withheld from them.

H, this is, you know, this thing called reactant, sometimes called the backfire fed, where, when you would hold what he says, people can't have something, they become even more adamant that they they want IT even more, you know, you. And so this leads to, uh, essentially a backfire. You know, that's what what's called the back side effect.

And what IT happens is that people then decide that, hang on a second, if this is being withheld from me, then it's gonna. Obviously, I think i'm kind of i'm going a little bit very much a little bit from the original thing, but so that's just one aspect of IT. But like yeah another aspect of this whole censorship thing is that when people realize that they can't say certain things, they instead will lie and they will they not going to change their beliefs.

Like I said, the backfire effect means that people don't become, if you sense of people, they're not gonna become less likely to believe that thing. They're na become more likely to believe that thing. And the only thing that's gona change is that if they know that they going to get back to say something just lie, but they're not it's not going to change their thoughts.

In fact, the opposite is happening. And so it's a counterproductive thing to do in the digital. That's why censorship just doesn't work in the digital age because although people you can control what people say online, you can't control what they think. In fact, what you do is you make people more adamant, think they become more entrenched .

in their beliefs. Well, you taught me a couple of episodes to go about the chilling effect. When punishment for what people say becomes widespread, people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive in the social environment.

Thus, limits on speech become a limits on sincere IT seems very similar to preference falsification is is a direction between the two. Is what? Where is the difference?

yeah. So I mean, they are essentially the same thing. I mean, maybe the difference would be something of scale where preference falsification really refers more to the individual actions, you know and then you have things like the spiral of silence, which is another way of saying saying things expire of silences is the captive effect of preferences falsification. So what happens is that um certain ideas become more more of voting over time and and when they become the voting that people .

don't want to to be the first place.

It's just fancy way we ve seen .

forbidden OK let's go the .

button yeah jevon. It's for some reason I don't know .

why I said for Better I could .

for Better yes yeah um but like yeah what happens is that IT leads to aspire of silence. So the more that an idea becomes unstable, the less likely people are to say IT. And so the more .

IT becomes unstable.

so IT becomes, yeah it's not be important here yeah so yeah I mean, I I just don't know what people are thinking like these organizations when they think that they can sense or information in the digital lage IT just very, very rarely works. I might work in a place like china if, but even in china, right where the government has absolute control, they've got the the sort of the great firewall, what they call the great firewall.

But even that is not enough now. They're y've been cases now where information has gone viral that the ccp didn't want to go viral because they were trying to stiff IT. And in the age of, you know, even though they they do all they can IT just isn't possible because of the number, because of how a fast information travels in the digital age and because of the number of connections between nodes is just not possible to use censorship anymore.

So any any organization that's trying to use censorship, they're using twenty th century tactics against twenty first century information systems. IT just doesn't work. And again, IT leads to more distrust of institutions.

So this gets back to this whole thing that we talking about with, you know, the the problem of trust in society, and that leads to more synonym. So all of IT, you know, so going so between the backfire effect and the cynical, the whole sync thing, you know, IT just makes things worse. And I don't know when institutions are going to learn this, but eventually they will hopefully.

But you up put kind of game where they chase their own tail in a little bit and sufficient. You see this with uh, youtube channels. So youtube channel will begin to struggle with plays ah and they won't be too sure why.

And everybody has a on youtube um when IT comes to the way that they frame the episode and what they do, both content and framing, they have a an overton window that they exist within and they're not prepared usually to go beyond a particular level of boring because people in a click and there's usually an upbound of click bait ness that they're also not prepared to go pass as that seems kind of hacking. And what will happen is they will begin to skill more and more toward the click outside. They will use more limbic hijack words, war, battle 啊， imagery of the whole mister bestia ation faces.

They'll lean more than that. But the problem that you have, as you begin to pull that, leave a more and more to chase ever declining place, your audience becomes increasingly desensitize to the subtitles ty, that you want them to come back to. So it's a one way street when you start to rip that, pull that record like russia brands channel, you regard to less of what you think about Russell brand, what he says his content is, I would chAllenge anybody to say that the framing around his youtube channel is like fair and gentle and reassuring as someone that talks a lot about, you know, like a love, you awakening wonders and all I saw this stuff.

It's like they are coming for your kids what you won't believe they did what it's like the most olympic hy jack, like, I pretty sure that was his channel that did that image of the hawaii laser beam hitting the room of a thing and pretty sure that he either created or his team created or use like this way. Anyway, my point being that you chasse that sort of olympic hydrate game and IT makes people become increasingly desensitized to the things that you can say in the same way as institutions that feel like they are losing control increasingly apply more rigorous um high levels of scrutiny, levels of control. And what happens? IT drives the trust down even more.

You can't dictate trust a top down. IT has to be emerging. IT has to come out bottom up. And but they're chasing IT more of my go. We need to do more because the trust is declining. And that means that we need to use more, you know, ever a moto talith an techniques to do this. And IT doesn't work.

And the t and the fact think and the fact that they think that is gonna work actually makes IT even harder to trust them because they're just so wrong about that. So you ask yourself what else they are wrong about? They're gna be wrong about so many the things if they don't understand this basic, basic of human psychology. Gy, then you know that the pretty much hard to, or anything else.

yeah, uh, hero static fame. Many people would rather be hated than unknown. In ancient greece, harrods, atas burn down the temple of optimists, purely so he be remembered. Now we have news's influences who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for cloud.

Yes, so this has become a serious problem. Now I think I don't know if you know who jack docket is.

I do this sort of world of I R L streamers and jacot tell me, when I get this.

he .

appears to kind of start fight in person and has massive bouncers, flash security guys with him, most of whom seem to be black, and then they will sort out whatever the issue is, by punching or choking out the person that jack just started some beef. And then the internet goes completely crazy by saying this do started on somebody then god is six seven behemoth, a security guide to step in and smash some kid in the face.

And now he's getting paid millions of dollars and has a lambo and lives in L. A. Or something.

exactly. yes. And he's not the only only one.

I mean, this is a whole trend. You so there's people like music for stance. You probably know about mizzi as well.

He was the guy who was going into libraries and breaking up the books. What's filming the librarians to see what they would do. And then you have like, uh, john y.

Smale, who would go out and and start harassing people in streets and recording their reactions. And he actually was japan. And it's quite interesting because he first they got knocked out. He'd hitting the face and knocked out because in japan that I screw around, right? And many got arrested and now is in jail.

At least head was in jail, is in jail in japan, right? So so there is occasionally there is come up, but I mean, most of time there is no come up for these influences and they just go out there and they harassed people in the streets, and they record IT because they know against this olympic hy jacking, right? They know that they are just by appealing to the worst, most basic impulses of the human brain, they can get a lot of vibes.

And so they just based they would there's a lot of pressure on Young people to be to have a lot of followers on on social media, for instance. You know, they want to they want to be popular. Everybody wants to be the cool kids.

And and one way to get a large halloween online, if you don't have other talents, is to just be an asshole, you know, just be an us. all. And film people around you and the people get hate followers y'll get hate audiences who watched them simply to hate on them. And I think you know people like music and jack doc ity have fall into this this kind of strategy.

I think think jet doc ti originally he was just some he just did some other lifestyle stuff um but he obviously found this niche and he thought while i'm making way more when he doing this and now he's a millian aramid, he's he he's got a lot of money and you know he's he's got a very glamourous live start at least they appears glamorous if you look at his instagram account, you know he's surrounded by fancy as and beautiful women and all this stuff, you know, and he portrays this kind of lifestyle of, you know, i'm success, but really, when you look at what he does to earn that success now, he just goes out there and he just makes life miserable for everybody. And this is bad because this is creating again, this is creating a very perverse incentive structure fuel by tiktok again. And the chinese government probably knows that they're doing this and that they're allowing that these these nuisance influences to get a lot of views on tiktok because they know that is bad for amErica and is bad for the U.

K. And spad for west in general. But yeah I mean, so it's a race to the bottom now where you've got a lot of people competing to be the most nuisance, to be the biggest news, to be the the worst possible human being. People who formally were printed, people like fuzz tube, so before yeah.

he basically had a on psychological break on camera, got arrested by miami police, called the cop like on himself, pretended that he was someone at a knife or a dinner, something yeah wild.

wild exactly. And and the crazy thing is, is that we don't even know if this was genuine or not. This could all been part of, again, just being a nuisance. You know, I might be real. You know, I might not.

We don't know, because the the the line between sort of real and and so fiction is sort blaring now and um you know for instance, missing said that all of his pranks were planned and stuff but it's hard to believe that he would go to say edda go to a superstore and you know he would start riding on the this sort of disabled torley things that they have and you know just smashing shell's instead that the supermarkets would actually allow him to do that. It's just not I don't believe that, you know, but like a lot of them will save to fly that to defend themselves if they get into a lot of hot water. And ultimately, what this does is that this creates really bad incentives for kids.

Because if you think about in the past, in order to be at the dawn of youtube, for instance, in order to get a big following on youtube, you attended to have to do something that was extraordinary somewhere and extraordinary a positive sense. You you tend to you have to be talented at something. The the first big youtube is tended to be sort of musicians um or sort of you know athletes of some kind of people who had some kind of skill.

But very soon people realize that you could actually develop just as big of a following by having zero talent and just being a nuisance, just being an assault people. And once that happened, this kind of nuance influence went viral and is essentially a race to the bottom. Now, where people are competing now to be the worst possible human being, which really sets a bad precedent, is sets bad incentives for Young, other Young kids watching this.

Because when the kids watch IT, they say, oh, you know, I wanna be like missing, I wanna be like jacox ity. You know, I want to have all these fancy girls with these fancy cars, you know, I want to, I want to be like that. So i'm going to learn how to be an insufferable human being. That person is bringing that person is bringing no value to to life.

They're getting rewarded for IT life. Yeah they respond to incentives. And if if you say rather than working really hard at the thing consistently for a long period of time and accumulating skills and making yourself worthwhile, the bottom of the brain.

It's the reason I think in part that there is uh some this taste against silva spoon dynasty children and only funds influences that is something ah something unfair IT feels like well how you've got that but you didn't work for IT and in a amErica rather system, which is what we've got that's always going to get people's bixi. I have to work harder than this person to get less. How can that be fair? Oh, well, it's because they were given a privilege that I didn't get.

That seems unfair. It's because that prepared to compromise their morals in some way that I see as I wouldn't do that for I am somehow superior to them. This is like pure sort of ability that gets associated with that. But when we're talking about news's influences, which I think is a phenomenal term i've never heard of before, and do that first sentencing, you put, uh, many people would rather be hated, the unknown, just brilliant.

And I can't I know you ve got two books in the works, one of which you may have submitted, but I can't wait for both of the man like, I think I all of the time I watch you very similar stuff to what you watch. And yet what you're able to pull out of IT is significantly more in depth than meat. I am very, very excited for what you ve got coming up.

Thank you. Yeah, so i've got one one this one that I made earlier. So toxic compassion, in a world where our opinions have been separated from our needs, appearing to do good has become more important than actually doing good.

The prioritization of short term emotional comfort over actual long term flourishing motivates people to say the things which make them appear Carrying an empathetic, even if the result in negative outcomes over time. And this is seen most obviously, in support for the body positivity movement. Rather than make someone feel uncomfortable about that weight, you would say that weight has no barring on health, even if that encourages people, are discouraging them from losing weight, which results in worse outcomes over the long term. Same thing could have been seen for death on the police that rather than talk about some of the chAllenges that are faced by different groups when IT comes to policing, you say that all police are mistreating minorities. Therefore, the police should be withdrawn even if the actual outcome of the long term is more poor policing and more negative outcomes for those precise minorities that you'll looking to protect in the first place.

Yeah absolutely yes. So this brings together quite a few very, very interesting and informative ideas a one of which you would be luxury beliefs of which I think you kind of eluded to the end there and also my idea of the opinion pageant um where the whole thing about the social media has caused us to sort of overvalue opinions as a gage of character in a whistle of judge more by what we say them, by what we do.

And so this goes to what you saying initially about how it's all about looking good rather than doing good. Again, echoes while eo must um said I think in in the talk uh I think with the new york times a couple of weeks ago, you know where he just expressed a bit about rage, how corporations are trying to look but not actually doing good. And yeah, I think this is one of the key concepts to understand the digital age where because we now have an image oriented sort of economy where everything your your success in life is based on how you appear to others.

Now more than ever, because we're all the social media is where people come to promote this stuff, where they are CoOperation, where you are a politician, whether you an influence h you know everybody's on social media trying to promote themselves， trying to show why their brand is the brand that you should know, uh sort of, uh, buy into. And part of this is this whole social game, this new social game. I mean, obviously, there's always been a social game, a as long as it's been a society, but it's been sort of pushed to the forefront by the fact that the vast majority of our lives now are spent trying to appear a certain way to people in terms of you know just on social media.

Um IT really explains so much of everything from sort of cancellation um to uh the kinds of a politics that we have now polarization. Um and even this information you know all of these things really ultimately come down to people trying to look as good as they can rather than trying to do as good as they can. Um so people are you know for pedling uh theories that they are again the pedling theories that they gonna hijack people's brains and um you know sare under them or they're trying to um convince people that they are morally superior.

So there will uh you know that expose their luxury beliefs online. And I think that it's hard to really work out how we go from here where everything is image oriented and things are becoming more some. I think that ultimately, I think there may be some kind of I mean, we kind of seeing IT already where we've see IT with there's a kind of backache to people just going against looking good china people counter signaling.

There's been a rise of counter signaling. I think that trump s election in two thousand sixteen was a four of counter signaling where people elected the most of noxious outward. You know, like kind of somebody who just made no effort to even appear good, or at least they did IT in a really, really obnoxious and sort of overbearing, cartoonish way, almost as a parody of the society that we living in.

I think that was a kind of count signal, but I think that yeah, there's also there's been the rise of vice signal as as a response to the sort of prevAiling of virtue signaling. But even like why signaling is where people were hardly just say things that they know are going to upset people. You could even would say that this decent influence thing is a kind of very signal when people are like, I don't care ah I i'm over above the morale game I I don't have to appear a good I can just be the worst person possible people are and relate, for instance, who have developed massive following by saying the opposite of what is considered good by the majority society.

You know, you see even elon musk in elon mosques counter signaling very, very strongly on twitter all the time where he will say things that are the company opposite of what we've been told we should say by the new york times, by the washington post, by the world health organization, these other, you know, mainstream of organizations, they tell us that we should be saying these kinds of belief. We should be portraying this kind of person. We should be, you know, this is how we should be to be a good person.

And then you got these rugs like elon, like Donald trump, Andrew take, who are based saying, no through that, less to the opposite of what they say. So that's a kind of ballasted. But in a strange sense, this vice signalling is itself a kind of virtue because IT is signaling to others that you are way above all of this silly sort of feel bickering that people are engaging in.

It's the same reason why eases have got progressively more ugly over time. And if you actually look at what counts for a lot of super fashionable street where at the moment it's almost like hobo shek, well, that's because you're say, look, I have so much surplus cool in me that I can basically dress what is so a foggy al to what other people think is cool and still be cool.

That's how cool I am, which oddly, is because of how cool is kind of it's just so subjective if you call something cool, if enough people agree that kind of is. And no one can falsify whether IT is or not. But yeah, this talk, compassion thing i've been playing around with for ages and it's the interesting bit is that second part, the prioritization of short term emotional comfort over a long term flourishing same things.

You know, like you totally correct, uh, living life online has caused us to flatten down how we are judged to be about proclamations rather than actions. And it's the reason that people were about whether they did or didn't post a black square. It's about whether you do or don't have ukrainy in your bio.

It's about whether you do or don't have prononce s in your email signature. All of those things. And yeah that the addition again.

it's it's perverse incentives. You know I think that's probably the running theme of today's discussion is we're creating all these perverse incentives for people to follow. Um and that's essentially what's driving these behaviors is that we're rewarding. We're rewarding, like you said, are rewarding the short term gains over the long term, the actual proper gains, which are the long term gains. We're all of trapping ourselves in these in these compulsion loops. The compulsion loops are a this idea from h gaming and and game fiction where you trap people in these short term cycles of of F N reward that can often lead them away from what they should really be doing uh and we're all getting trapped in these compulsion loops uh, whether it's a being you know, being a nuisance, being an asho online uh, or whether it's being virtuous, single online, kind of all chasing these short term rewards at the expense. But not all of us, but I mean, many of us are, you know, I like think that you and I A little bit Better, but I mean, we completely were not completely into .

I think to think about how many times um anyone has ever been on a plane knowing that they don't have connection, gets their phone out, swipes up, cycles to a bunch of apps, even knowing that nothing can have happened. It's compulsion. It's just a it's it's Green dinner, right? Next one a tazia ls razer.

Emotion causes bias, but IT also causes his motivation. As such, were most likely to act when our judgment can be trusted. Least solution, don't trust, thought you have while emotional. Instead, pause and wait for the feeling to pass .

before acting. Yes, so I think everybody is not a single person, but is a collection of selves. And some of these selves are much more representative who who we are our core than others.

And I think emotion can bring out outside of us that is not really us. And IT can causes to act in ways that we would later regret. And I found this myself like, I don't really do IT anymore.

But back in the early days, you know, ten years ago, I would get, sometimes I get angry online if somebody said something nasty to me, and I would be spiteful and I would say something nasty back, and I would later read back what i'd written, and i'd just be like, wow, you know, I can't believe I actually said that when I was in basic was just as bad as them. I know I should be, I should be Better. And I just realized that that person, that saying those things was not actually me because if i'm later regretting when i'm calm, later regret what actually said when I was angry, then i'm not, is not really me.

One of the things I say is that you know, when you act, when you're emotional, you are an ambassador, your most primitive self, you're basically acting for your most animals off because you're engaging your retile brain. And any decision that i've made when i've been emotional has pretty much turned out to be a bad decision. I mean, at least is not is being optio.

I always make Better decisions when i'm mentally sort of baLanced. And I think that's true of pretty much any anybody. But if you send an email in the spirit of the moment, more often than not you're going to think I could wait that Better.

You know, I could that I know that. So what I do now is it's not like i'm a robot, do feel emotions, you know, we ve somebody says something industry to me online. I get an edge to just be nasty back, you know, I get IT like we all do IT, we're all humans.

But I don't, I never, I never do IT now, I never, I never like this. I never Spiked for if I, if I reply somebody sometimes, i'm snaky, I am snaky, but I tend to do IT in a way that I think is more productive. But what I always do is like, if I am feeling particularly emotional, I will always wait for that emotion to pass, because I will pass.

And it's amazing how often when you let that emotion pass and then you consider what you were would have done when you are emotional, you realize how biotic would have been. You know, that happened to be so many times that it's, I actually, i'm afraid of acting when i'm emotional now, because I just realize how how demented I am emotional and I think this is true of everybody yeah, that is draining because I mean, emotions ultimately are the opposite of of rationality. They they are a shortcut.

There's a thing called the effective isc, which is this idea that emotions evolve. I mean, I would say emotions evolve for two purposes. One of them is they evolved for motivation and the other is that they evolved for decision making in low information environments.

Um you know your gut feeling for instance, your gut feeling is how you make decisions when you don't have enough information. Um and the thing with good feeling is is actually often wrong. People will say, I I swear i've got a really good, good.

I've got a really good, good feeling. I always, I always trust my up. But what they're doing is they are engaging in confirmation bias.

They will usually remember when they are got feeling was right, but they won't remember when they got feelings wrong. And so they're sely gone naturally be sew towards believing that they are got feedings more eco than actually is in. That's why I don't really trust IT so much.

I mean that there's something called intuition which is a little bit more than good feeling, which is or something that you've learned to trust over time. It's something that you certain cues that you just see. And then from that you can build the full picture. But but just relying on emotional alloa is usually not a good strategy for decision making, because, again, emotion favorite short term impulses is favourite short term compulsion loops over long term compulsion loops. And so this is why I think you should always, if you're gone to .

make an .

important decision, just wait for the emotion to pass IT will pass IT. Most emotions don't last very long. Most emotions last few minutes, you know. And then they are usually they weaken and they fade in and and that's only to just way a couple minutes.

And men, see, compare your your actions when you're not emotional to how you were going to act when you are emotional, and you will realize there's a massive difference. And that way you are, you prevent yourself from many regrets. I think .

semantic stop sign one way people in discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word evil is used to explain behavior, but really only describes IT. IT resolves the question by not creating understanding, but by killing curiosity.

Yeah, so we see this, see this online a lot, again, with people calling other people names in order to sort of dismiss anything that they've said. so. Um an example of this might be calling somebody a bigger you know saying i'll you know you're a bigger and stuff and basically say no why did why did he why did he feel this? Why did he think that? Oh because he's a bigger and for many people that's enough are okay.

He's a big IT, so I don't need to listen to what he has to say anymore. But really, what is what is bigotry? Bigotry is not an explanation for behavior, is a description of behavior, right? It's a description in basically it's a stainless ment that somebody's prejudice towards somebody, right? So that's it's not really I mean, you could use IT as a very shallow explanation, but IT doesn't really explain much.

If you really want to know, if you really want the explanation that you've GTA do a little bit deeper, you've got to, you've gotto go a bit further back, and you ve got to say, okay, so this persons a bigger? So that's that's a description. So now we need an explanation for, why is that person a bigger? Why would they say that thing? And you then you would say, or okay IT could be many things like for this, let's using example of classical bigotry.

So um somebody might, for instance, hey, immigrants, you they might they might say, no, I hate immigrants side. I just don't want I don't want these boats to keep coming to our sure or whatever. And the standard response from many people in positions of power is to say all that's just be at ted.

Move on. Next next question, you know. But if you really want to understand, you've got ta ask yourself why this person and IT may be a pretty enlightening answer. They might, they might be that they had their jobs taken away. They might have their their jobs taken away by immigrants, and now they're out of work.

And there, you know, on the doll or whatever, there are welfare or whatever, and their life is you know all that plans have been you know destroyed by this fact that they have just they're been supercede ded by somebody from you know another country um or you might be that that family member was a victim of a crime by immigrant, you know so if you can actually go past the instinct to dismiss somebody by disguising a description as an explanation, then you can actually get to the real explanation, and then you can start to actually resolve the question. You can actually say, okay, well, so if this is the case, then I can go out there and I can convince this person um that hang on a second um immigration necessary, you might have taken your job, but some immigrants also create jobs. Whatever I am, I am not.

I'm gonna go into the whole whether immigration is good or not or bad or not, but this is just an example of what somebody could do, you know, so you you could maybe if you were interested in in getting people to accept immigrants, if you were one of these people, you could basically, that's what you could do. And you could actually, instead of dismissing them and making them you even more and hate immigrants y even more, which is gna happen. If you dismiss the boy's concerns, they're y're really going to react again.

What we talk about earlier reactors backfire effect. If you tell people that their opinions are bigoted, it's not going to stop them from being bigoted. It's going to make them more bited and it's going to know they are going to stop thinking all there's a conspiracy now to stop you.

There's a conspiracy by the juice um you know flood the west with immigrants and all this and these people are call in me a bigger because they trying to destroy my life because they don't want the truth to come out. So it's gona create or gonna basic, just have a negative effect for everybody, is just going to make things worse for everybody. And that's why the semantics stop signs are bad because they don't resolve the question.

They don't really they don't solve anything. They just make the problem worse. And that's why I I don't call people racist.

I don't call people big date. I don't call people transformed. What I do is I might, I might call something they've said bigoted.

I I would not really do that. But if I were, if I were onna use the word bited. I D don't like the word because did I feel it's overuse?

I don't like the race where racist. I feel it's overused. I don't think that these words really mean anything anymore.

But if I were going to use those words, I wouldn't call people racist. I wouldn't all people bigoted. I would call their actions bigoted. I call their actions racist. Because I think that much more helpful, because if you call somebody bigoted or call them racist, you calling transferred, because sexist, m method eristic or fascist or any of these other words that are thrown around so casually these days, if you use those terms to describe a person, you're essentially implying that person is irresponsible, that they are no, you can help that person because there are lost cause because they're just a bigger you know whether if you call their actions bigoted, if you call their actions racist or transfer big.

And i'm not advocating this, but i'm just saying it's it's Better then then calling them bigger because if you call their actions but that that actually allows you to still see them as a human because I feel that calling somebody a races is actually dehumanizing and sense. Um you know you kind of cause especially when you consider that the your terms like fascists not see a lot of these terms are used to sort of paint people as the worst possible human beings because what do you think of the term fascist? When do you think of the the term a nui racist?

When you think of these terms, you think of the pretty much the worst human beings. You think of the nays, you know the noses of germany in the nineteen thirties um you think of the cool cks clan. You think of really bad.

You are busy think of people who lunched black people. You think of the worst you are best. So it's it's dehumanizing and sense because your pet portraying people as villains, you saying this person is a villa, you know?

So I can just discount everything that they say. Where's when you call that actions bigoted or whatever? Then you can say, okay, well, we can actually convince this person to behave differently.

So I I think these semantic stop signs are are a sort of very harmful aspect of our society. And and you know, that's just one example that I just gave you. We have many other examples in which these kinds of questions that that people have are just sort of dismissed by disguising explanations as descriptions. So sorry, describe guises. The description as a yes.

max content raises. So this is from mutual friend George mac. Would you consume your own content? If not, don't post IT. And it's just the the easiest way to work out whether or not what you're producing is actually something that you should continue producing. And I had a similar idea, tangential idea, post content clarity. If we presume that your body is made up of what you put in your mouth, your mind is made up of what you put in your eyes and ears, your content diet should be sparing for your soul, not fast food for your a middle.

Yeah, one hundred percent. I agree. I'm very selective now about the kind of the content that I consume. I used to be very careful.

I used to just mindless lesly browse my twitter feed and just whatever got my attention you, I would follow IT. But the thing is, I found that that just leads to a lot of wasted time and very low information. There's a lot social media, not very information tense.

I mean, your feed is probably lot Better in the mind because you only follow like about hundred people where as I follow like six hundred, that's why I never I i'd never bring my feet. I usually see lists. But um yeah I mean yeah I do absolutely go by that uh that razer because I find that it's a good horse.

C to use one of the reasons why I I originally wrote those megatheria s start writing those megathrust on on twitter was because they were the kinds of things I wanted to read. Yes, I wanted to learn about the world. And I feel, well, this would be a good exercise for me. You know, I, if I can get like forty concepts that are very useful that I think can help people understand the world Better. That's exactly the kind of content I would love, but nobody was doing at the time that I, that I was war of.

So I thought, okay, i'll do IT that you know, i'll be the person to do IT and then IT was interesting because, you know, IT sort twenty twenty, I think is the bright the beginning twenty twenty that I I posted the the first mega thread and IT went vision just realized there was so many people that actually wanted to see that kind of thing. But nobody had thought of that before, even though ti, i'd been run for quite a while as far as I could tell. Anyway, nobody for you before.

But what was quite interesting was in the aftermath of that, there were a huge number of people who did exactly the same thing that I was doing in order to kind of replicate the successor had at that first mega read. So I just saw, like I saw them all over the place, you know, people doing their own threats. And I got to think I I got to think against people to do that.

I don't think i've got like the soul rights to do or anything. But like I was interesting because I think IT just made something click in people's minds where they for, wow, this is a great idea. Why do nothing this? And then they they did IT the selves, and IT showed that if you do the kinds of things that you want to see, if you, if you create the kinds of content that you want to see, and then because you are a human being, and you've got you share like ninety and nine percent of your D N.

A with every really human being, that, you know, there's gonna be a large number of people that will have similar enough interests that they will actually, you know, want to do what you what you want to do. I suppose this this actually fits in quite niche with one of the other concepts are in that in in one of my recent megatheria s which is hotel ling's law um which is based in this idea that um people will tend to copy whatever is successful whether they we're talking about business in politics um in are to whatever. And as a result of that, content tends to converge.

IT tends to become more similar over time. And you see IT with tiktok. Um there were a very small number of people like below porch and charlie demo who became extremely popular on tiktok.

Um they they basic the the most viewed people on tiktok. And h all they did was lip sinking and dancing. Now I I have no interested in watching that kind of stuff, but evidently they thought I was fun.

Maybe that's the kind of content they wanted to see, but somehow that's the play work. And as a resolve that IT, IT started a whole new genera of tiktok video, where you just had people lip sinking and dancing, and everybody was doing IT now. And I want to decreased the value of doing that and is to say with politics now you know if you look at for instance, in the U K, um you have the political part is labor and conservative.

If you look at, say, the postwar period um you have comment at levers with the church climate like was he was a socialist, he was a full on on the labor party. He was full on socialist party uh winter and churches conservatives were proper conservatives. They were like in burkina conservatives uh and over time the two parties have moved toward the center, so labor's become more lightning and conservatives have become more learning.

And is interesting because the right wing party of the U. K. Conservatives are now to the left of the left wing party in the U. S.

And the reason this happen is the reason this happens because of walling's law because um what happened is that when a certain politicians in both these parties appeal to the center, they had a huge amount success and the other people saw this and thought, wow, you know, we Better capture the center, get some of these people's audiences from them. And so these two parties gradually began to try to eat the center, eat as much of the center before the other party got center. So they'd move close in together.

And they converge in the same with content creators. They they tend to converge over time. And the great thing about the max razer that you just spoke about when you create content that you yourself would want to see is that you can avoid hotel lings law because you're create in content that you want.

You know you not chasing what everybody else is, is doing. You're doing the opposite because the interesting thing about hotel ling's law is that the more IT happens, the more these content creators of these politicians are whatever we talk about, the more that content convergence, the more value there is in being different. And then actually, you know, trying to to do something that you want to see um you know like for instance, are going back to my h megathrust.

I saw a lot of stuff about mental models. H but IT was not IT was not portrayed in the way that I decided to. IT was more about getting a single mental model than doing a thread about IT.

And loads of people were doing that. And I initially was gonna that. But I feel i'm doing the same thing that everybody else is doing if I do that, because that was that that form was originally popularized.

I think people like tim faris, you know, they popular zed, that stuff, and they became very successful with IT. And IT was such a good formula that a lot of other people try to do that. And I know, well, why don't I do something different instead? Because I decided to just go against that.

And I thought, I don't want to see this. I don't want to actually consume this kind of content because i've already consumed IT, because so many other people are doing IT. So I thought, let me do something a little bit different and let me just create a thread of various different concepts. And so that was different enough that I actually allowed me to go viral when I did IT. So it's a very good strategy to chase not what other people are doing, but what you want to see.

I think I agree you need I understand some people would say that um if you copy successful content, you avoid making stuff which is absolutely atrocious, like your instinct could just be completely off killer like you're aiming at the target of the north and you shoot south basically.

So there's A A basically as a foundation of understanding writing princess, if you were going to do the the thing, if you couldn't write IT doesn't matter how good your idea is. It's not going to work if you don't understand how twitter work, if you don't understand the concept, if you can't portray them in an interesting way. There's like a lot of things that you need to get in place.

But once you've got basically the rules of the game, you can then start to maybe step outside and completely break them. So for instance, with these listed al style episodes that I do and that some of my favorite and I think that they keep the episode moving really quickly. I know that me and you when we finish these episodes feel like we've been in a fucking fever dream for two hours and how's IT been two hours already?

Um and I did them with homozygous, done them with, have done them with George mark, have done them with yourself, you know, going through a list of things because that that would be fun to me if I left this like pressure holds bucky of like insights about human behavior. I would I would have left an episode again. Wow, that's cool.

And yeah, I was something that was my instinct. Now that being said, it's framed in a way that we know works for the algorithm. It's uh, presented from a tech perspective in a way that we think is engaging in edit these things in a way that keeps stuff engaging.

So again, we're playing within the the physics of the system in some regard, but were also trying to give our on spin on something with something new. And Douglas mario said, this is, well, like, follow your instincts. Your instincts are a pretty good guide and allows to be unbelievably unique and IT allows, like, if you are interested in something, there is a pretty good likelihood that some non insignificant minority of other people are also interested in IT. And given how broad the access that you have on the internet is now, you only need some non insignificant minority of other people to have a massive audience like millions of .

people solution. And that's what expect to. And another respect is that if you are genuinely passionate about something, if you are genuinely interested in something, you will make IT interesting to other people.

You because you'll be passionate about IT, if you're just chasing, you know, metrics, if you're just looking at all the people are doing and you then you just copy them, your passions is not going to be in IT. You're not gona be interested in IT. You're just going to be interested in getting as many views, whatever you'll be chasing the wrong metric.

The right metric is interesting. This interesting this to you because if you make IT, if it's interesting to you, you will make IT interesting to other people because you passions is contagious. And I think that's the best sort of advice I give you to somebody who wants to sort of make a start in in some of you just being an influence or or whatever.

You know it's just to to just find what interests you, right? Don't try to find what you think other people are going to find interesting because no matter what IT is, even if it's something like stand collecting or whatever, right? If you are passionate about about IT enough. You will make IT interesting to other people.

I so mean, mean in my house. Max ac, love these videos of guys that watch, uh, rally cross. So it's like a column ray, you know, four wheel drive cars going through a dirt road and these blocks will have gone up to fucking air in scotland or the queen or something.

And that stood in a pon show, under a umbrella, in the pissing rain in middle, basically in the dd of forest, to see, to see that right? The point three of a second. And then when these cars go past, we'll turn to each other and go.

And we love watching, because IT watching anyone get fired up about anything makes you feel fired up as well. You just, I love people that love things. And yes, yeah, if you follow your passions in that regard, you're always going to remain on the right side tivat as well.

Yeah, another thing is you will be more motivated.

Yeah yeah. All right. Next one epidemic. Look, you know that if you'd lived in a different place or time, read different books, have different friends, you'd have different beliefs, and yet you're convinced that your current beliefs are correct. So are you wrong or the luckiest person ever?

yeah. And this is one that gets me a lot, you know, because I I find that a lot of my opinions are in sink with the society in which I live. So, you know, I have broadly sort of kind of, i'm quite sort of liberal incense. You know, I I wouldn't say that i'm actually liberal, but I have very liberal views and we live in a liberal society. And I find that IT it's hard to extricate my beliefs from the time and placing which i'm living.

I always wonder what what I believe if i'd lived, if i'd say been born in in sort of india, for instance, i'd been born in india, what would I believe there if I had been born in the one thousand nine th century, what would I believe um if I, you know, if I was born into a rich family rather than a poor family, what would I believe and all of these things make me question my belief, because I think to myself, my blues seem to be quite local to where i'm living in, in time, in space. I think this is very true of religious people in particular. So if you you know, if you think about saying a muslim person, a muslim obviously believes things that were originally sort of in the a police system that was invented in seventh century arabia, but what would happen if that person was born before the creation of islam? So what would have been born um so of in the second century would they still be a muslim? No uh obviously not.

You know they still have muslim principles, obviously, and this is interesting because islam is supposed to be a religion for all times and all places you that does its sort of main claim fame and so you know although there is concept in islam called jai a uh which is about basic idea that um before the coming of his mom that was ignorance still you got to ask yourself, you know. Surely that means then that being born before the craft of islam means that you're not gonna have the advantage in god size of somebody he's born after the creation of islam, because the person he's burn after the creation is of islam is going to be an more likely to follow islam than the person before. So there's this weird sort of, you know, disparity there.

And I think you you could extend this to any body system, communism, for instance, as well even you know, if you're born before the creation of communism, you're not going to be a common ist. And so, you know, would you be different if you were born? And if would a communism be different if they were born before the court of communism? Of course they would.

And so how can they be sure that they believe is right? And do they just happen to be born at the right time in history to have the right belief? And you know, that's why when I my solution to this problem is to try to find beliefs that are as universal as possible. So one way that I can gage whether a belief is a good one is whether I can view myself as having believed that no matter what time or place I was living in and it's not a perfect system because obviously knowledge is constantly growing. Um and you know obviously I wouldn't know the germ theory of disease a thousand years ago, but I do believe in now and I think i'm pretty justified in believing in the gym theory of disease given the evidence for IT.

Uh but as a general rule, I think it's a pretty good one where you think about is this belief a product of the society which i'm living or is IT one that can be applied to any time in any place and via gym theory of disease? And even though IT didn't exist a thousand years ago, I would still have helped me a thousand years ago. I would still have been beneficial to believe in in a thousand years.

So I think that's a good Christian to use in order to determine whether police are real. IT doesn't matter through a product of your time. What IT matters is will that be useful in any time and any place? That's the kind of universities sina of our belief.

And so if your beliefs wouldn't work very well a thousand years ago, then that's a good sign that you're probably just embrace what you're learning from the present day. Your kind of know your mind optically sort of trapped in the present moment and in the present place. Um so yeah I think universe of applicability is what you want to look at.

So you can you apply university and if you can, then that sign up. It's a good belief. So rob henderson puts .

something in his newsletter a couple of weeks ago, and I gave IT a name. So i've i've come in at the end and thrown like a pretty bow on top of something which I I really like as an idea. So I called this the intellectual tread mill, some thinkers, as they rise in prominence as a result of their interesting ideas, gradually devote less time to reading and more time to lucrative opportunities.

This is a mistake. They're neglecting one of the core habits that made them so interesting. In the first, I.

Think I think i'm guilty of this. I tend to read less than I used to. But I think I think you I definitely agree with the in general.

I think one of the problems with a lot of thinkers is that they tend to just resort to the same set of tools that got them famous. So a classic example of this would be somebody like nothing in to eb. You know, he became famous through handful of concepts, anti fragile ity, the Linda effect of skin in the game and these obvious ly.

They're great ideas. They're really good ideas, and that's why they became popular. But since then, what i've noticed in him is that he tends to sort of tried to apply these concepts to pretty much anything that happens.

Is the gold hamer.

the golden hammer? Yeah, yeah. We spoken about this before the goldman 他们 and IT also sort of a links in with another thing called the tooth push problem， where the tooth push problem is a where intellectuals a treat theories like tooth bushes.

They don't anna use anybody else. They just want to use their own. And that's the option.

the opposite of me who just shamelessly purposes everybody else.

Well, I think that's the healthier way to be. I think often times, you know it's it's when you just rely on your own theories, you're just closing yourself off from from so much learning and so much knowledge and it's why I trying not to do these things, you know.

But I mean, it's hard because when you do become famous for a certain idea, you you develop a certain brand and you want to sort of you, anna, you want to overstate the kind of importance of your ideas. So obviously to lab got very famous from his three major ideas and you know tail risk and all the other ideas that he's come out within. So he's gotten he's incentivized to, instead of learning new ideas by reading books, to just double down on his own ideas, by just constantly writing about them. And and so he's that's obviously gone to get him more cloud, because the more important his ideas seem, the more important he seems, and the more opportunities he's gna get to sort of expound upon various social issues and apply them to you apply IT his golden hammer to those well.

I read this is I remember hearing Peters in a while ago. Um it's probably five years ago he was on rogan and he was really at the quest of this huge growth curve that he was on maybe just after the Kathy human interview, something like that and he said something along the lines of I need to take some time to go away because if you are out putting more than you are inputting, all that you're doing is just saying the same things over and over again and you end up becoming a Carry icatu of yourself, which is dangerous does this I learned from critical drinker you follow .

that guy the yeah yes yeah so yeah um I learned .

from him that there's four stages to most of media movements so let's say like the super ho genre that we've seen sense sort of the mid uh notes. Um there is like the introduction phase, the growth phase, the maturity phase and then the parody phase.

What's interesting about that is you can track IT perfectly with though, so you have this kind of ground breaking, or maybe less, I in mind, because he died, I guess, before, uh, you could get into parody, but certainly thought you get this ground breaking one and everyone is, oh my god, Chris ripped. And then he get into growth and itself still developing. Then you get into maturity where is a little bit more predictable and you kind of good idea. Then you yet to love and thunder, which was the most recent one, and you even saw bit s of parody early run in IT.

But where the jokes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

yeah. He's the bud of all of the jokes. He's doing a set of splits on the top of like a parad dragons like jungle advance dam uh even doctor strange, I guess he featured as a sort of ancillary character in lots of other things, but he only got two so he had the first doctor range with benedict baba is a phenomenon actor first one super I like since ere ah in the way that they did IT and IT was very meaningful about him.

The second one, a zombie version of benedict babache goes back in time to a different universe to tell the central american daughter of a lesbian couple called amErica chavez that SHE just needs to believe in herself, like it's just the most parody of the most parody that you can think. So yeah. And I think that one of the problems that you get is what Peter is identified.

If you are outputs more than your inputting, you end up just refrigerating ideas. You bastide ze that you don't have anything fresh. You become a Carry icatu of yourself.

You become a part. You come easy to be parodied. And that's dangerous. And he was saying, I had to take some time away. It's someone that we can say absolutely has at here.

And this, all we do is how you going to say no to another speaking gay? How gonna say no no to another geo rogan experience episode? How you going to say no to at least things I get IT right, but someone that definitely hasn't. This was naval who just said I did my rogan episode and am now away on sebastian because I never want to say the same thing twice and I won't be doing any more podcasts until I have three hours worth of new things to talk about that play.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think he novl is very wise and that he's he's done this a thing to avoid audience capture. I think what we are, that's an ultimately what we're talking about because when you have the same set of ideas, there's a pressure on you to continue to talk about those ideas um again to sort out of emphasize their importance.

And I think teeb is a very good example of this going back to him because I feel he has kind of been audience capture in the sense where he's is now expected that he's going to try to explain things in terms of, you know, tail risk or whatever. And it's because it's what he knows and I I understand what he does IT because, you know, it's kind of wise to a certain extent to just stick to what you know. But he's he's clearly a very intelligent mine and he's a man who could who could learn a lot more about many other things, but he instead just chooses to pretty much talk about the same sort of things again and again.

He's doing what Jordan peace and essentially warned about where instead of learning because he is, you know, tell lab he's he's a smart guy, but he's his his arrogant is hell, you know and he thinks that he sort of has the fine and safe, thinks he he understands, thinks even when he doesn't really have a grounding in IT like he he thinks he understands I cube, you know he he makes very elementary mistakes about I Q. But yeah he he tends to just sort of focus on very narrows field of months, a statistical kind of tail risk analysis, risk risk analysis, that kind of stuff. And you know so he uses a very narrow set of tools, very useful tours, but the very narrow and he uses that very narrow system of tools to explain everything from like covered to a polarization to, uh, israel and palestine.

You know, he he talks about a lot of these things, often just using very narrows of tools. And it's it's weird because he's he's otherwise he's quite an ardie guy, but he just choose is not to sort of progress beyond what he what made him successful. And I see this, I see this with a lot of other influences, a lot of other intellectuals, where they just stick to the thing that made them successful over and over again, as if, you know, they just sort of scared of venturing into new territory.

Uh, you see IT with a lot of sort of anti woke accounts online now as well, where the same thing is always the case is always about weakness. Everything's woakus everything that everything can be explained in terms of witness. And you see the opposite side with everything's racist you know racism, as he explains of everything.

H it's because of systemic racist m is because of Whitehouse is because White fragility um you know all of this stuff. And then you just see the same sets of explanations were used over and over again because these people are not reading new things, just that just reggina what was already in their head again and again and again, that they're basically being spoon fed the own intellectual vomit IT. And you know just kind of recycling IT and vomitings out again and you know and IT just degrades.

It's like ChatGPT being trained on its own outputs. You it's just you know it's kind of like just IT is a very dangerous thing and that's why I think um I try to go abroad rather than narrow in on one thing. You know I do occasionally narrow in on one thing when I write, like a long, long reader, whatever.

But what I try to do is to just keep learning, learning new concepts, new things. And you know, like i've set a pretty good thing now where I i've I got an audience that expects me to write about a wide range of different things, but very, very sort of shallow things. You know, I do write pretty allow stuff like in general, just because i've got so many ideas to cover that I can't go into the to each detail.

I mean, i'm not always shared. I do sometimes go on deep dives into articles and essays when I write four thousand, five thousand words about a single concept. But usually I write sort of a wide range of things, but quite shallow, in order to give people ideas for them to sort of springboard their own ideas. You know, that's generally what would like to do. And I find that that's a healthy way to approach, because that means i'm constantly learning new ideas instead of just focusing on one idea and using that one tool to explain everything you know.

which is a temptation. IT seems like this is related to another one I got from you begin as bubble effect, you cannot learn that which you already know from repetitis. The most ignorant are not those who know nothing, but those who know a little, because a little knowledge grants the illusion of understanding, which kills curiosity and closes the mind.

Yeah, so this is, this would appear to go against what i've just said. You know, I would seem, oh, okay, you shouldn't learn just a little thing. You really go deep, in fact, but in practice does not actually possible.

You can't you can't just learn one thing in loads and loads of detail and not learn anything else. You're always gonna be in a situation where you have to learn a little bit. The key to overcoming the big beginners bubble effect is not to learn more because you can't learn more about everything.

The key is to recognize your limits, is to recognize what how much you actually know, basically, what's do you learn, how much you actually know? And that comes from humility and from curiosity. Then you're no longer subject to the biggest bubble effect.

The big in this bubble effect is a product of thinking, you know, more than you actually do. And I usually comes from having a very shallow explanation for something. Because once you have a shallow explanation, you think you have a full explanation is just the way our brain works.

You know, I just, you kind of IT kills your curiosity when you, when you have a shallow explanation for something um you know IT IT falls your brain into thinking that you understand IT and that's where the danger lies. So i'm not saying you shouldn't just learn little things. In fact, I actually advocate up so I think you should learn a little about a lot rather than doing a lot about a little.

I think you don a little about A A little about a lot. And the reason for this is um well this goes to phillip tetlock work. Phillip tetlock h is one of the founding sort of fathers of decision theory um along with sort of people like Robert cy, ordinary and dane they founded sort of the field of rationalism and tet locks all about predicting the future.

He's basically because the truth measures of how rational you are and how much truth you have is whether you can predict the future consistently. If you can't, as only truth that as you to do that nothing, you can't bulch IT your way to look to predicting the future. That's one thing you cannot bulch IT.

So you have to know the truth in order to consistently predict the future. And that's why he's into the the whole thing about sweep forecasting. And he basically found that the the people who are most accurate at predicting in the future, he could eat some a series of trials which were actually involved, the C I, A.

Involved, like there was a massive funding from the CIA. He did some pretty crazy stuff in the nineteen eighties and where he based these competitions to see who could predit the future, the best. And people adopted various strategy of various ua kinds.

Uh, this phenomenon became known a super forecasting. And what text lock found was that the people who tended to be the best at predicting future were not the people who had who knew a lot about a little, but actually the people who knew a little about a lot. And this was because I think they're probably are several explanations for IT.

But I think one of the key explanations is that the people who know a lot about a little tend to try to solve all problems by records to that little narrow sort of sliver of information that they know really, really well because they feel they safe on that territory and they don't want to venture outside of IT. So they tend to try to review everything to the lens of what they know really, really well. Where's the people who know a lot about IT? Yeah, know a lot about little.

They sorry. A little about a lot, sorry, they they tend to be a lot more generalist and they they are more flexible than their thinking. And so this is why I would advocate if you have a choice between specializing in just a small number of or learning a little about a lot.

I would advocate the latter because that puts you in a good terri to sort of be flexible in your thinking and learn. Um you can then learn, if you wanna know more about certain thing, you can learn about IT. And this is a concept called the curiosity zone, which is when you learn A A lot was I when you learn a little about a lot, what happens is that your create curiosity gets stoked and you want to learn more.

Because curiosity is not it's not stoked by an absence of knowledge. It's stocked by having a little knowledge, because when do you have a little knowledge? You know, curiosity is the desire to fill gaps in knowledge.

And in order to have gaps in knowledge, you need to have things. You need to actually learn things. Because a complete absence of colledge is not a gap in knowledge.

You need to look up something to what you .

don't know yeah. And the gap is can only exist between two objects. You can't have a gap without, you know, not empty space is not a gap is going to be in middle of two things. So if you learn those two things, you know, then you have a gap. Now you have a gap in, acknowledge that gap is where your curiosity blues, basically.

So if you want to stock your curiosity, if you, anna sort, you know, evoke curious ity in yourself, then the best way to do that is to learn a little about a lot, because that way you will wanna know more. You will motivate you to want to know more. And so yeah, that's what that's what I would definitely advocates is, is doing us why I like to be more of a generalist, rather specializing in a single you know sort of concept. I think it's much Better to to do that yeah.

Agenda setting theory. Most of the time, what's happening in the news isn't actually important. IT only appears important because it's in the news. The public conversation is based on whatever reported by the press, giving the impression that this news matters most, when really it's just what was chosen by a few editors and thoughtlessly amplified .

by the masses. Yes, so this is why I don't really read the news very much. I I browse IT very, very casually, often in just once in a while.

I don't really read IT much because what i've found is that ninety nine percent of the time the news doesn't make me any wiser IT doesn't make me any more informed IT doesn't really help me in my day to day life IT doesn't help me understand the world any Better. It's just something I do for entertainment. And I think most news is just that is just entertainment.

I think it's entertainment that you that is presented in such a way that you don't feel guilty for consuming IT because you think you're learning about the world. And a lot of the time the reason for this is that news is hy jacking, what we call shiny object syndrome. And shiny object syndrome is a concept another concept I think from one of my recent threatens um where evolutionary in our evolutionary history we sort of evolved a keeps into wood evolved, but basically we evolved to to basically favor new information over old information because new information tended to be more useful.

What are you know, in a low information environment, new information can often be the the difference between life for debt. So new information, for instance, in a thousand years ago, or one hundred thousand years ago, would be seeing a lion coming out from the undergrowth. That's new information, and that's crucial information.

You mean a lion is coming out the undergrowth and is charging towards you? You need to know, right? So obviously, we became biased towards new information because new information could be the light, the difference between for death.

In a way, the old information wasn't. And so we have this bias towards novelty. We attracted to the new.

Anything that's new, we're just attracted to IT by virtue of its novelty and news. Hi jake's, this evolutionary impulse by providing us with new content. People are always searching for what's new. You they're constantly looking for the breaking news, the big bar in red, which you know say breaking news, or they're looking for a, you know, see, see new tweet or whatever, you know, click the button and see new tweet, you know, see the latest posts, all the stuff people want to see, what's the list? They want to know what's the list.

And this is a man adaptive desire, because in a world where information is must produced, it's no longer if it's no longer actually like valuable to have new information most of the time, because the majority of the new information has been created for one reason and one reason only. And that is to hijack your imports for novelty. Your your desire fell, ty.

You is there to just it's basically rushed out. The information is rushed out. So if you look at a lot of the the latest breaking news is wrong because the journalist wanted to be the first person to break story, so they just rushed out as best they could, and they didn't do, they do do diligence, and they didn't really, you know, they didn't give you all the facts.

And likewise, people want to be the first to retweet, you know, this new story and talk about IT. And so theyll just hastily put theyll just retweet the headline without reading the article, whatever. So a lot of this new stuff is rushed out.

And that's why news is generally not that valuable because it's just reported is often reported impulsively by editors and by journalists. They just say, all okay, this sounds like you might do well online. So let's just post this, let's just to write about this.

And then what happens is that people think that because he was reported by the news, therefore, IT must be important. But it's not a lot of the time is not a lot of the time is there simply to hijacked your attention, hijack your your desire, fidelity and you're not gona remember IT, you're not gna benefit from IT. You know just think about just get go to any news page, right and just look at the the top stories and a lot of the time is just not really stuff that IT might be interesting.

IT might be interesting. Uh IT might interest you for A A couple of minutes. You know you might think, um okay, that's okay. But most of the time it's not really gonna that interesting. The exception of this would be news of news that's directly interest, news that's directly relevant to your field, your chosen field.

So for instance, if you are a biologist and you are interested in um hearing, lets say medical uh professional and you're interested in curing cancer, whatever, I mean, if there's a new vacation for cancer, which there is uh which is amazing story and then that's obviously you going to be interesting news and you want to know about that. But that's rare. That's very rare.

And you usually get that not from looking at the mainstream media. You usually get that from specialized news outlets. So you wants to go to like science news outlets, which will tell you about the latest breakthrough in in technology.

The mainstream media is usually just generalized, just stuff that that is just not really gonna a value to many people. It's just going to be there to tinkle your desire for novelty. So mainstream media use is generally not that useful.

That's why I don't really read IT much. I mean, I do read IT, but only because. A lot of people expect me to comment on IT.

If I wasn't if I wasn't writer, I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I wouldn't check the news. I would only just check information that's relevant to me. So maybe if I was an investor in checked ck Prices and stuff like that, you but I wouldn't check the general news because the general news is usually just as worthless and people fall into believing that is important because is reported. But it's not it's just what was chosen by a few .

editors yeah it's strange what we click on and what editors know will drive interest and engagement often has absolutely no correlation with something that's important. Like how many times have we seen um left wing woman says that he can't get a man to hold the door open for a IT goes like supervision online and everyone the same take of that's a conservative and it's it's like a whatever .

it's you know slow yeah it's like to fuel engagement and engaged farming. It's basically a lot of its rage bank you know they want to try make you as angry as possible because they want to start fight online.

Because if they start a fight online, then the two factions that fighting are going to be inverted tly promoting story by fighting over yeah and then also, you know just stuff that reported just generate like you know like if first is if if you're an average person you you know you hear all you know thirty people died in a bombing in gaza. You know it's bad, it's tragic. It's terrible news um but most people are not going to ever do anything about IT.

They're just gonna read and then does IT and they going to forget about IT and it's like they may as well have not even learned about IT because it's just it's not going to change their life in any way. They're not going to go out there in n you know stop the bombing. Um it's part from maybe .

there a bit more ambient's anxious about the world and the impending the sense of exactly it's .

just gonna them feel bad a lot of the time and and there's a negativity bias in the news reporting as well. And you know IT was interesting because so I think Stephen picker recently posted uh, a list of sixty six or news reports that were actually positive. There were positive developments, but they didn't get any traction because they were positive rather than negative.

You know the negative stories always get way more engagement. And so there's you if you constantly are consuming news, you're gonna develop this sort of more cynicism. You can develop Grace, cynical.

M, more pessimism. M, you gna become depressed in a sense. You know, you gonna feel bad because you just going to feel that the word's falling apart. Where is if you actually go to again, you go to these specialized the news outlets so you go to science reporting, you know then you'll find a lot of stuff about medical breakthrough, which is actually a lot more interesting because that will allow you to predit the future little bit. Um you know if there's been breakthrough, then you can uh maybe do something about that. You can maybe invest in if you learn a vx for cancer, you can invest in IT and you can help the people that actually trying to make that happen, you know so that's a lot more useful stuff is positive. Positive news tends to be more useful overall than the kind of negative engagement driven stuff that .

two of my favorite websites that I go to, py post and psychology today, both just have nal insights about human nature. If you're interested in that, a lot of the stays that I sight on the show come from A P S Y post or uh, psychology today. That great. Do you know what the browser is? You familiar .

with that browse?

So the browser is it's been going for, I think, over a OK. Now IT is a daily email of five articles, and there is nothing these articles have nothing in common at all other than the fact that the editor has found them to be interesting. And it's it's, it's my favorite place to just get exposed to always new, new, new, new, new stuff.

Like here is um the live story in three thousand words of like a boot polisher from eighteen hundreds. Uh and here is some new drone technology that's coming out of china and here is like a story about gangers cn and whatever. Like it's just so varied and literally the only single thread between the mall is the guy uh robt cultural I think do that in charge is not the interesting and on the whole is not every ones for me, but at least one to two per day.

It's amazing. And I think it's maybe like forty books a uh and your substate something else that people should subscribe to which they can go to a grindr substate dot com. I'm definitely some sort of premium member which I enjoy. What can people expect from you over the next few months? What's what's coming up?

Yeah so i'm working on my most ambitious article yet, which is going to a be a long read, is going to be about five thousand words. I'm working on IT for unheard, but i'm also going to be posting the longer version on my sub stack and it's about game fiction and how IT can be used to control this, but how we can take advantage of IT. That's gonna, I think, are a very useful one for a lot of people.

Um I also got my my book. I don't want to talk to what you have my book get because h it's coming, it's coming. But uh, there's something big in the works.

It's going to be the first one of the because it's right yeah.

that's the first one's coming out here next year. So not long. So yeah then the one after probably become the year after that, I be in twenty twenty five. But yeah there's going to be a book hopefully next year. Uh, and i'm also gonna trying to uh actually start doing videos as well, uh, because I ve had a bit of demand from that. So I think by the time this comes out, I might actually have a youtube channel I don't know um but if you are watching this and and you're interested in hearing me ramble more than you might .

want to search my name on the youtube, i'm going to go to your .

everything on witter, another member thread coming up actually because i'm going to do one for the the winter twenty twenty four uh meg thread gone to be out in about a months or two so that's gonna the next big thing on twitter. But i'll be i'll going to be posting a lot more now so because folk of my work on my book done so yeah I am hoping that twenty four is going to be a very productive year .

for me I look .

forward ah yeah yeah you want might .

want a bit more sleep than I get um but yeah do look I really Carry to these episodes that two hours that come by and literally no time at all. Once the next mega threats up you will come back on, we will talk about IT again and we we will have more fun but for now, IT leads and gentlemen, winter bugle. Thanks so much. I day.

Thank you. Always a pledge. C crist.