​​A Story of Us, by Tim Urban
​​NOTES / An epic blog series about the current state of public discourse
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​Contents

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​2nd pass notes

  • ​​VOCAB: A new vocabulary about how we communicate as individuals and in larger groups can help us see how we exist in a fractal of thinking that has grown ill.
  • ​​Primitive mind = system 1
  • ​​Higher mind = system 2
  • ​​Psych spectrum = the balance of power between the struggle of our primitive and higher minds
  • ​​Emergence tower = The fractal of society starting from cells, building up to organs, becoming individuals, and continuing to grow in complexity as teams, larger groups, communities, states, and nations. 
  • ​​Individual
  • ​​Inner self = The part of our selves that represents our own internal beliefs and the struggle between primitive and higher minds.
  • ​​Outer self = The part of ourselves that can be seen by others and which contribute to the beliefs, thoughts, and personality of the larger group.
  • ​​Human giant = collective of humans who think, express ideas, and have a personality larger than the individual. 
  • ​​Idea spectrum = A 2D spectrum of opinions about a specific topic.
  • ​​Thought pile = The distribution of individual opinions along an idea spectrum, showing where the most people think themselves to be (based on their inner self).
  • ​​Speech curve = The thoughts expressed by our outer selves about a particular idea spectrum (based on their outer self). 
  • ​​Thinking ladder = “How” you think about what you think, in terms of the struggle between the primitive and higher minds.
  • ​​What is, what should be, how to get there = “What you think is real” vs “what you think should be real” vs “How you think we should get there”. Head, heart, and hands.
  • ​​PERSONAL ANALYSIS: My take on this series’ main points.
  • ​​The articulation of the emergence tower as it relates to speech curves is really interesting and provides some useful concepts that make it a lot easier to talk about how polarization happens at multiple levels of society. That’s what I see as the main concept threading this whole series together, and that’s a worthwhile contribution to the conversation. 
  • ​​I think a whole lot more of this could be relegated to blue boxes that are linked off of the main series. I found a lot of the content to be repetitive and it would’ve been nice to skim over those more easily. But then again, it is probably helpful to review these concepts within the context of the argument… so I’m a bit torn on that still. 
  • ​​I found myself surprised by how many of the ideas here are ideas that I also reached over the last couple years. The most striking one is the “What is, what should be, how to get there” concept introduced in Chapter 9. It’s pretty much 100% in sync with my own “head, heart, hands” distinction. And he comes to the same general conclusion that I do, which is that we should spend more time on the “how” and less on the other two. 
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​Series links

  • ​​Part 1: The Power Game
  • ​​Part 2: The Values Game
  • ​​Part 3: Thinking in 3-D
  • ​​Part 4: Politics in 3-D
  • ​​Part 5: A Dangerous Trend
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​Concepts 

​​Primitive Mind: survival software of our genes
​​Higher Mind: product of reason, empathy, and imagination 
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​Emergence Tower
​​The Human Giant: Tribes evolve like individuals. 
​​The Inner Self: Emerges as the struggle between the two minds
​​The Outer Self: How the inner self expresses and behaves. 
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​Idea Spectrum
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​Thought Pile
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​The Speech Curve
​​Psych Spectrum: The Primitive Mind always lives at the very bottom of the Psych Spectrum, at the base human psychological level. The Higher Mind always lives at the top, at the pinnacle of human psychological evolved potential.
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​Wealth Spectrum, Idea Spectrum
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​The Thinking Ladder
​​What is? What should be? How to get there? Aka head, heart, hands.

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​Chapter 0: Intro

  • ​​We’re all a part of a giant human society / colossus. 
  • ​​Human society is an infant. 
  • ​​It’s perilous to write about human society in any generalized way, it’s too big.
  • ​​“So part of what I’ve spent three years working on is a new language we can use to think and talk about our societies and the people inside of them. In typical Wait But Why form, the language is full of new terms and metaphors and, of course, lots and lots of badly drawn pictures. It all amounts to a new lens. Looking through this lens out at the world, and inward at myself, things make more sense to me now.”
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​Raw Notes By Chapter

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​Part 1: The Power Games

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​Chapter 1: The Great Battle of Fire and Light

​​This chapter sets the stage for talking about the primitive and higher minds (fire and light, respectively).
  • ​​“The problem is that the animal world isn’t really an animal world—it’s a world of trillions of strands of genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality.”
  • ​​Animal survival software: “Genes can’t talk to their animals, so instead they control them by having them run on specialized survival software.”
  • ​​“When everything is going smoothly, the software will run in the background on low-power mode. But at some point, the animal will start to run low on energy, so the software will kick into gear and shift the “hunger” setting steadily upwards until it eventually overpowers the “tired” setting.”
  • ​​“But genes value reproduction above all else, so whenever mating is a possibility, it’ll crank up the horniness high enough to override everything else.”
  • ​​“The problem is that genes themselves aren’t alive, they’re just a force of nature—and forces of nature don’t give a shit about anything. Gravity wants to smoosh matter together, so that’s what it does. It has no concern for the well-being of the atoms it smooshes. If the hydrogen atoms in the center of the sun can’t handle the smooshing, they’ll fuse into helium atoms. Gravity doesn’t care. But the important thing is, atoms don’t care either. In the center of the sun, no one cares about anything, so everything’s fine.”
  • ​​“So genes are like gravity—but animals aren’t like atoms. Mindless evolutionary innovation brought survival tricks like feelings and subjective experience and higher sentience into animals, which means animals are like atoms in the center of a star…if the atoms hated being smooshed.”
  • ​​On intelligence: “It’s like running a small business and considering whether to hire an employee with a rare skill set who will only work for $1,000,000 a year. Doesn’t matter how good the employee is—no one is worth a million a year to a cash-strapped small business. But these ape genes tried it anyway.”
  • ​​Intelligence, reasoning, imagination, communication all combine to enable empathy and ultimately awareness. 
  • ​​Awareness allows us to overrule the instructions of our genes (in theory).
  • ​​“The difficulty with two minds is that there’s only one brain—leaving the two minds in an ongoing power struggle. When the Higher Mind is empowered, his staff lights up the room with self-awareness, offering a clear view of the Primitive Mind in all its silliness, which makes it hard for the Primitive Mind to do anything sneaky.”
  • ​​“But when the tides turn, the Primitive Mind’s torch grows along with his influence, and the room gets increasingly smoky. The more smoke there is, the more it blocks the Higher Mind’s light, cutting off his access to his human and making it hard for him to do his job.”
  • ​​“The never-ending struggle between these two minds is the human condition. It’s the backdrop of everything that has ever happened in the human world, and everything that happens today. It’s the story of our times because it’s the story of all human times. We’re gonna go to all kinds of places in this post series—and wherever we go, remember to remember the great battle of fire and light.”
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​Chapter 2: A Game of Giants

​​This chapter introduces the building blocks of society, aka groups of individuals, aka human giants. 
  • ​​“There’s no reason this concept shouldn’t apply across the board. Isolate an ant from its colony and it’ll suffer the same fate as the extracted sponge cell—so why do we think of the ant as the life form and the colony as simply a community of those life forms?”
  • ​​“The Primitive Mind is all about making giants. In fact, one of the Primitive Mind’s central talents is the ability to instinctually merge with other Primitive Minds, combining each of their individual primal flames into a raging survival bonfire, making the group stronger and more powerful than the sum of its parts. But when Higher Minds work together, the effect can be just as powerful: the group as a whole gains superhuman abilities in learning and creativity and discovery.”
  • ​​“Combining both emergent properties made the human tribe an incredible survival machine that allowed the species to stay afloat and thrive in a relentless natural world.”
  • ​​“If we wanted to understand why ants evolved to be the way they are, we’d want to think about the evolution of their independent life form: the colony. The individual ant wasn’t shaped by evolution to be the perfect survival creature—it was shaped by evolution to be just the right element of a perfect survival colony. That’s why ants happily sacrifice their lives to protect the colony during an attack.”
  • ​​“If we want to understand why people are the way they are, we should try thinking the same way. A human isn’t simply a perfect survival creature—it’s also just the right element of a perfect survival tribe. Examining the traits of a perfect survival tribe can help us see the specs for human nature, not only illuminating who we are, but why we’re that way.”
  • ​​“In the human world, we think of “Me vs. You” selfishness and “Us vs. Them” tribalism as different concepts, but they’re actually just the same phenomenon happening on different parts of Emergence Tower.”
  • ​​“The human Primitive Mind isn’t any nicer than the spider or ant Primitive Mind—but it is a bit more complicated. Unlike spiders and ants, whose independent life form never changes emergence floors, humans are a kind of hybrid creature that inhabits a rangealong Emergence Tower, not a single floor.”
  • ​​“When my tortoise Winston is scared, he tucks his head and his limbs into his shell. When humans are scared, they form giants. The giant is the human tortoise shell. Typically, the bigger the giant that threatens a group of people, the bigger a giant they’ll form in response.”
  • ​​“Psychologist Jonathan Haidt likes to point out an old Bedouin proverb that nails this idea. It goes: Me against my brothers; my brothers and me against my cousins; my cousins, my brothers, and me against strangers.
  • ​​“The evolutionary sweet spot probably wouldn’t have been kindness or empathy or compassion or cooperation—it would have been to have these traits on a toggle switch. To be micro-kind and macro-ruthless.”
  • ​​“Selective kindness isn’t high-mindedness. The Higher Mind exhibits these traits all the time. He’s high-minded universally, as a general principle, and applies it to everyone equally. Selective kindness is a Primitive Mind trick that appears to be high-mindedness, if you’re not paying close enough attention. Remember, at first glance, ants seemed like nice people too.”
  • ​​“That’s why the litmus test of anyone’s true colors—the revealer of which mind is running the show in their head—is how they treat people outside their tribe. Both the Higher Mind and Primitive Mind tend to treat fellow tribesmen with kindness, so that tells you nothing—it’s when dealing with Them that the two minds diverge.”
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​Chapter 3: A Story of Stories

​​Lovely chapter that explores how stories function as psychotechnology that in effect allow larger human giants to form. 
  • ​​“When a loose tribe held together by weak glue grows bigger and bigger, it also gets looser and looser until it can’t hold itself together anymore, and it splinters.”
  • ​​“This imposes a natural ceiling on human giant size—and therefore on human power itself. Except I’m currently sitting in an eight-million-person city that’s inside of a 325-million-person country. So what changed?”
  • ​​Stories are tribal technology: “The Johnsons could go for a similar strategy, giving Lulu candy for staying home at night and lining her window frame with live electrical wire. But instead they tell her about Santa Claus. They tell Lulu that A) Santa Claus is omniscient—he knows when she’s been sleeping and he knows when she’s awake and he knows when she’s been bad or good; and B) when Santa breaks into their house next Christmas, he’ll leave presents for her if and only if she’s been good.”
  • ​​“On top of all the standard animal desires, humans are incentivized by all kinds of weird Snausages and electric fences. They crave self-esteem and want to avoid shame. They yearn for praise and acceptance and detest loneliness or embarrassment. They pine for meaning and fulfillment and they fear regret. They’re gratified by helping others and guilty when they cause pain. They’re terrified of their own mortality.”
  • ​​“In each case, another person presented Lulu with a claim about reality, placing it into her imagination. Lulu, being no fool, treats her beliefs like an exclusive club, and she treats the claims of others like the line outside the door. The gatekeeper of her beliefs—the club’s bouncer—is Lulu’s sense of reason. In these three scenarios, Lulu’s “reason bouncer” admitted Mimi’s claim into the club but turned the other two claims away.”
  • ​​“If you want to change someone’s behavior, easier than altering their motivation or changing their actual environment is altering their perception of reality. This third way of manipulating a human is a shortcut—a cheat—made possible by one of human evolution’s best tricks: Delusion. Delusion is what happens when our reason bouncer fails as the gatekeeper to our beliefs—when our imagination is stronger than our judgment. It might be the most universal human quality.”
  • ​​“This is the power of human beliefs. Not only do they produce an endless array of behavioral varieties—a million little evolutionary experiments—they allow for the complete behavioral mutation of any one of them within a single generation. Sometimes within a single day.”
  • ​​“As we discussed, the glue of raw tribalism is only so strong, which imposed a ceiling on tribe size for a long time. This isn’t just a human problem—mass cooperation is rare anywhere in nature. Ant and bee colonies seem to pull it off, but they’re actually just using the same “glue via family ties” trick human tribes use: they’re all siblings in one huge immediate family. No human female can have thousands of children, so humans couldn’t do mass cooperation.”
  • ​​“Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein talks about what he calls a “metaphorical truth”—a belief that’s not true, but one that enhances its believers’ survival chances. One example he gives is the belief that porcupines can shoot their quills. In fact, they cannot—but those who believe they can are more likely to stay far away from porcupines and therefore less likely to end up hurt by one.”
  • ​​“Human history is a long progression of human behavior, and human behavior is largely driven by human beliefs. And as Harari, Weinstein, and others point out, what has mattered most in our past is not whether our beliefs were true but whether they drove the right behavior.”
  • ​​Story virus: “A story, for our purposes, is the complete array of a human’s beliefs—their beliefs around values and morality, their beliefs about their environment and the broader world they live in, their beliefs about what happened in the past and what will happen in the future, their beliefs about the meaning of life and death.”
  • ​​“Well, a story is like a virus. It can’t exist on its own—it requires a host. In the case of story viruses, a human host. So the first prerequisite for a fit story is that it’s good at binding to its host. A virus can invade an animal, but if it can’t convert that animal into its long-term home, it won’t make it.”
  • ​​Characteristics of a story virus:
  • ​​Simplicity
  • ​​Unfalsifiability
  • ​​Conviction
  • ​​Contagiousness
  • ​​Incentives
  • ​​Accountability
  • ​​Comprehensiveness
  • ​​“In the game of stories evolution, the long-term survivors will be those whose hosts fare best over time.”
  • ​​“But does that necessarily mean making the individual humans who believed it better at surviving? No, because as we’ve discussed, the ancient human life form wasn’t just the human—it was also the human giant. So the right kind of story symbiosis would line up with the survival game humans had already been playing. It would need to make the giants who hosted it better survivors.”
  • ​​Tribal values
  • ​​“Humans are Emergence Tower hybrids whose mindset can move up and down the tower’s elevator—and nothing brings humans up to the “small piece of a larger organism” level better than a threat from a common enemy. The bigger the common enemy, the stronger the glue.”
  • ​​“An effective superglue story goes further than painting the enemy as bad, dangerous people—it dehumanizes them.”
  • ​​A Queen Bee
  • ​​“If you want people to act like ants or bees, give them a queen. The queen bee can be a rightful ruler or a mythic figure or a natural wonder or a higher cause or a hallowed homeland. The important thing is that the queen bee is seen as more sacred than any form of primal fulfillment.”
  • ​​Afterlife: “Extending the range like this overrides any care the Primitive Mind would otherwise have for what goes on within the normal range. If you’re sitting in hell when all is said and done, all of that food and friendship and sex and power you scored during your life does you no good. If you have to do some seemingly awful things in order to win a ticket to eternal heaven, you do them without a second thought.”
  • ​​Identity Attachment
  • ​​“A superglue story will almost always intertwine itself with the identity of its believers. You know a superglue story is linked to its believers’ identities when you hear them use the story as a noun to describe themselves—when they call themselves “a [story]an” or “a [story]ist” or something like that.”
  • ​​“When people see a story as an external object, then someone challenging the story is just making an intellectual argument. But when believers identify with a story, someone challenging the story is a personal threat. And since our brains are notoriously bad at distinguishing between our psychological identity and our physical body, the personal threat doesn’t feel like an insult—it feels like danger.”
  • ​​“On the flip side, when a story is culturally sacred, a challenge to that story is culturally taboo. Sacredness and taboo are almost always opposite sides of the same coin—the sword and shield of uniformity.”
  • ​​“By attaching itself to believers’ identities on both the individual and group emergence levels, a superglue story becomes synonymous for “Us” and synonymous for “Me” in the minds of its believers. Via the transitive property, this makes Us and Me feel one and the same, bonding them together with the story’s glue.”
  • ​​“Delusion isn’t the same as fogginess. Fogginess on its own is just confusion, disarray, forgetfulness. Delusion is fog plus the illusion of clarity. Delusion isn’t confusion about what’s true—it’s full belief in what’s not true. When the Primitive Mind is fully empowered, it can turn reason down while jacking imagination up to the max—which can leave a person vividly believing crazy things, including the belief that their Higher Mind is the one doing the thinking and that what they believe has been fully vetted by reason.”
  • ​​A Cudgel
  • ​​“If there’s a common theme to all of human history, all over the globe, it’s probably humans bullying other humans. This is because bullying is one of the primary ways the Primitive Mind does business. Bullying is just humans doing business in a primitive format: the Power Games.”
  • ​​“The Power Games basically goes like this: everyone acts fully selfish, and whenever there’s a conflict, whoever has the power to get their way, gets their way. Or, more succinctly: Everyone can do whatever they want, if they have the power to pull it off.”
  • ​​“Humans have power in numbers. That’s why tribe glue was so important in the ancient world. More glue = bigger tribe = bigger cudgel. And in the Power Games, a bigger cudgel is the means to every important end: safety, resources, mates, peace of mind.”
  • ​​“Just as important as the size of a tribe’s outward-facing cudgel (the giant’s “military”) is the size of the one it points inward at its own members (the giant’s “police force”). One fights external threats—the other fights cancer.”
  • ​​“A superglue story will usually go even further and write a cudgel right into its pages—it’s a jealous story that expressly forbids belief in other stories”
  • ​​“The “critical bully mass” phenomenon can turn a made-up story that somepeople live in into the actual environment that everyone lives in. When enough people believe that there’s a god who wants death for anyone who says X, those who say X will actually end up dead. When enough people think saying Y means you’re not a member of the tribe, saying Y actually gets you excommunicated. If a story could alter the behavior of enough people via indoctrination, the believers would alter the behavior of the rest via intimidation. This creates a loop that can keep a story, once implanted, in control of a tribe for centuries.”
  • ​​“The self-perpetuating indoctrination-intimidation loop is the story virus’s promised land. It’s the reason why so many stories seem to get stuck in human beliefs for ages, even as the species continues to enhance its knowledge of reality.”
  • ​​“In a Power Games environment, humans with a natural pull toward tribalism and conformity, with strongimaginations and questionable reasoning, and with an instinct to please powerful people rather than defy them, may have been the best survivors. It would explain a lot about the world around us today.”
  • ​​“Over hundreds of centuries, hyper-optimized superglue stories came to cover all the bases so thoroughly, they were able to do something biological evolution never could—convince masses of human beings to cooperate. Rather than repress the human primal flame, these stories harnessed it, grabbed its reins, and redirected it—lining up individual flames in parallel lockstep, pointing them all in the direction dictated by the story. With glue like that, we transformed our little primate giants into world-conquering beasts.”
  • ​​“Of course, there were some major positives—we had made an unfathomable amount of progress. Cooperation on a mass scale made human knowledge and technology soar into the stratosphere, and in some ways, quality of life rose with it. The world’s superglue stories, for all their downsides and damage, were also the source of some of the wisest and highest-minded values in our history, and were at times the bedrock of peace and stability.”
  • ​​“For all our advances, we hadn’t advanced where it matters most—the human world remained, like the rest of the animal world, a stressful place to be.”
  • ​​“The Power Games are survival of the fiercest, survival of the greediest, and survival of the conformist-est. They favor the tribal, the manipulative and the gullible, the bully and the bulliable—each of them right in the Primitive Mind’s wheelhouse. The Higher Mind just isn’t cut out for those streets. History is scattered with moments of Higher Mind triumph, but it typically was only a matter of time before the high-minded culture was trampled over by the stampeding Power Games.”
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​Part 2: The Value Games

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​Chapter 4: The Enlightenment Kids

  • ​​“The forefathers were sick of tyranny and decided it was time to move on to the coup stage—or, in this case, the coup’s less intense cousin, an independence movement.”
  • ​​“This particular scene wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It was a typical development in the Power Games, where most nations of the time were on the “tyranny → coup → chaos → tyranny” merry-go-round.”
  • ​​“What was unusual was their long-term plan. Normally, the people rebel because they’re annoyed about being powerless and they want to turn the tables. So a rebellion topples the king, some chaos ensues, some friends murder friends, and when the dust settles, there’s a new king. For centuries, most people assumed that this was just the way things had to be. But this was the late 1700s, and the forefathers were Enlightenment Kids.”
  • ​​“The American forefathers were coming of age right in the middle of all of this, and they decided to take action. They had bigger ambitions than overthrowing their king—they wanted to overthrow the concept of a king.”
  • ​​“The U.S. Constitution would work the opposite way. It was a set of rules that, rather than serving any particular goal or outcome, would be sacred in themselves. The Constitution described a sacred process—a set of inviolable means by which any and all national or individual goals would need to be accomplished. It outlined the means by which leaders would be elected, the means by which conflicts would be settled and people who broke the rules would be punished, the means by which the country could act on the international stage—all processes that emerged from Enlightenment values. The U.S. and its citizens could and would do anything they wanted—as long as they did it Enlightenment-style.”
  • ​​“A huge chunk of the Constitution’s rules would pertain to the scope and limitations of the government. The idea was, the government wouldn’t make the rules, it would be subject to the rules. The government wouldn’t be the core driver of the evolution and direction of the country—it would, in theory, simply execute the will of the people as they evolved. With a monopoly on the use of violence, the government would be the grand enforcer that holds the operation together—but its use of force would be severely restricted beyond that purpose.”
  • ​​“The Founders couldn’t conjure a mythical, immortal, high-minded dictator, but they could conjure each of its parts, that together, could last forever, remain consistent, and ultimately accomplish the same thing.”
  • ​​“Without any principles in charge, the Power Games are a simple contest of who can be the biggest bully. In most cases, no matter how much power you can muster, there’s someone around with an even bigger cudgel—and they’ll usually use it to restrict some of that unlimited freedom of yours, whether you like it or not.”
  • ​​Freedom
  • ​​“The U.S. was founded, above all, as a reaction against the Power Games’ freedom problem—a problem that the Constitution solves with a compromise that goes something like this: Everyone can do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.”
  • ​​“Your right to swing your arms ends just where another person’s nose begins.”
  • ​​“In his famous philosophical work On Liberty, John Stuart Mill calls this concept The Harm Principle, stating: The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
  • ​​Fairness
  • ​​“One important component is procedural fairness—i.e. are people being treated equally under the law, and is everyone subject to the same processes? A classic example here is the justice system.”
  • ​​“When someone breaks the law, or when there’s a conflict between citizens, the government referee has to ensure it’s doling out the yellow and red cards consistently and correctly. Even when everyone is trying to be as fair as possible, this can be tricky.”
  • ​​“So the Founders created a justice system that allows anyone in a conflict or accused of a crime to tell their side of the story to other citizens, who can then decide who’s at fault and for what. The Power Games is full of people being found guilty without evidence and punished unfairly, something the Enlightenment was determined to put an end to—so the hard rule would be: innocent until proven guilty.”
  • ​​“The other major component of a fair country is distributive fairness. Humans like resources, and resources are limited. In the Power Games, whoever holds the cudgel tends to also distribute the resources, in any way they see fit. In the new U.S., that would no longer fly.
  • ​​“The Founders favored the middle part of the spectrum—free markets and equality of opportunity—over the left end. They believed that on the U.S. soccer field, everyone should have an equal opportunity to play, but beyond that, how people played should determine their lot in life. The “equal opportunity” language is baked right into the third inalienable right: the pursuit of happiness. A right to the pursuit is what mattered to the Americans—the pursuit of happiness, wealth, power, influence—not a right to the acquisition of these resources.”
  • ​​“There was another argument for free markets and equal opportunity—one that went beyond the realm of morality. The Founders predicted that equal opportunity would produce a brilliant side effect—fantastic productivity. A system in which everyone had the opportunity to compete for resources would generate a complete alternative to the Power Games—what we might call the Value Games.”
  • ​​The Value Games: “In the Power Games, people who have cudgels use them to forcefully take the resources they want. In the Value Games, people use carrots to win resources over from others. The Value Games are driven by human nature, just like the Power Games are. The difference is the Power Games is what humans do when there are no rules—the Value Games is what humans do when a key limitation is added into the environment: You can’t use a cudgel to get what you want.”
  • ​​“In the economic Value Games—i.e. capitalism—any citizen can vie for wealth, but to actually gain wealth, a citizen has to figure out how to provide some form of carrot that other citizens want badly enough that they’ll trade their wealth for it. So, for example, anyone can apply for a job or start a business—but for your pursuit at wealth to turn into actual wealth, you’ll need employers or customers to decide to trade their wealth for the value you can provide.”
  • ​​“In the political Value Games—i.e. democracy—any citizen can run for office and vie for the power to allocate government muscle and funding. But to actually acquire that power, you have to convince other citizens to grant you the seat by earning enough votes to win an election. And to maintain power for a long time, you’ll have to use your power in a way that satisfies enough citizens to be continually reelected.”
  • ​​“While it was typically better to be feared than loved in the Power Games, in the Value Games, it’s usually better to be loved than feared—which keeps politicians and businesses on their best behavior.”
  • ​​“But the coolest free market in the Value Games wouldn’t be economic or political, it would be the game of ideas—the game that would give the U.S. giant a brain.
  • ​​If we’re going to achieve our goal in this series—to understand what’s going on in U.S. society and others—we’re going to have to learn to be neuroscientists in the world of giants and wrap our heads around the way a society thinks.”
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​Chapter 5: The Mute Button

  • ​​The Inner Self: “The Inner Self is the product of the struggle between the Primitive Mind and the Higher Mind. At any given moment, the way the Inner Self thinks and feels, what it believes, its values and motivations, are a reflection of the state of that struggle. For our purposes in this chapter, we’ll only worry about the Inner Self as a whole.”
  • ​​The Outer Self: “The Outer Self is the human body the Inner Self lives in. The state of the Inner Self determines how the Outer Self behaves—where it goes, how it acts, who it spends time with, what it says or doesn’t say. So the Outer Self isn’t really an independent entity—it’s more like a big robot being controlled by the Inner Self, who sits in a little cockpit in its head.”
  • ​​“Language is so magical because it allows individual brains to connect, like neurons, to form a larger thinking system. If a human’s Inner Self is like a neuron, the Outer Self’s ability to express itself gives the neuron its axons, and its ability to see or listen to the expression of others gives it dendrites.”
  • ​​“In theory, with enough communication, an entire country with millions of people could become a colossal national brain.”
  • ​​“Through the magic of communication, human thinking can glide up and down Emergence Tower.”
  • ​​Thought Pile: “The Thought Pile is a visual representation of how the country feels about Topic X. On its own, the Thought Pile is not a higher-emergence giant. Remember, the phenomenon of emergence is many small parts combining together into a larger entity that is more than the sum of its parts. The Thought Pile represents a large group of individual viewpoints, all isolated from one another like a pile of disconnected neurons, equaling the exact sum of its parts. That’s why a Thought Pile alone is still on the “individual animal” level of Emergence Tower—it’s just a large group of items at that level.”
  • ​​“To actually move up Emergence Tower and become a larger communal brain, neurons have to communicate with each other. This is where the Outer Self comes in.”
  • ​​“The Outer Self has a location on the idea spectrum too—a location that represents what a person outwardly says they think about the topic.”
  • ​​“We can represent these platforms with a megaphone. The color of the megaphone represents the viewpoint being expressed through it. And the bigger the megaphone, the bigger the listening audience.”
  • ​​“This phenomenon means that all ideas along the spectrum have an expression ceiling—the largest stage that can support it, given the interest it generates. The expression ceilings for the ideas within Topic X are highlighted below.”
  • ​​The Speech Curve: “The Speech Curve is called the Speech Curve because it shows us the upper limit on how “loudly” each viewpoint is being expressed along a given idea spectrum—with loudness in this case referring to the size of the biggest stage on which the idea is being consistently expressed. While the Thought Pile lets us visualize what a population’s collective Inner Selves are thinking about a topic, the Speech Curve shows us what their Outer Selves are saying about the topic.”
  • ​​“Well when the individual brains in a human giant can freely communicate with one another, the giant itself wakes up, developing the ability to think for itself.”
  • ​​“While the Thought Pile shows us what the individuals are thinking, the Speech Curve shows us what the giant is thinking. And when the two are aligned, the giant is thinking perfectly clearly.”
  • ​​Censorship: “Looking at it from the perspective of an individual, censorship is control over what people can say. And as individuals ourselves, this is what we usually think censorship is. But from a perspective higher up on Emergence Tower, censorship is control over what a giant can think. To a giant, censorship is mind control.”
  • ​​“Meanwhile, beyond prohibiting that which cannot be said, the electric fence also emphasizes what should be said. Especially on the large platforms, the king’s preferred viewpoints are now repeated ad nauseam—receiving a far brighter spotlight than the Thought Pile would normally warrant.”
  • ​​“With their Outer Self broadcasting different beliefs than the Inner Self holds, the ideas of the Inner Self become hidden in a person’s head, isolated from the outside world. From the communal brain perspective, where each individual human mind is a single neuron, it’s as if the axons of the neurons have been hijacked, which ceases any real neural communication.”
  • ​​“In the absence of anonymous surveys (which King Mustache banned a long time ago), the Thought Pile is invisible to citizens. All a citizen can see is the shape of the Speech Curve—which they often mistakenly assume to be the shape of the Thought Pile.”
  • ​​“For all these reasons, of all a dictator’s possessions, the most precious one is his mute button.”
  • ​​Restrictions on free speech
  • ​​Incitement
  • ​​Fighting words
  • ​​Defamation
  • ​​Perjury
  • ​​Extortion
  • ​​False advertising
  • ​​Obscenity
  • ​​Child pornography
  • ​​“The First Amendment was a revolution for the Outer Self. Whether in speech or any other form of legal expression, you could no longer be punished by the government for being on the outside who you were on the inside. With the country’s human neurons able to freely connect, the U.S. organism would be a lot more like a giant human being with a mind of its own than a big dumb orange monster giant that’s controlled by strings.”
​​

​
​Chapter 6: The American Brain

  • ​​“How do millions of citizens, holding a wide range of views, often in furious conflict with each other, actually function as a single brain in practice? How does the brain form opinions? How does it learn new things? How does it make concrete decisions, and how does it change its mind?”
  • ​​“We don’t always think of it like this, but the marketplace of ideas (MPI) works the same way. The demand for everything from knowledge to wisdom to leadership to entertainment to emotional catharsis is met by an endless supply of human expression. But there isn’t really an established way to analyze the MPI the way there is with economics, so we’ll come up with our own way of doing it, using the new language we’re developing.”
  • ​​“In its most basic form, the MPI is an attention market, where attention is the key currency instead of money.”
  • ​​“Economic demand is generated by consumer preferences; demand in the MPI is a function of listener preferences. The listener is the consumer of expressed ideas—and in the same way economic consumers have limited money to spend, idea consumers have limited time to spend listening.”
  • ​​“But the MPI has a natural filter to keep discussions within a range it considers reasonable—what we can call a relevance window. The relevance window is a concept we discussed in Hypothetica—the portion of the idea spectrum where listener demand is high enough to support attention on that size stage.”
  • ​​“The typical bell curve shape means that as a speaker, you can express far-out viewpoints or you can shoot for a super-high attention platform—but you typically cannot do both.”
  • ​​“Political sea level sets the boundaries of the national politics relevance window, which actually has its own name in political science: the Overton window.”
  • ​​“In a totalitarian dictatorship, power flows from the top down. Leaders aren’t beholden to any kind of relevance window—so they go wherever they want along the idea spectrum. But a democracy works the opposite direction—bottom-up—as the leaders are forced to be wherever the Thought Pile wants them to be.”
  • ​​“The need to win both the primary and general election means politicians are actually bound to an even smaller window—the intersection between their party’s relevance window and the national Overton window. Go too far towards the center and drown in the primary election; go too far away from the center and drown in the general election.”
  • ​​“Likewise, if you want to do more than preach to the choir in the MPI—if you want to help drive knowledge or wisdom forward—you’ll need to make the jump from the benign attention market to the brutal influence market. You have to roll up your sleeves and go looking for the far less pleasant and far less willing kind of audience—the audience who doesn’t agree with you—and tell them things they don’t like hearing. You’ve got to do something a thousand times harder than confirming people’s beliefs and validating their identities—you have to change people’s minds.”
  • ​​“Preaching to the choir is generally received well, met with a reaction of love or approval. When your mission is to make people feel great about what they already believe, the MPI is usually a pleasant, friendly place.”
  • ​​“But when you tilt the angle of that megaphone towards people who don’t agree with you, the MPI becomes a gauntlet.”
  • ​​“The MPI gauntlet is especially treacherous for ideas outside the mainstream. People don’t like having their beliefs challenged or their favorite habits disparaged. Companies profiting off the status quo really don’t like dissenting viewpoints. So the new, anti-smoking ideas were attacked from all sides.”
  • ​​“The cigarette story is a story of the MPI doing its job. It’s a story of a needle of truth rising up from a haystack on the fringes of the big brain’s consciousness and piercing its way through a century-long barrage of gauntlet attacks until it had conquered the Thought Pile mountain and become the mainstream, status quo viewpoint.”
  • ​​“And as the “smoking causes cancer” needle coaxed the Thought Pile to slide itself along the Idea Spectrum towards it, the Thought Pile dragged everything else with it—culture, politics, laws, and behavior. All of this happened against the tremendous force of a large industry’s fight for survival—because the little needle had truth on its side, and in a free MPI, truth prevails.”
  • ​​“Given this fact about us, the MPI isn’t just a way for a large group of people to work together to find truth, it’s the only way for them to do it. As author Jonathan Rauch points out, when someone like Einstein declares his theory of general relativity, there literally is no way to tell if he’s a genius or a madman until the “global network of checkers,” as Rauch puts it, attacks the theory from all angles, looking for holes, and continually fails.”
  • ​​“Starting a mind-changing movement is like starting a fire with flint—it’s laborious and sometimes not even possible. But when it gets rolling, it can spread like a forest fire. The history of interracial marriage in the U.S. is another story about the power of a free marketplace of ideas. It’s the same power that changed the U.S. brain’s mind about duels, about slavery, about child labor, about women’s suffrage, about business monopolies, about segregation, and the same power that’s currently working out what it thinks about animal rights, and bioethics, and online privacy, and ten other things, many of which seem right now like fringe dogshit to 96% of us.”
  • ​​“While most of us are busy arguing about whatever’s being debated within the Overton window, big picture change is being driven by a second set of battles happening outside the window—battles about exactly where the edges of the window lie. Or as Overton’s think tank puts it, “the ongoing contest among media and other political actors about what counts as legitimate disagreement.” In this second set of battles, proponents of a policy outside the Overton window fight to simply get their policy into the window—that’s the hard part. Then they can worry about winning the inevitable battle over that policy that will ensue within the window.”
  • ​​“Meanwhile, opponents of that policy will fight fiercely to keep the policy outside the window, where it’s deemed unacceptable to even be debated. That’s the best way to prevent it from happening.”
  • ​​“Free speech gives power to the powerless. It’s never easy being in the minority in any country. The rich are protected and empowered by their money, the elite by their connections, the majority by their vote. A minority population is often helpless. But free speech gives the powerless a voice—an ability to launch a mind-changing movement that wins over the majority and makes the country better for themselves.”
  • ​​“The free speech of individual citizens is the free thought of the communal citizen body, and the singular right that lets hundreds of millions of minds link together into a giant network that can learn, grow, and think as one. Society is driven by the stories we believe, and free speech hands authorship of those stories over to the people themselves.”
​​

​
​Part 3: Thinking in 3-D

​
​Chapter 7: The Thinking Ladder

  • ​​“Scientists aren’t positive about the timeline, but many believe that all humans in all parts of the world lived in hunter-gatherer tribes as recently as 11,000 BC. So 13,000 years ago—or, if we call a generation 25 years, about 500 generations ago.”
  • ​​“A values conflict happens when the Higher Mind has a moral objection to something the Primitive Mind is programmed to want. Like, say, the way the Primitive Mind is programmed to try feverishly to deliver its precious genetic cargo to as large a variety of new containers as possible, at the expense of values like kindness, civility, professionalism, or marital fidelity. An inner values conflict is in progress anytime you’re coping with a moral qualm or integrity struggle. There’s also the reverse kind of values conflict—when the Higher Mind values something that the Primitive Mind is specifically programmed to resist—like, say, pitching in with housework or donating to charity.”
  • ​​“Humans are so complicated for a simple reason: we’re each the product of a struggle between two fundamentally different, often contradictory forces.”
  • ​​“The tug-of-war isn’t binary—it’s a spectrum. Let’s call it the Psych Spectrum.”
  • ​​“Most of the problems with humans can be boiled down to unchecked Primitive Minds getting their way against the Higher Mind’s better judgment. This is what’s behind chronic procrastination, chronic overeating, temper outbursts, infidelity, sexual assault, and all the other terrible things humans do to themselves and others. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, the Primitive Mind was mostly on point—but in the modern world, it’s our collective mental illness. And no one is immune.”
  • ​​“If you want to place blame for society’s ills, and you only have one dimension to work with, you’re left with the unnuanced option of blaming the rich, blaming the poor, blaming both, or blaming neither.”
  • ​​The Thinking Ladder: X axis is what you think, Y axis is how you think. Moving up is about changing how you think about what you’re thinking.
  • ​​Rung 1: Thinking like a scientist
  • ​​“We often think of science as the study of the natural world, but in the words of Carl Sagan, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.””
  • ​​Hypothesis + Testing Hypothesis + Gathering Information + Evaluating Information + Updating Hypothesis
  • ​​The Skepticism Spectrum
  • ​​Rung 2: Thinking like a sports fan
  • ​​“The biggest psychos aside, most real-life sports fans want the games they watch to be played fairly. They don’t want corrupt referees, even if it helps their team win. They want their team to win fair and square. They place immense value on the integrity of the process itself. It’s just…that they really really want that process to yield a certain outcome. They’re not just watching the game—they’re rooting.”
  • ​​Rung 3: Thinking like an attorney
  • ​​“A Sports Fan wants to win, but when pushed, they care even more about fair play than winning. An Attorney’s job is to win, and no matter how hard you push them, nothing can alter their allegiance. Because has this ever happened?”
  • ​​Rung 4: Thinking like a zealot
  • ​​“When you’re thinking like a Zealot, humility feels weak and shameful. You’ll never say “I don’t know,” because that sounds the same to you as saying “I don’t know who I am.” You do know. Your beliefs are a rock-solid reflection of the objective truth, period. Knowledge is the opposite of hard—it’s like knowing the sky is blue. Anyone with a mind and a heart knows what’s true and what’s not.”
​​

​
​Chapter 8: Idea Labs and Echo Chambers

  • ​​3D: Idea spectrum + Psych spectrum + Emergence Tower
  • ​​“To really understand the 500-person community and why it is the way it is, we have to examine each layer of smaller units that make it up and the larger giants that encompass it. To really understand what’s going on with a group of any size, we have to consider how it interacts with all parts of the loaf.”
  • ​​“The same goes for understanding individuals. The people within our 500-person community don’t exist as isolated minds. Each person is an individual organism, an “organ” in the mini giant of their family, a piece of tissue in the larger giant of their small community, a cell in the 500-person community giant, and an organelle, molecule, atom, and subatomic particle in the subsequent even larger giants above—all at the same time. Each of those slices plays a role in influencing the thoughts and behavior of the individuals, and in turn, each person plays a small part in influencing the giants they’re a part of.”
  • ​​The Marvelous Thinking Fractal: “Inside of the broadest cultures are thousands of smaller communities—each with their own cultural vibe that exerts influence on its members. Someone working in a tech startup in the Bay Area is simultaneously living inside of the broad human community, the global Western community, the American community, the U.S. West Coast community, the San Francisco community, the tech industry community, the startup community, the community of their workplace, the community of their college alumni, the community of their extended family, the community of their group of friends, a few other bizarre SF-y situations, and a dozen other communities their particular life happens to be part of (including, if they’re a regular visitor here, the Wait But Why community). Most immediate to each of us are the micro-cultures of our immediate family, closest friends, and romantic relationships. Going against the current of all the larger communities combined tends to be easier than violating the unwritten rules of the most intimate mini cultures in someone’s life.”
  • ​​Culture, in 3-D: “So far, we’ve been focusing on the relationship between culture and individuals. In that realm, culture functions as the rules of engagement. But when we move up to higher levels of emergence, where groups of people function like giant organisms, a group’s culture becomes the giant’s personality.”
  • ​​Weird diagram: “In communities, info flows in a similar way. Amps are info. Volts are conviction. And ohms are skepticism.”
  • ​​“Alcoholics Anonymous is a Higher Mind support network, where a bunch of people suffering from a disease—one in which the animal they live in has become fixated on using alcohol to ruin their lives—can get together and help each other fight the good fight. An Idea Lab is the same thing for our intellect—Dogmatics Anonymous.”
  • ​​Idea Labs: “The thing going on here is that Idea Labs are micro-divided, and macro-united. On a micro scale, Idea Labs and the people within them disagree often—that’s the intellectual diversity component.”
  • ​​“Idea Labs are awesome because they’re awesome at every level of emergence.
  • ​​They’re great at the individual level. Individuality is valued, people are respected, and communities are safe spaces to share whatever ideas you’re thinking about, without fear of negative consequences. An Idea Lab is a good mini nation to be citizen of. Spending time in an Idea Lab makes you smarter, wiser, humbler, more realistic, and helps pull your internal battle upwards.
  • ​​Idea Labs are great at the community level. The same people encouraged to retain their full individuality at the low-emergence level also get to enjoy the benefits of being a cell in a larger, superintelligent system, with all of the social and community perks that come along with it.
  • ​​Idea Labs are great at the national and pan-national level. We have Idea Labs to thank for the collective knowledge tower we’ve built as a species, for the evolution of our species’ psychological maturation, and for the development of our growing philosophical clarity.”
  • ​​Free Speech vs First Amendment: Greg Lukianoff: “Though often used interchangeably, the concept of freedom of speech and the First Amendment are not the same thing. While the First Amendment protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press as they relate to duties of the state and state power, freedom of speech is a far broader idea that includes additional cultural values. These values incorporate healthy intellectual habits, such as giving the other side a fair hearing, reserving judgment, tolerating opinions that offend or anger us, believing that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and recognizing that even people whose points of view we find repugnant might be (at least partially) right. At the heart of these values is epistemic humility – a fancy way of saying that we must always keep in mind that we could be wrong or, at least, that we can always learn something from listening to the other side.”
  • ​​Echo Chamber: “When a culture holds an object to be sacred, the culture becomes embedded with an implicit set of iron-clad social rules about how that object must be treated. Praising the object becomes a very cool thing to do, while saying anything bad about the object is considered an act of unredeemable blasphemy. When something becomes uncriticizable to a culture, the culture becomes the opposite of an Idea Lab about that thing. It becomes an Echo Chamber.”
  • ​​“Where Idea Labs are cultures of critical thinking and debate, Echo Chambers are cultures of agreement and confirmation.”
  • ​​“First, it comes from a core distinction between how the two cultures view ideas. Idea Labs see people and their ideas as separate entities—people are meant to be respected, ideas are not. In Echo Chambers, a person’s ideas are part of their identity, so respecting a person and respecting their ideas are one and the same. While people in an Idea lab argue with each other for fun, disagreeing with someone in a culture of agreement is seen as rudeness, and a heated argument about ideas in an Echo Chamber is indistinguishable from a fight.”
  • ​​“Second, Echo Chambers are devoted to specific ideas. While the constitution of the Idea Lab mini nation is devoted to a kind of thinking, an Echo Chamber is an idea temple whose constitution is a set of sacred beliefs themselves.”
  • ​​“Virtue signaling is your Primitive Mind’s way of expressing your sheer Us-ness. While conviction in an Idea Lab expresses your degree of certainty about what you’re saying, conviction in an Echo Chamber expresses the degree of your Us-ness. The baby isn’t kind of cute. It’s not maybe cute. It’s deeply fucking cute. Period.”
  • ​​“For Echo Chamber couples, it’s pretty easy to keep things glued tightly together. But as Echo Chambers grow in size, it becomes a greater challenge to hold them together by shared ideas—so usually, the binding beliefs are honed down and simplified to the common denominator ideas that the whole community can get behind. So while Idea Labs get even smarter and more nuanced as they grow, growing Echo Chambers become even dumber and more sure of themselves.”
  • ​​XKCD comic about free speech: “Communities that define asshole as “someone who in arguments attacks people, not ideas,” or “someone who expresses conviction on viewpoints where they don’t actually know very much,” or “someone who never admits when they’re wrong” are Idea Labs. They eject from the club those who turn arguments into fights and hinder the community’s ability to search for truth.”
​​

​
​Part 4: Politics in 3-D

​
​Chapter 9: Political Disneyland

  • ​​“Then I went to college. It was 2000. Bush-Gore year. While everyone I grew up with was obviously rooting as hard as possible for Gore to win, it began to dawn on me that I had made a very strange group of new friends in college. Some of them were rooting for Gore, but they hated certain things about his beliefs. Others disliked both candidates. And some of them were fervently rooting for Bush, even though they had previously seemed like reasonable people.”
  • ​​“I knew exactly where I stood, of course, and made my opinion clear. When I explained that I was unquestionably voting for Gore, instead of giving me a high five, my friends asked me why. I had all kinds of explanations, but when they’d push me to talk in specifics, I’d run into a problem.”
  • ​​“I didn’t really know the specifics.”
  • ​​“I knew Gore was the better choice, just like I knew the Democratic Party was the better party—but when pressed about my underlying reasons for liking any specific policy of Gore’s, I’d end up in an uncomfortable place.”
  • ​​“When continually pressed, my underlying reasoning for my positions would always seem to boil down to some combination of, “Because that’s what seems intuitive to me based on what everyone I know has always said” and “Because the Democrats are the good guys”.”
  • ​​RE quadrant of political spectrum and ways of thinking 
  • ​​“The two thinkers on the left side, at least on the topic at hand, share a common viewpoint. Same for the two thinkers on the right.”
  • ​​“But the two high-rung thinkers share a common way of thinking. They’re humbler, more nuanced, and their opinions about the topic were hard-earned. The two low-rung thinkers are more sure of themselves while knowing less than the thinkers above them—and there’s nothing you could really do to change their minds.”
  • ​​“Our societies are great at talking about the horizontal distinction. We’re experts at identifying what people think and grouping people that way, because we’ve been trained to look at these four thinkers and see two left-wingers and two right-wingers.”
  • ​​“But we’re awful at talking about the vertical distinction. When I listen to arguments or read op-eds, I constantly hear people trying to make vertical distinctions in their arguments about politicians or ideas, but because A) many people forget that there is a vertical axis, and B) those who do think vertically lack a common language with which to talk about it, those attempts are usually misunderstood or missed altogether.”
  • ​​High rung and low rung thinking
  • ​​What is true (head) vs What should be (heart) vs How to get there (hands)
  • ​​“The Left sometimes seems overly focused on the global and the universal, and the Right can be a broken record about individualism and community and family values—but when you remember that each is half of a two-part system, it all makes sense. They’re both just doing their part of the job.”
  • ​​“It’s like a company having two founders, one who focuses more on operations and the other who thinks more about growth. Progressivism and Conservatism each worry about one half of every issue, and together, they make sure we’re paying enough attention to everything that matters.”
  • ​​“Every person involved in high-rung politics has a Primitive Mind in their head that wants to identify with political parties and treat politics like a tribal war. But up on the high rungs, the Higher Minds have the edge—one that they protect with a pervasive high-rung culture. The culture keeps everyone—even the more partisan people—aware that ultimately, they’re all on the same team. As fierce as the debates between the high-rung giants can be, they know deep down that what they’re really doing is working together to navigate their way up the mountain, towards a more perfect nation.”
  • ​​Analog vs digital information
  • ​​“When I wrote about Neuralink, one of the concepts I got into was the difference between analog and digital information (brain waves are analog signals, but they need to be converted to digital information in order to be processed by a brain-machine interface).”
  • ​​“The thing is, ever since then, I can’t get analog and digital out of my head. I see it as a metaphor for all kinds of things in the world. Here’s what I mean: Analog is what actually goes on in the natural world. It’s a perfect representation of reality: information in its natural, messy state. Sound is a nice example. Sound is analog information that can be represented by a wave. Digitization is a way to approximate analog information using a set of exact values.”
  • ​​“The more you compress a sound file, the smaller the mp3 file gets, because bigger steps require fewer 1s and 0s to express the sound. But the song also sounds worse, because more “rounding” is happening to make cruder approximations—i.e. the sound has become lower-res. The size and sound quality of a digitized file all depend on how far down the digitization spectrum you go in your conversion. At the far end of the digitization spectrum, you’d have only straight 1s and 0s—a tiny file that would sound almost nothing like the original song.”
  • ​​“The typical goal when we work with audio and visual information isn’t to try to go as high-res as possible—it’s to try to find the sweet spot: the crudest approximation you can get to while still accomplishing your goal. You want to weigh the costs of high file size alongside the costs of quality reduction and choose the optimal compromise for whatever you’re trying to do.”
  • ​​Disney movies:
  • ​​“The real world is analog—gray, amorphous, and endlessly nuanced. What Disney movies do is they digitize the shit out of the real world. They go the full distance, converting all that gray into clean black-and-white 1s and 0s.”
  • ​​“Real people are complex and flawed, full of faults but almost always worthy of compassion. Disney characters, on the other hand, are either entirely good or entirely bad.”
  • ​​“Digitizing an analog world into perfect cartoon simplicity makes sense. In fictional Disney movies. Made for kids.”
  • ​​“But over-digitizing the real world is pretty bad idea—and unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Primitive Mind likes to do. So low-rung politics ends up feeling, to its participants, just like a Disney movie.”
  • ​​“Political Disney World is much more fun. Everything is nice and crisp and perfectly digital. Good guys and bad guys, with good ideas and bad ideas, respectively. Good politicians and bad politicians with good policies and bad policies. Right and wrong. Smart and ignorant. Virtuous and evil. Safe and dangerous. 1s and 0s. In the foggy minds of Political Disney World, it’s all quite clear.”
  • ​​“Digitizing people is a practice in moral dualism. The world of low-rung religion (Religious Disney World) does this all the time, with their gods and devils, their believers and infidels, their heaven and hell. Political Disney World does the same thing, just using different terms. A digital people mentality is why people in PDW rarely marry someone with opposing political views (something people in the high-rung political world do all the time). It’s why people in PDW tend to feel an endless well of compassion and understanding for bullies, blunderers, and criminals within the protagonist group, while dropping all semblance of empathy for bad actors on the evil side.”
  • ​​“If high-rung politics is micro-divided and macro-united (people disagree, giants work together), low-rung politics is the opposite: micro-united (people in a giant all agree) and macro-divided (giants are enemies with other giants). Keeping things this way is the critical objective of the superglue story.”
  • ​​“It’s amazing how much clearer your vision gets when you really—actually—separate your identity from a tribe. I can see reality better now. The bad news is that I don’t like what I see with my new eyes. It’s…the situation is pretty scary. We’ve got a problem and we need to fix it. This whole series so far has been getting us ready to dive head first into that problem, with clearer eyes than normal. That’s where we’ll be headed in the final group of chapters.”
​​

​
​Part 5: A Dangerous Trend

​
​Chapter 10: A Sick Giant

  • ​​Seeing in 2D vs 3D: “Putting the two ideas together, it’s as if the tug-of-war is itself a fractal that scales up and down. There’s a tug-of-war in every human’s head, as we struggle for self-control and try our best to think and behave wisely. That same tug-of-war takes place on a macro scale in large and small groups of humans. When couples, communities, and societies let control of the rope slip towards the Primitive Mind, they end up playing out an ancient pre-programmed skit, falling into what I call the Power Games—the most primitive format of human interaction, where the only rule is: “Everyone can do whatever they want, if they have the power to pull it off.” When their collective Higher Minds regain an edge, they’re able to live within a wiser and more grown-up structure made up of consciously chosen principles. Tug-of-war shifts are also contagious. The state of each person’s tug-of-war influences both the psychology of the people around them and the collective tug-of-war of groups the person is a part of. In turn, shifts in a society’s collective mindset exert a pull on the communities and individuals within it.”
  • ​​“In his farewell speech at the end of his presidency, George Washington warned about the dangers of political polarization: This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy. The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism…It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions…it is a spirit not to be encouraged.”
  • ​​Geographic bubbles
  • ​​Information bubbles
  • ​​Broadcasting to narrowcasting
  • ​​Political junk food
  • ​​Politics reality television shows
  • ​​Media algorithms
  • ​​Disgust
  • ​​4 reasons political polarizations scares me:
  • ​​We’re losing our ability to gain knowledge. If our perceptions of reality are increasingly informed by media with other-than-truth motivations, we’ll increasingly lose our handle on the truth. This is like the big U.S. giant becoming schizophrenic.
  • ​​We’re losing our ability to think together. Human giants can only think when people talk and when they’re free to say what they really think. As Echo Chambers grow larger and more intimidating, people inside them are afraid to defy the sacred narrative. And the more all-encompassing political identities become, the more topics turn from kickable machines to precious infants. Meanwhile, intergroup communication suffers even more, as opposing groups become totally unable to collaborate on ideas. As the downward trend deepens, the voices of high-minded Progressivism and Conservativism—the team that navigates the U.S. up the mountain—are growing more timid and harder to hear. The U.S. giant is losing its ability to learn.
  • ​​We’re losing our ability to cooperate. A polarized country that isn’t capable of building broad coalitions can’t take forward steps—it can only self-inflict.
  • ​​We’re doing that thing that people do before really, really awful things happen. Disgust should scare you as much as it scares me. If our species were a person, it would have a mix of beautiful and unadmirable qualities—but its darkest quality would be the ability to dehumanize.
  • ​​Basically, the power games are central. “When I look at the downward trend, I see a resurgence of the Power Games. We’re starting to do a lot of those things humans do when they’re at their worst. We’re tossing our principles aside and glomming onto big, mindless giants who aren’t sentient enough to know that that kind of structure doesn’t make sense anymore. As the country slides its way down the mountain, we’re behaving more and more like the output of a non-living, force-of-nature software program that only wants genes to be immortal.”
  • ​​“The geographic and information bubbles are relatively new. The internet especially is evolving and changing literally by the month. The U.S. was built to be incredibly robust, but such insanely rapid environmental change is pushing it to its limits.”
  • ​​“Most interesting to me was a fascinating report called The Hidden Tribes of America—a year-long study that collected the views of over 8,000 Americans—which found that two-thirds of Americans fall into what they call the “Exhausted Majority.””
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