17 Shocking Lessons About Human Psychology - Gurwinder Bhogal

every single time dude 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 uh we'll see what we can get to first one cynical genius illusion cynical people are seen as smarter but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be Dumber cynicism is 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 uh which was conducted in 2018 um by stavrova at Al and uh 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 intelligent so you see characters like uh do to house played by H lry in that that show um Sheldon from Big Bang Theory a lot of these characters tend to be very cynical very pessimistic but but also Geniuses so it's become a bit of a stereotype so these researchers decided to test this by actually doing a massive study um which involved about 200,000 people in 30 different countries and it was a series of surveys firstly to test uh the their cynicism and secondly to test their competence that their sort of essentially their IQ 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 of posit the as an explanation for this the idea that uh cynicism is basically a evolutionary horis to basically save people from having to think uh it's basically a way to uh protect yourself against betrayal to protect yourself against uh 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 say about 100 thousand years ago um they they in the study they describe it as the better safe than sorry horis so it's this idea that for instance if you're out there and you're in a low information environment so let's go let's go 100,00 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 of a forest and we see this alien looking fruit on a tree and we have the choice whether we can eat it or not eat it and we don't know what this fruit is we've never we've got no books we've got no understanding of it we've never seen it before so in that situation the best thing to do is to default to believing that it's dangerous uh because obviously one fruit if you eat it and it turns out to be harmless is not going to benefit you that much but if you eat that fruit and it turns out to be poisonous that's the end so obviously from that point of view it makes sense to have this kind of pessimistic risk averse uh sort of approach to life now the thing is is obviously the world now is very very different from the world that we have and yet we retain the same basic psychology the same kind of biology we are averse to risk and that involves being sort of distrusting of other human beings um you know because we don't know these other one thing that I'm trying to uh bate here what's the difference between cynicism and conservatism or risk aversion or something like that so cynicism 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 it's usually you can summ summarize it as saying that people are only in it for themselves um you know so basically you can't trust people basically uh so obviously cons some conservatism could be a a function of cynicism uh but I I think that obviously conservatism is much more broader than that uh and it takes into account many other different horis STS so the thing with cynicism is it's very low cognitive effort it it's it doesn't require you to really expend much mental effort to do anything all you've got to do is NRA something you know and to basically just say to yourself oh wellow you know um I don't I I shouldn't do this because something bad might happen and our brains are very very good at finding reasons not to do something um so there's you know there's 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 would just not do it you'd be like oh what's the point I don't need to do it it's sunny outside it's just letting Sunshine into my house it's actually a good thing on the other hand if it's raining you could also say oh wow it's raining so I don't want to get wet so I won't go out I might slip from the ladder and fall you know so your brain is very good at inventing reasons not to do things and so we have this natural kind of cynicism and it actually takes mental effort to overcome that it actually takes mental effort in the study they actually found that people with higher IQs actually tend to be more trusting which is quite unusual thing you would expect it to be the other 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're not necessarily better at determining whether they should trust someone or not but they're they're better at determining um whether cynicism is warranted or not which is slightly different why does this sort of uh 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 wool pulled over your eyes it's seen as kind of juvenile or innocent or unsophisticated and the converse of that is you know cynicism or skepticism is more mature intellectually in some way yeah I mean this is sort of like a very popular misconception I think and that's why cynicism is is very popular because it it has the illusion because obviously if you're if you take no risks in life then you're not going to fail ever at anything because you didn't go out you didn't put yourself out there um you know you have this idea that I've heard you you speak about called the cynicism safety blanket which I think really sort of jives with this very well because obviously cynicism is is a form of protection it's a it's a it's sort of like 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 and if you don't try to succeed at anything then you won't fail at anything so you know it's basically like a a way to guard yourself against any form of failure and that's why I think people who maybe don't want to expend mental effort or emotional effort because there's an emotional aspect of this as well they will instead just choose not to take the risks it's much easier to just say oh I'm not going to take a risk because everything's gone to [ __ ] every everybody's out for them elves I'm not going to trust this person I'm not going to love this person because you know they might betray me they might uh they might not return the affection um 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 to yourself oh well I've never failed you know it's it's like a kind of ego trip that you you put yourself on but the thing is is the the truly sort of intelligent people will say to themselves well look yeah I might fail but at the end of the day it's worth it's worth trying because at the end of the day if you don't try you'll never achieve anything you're not actually going to better yourself you're just going to remain in the same situation whatsoever and even failure can be good if you're intelligent failure can be good because you learn from failure in fact failure is pretty much the only thing we learn from you know it's 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 uh Endeavors because they know that at the end of the day even if they fail at that endeavor they're actually still improving their station because they're improving their knowledge they're learning from it so I think that's ultimately what it comes down to is if you're not if you don't have a high IQ you can Fain a high IQ by criticizing other people their efforts and saying oh look at this fo he failed you know whereas you'll never fail so you say oh you'll always have that you know I've never failed but then you've 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 seagull's 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 cacophonies of competing narratives without trust more data doesn't make us more informed but more confused yeah so if you talk to um a lot of these sort of uh disinformation academics people who study disinformation and stuff they'll often um say that there's a a problem uh of people not getting enough information you know there's this whole idea of low information voters and stuff you know um that's what people tend to call euphemistically call people that they regard as stupid it's low information uh 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 bottleneck that is stopping uh progress because look we have we have more information than we've ever had in whole of human history um I think I read somewhere that sort of every year more information is produced than in all of the preceding years of human history that's how much information is exploding it's the most exponential of exponentials yeah yeah and um so information is not the problem have more than enough information the thing that's holding people back is a lack of trust and I think this got particularly bad since sort of the pandemic because you know obviously our mainstream 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 um at the beginning of the pandemic the World Health Organization said that covid is not airborne and if you go on Twitter and you look at their page the tweet's still up you know which says that Co is not Airborne but we very quickly found out that Co was airborne and it was actually disastrous because people obviously were lulled into a false sense of security so that was obviously a big problem and then we also had the problem with the masks uh you know how how efficacious are they um then there was a problem of um vaccines like how ifications of vaccines and what's what are the side effects and then of course there was the lably hypothesis and uh you know that was instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theory despite the fact that there is at least as good an argument that that Co escape from a lab as that it was naturally um that it was a resort of a natural spillover so these events I think really destroyed trust in institutions but I mean obviously this problem began before Co it just Co exacerbated it a lot and obviously things have not gotten any better since then you know we've seen um for instance the whole Harvard Scandal the plagiarism Scandal um this year we've seen many big academic studies which have been shown to be completely bunk um there was a there's a a famous Professor His Name Escapes me but he did a series of studies about uh systemic racism in which he basically showed that systemic racism is a thing and this was picked up by the New York Times The Washington Post to basically say hey look systemic racism is a real thing look at these disparities in in treatment of of white people and black people that was all shown to be complete nonsense it was all fabricated all the data was fabricated and uh Dan areli 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 faked so you know so that that this year has been really bad for Academia there's been a lot of there's been a massive drop in trust and if you look at any poll regarding trust in the media you see a gradual slope you see people you see decline um on both sides of the aisle but particularly amongst people on the right uh because obviously you know this's is sort of idea that that most of the mainstream institutions in the west lean left um but even the left even the left have less trust over time in in in institutions and obviously this has gotten a lot worse a lot worse over the the the few the past few years so the problem with trust is it's like it's like a tree where it takes a long period of time of nourishment and light seeing what's going on to actually grow it but it can be chopped down in like a day you know it takes years for a tree to grow but it could be chopped down in a single day and it's you know institutions over many years they tried to build trust with the public but a few real bad instances of betrayal of that trust have now caused the the trust to to nose dive um and what's interesting here is this dovetails with what we were talking about previously about the cynical genius illusion because a lack of trust leads to more cynicism and the cynicism stops people from you know doing things that people become more risk averse they become less likely to form Partnerships with people even to form relationships with people um 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 it in in our daily lives um with the ways again this is not saying that this this trust is unwarranted a lot of it is warranted I mean if you look at what's going on in in America in San Francisco in places like that where you see um you know the the government in San Francisco had an opportunity to clean up the streets to to take the fentol users off the streets to house them in a in a decent place and U you know to try and give them help and to to clean up the streets generally and they didn't do it they only did it when the premere of China xiin ping came now you know they thought okay now we've definitely got to do something about it so they that just showed that they just didn't care obviously you know when when there's a foreign leader coming to visit then they suddenly clean up the streets so this is obviously you know this is this distrust isn't necessarily unwarranted um but what's happened is the result of this is that people tend to no matter how much information you give them no matter how how much information the World Health Organization or U you know governments or corporations even try to give people the fact is is that there's pity of trust and I don't to be honest I don't think that this trust is ever going to be fully restored I I personally don't trust institutions anymore um I I find that it's 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 uh and it's much easier to gauge 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 um this is because corrupt corrupt people obviously tend to rise high in institutions because they tend to 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 top in 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 abalene Paradox all of that all of those things happen so you get uh honest individuals and untrustworthy uh highly falsified groups even if they're made even if the constituent parts are trustworthy yeah that's it yeah it it all comes down to the sort of perverse incentive structures that institutions have you know they tend to be these sort of closed systems of status games um they also tend to be chasing money and a lot of the time these people people are playing against each other for status so you know leads to Purity spirals for instance and uh a lot of these perverse incentives ensure that institutions can never really rise above their worst members whereas individuals they are a lot more variable not every individual is is more trustworthy than every institution but of the high integrity individuals there are a lot more trustworthy than high integrity institutions and so I tend to trust individuals a lot more and the ways that that I learn whether I can trust someone or not I have a few heris tis but um you know for instance one of them would be um are they willing to publicly admit when they get things wrong because you know it takes it takes Integrity to admit when 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 rare rare skill uh a very it takes a huge amount of strength to be able to go out there and say okay I was wrong and so that for me is a very good indicator that somebody's high integrity it shows that they value the truth more than their own ego do you know what one of my one of my favorite heuristics for this is when was the last time that the person you're thinking about surprised you with one of their 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 accurately predict everything else that they believe they're 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 that birds of a feather uh but yeah when was the last time time that this person surprised you with something that they commented about yeah that's definitely one of mine as well because it it shows that somebody's willing to sort of think for themselves rather than sort of subscribe to a 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 freedom speech you know all of these things are generally unrelated but if somebody's got all of these predictable opinions it shows you that they're kind of getting it all wholesale from somewhere else there there's something that I think is uh associated with this another one of yours ambiguity aversion people tend to find uncertain outcomes less to tolerable than bad outcomes de Burker rle 2016 found that test participants who were told they had a small chance of receiving an electric shock exhibited much higher stress levels than those who knew they'd certainly receive an electric shock yeah I mean this this explains so much I mean everything from sort of the world of investing you know it explains Market volatility um 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're going to be pretty much like you know it's just it's a very simple thing but but I find that the sort of the anxiety of expecting what what trying to expect what's going to happen is often worse than the actual any even the worse eventuality so you know for instance if I were if I were one of my old selves you know from say 10 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 it could go wrong I might say the the wrong word you know I might you know I might say something really bad I might say the NW or something accidentally you know and that's it you you know and I would think about the worst possible scenario right and um that would really like you know me nightmares but then I would find that even if the worst did happen it probably wouldn't actually be that bad not that I'm actually going to say the word but like you know it just um 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 it's a more skilled um sort of scaremonger than reality you know because it it can it knows your wayst 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're talking about with the uh with the electric shocks again it's it's managing the anxiety of uncertainty that takes a bigger toll on somebody than actually just resigning themselves to the worst outcome I found that this is again you know if if I just if I know that something is going to happen something bad is going to happen it gives me a sense of peace of mind because I I know what to predict I know what to expect and so I don't need to expend stress and mental effort in trying to uh find a way out of it trying to uh trying to sort of uh uh predict what's going to happen because trying to predict what's going to happen is a very stressful um sort of thing to do it it basically requires you to consider an extremely wide sede of of possibilities and our minds are just not very good at doing that we take you know if we have just one path ahead of us even if that's a bad a bad path even if it's got a ditch at the end of it it's much easier to just continue along that path and say okay so when it happens I'll deal with it you know than it is to say okay which of these paths has got ditch at the end uh you know what how many steps away is it uh you know B every step you take you have to be worried that you might fall down that ditch so it's the it's 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 doomsday cultish like uh fads that we've seen that it 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 100% um because I think there is one thing that's scarier than a conspiracy of people plotting everything and that is no conspiracy of people plotting everything that everything is just rudderless that society's rudderless basically um nobody knows what they're doing you know everybody is just kind of trying to navigate the world as best as they can um there is no overarching plan that's 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 uh 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 of trying to work out which path is the true true one that is an underrated form of stress whereas the stress of knowing that there is a bad there's a group of bad people out there who are applying everything that actually isn't really stressful at all in fact it's actually quite interesting because then you want to go online and you want to learn more about of certainty about it yeah I I came up with this idea called anxiety cost so in the same way as you have opportunity cost the amount of time that you spend thinking about a thing that you could have gotten rid of had you have just done the thing when you wake up on 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 tracted version of that there was this uh from Matthew sad in the times this is back in 2020 psychologists have conducted experiments to shed light on why people lose or at least suspend rationality one experiment asked 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 deep uncertainty when they feared for their jobs or the health of their children they were far more likely to see a pattern in meaning static or to infer that 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 intrudes Upon Our Lives we respond by reintroducing order in some other way superstitions and conspiracy theories speak to this need it is not easy to accept that important events are shaped by random forces this is why for some it makes more sense to believe that we are threatened by the grand plans of malign scientists than the mutation of a silly little microb yeah absolutely I think it explains so much about why we dramatize reality um 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 there's 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 S you know we collapse the sort of web of causality down 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 sort of sense making truth Mak 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 expend that much mental effort 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 the libtards or the whatever if every single problem is due to the same Solution that's 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 cognitive sort of it's It's energy saving uh mechanism that would people engage in and I think yeah it just explains so much of the current landscape the current sort of online landscape in particular it explains um Tri ISM you it's much easier just to um for instance I saw this really good um tweet um by Michael malice um I think he's been on this show on your show many many times unfortunately yeah yeah and he said um I haven't got it in front of me but he wrote something like um in terms he said people don't see the world um including sorry most people don't navigate the World by a true and false filter but by an Us and Them filter um and so it's like this true and false is too much of a cognitive demand you know trying to work out what's true and false it's just way too much effort for most people and it's it it requires statistical analysis it requires um looking at hard data it requires uh sort of suppressing your own emotions there's so much that you need to do in order to actually work out what's true whereas if you just adopt a very simple US versus them horis it's so much easier and you can still get on in your life because if you have an US versus them um sort of strategy then you're going to be in the same boat with a group of other people who will help you you know sort of navigate the world and they'll become your allies so it's just so less cognitively 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 you know we when we were hunted gatherers we we lived in tribes and we uh we sort of engaged in tribal Warfare so everything that we've just been talking about this pattern matching and everything is all in the service of tribalism ultimately um so we will see the best in what our allies say and we will see the worst in what our enemies say uh will you know we'll interpret it in the worst possible way um we will see signs in the clouds that sort of prend that God is on our side or whatever you know he's on our side and he you know he he hates the enemies you know whatever it is you know uh we'll find patterns that justify an Us Versus Them sort of attitude naturally you know that's what comes naturally to us and it also explains why we see things in terms of drama rather than data um you know I think this was one of my other sort of Concepts that was talking about compassion fade um this idea that sort of uh there were experiments that were conducted uh in which people um they basically engaged in sort of uh these appeals for charity so uh what they did is it was like a sort of campaign for U for funding for charity and they had two different ways of doing it one way was based on um presenting famine 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 just something that we're not it's not our brains are not formatted for that kind of data analysis we're just not you know it's too much effort it requires too many calories and too much time so what our brains do is we again we now we collapse the web of causality we collapse all the variables into a single thread a single line a single linear sort of um Vector which just has a beginning a middle and end so you know the girl is starving she needs your help you give her your help she is no longer starving and therefore you've saved you know you saved a girl and then that's it and then you're a good person you know so that's how we sort of we we collapse the whole world down to these single narrative threads and it just makes because obviously we think in the language of story if you want to convince people that's how you've got to appeal to people you've got to you statistics aren't going to help you you can rattle off all the numbers you want you know and the bigger they are the more alien they are and the less they'll be believed the less they'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 threea structure you could use the hero's journey whatever system you want but as long as it's a a narrative thread single narrative 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 kid in fact it's probably the opposite that that pulls on our heartstrings yeah the personification of of data and stories and you can see this the charity example is perfectly right they are split testing into Oblivion what the most effective way to pull on people's heartstrings is like they 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 they're doing precisely the thing that motivates behavior and they have had behavioral scientists and aval economics guys they'll have had Rory Sutherland will be in there and the copywriters and all the rest of it split testing everything that's what they've 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 offense or by threatening censorship is ultimately a request to be deceived yeah I mean so this I think is is another reason why there's actually a distrust in institutions because they've tended to react to criticism by essentially censoring people um but it's sens censorship is based on a very outdated way of operating it's based on a very outdated information architecture so censorship would have worked very well uh 100 years ago when there was a centralized Authority which passed information down to every whether it was via um printed leaflets or television screens you know information was very Central it was very centralized but that system no longer works because the reason it worked in the past was because since the authorities provided a single system of information so for instance think about the TV right the TV tend to in the UK the TV tended to only have uh four channels uh originally when I was young very young and those four channels all tended to have the same sort of narrative so if you wanted to censor certain information you could just basically uh you could pass a law because this was broadcast media so they were beholden to 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 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 it's decentralized um in the sense that somebody can pick up on anything now and and make it go viral um so now censorship doesn't work now what happens is people are well aware of what's being censored and you have this thing obviously the strian effect where when people learn what's being censored then they want to know what that thing is even more you know in the past like the further back into the past we go the less likely this the stri and effect was because people wouldn't even know what was being censored since information was centralized but now because information is everywhere there's that information is going to leak leak out people are going to know what's being sensored people are going to know even if they don't know the precise thing that's being sensored they're going to know what kind of information is being censored from them because somebody's going to Spill the Beans somewhere because of how interconnected everything is um you know all it takes is just one person to spill the beans and then that's going to go viral everybody's going to find out about it and we see this repeatedly you know like for instance with the L labl leak going back to the labl leak hypothesis immediately as soon as Facebook uh and Twitter and everybody else tried to stifle that story it went viral and everybody was talking about it because isn't possible yeah Hunter B that's another perfect example there's many other examples you know as soon as one organization tries to s something other individuals will immediately raise the alarm and as soon as that happens everybody now wants to know what that thing was sensitive they want to know why it was withheld from them uh this is you know this thing called reactants um sometimes called the backfire effect where when you withhold when he says people can't have something they become even more adamant that they want it they want it even more you know and so this leads to uh essentially a backfire you know that's what it's called the backfire effect and and what it happens is that people then decide that hang on a second if this is being withheld from me then it's going to obviously I mean I'm kind of I'm going a little bit I'm veering off a little bit from the original thing but so that's that's one aspect of it but like um 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're not going to change their beliefs like I said the backfire effect means that people don't become if you censor people they're not going to become less likely to believe that thing they're going to become more likely to believe that thing you know and the only thing that's going to change is that that if if they know that they're going to get banned for saying something they'll just lie but they're not it's not going to change their thoughts in fact the opposite is happening and so it's it's it's a counterproductive thing to do in the digital age 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 to think what they want to think so they become more entrenched in their beliefs well you taught me a couple of episodes ago 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 limits on sincerity it seems very similar to preference falsification is there is there a distinction between the two is there where is the difference yeah so I mean they are essentially the same thing I mean maybe the difference would be something of scale U where preference falsification really refers more to the individual actions um you know and then you have things like the spiral of Silence which is another way of saying the same thing spiral of silence is is the cumulative effect of preference falsification so what happens is that um certain ideas become more and more voten over time and and when they become voton then people don't want to to be the first person just a fancy way of saying forbidden okay that's cool verboten yeah German it's for some reason I don't know why I said verboten when I could have just said forbidden ni I like I prefer it yeah um but like yeah what happens is that it leads to a spiral of Silence so the more that an idea becomes unsayable the less likely people are to say it and so that the the more it becomes unsayable you know so it becomes yeah self it's kind of like a cycle yeah self forcing system yeah yeah so yeah I mean I I just don't know what people are thinking like these organizations when they think that they can censor information in the digital age it just it it just very very rarely works it might work in a place like China but even in China right where the government has absolute control you know they've got the the sort of the great firewall what they call the great firewall but even that is not enough now they've there have been cases now where information has gone viral that the CCP didn't want to go viral because they were to stifle it um and in the age of you know even though they they they do all they can it just isn't possible because of the number because of how it fast information travels in the digital age and because of the number of connections between nodes um it's just not possible to use censorship anymore so any any organization that's trying to use censorship they're using 20th century tactics uh against 21st century Information Systems it just doesn't work and again it leads to more distrust of institutions so this goes back to this whole thing that we're talking about with you know the the problem of trust in society and it leads to more cynicism so all of it you know so going so between the backfire effect and the cynical the whole cynical 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 well you end up you end up with this uh this kind of game where they chase their own tail in a little bit so for instance you see this with uh YouTube channels so a YouTube channel will begin to struggle with plays uh and they won't be too sure why and everybody has on YouTube um when it comes to the way that they frame their episodes and what they do both content and framing they have an Overton window that they exist within and they're not prepared usually to go beyond a particular level of boring because people aren't going to click and there's usually an upper bound of clickbait that they're also not prepared to go past because that seems kind of hacky and what will happen is they will begin to skew more and more toward the clickbait side they will use more lyic hijack words War battle uh like like uh imagery the whole Mr beastify faces they'll lean more down that but the problem that you have as you begin to pull that lever more and more to chase ever declining plays your audience becomes increasingly desensitized to the subtlety that you want them to come back to so it's a oneway street my point being that you chase that sort of limic hijack 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're losing control increasingly apply more rigorous um high levels of scrutiny high levels of control and what happens it drives the trust down ever more you can't dictate trust top down it has to be emergent it has to come out bottom up and but they're chasing it more and more oh my God we we need to do more because the trust is declining and that means that we need to use more you know ever more totalitarian techniques to do this and it doesn't work and the fact and the fact that they think and the fact that they think that it's going to work actually makes it even harder to trust them because they're just so wrong about that so you ask yourself what else are they wrong about they got to be wrong about so many other things if they don't understand this basic facet of human psychology then you know they're they're pretty much uh hard to trust on anything else yeah uh herostratic Fame many people would rather be hated than unknown in ancient Greece herostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis purely so he be remembered now we have nuisance influencers who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout yeah so this has become a serious problem now I think um so I don't know if you know who uh Jack doti is I do this sort of world of IRL streamers and Jack doy tell me when I get this there a few of them he appears to kind of start fights in person and has massive bouncers SL security guys with him most of whom seem to be black uh and then they will sort out whatever the issue is by punching or choking out the person that Jack just started some beef with and then the internet goes completely Crazy by saying this dude started on somebody then got his 6' s Behemoth of a security guide to step in and smash some kid in the face uh and now he's getting paid millions of dollars and has a Lambo and lives in LA or something exactly yeah and he's not the only one I mean this this is a whole Trend you know there so there's people like mzy for instance you probably know about mzy as well um who was the guy who was going into libraries and ripping up the books whilst filming the The Librarians to see what they would do um and then you have like um uh Johnny Somali who would go out and and start harassing people in the streets and recording their reactions and he actually went to Japan and it's quite interesting because he first he got knocked out he got hit in the face and knocked out because in Japan they don't screw around right and then he got arrested and now he's in jail at least last I heard he was in jail he's in jail in Japan right so um so there is occasionally there is comeuppence but I mean most of the time there is no comeuppence for these influencers and they just go out there and they harass people in the streets and they record it because they know again this is limic hijacking right they know that they're just by appealing to the worst most basist impulses of the human brain they can get a lot of eyeballs and so they just basically they would look 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 and they want to they want to be popular everybody wants to be the cool kids and and one way to get a large following online if you don't have other talents is to just be an [ __ ] you know just be an [ __ ] and film people around you and that people will get hate followers they'll get hate audiences who watch them simply to hate on them and I think you know people like mzy and Jack docky fall into this uh this kind of strategy I think I think Jack docky originally he was just some he just did some other lifestyle stuff um but he obviously found this Niche and he thought wow I'm making way more money doing this and now he's a millionaire I mean he's he's got a lot of money and uh you know he's he's got a very glamorous lifestyle at least it appears glamorous if you look at his Instagram account you know he's surrounded by fancy cars and um 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 um fueled by Tik Tok again and the Chinese government probably knows that they're doing this and they're allowing that these these nuisance influencers to get a lot of um views on Tik Tok because they know that it's bad for America and it's bad for the UK and it's bad for West in general um 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 to be the biggest nuisance to be the the worst possible human being people who formerly were pranksters people like fuzy tube so you'd probably know about he uh he basically had a fullon psychological break on camera got arrested by Miami police called the cop like on himself pretend that he was someone had a knife or a gun or 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 have all been part of again just being a nuisance you know uh it might be real you know it might not we don't know because the the the line between sort of real and and sort of fiction is sort of blurring now and um you know for instance mizy said that all of his pranks were planned and stuff but it's hard to believe that he would go into say aai go into a Superstore and you know he would start riding on the um the sort of disabled uh trolley things that they have and you know just smashing shelves and stuff and that the supermarkets would actually allow him to do that it just that it's just not I don't believe that you know but like um a lot of them will say stuff like 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 you know at the dawn of YouTube for instance in order to get a big following on YouTube you tended to have to do something that was extraordinary in some way and extraordinary in a positive sense uh you you tend to you know have to be talented at something the the first big YouTubers tended to be sort of musicians um or sort of you know athletes of some kind people who had some kind of skill but very soon people realized that you could actually develop just as big of a following by having zero talent and just being a nuisance just being an asshle people and once that happened this kind of of nuance influencing went viral and it's 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 it sets bad incentives for young other young kids watching this because when the kids watch it they say oh you know I want to be like mzy I want to be like Jack do you know I want to have all these fancy girls all these fancy cars you know I wna I want to be like that so I'm gonna learn how to be un insufferable human being that person's bringing that person is bringing no value to to life and they're getting rewarded for it you know hard yeah they respond to incentives and if if you say rather than working really hard at a 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 distaste against Silver Spoon Dynasty children and only fans influences that there's something uh something unfair it feels like well you you got that but you didn't work for it and in a meritocratic system which is what we've got that's always going to get people's backs up 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 they're prepared to compromise their morals in some way that I see as I wouldn't do therefore I am somehow Superior to them there's this like Puritan sort of nobility that gets associated with but when we're talking about nuisance influences which I think is a phenomenal term that I've never heard of before and dude that first sentence that you put uh many people would rather be hated than unknown just brilliant and I can't I know that you've got two books in the works one of which you may have submitted but I can't wait for both of them man like I think I all of the times I watch very similar stuff to what you watch and yet what you're able to pull out of it is significantly more in depth than me so I'm I'm very very excited for what you've got coming up thank you yeah uh so I've got one one here's one that I made earlier so toxic compassion in a world where our opinions have been separated from our Deeds 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 caring and empathetic even if they 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 their weight you would say that weight has no bearing on health even if that encourages people or discourages them from losing weight which results in worse outcomes over the long term same thing could could have been seen for defund 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 over the long term is more poor policing and more negative outcomes for those precise minorities that you were looking to protect in the first place yeah absolutely yes so this brings together quite a few uh very very interesting and informative ideas um one of which would be uh luxury beliefs which I think you kind of alluded to at the end there um and also my idea of the opinion pageant um where you the whole thing about the social media has caused us to sort of overvalue opinions as a gauge of character you know we're sort of judged more by what we say than by what we do and so this goes to what you were saying initially about how it's all about looking good rather than doing good which again Echoes what Elon Musk um said I think in a in a talk uh I think with the New York Times a couple of weeks ago uh you know where he just expressed a bit of outrage at how corporations are trying to look look good 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 uh sort of economy where everything know your success in life is based on how you appear to others now more than ever because we're all because social media is where people come to promote their stuff whether you're a corporation whether you're a politician uh whether you're an influencer you know everybody's on social media trying to promote themselves trying to show why their brand is the brand that you should you 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 as long as there'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 to uh the kinds of uh politics that we have now polarization um and even disinformation 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 that again the pedaling theories that they're going to hijack people's brains and um you know scare among them or they're trying to um convince people that they're morally Superior so they will uh you know they'll they'll sort of uh post their luxury beliefs online and um 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 so um I think that ultimately I think I think there may be some kind of I mean we're kind of seeing it already where we we've seen it with there's a kind of backlash to people just going against looking good trying to people counter signaling uh there's been a rise of counter signaling um I think that Trump's election in 2016 was a form of counter signaling where people elected the most obnoxious outwardly 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 noxious and sort of overbearing cartoonish way almost as a parody of the society that we're living in I think that was a kind of counter signal but I think that yeah there's also there's been the rise of Vice signaling as a as a response to the sort of prevailance of virtue signaling but even like Vice signaling is where people will outwardly just say things that they know are going to upset people um you could even say that this nuisance influencing is a kind of VI signaling where people are like I don't care you know I'm I'm I'm over and above the morality game I I don't have to appear good I can just be the worst person possible people like Andrew tape for instance who have developed massive followings by saying the opposite of what is considered good by the majority of society you know um you see even Elon Musk you know Elon Musk is counter signaling very very strongly on Twitter a lot of the time where he will say things that are the complete opposite of what we've been taught we should say by the New York Times by The Washington Post by the Health Organization all these other you know mainstream organizations they tell us that we should be saying these kinds of beliefs 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've got these Rogues like Elon like Donald Trump like Andrew Tate who are basically saying no screw that let's do the opposite of what they say so that's a kind of backlash but in a strange sense this Vice signaling is itself a kind of virtue signaling because it is signaling to others that you are way above all of this silly sort of you know bickering that people are engaging in it's the same reason why Yeezys have got progressively more ugly over time and if you actually look at what counts for a lot of super fashionable street wear at the moment it's almost like hobo chic well that's because you're saying look I have so much Surplus cool in me that I can basically dress what is so orthogonal to what other people think is cool and still be cool that's how cool I am which oddly because of how cool is kind of it's just so subjective if you call something cool and if enough people agree it kind of is and no one can falsify whether it is or not but yeah this this toxic compassion thing I've been playing around with for ages and it's the interesting bit is that second part it's a prioritization of short-term emotional Comfort over long-term flourishing saying things you know like you're 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 bullied about whether they did or didn't post a black Square it's about whether you do or don't have Ukraine in your bio it's about whether you do or don't have pronouns in your email signature all of those things and yeah that the additional again yeah it's it's perverse incentives you know I think that's probably the running theme of today's uh discussion is D 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 we're rewarding the short-term gains over the long-term the actual proper gains which are the long-term gains uh we're sort of trapping ourselves in these in these compulsion Loops so compulsion Loops are uh this idea from uh gaming and and gamification where you trap people in these short-term cycles of of effort and 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 uh being you know being a nuisance being an [ __ ] online uh or whether it's being virtue single online you know we're kind of all chasing these short-term rewards at the expense well not all of us but I mean many of us are you know I'd like to think that you and I are a little bit better but I mean we're not we're not completely you know we're not completely immune to it I mean d think about how many times um anyone that's ever been on a plane knowing that they don't have connection gets their phone out swipes up Cycles through a bunch of apps even knowing that nothing can have happened it's a compulsion it's just a it's it's ingrained in there right next one uh tazwell razor emotion causes bias but it also causes motivation as such we're most likely to act when our judgment can be trusted least solution don't trust thoughts you have while emotional instead pause and wait for the feeling to pass before acting yeah so I think everybody is not a single person but is a collection of selves and some of these selves are much more represented of who who we are at our core than others and I think emotion can bring out a side of us that is not really us uh and it can cause us to act in ways that we would later regret um and I found this myself like I don't really do it anymore but back in the early days you know like 10 years ago I would get sometimes I'd 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 you know what an [ __ ] I was you know I basically was just as bad as them like you know I should be I should be better and I just realized that that person that is saying those things was not actually me because if I'm later regretting when I'm calm I'm I'm later regretting what I actually said when I was angry then I'm not it's not really me I'm I'm one of the things I say is that you know when you act when you're emotional you are an ambasador for your most primitive self um you're basically acting for your most animal self because you're engaging your Reptilian 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 or at least it's not it's been subop suboptimal I always make better decisions when I'm mentally sort of balanced and I think that's true of pretty much any anybody like if you send that email in the SP of the moment more often than not you're going to think ah I could have weed that better you know I could have weed that a lot better um so what I do now is it's not like I'm a robot I do feel emotions you know if somebody says something nasty to me online I get an urge to just be nasty back you know I get it like we all do we're all humans but I don't I never I never do it now I never you know I never like just I'm never spiteful if I if I reply to somebody and sometimes I'm snarky I am snarky but I tend to do it in a way that I think is more productive but what I always do is I if I feelings particularly emotional I'll always wait for that emotion to pass because it will pass and it's amazing how often when you let that emotion pass and then you consider what you would would have done when you were emotional and you realize how idiotic it would have been you know that's happened to me so many times that it's I actually am afraid of acting when I'm emotional because I just realize how how demented I am when I'm emotional and I think this is true of everybody yeah it is deranging because I mean emotions ultimately are the opposite of of rationality they they are a shortcut there's this thing called the effect turistic which is this idea that emotions evolve I mean I would say emotions evolve for two purposes one of them is they evolve for motivation and the other is that they evolved for decision- making and low information environments um you know your 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 gut feeling is it's actually often wrong people will say oh I swear but you know I've got a really good gut I've got a really good gut feeling I'm always you know I always trust my gut but what they're doing is they're engaging in confirmation bias they will usually remember when they got feeling was right but they won't remember when they gut feeling was wrong and so they they're obviously going to naturally be skewed towards believing that their good feeling is more accurate than it actually is and that's why I don't really trust it so much I mean there's there's a certain thing called intuition which is a little bit more than gut feeling which is more something that you've learned to trust over time it's something that you certain cues uh that you just see and then from that you can build a full picture but but just relying on emotion loone is usually not a good strategy for decision- making because again emotion favors short-term impulses it fa it favors shortterm compulsion Loops over long-term uh compulsion loops and so this is why I think you should always if you're going to make an important decision just wait for the emotion to pass it will pass em most emotions don't last very long most emotions last a few minutes you know and then they're usually they weaken and they fade and and that and that's all you got to do just wait a couple of minutes and then see compare your your actions when you're not emotional to how you were going to act when you were emotional and you will realize there's a massive difference and that way you'll you'll you'll prevent yourself from many regrets I think semantic stop sign one way people end 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 um see this online a lot again uh 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 oh you know you're a bigger and stuff and and basically saying oh why did he why did he why does he feel this why does he think that oh because he's a bigger and for many people that's enough oh okay he's a bigot so I don't need to listen to what he has to say anymore but really what is what what is bigotry bigotry is not an explanation for Behavior it's a description of behavior right it it's a description it basically it's a statement that somebody is prejudiced 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 then you've got to delve a little bit deeper you've got to you've got to go a bit further back and you got to say Okay so this person's 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 you know and you know then you would say oh okay it could be many things like for instance let's let's use an example of classical bigotry so um somebody might for instance hate immigrants you know they might they might say oh you know I hate immigrants I just don't want I don't want these boats to just keep coming to our Shores or whatever and the standard response from many people in positions of power is to say oh that's just bigoted move on next next question you know but if you really want to understand you've got to ask yourself why is this person bigoted and it may be a pretty enlightening answer they might it might be that they had their jobs taken away you know they might have their their job taken away by uh immigrants and now they're out of work and they're you know on the doll or whatever they're on welfare or whatever and their life is you know all their plans have been you know destroyed by this fact that they've just they've been superseded by somebody from from you know another country um or it might be that their their family member was a victim of a crime by an immigrant you know so if you can actually go past the instinct to dismiss Somebody by disguising a 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 I could convince this person um that hang on a second um immigration necessar it might have taken your job but some immigrants also create jobs or whatever I mean I'm not I'm not going to 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 uh you could you could maybe if you were interested in in getting people to accept immigrants if you were one of these people um you could basically that's what you could do and you could actually instead of dismissing them and making them hate you even more and hate immigrants even more which is going to happen you know if you dismiss somebody's concerns they they're only going to react again what we were talking about earlier reactant the 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 bigoted and it's gonna you know they're going to start thinking oh there's a conspiracy now to stop you know there's a conspiracy by the Jews to um you know flood the West with immigrants and all this and these people are calling me a biger because they're trying to destroy my life because they don't want the truth to come out so it's going to you know create it's going to basically just have a negative effect for everybody it's just going to make things worse for everybody and that's why these semantic 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 bigoted I don't call people transphobic what I do is I might I might call something that they've said bigoted U I don't I don't really even do that but if I were if I were going to use the word bigoted because I don't like the word bigoted I feel it's overused I don't like the RAC the word racist I feel it's overused I don't think these words really mean anything anymore but if I were going to use those words I wouldn't call people racist I wouldn't call people bigoted I would call their actions bigoted I call their actions racist because I think that's much more helpful because if you call somebody bigoted or call them racist or you call them transphobic or sexist or misogynistic 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 that person is irredeemable that they are you know you can't help that person because they're a lost cause because they're just a bigot you know whereas 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 it's better than than calling them a biger because if you call their actions bigoted that actually allows you to still see them as a human because I feel that calling somebody a racist is actually dehumanizing in a sense um you know you kind of because especially when you consider that you know terms like fascist nazi a lot of these terms are used to sort of paint people as the worst possible human beings because when you think of the term fascist when you think of the the term U nazi racist when you think of these terms you think of the pretty much the worst human beings you think of the Nazis you know the sort of the Nazis of Germany in the 1930s um you think of the Kooks Clan you think of really bad human beings you think of people who lynched black people you think of the worst human beings and so it's it's dehumanizing in a sense because you're you're portraying people as villains you're saying this person is a villain you know so uh I can just discount everything that they say whereas when you call their actions bigoted or whatever then you can say okay well we can actually convince this person to behave differently so 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 um sorry dis disguising descriptions as exp yes uh Max content razor so this is from mutual friend George Mack 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 ear your content diet should be Spirulina for your soul not fast food for your amigdala yeah 100% I agree um I'm very selective now about the kind of con the sort of content that I consume I used to be very careless I used to just mindlessly browse my Twitter feed and just whatever got my attention you know 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 is not very information dense I mean your your feed is probably a lot better than mine because you already follow like about 100 people whereas I follow like 600 that's why I never I hardly have a brows my feed I usually just use lists but um yeah I mean yeah I do absolutely go by that uh that razor because I I find that it's a good horis to use um one of the reasons why I originally wrote those Mega threads writing those Mega threads on on Twitter was because they were the kinds of things I wanted to read yeah um I wanted to learn about the world and I thought well this would be a good exercise for me you know I thought if I can get like 40 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 it at the time um that I that I was aware of so I thought okay I'll do it then you know I'll be the person to do it and um it was interesting because you know sort of 2020 I think it was right at the beginning of 2020 that I I posted the the first mega thread and it went viral and I just realized there was so many people that actually wanted to see that kind of thing but nobody had thought of it before even though Twitter had been around for quite a while uh as far as I could tell anyway nobody had thought of it before um but what was quite interesting was uh 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 success I had with that first mega thread um those was I just saw like I saw them all over the place um you know people doing their own threads and and I've got nothing I've got nothing against people to do that I don't think I've got like the sole rights to do it or anything but like um it was interesting because it I think it just made something click in people's minds where they thought wow this is a great idea you know why didn't I think this and then they they did it themselves and it showed that if you do the kinds of things that you want to see like if you if you create the kinds of content that you want to see um then because you're a human being and you've got you share like 99% of your your DNA with every other human being that you know there's going to be a large number of other people that will have similar enough interests that they will actually um you know want to do what you what you want to do I suppose this this actually fits in quite nicely with one of the other Concepts uh in that in in one of my recent Mega threads which is hotelling's law um which is basically this idea that um people will tend to copy whatever's successful whether we're talking about business in politics um in art or whatever and as a result of that content tends to converge it tends to become more similar over time and you see it with Tik Tok um there were a very small number of people um like Bella porch and Charlie Demello who became extremely popular on Tik Tok um they they're basically the most viewed people on Tik Tok and all they did was lip syncing and dancing now I I have no interest in watching that kind of stuff but evidently they thought it was fun maybe that's the kind of content they wanted to see but somehow that stuff blew up and as a result of that it be it started a whole new genre of Tik Tok video where you just had people lipsyncing and dancing and everybody was doing it now and it kind of decreased the value of doing that and it's the same with politics like you know if you look at for instance in the UK um you had the political parties laboring conservative if you look at say the postwar period you had Clement Atley versus Winston Churchill Clement Atley was uh he was a socialist he was a full-on and the labor party was full-on Socialist Party uh Winston Churchill's conservatives were proper conservatives they were like you know Buran conservatives uh and over time the two parties have moved towards the center so labors become more right-wing and conservatives have become more leftwing and it's interesting because the right-wing party of the UK conservatives are now to the left of the leftwing party in the US and the reason this has happened is the reason this has happened is because of hotelling's law because um what happened is that when uh certain politicians in both these parties appealed to the center they had a huge amount of success and the other people saw this and thought wow you know we we better capture the center and get some of these people's uh audiences from them and so these two parties gradually began to try to eat the center eat as much as the center before the other parties got Center so they moved closer and together and they converged and it's same with content creators they they tend to converge over time and the great thing about the max Razer that you just um spoke about when you create content that you yourself would want to see is that you can avoid hoteling's law because you're creating content that you want to see you're not you're not chasing um what everybody else is is doing you're doing the opposite because the interesting thing about hotelling's law is that the more it happens the more these content creators or these politicians or whatever we're talking about the more their content converges the more value there is in being different and in actually you know trying to to to do something that you want to see um you know like for instance and going back to my uh Mega thrs I saw a lot of stuff about mental models uh but it was not it was not portrayed in the way that I decided to do it it was more about getting a single mental model then doing a threat about it and loads of people were doing that and I initially was going to do that but then I thought I'm just doing the same thing that everybody else is doing if I do that you know because that was that that form was originally popularized um I think people like Tim Ferris you know they popularized that stuff and they became very successful with it and it was such a good formula that a lot of other people tried to do that and I thought 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 it actually allowed me to go viral when I did it so it's a very good strategy to 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-kilter like you're aiming at the target at the North and you shoot South basically so there's a a basay there's a foundation of understanding writing for instance 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 works 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 listicle style episodes that I do and they some of my favorite and I think that they keep the episode moving really quickly and I know that me and you when we finish these episodes feel like we've been in a [ __ ] fever dream for 2 hours I'm like how's it been two hours already um and I did them with hosi I've done them with Shan porri I've done them with George Mack I've done them with yourself you know going through a list of things because that's that would be fun to me if I left this like pressure hose [ __ ] of like insights about human behavior I would have I would have left an episode going wow that's cool and yeah it's it 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 ACH perspective in a way that we think is engaging Dean edits 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 we're also trying to give our own spin on something with something new and Douglas Murray has said this as well like follow your instincts your instincts are a pretty good guide it allows you to be unbelievably unique and it allows like if you're interested in something there is a pretty good likelihood that some non- insignificant minority of other people are also interested in it and given 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 absolutely yeah that's one aspect of it and another aspect is that if you are genuinely passionate about something if you're genuinely interested in something you will make it interesting to other people yeah you know because you'll be passionate about it if you're just chasing you know metrics if you're just looking at what other people are doing and you then you just copy them your passion is not going to be in it you're not going to be interested in it you're just going to be interested in getting as many views or whatever you'll be chasing the wrong metrics the right metric is interestingness interestingness to you because if you make it if it's interesting to you you'll make it interesting to other people because you your passion is contagious and I think that's the best sort of advice I'd give to somebody who wants to sort of make a start in in sort of you know just being an influencer or whatever you know is 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 stamp collecting or whatever right if you are passionate about about it enough you will make it interesting to other people dude so me and me and my housemate Zach love these videos of guys that watch uh rally cross so it's like Colin McCrae you know four-wheel drive cars going through a dirt road and these blocks will have gone up to [ __ ] air in Scotland or Quebec or something and they're stood in a Pono under a umbrella in the p ing rain in the middle basically in the middle of a forest to see to see that right for three of a second and then when these cars go past they all turn to each other and go and we love watching it 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 yeah if you follow your passions in that regard you're always going to remain uh on the right side and you also be motivated as well yeah another thing is you'll be more motivated yeah absolutely all right next one epistemic luck you know that if you'd lived in a different place or time read different books had 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 sync with the society in which I live so you know I have broadly sort of kind of I'm quite sort of liberal in a sense you know I mean I wouldn't say that I'm actually a liberal but I have very liberal views and we live in a liberal Society um and I find that it it's hard to extricate my beliefs from the time and place in which I'm living I always wonder what would I believe if I had lived if I'd say been born in in sort of India for instance if I'd been born in India what would I believe there if I'd been born in the 19th 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 beliefs because I think to myself my beliefs seem to be quite local to where I'm living in in time and space um I think this is very true of religious people in particular so if you you know if you think about say a Muslim person a Muslim obviously believes things that were originally uh sort of in a belief system that was invented in the seventh century Arabia um but what would happen if that person was born before the creation of Islam so what would what you if they had been born um sort of in the second century would they still be a Muslim you know uh obviously not you know would they still have Muslim principles obviously not and this is interesting because Islam is supposed to be a religion for all all times and all places you know that's that's its sort of main claim to fame uh and so you know although there's this concept in Islam called jilia uh which is about basically this idea that um before the coming of Islam there was ignorance still you got to ask yourself you know surely that means then that being born before the creation of Islam means that you're not going to have the advantage in God's eyes of somebody who's born after the creation of Islam because the person who's born after the creation of Islam is going to be more likely to follow Islam than the person before so there's this weird sort of you know disparity there and I think you could you could extend this to any belief system communism for instance as well even you know if you born before the creation of Communism you're not going to be a communist and so you know it's it's like would you be different if you were born if would a communist be different if they were born before the creation of Communism of course they would and so how can they be sure that their belief is right do they just happen to be born at the right time in history to have the right beliefs um and you know I 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 gauge 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 it now and I think I'm pretty justified in believing in the gym theory of disease given the evidence for it um but as a general rule I think it's a pretty good one where you think about know is this belief a product of the society in which I'm living or is it one that can be applied to any time in any place and the thing with a germ theory of disease is even though it didn't exist a thousand years ago it would still have helped me a thousand years ago it would still have been beneficial to believe in it a thousand years ago so I think that's a good horis to use in order to determine whether your beliefs are real it doesn't matter if they're a product of your time what it matters is will they be useful in any time and any place that's the kind of univers universality of of a belief um so if your beliefs wouldn't work very well a thousand years ago then that's a good sign that you're probably just em bibing what you're learning from the present day you're kind of you know you're myopically sort of Trapped in the present moment and in the present place um so yeah I think universality uh of applicability is what you want to look at so you can you apply it universally and if you can then that's a sign that it's a good belief so Rob Henderson put 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 intellectuals treadmill some thinkers as they rise in prominence as a result of their interesting ideas gradually devote less time to reading and more time to to lucrative opportunities this is a mistake they are neglecting one of the core habits that made them so interesting in the first place I think uh I think I'm guilty of this um I tend to read less than I used to but I think I think yeah I definitely agree with it in general I think um 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 example of this would be somebody like Nasim TB you know he became famous um through a handful of Concepts like anti fragility the Lindy effect uh skin in the game and these obviously they're great ideas they're really good ideas um and that's why they became popular but since then what I've noticed in him is that he tends to sort of try to apply these Concepts to pretty much anything that happens this is the golden Hammer isn't it the golden Hammer yeah yeah we've spoken about this before the golden Hammer um and it also sort of uh links in with another thing called the toothbrush problem where the toothbrush problem is basically where intellectuals treat theories like toothbrushes they don't want to use anybody else's you know they just want to use their own and um that's the opposite that's the opposite of me who just shamelessly repurposes everybody else's well I think that's the healthiest way to be I think often times you know it's it's when you just rely on your own theories you just closing yourself off um from from so much learning and so much knowledge and it's why I try not to do these things you know um 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 w to you want to overstate the kind of importance of your ideas so obviously TB got very famous from his three major ideas and you know tail risk and all the other ideas that he's come out with and 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 um and so he's that's obviously going to get him more clout because the more important his ideas seem the more important he seems and the more opportunities he's going to get to sort of expound upon various social issues and apply them to you know apply his golden hammers to those well I remember I remember hearing Peterson a while ago um this is probably five years go he was on Rogan and he was you know really at the crest of this huge growth curve that he was on maybe just after the Kathy Newman 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 outputting 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 caricature of yourself which is dangerous there's this I learned from critical Drinker do you follow that guy in the Scot yeah I watch his videos yeah yeah he's funny Brant so um I learned from him that there's four stages to most uh media movements so let's say like the superhero genre that we've seen since sort of the mid uh norts 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 Thor so you have this kind of groundbreaking or maybe less so Iron Man because he died I guess before uh he could get into parody but certainly with Thor you get this groundbreaking one and everyone's like oh my God Chris H A RI and then you get into growth and it's sort of still developing then you get into maturity where it's a little bit more predictable and you've kind of got an idea then you get into love and thunder which was the most recent one and you even saw bits of parody earlier on in it but where yeah yeah yeah he's the butt of all of the jokes he's doing a set of splits on the top of like a pair of dragons like jeanclaude vanam uh even Doctor Strange I guess he featured as a sort of anciliary character in lots of other things but he he only got two so he had the first Doctor Strange with Benedict Cumberbatch he's a phenomenal actor first one super kind like sincere uh in the way that they did it and it was very meaningful about him the second one a zombie version of Benedict Cumberbatch 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 um so yeah and I think that one of the problems that you get is what Peterson identified if you are outputting more than you're inputting you end up just regurgitating ideas you bastardize them you don't have anything fresh you become a caricature of yourself you become a you become easy to be paraded uh and that's dangerous and he was saying you know I need to take some time away someone that we can say absolutely has adhered to that and there's all dude it's how are you going to say no to another speaking gate how are you going to say another no to another Joe Rogan Experience episode how you going to say no to all these things I get it right but someone that definitely has done this was Naval who just said I did my Rogan episode and I'm now away on sabatical 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 fair play yeah yeah yeah I mean I think nval is very wise in that he's he's done this I think to avoid audience capture uh I think what we that's ultimately what we're talking about 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 of sort of emphasize their importance and I I think TB is a very good example of this going back to him because I feel he has kind of been audience captured in a sense where he's it's 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 why 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 a clearly a very intelligent man 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 Peterson essentially W warned about where instead of learning because he's he's you know TB he's he's a smart guy but he's he's he's arrogant as hell you know and he thinks that he sort of has the final answer he thinks he he understands things even when he doesn't really have a grounding in it like he he thinks he understands IQ but you know he he makes very Elementary mistakes about IQ but um yeah he he tends to just sort of focus on a very narrow field of maths uh statistical kind of tail risk analysis risk risk analysis that kind of stuff and um you know so he uses a very narrow set of tools they're very useful tools but they're very narrow and he uses that very narrow system of tools to explain everything from like covid to um polarization to uh Israel and Palestine you know he he talks about a lot of these things often just using very narrow set of tools and it's it's weird because he's he's otherwise he's quite an aidite guy but he just chooses not to sort of progress beyond what he what made him successful um and I see this I see this with a lot of other influences a lot of other intellectual where they just stick to the thing that made them successful over and over again as if you know they're 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 you know it's always about wokeness everything's wokeness everything's everything can be explained in terms of wokeness and you see on the opposite side with everything's racist you know racism is the explanation for everything oh it's because of systemic racism it's because of whiteness it's because of white fragility um you know all of this stuff and then you know you just see the same sets of explanations being used over and over again because these people are not reading new things they're just they're just regurgitating what was already in their head again and again and again that they're basically being spoonfed their own intellectual vomit and you know just kind of recycling it and vomiting out again and you know and it just degrades it's like chat GPT being trained on its own outputs you know it's just um you know it's kind of like just it is a very dangerous thing and and that's why I think um I try to go broad rather than narrow in on one thing you know I do occasionally narrow in on one thing where I write like a long long read or whatever but what I try to do is to just keep learning learning new Concepts and new things and you know like I've set a pretty good thing now where I'm I've 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 shallow stuff like in general just because I've got so many ideas to cover that I can't go into deep too much detail I mean I'm not always shallow I do sometimes go on deep Dives into articles and essays where I write 4,000 5,000 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 that's generally what I like to do and I find that that's a healthy way to approach because it 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 bubble effect you cannot learn that which you already know from epic tetus 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 um this would appear to go against what I've just said you know it would seem oh okay you shouldn't learn just a little thing you should really go deep into that but in practice that's not actually possible you can't you can't just learn one thing in loads and loads of the detail and not learn anything else you're always going to be in a situation where you have to learn a little bit the key to overcoming the big beginners bubble effect is not to um learn more because you can't learn more about everything the key is to recognize your limits is to recognize um what how much you actually know basically once you learn how much you actually know and that comes from humility and from Curiosity then you're no longer subject to The Beginner's bubble effect the beginner bubble effect is a product of think you know more than you actually do and it usually comes from having a very shallow explanation for something because once you have a shallow explanation you think you have the full explanation it's just the way our brain works you know it just you kind of your it kills your curiosity when you when you have a shallow explanation for something um you know it it fools 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 the opposite I think you should learn a little about a lot rather than learn a lot about a little I think you should learn a little about little about a lot and the reason for this is um well this goes to Philip tetlock's work Philip tetlock uh is one of the founding sort of fathers of decision Theory um along with sort of people like um Robert calini and um Daniel conman they founded sort of the field of rationalism and tetlock's all about predicting the future he's basically because the true measure of how rational you are and how much truth you have is whether you can predict the future consistently if you can't because only truth allows you to do that nothing you can't [ __ ] your way to to predicting the future that's one thing you cannot [ __ ] so you have to know the truth in order to to be able consistently predict the future and that's why he's into the the whole thing about uh super forecasting and um he basically found that the PE the people who were most accurate at predicting the future because he did some a series of Trials which were actually involved the CIA uh involved like there was a massive funding from the CIA he did some pretty crazy stuff in the 198s s where he basically did these competitions to see who could predict the future the best and people adopted various strategies of various uh uh kinds this phenomenon became known as super forecasting and what tlock found was that the people who tended to be the best at predicting the 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 there 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 recourse to that little narrow sort of sliver of information that they know really really well because they feel they're safe on that territory and they don't want to venture outside of it so they tend to try to they they view everything through the lens of what they know really really well whereas the people who know a lot about it Sor yeah know a lot about a little they sorry a little about a lot sorry um they they tend to be a lot more generalist and they they are more flexible in their thinking and so this is why I would Advocate if you have a choice between specializing in just a small number of topics or learning a little about a lot I would Advocate the latter because that puts you in a good territory to sort of be flexible in your thinking and learn um you can then learn if you want to know more about a certain thing you can learn about it and this there's a concept called The Curiosity Zone which is when you learn a a lot sorry when you learn a little about a lot what happens is that your C curiosity gets stoked and you want to learn more because curiosity is not it's not stoked by an absence of knowledge it's stoked by having a little knowledge because when you have a little knowledge it's 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 knowledge is not a gap in knowledge you need to Gap thing teaches you what you don't know yeah and a gap is can only exist between two objects you can't have a gap without you know empty space is not a gap it's got to there got it's got to be in the middle of two things so if you learn those two things you know then you have a gap now you have a gap in that knowledge and that Gap is where your curiosity blooms basically so if you want to stoke your curiosity if you want to sort of you know evoke curiosity in yourself then the best way to do that is to learn a little about a lot because that way you'll want to know more it will motivate you to want to know more and so yeah that's what that's what I would definitely Advocate is is doing that's why I like to be more of a generalist rather than specializing in a single um 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 is based on whatever's 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 yeah so this is why I don't really read the news very much I I browse it very very casually often you just once in a while I don't really read it much because what I've found is that 99% of the time the news does 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 it's 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 hijacking what we call shiny object syndrome and shiny object syndrome is a concept another concept I think from one of my recent threads um where evolutionarily in our evolutionary history we sort of evolved I keep saying the word evolve but basically we evolved to um to basically favor new information over old information because new information tended to be more useful you know in a low information new information can often be the the difference between life or death so new information for instance in a thousand years ago or 100 thousand years ago would be seeing a lion coming out from the undergrowth that's new information and that's crucial information you I mean if a lion is coming out of the undergrowth and it's charging towards you you need to know right so obviously we became biased towards new information because new information could be the like the difference between life or death in a way that old information wasn't and so we have this bias towards novelty we we're attracted to the new anything that's new we're just attracted to it by virtue of its novelty and news hijacks this evolutionary impulse by providing us with new content people are always searching for what's new you know they're constantly looking for the breaking news the big bar in red which you know say breaking news or they're looking for um you know see see new tweets or whatever you know click the button see new tweets you know see the latest posts all this stuff you know people want to see what's the latest they want to know what's the latest and this is an a maladaptive 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 being created for one reason and one reason only and that is to hijack your impulse for novelty your your desire for nov it's you know it's there to just it's basically it's rushed out the information is rushed out so if you look at a lot of the the latest breaking news is usually wrong because the journalist wanted to be the first person to break the story so they just rushed it out as fast as they could and they didn't do their due due 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 they'll just hastily they'll just retweet the headline without reading the article whatever so you know a lot of this news stuff is rushed out and that's why news is generally not that valuable because it's just reported it's often report reported impulsively by editors and by journalists they just say oh okay this sounds like it might do well online so let's just post this let's just write about this and then what happens is that people think that because it was reported by the news therefore it must be important but it's not a lot of the time it's not a lot of the time it's there simply to H Jack your attention hijack your your desire for novelty and you're not going to remember it you're not going to 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 it's just not really stuff that it might be interesting it might be interesting uh it might interest you for a couple of minutes you know you might think oh okay that's okay but most of the time it's not really going to be that interesting um the exception to 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 curing let's say you're a you're a medical uh professional and you're interested in curing cancer or whatever and then if there's a new vaccine for cancer which there is uh which is Amazing Story um then that's obviously going to be interesting news and you 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 want to go to like science news outlets you know which will tell you about the latest breakthroughs in technology the mainstream media is usually just generalized just stuff that that is just not really going to be of value to many people it's just going to be there to tickle your desire for novelty so mainstream media news 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 a writer I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't check the news I would only just um check information that's relevant to me so maybe if I was an investor I'd check stock prices and stuff like that you know but I wouldn't check the general news because the general news is usually just is worthless and people fooled into believing that it's important because it's 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 dve 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 she can't get a man to hold the door open for her and it goes like super viral online and everyone's got the same take of that's a conservative and it's it's like a whatever it's a you know slow fuel yeah it's there to fuel engagement and you know it's engagement farming it's basically a lot of it's rage bait you know they want to try and make you as angry as possible uh because they want to start a fight online because if they start a fight online then uh the two factions that are fighting are going to be inadvertently promoting Story by fighting over it yeah and then also you know just stuff that's reported just generally like um you know like for instance if you're an average person you know you hear oh you know 30 people died in a bombing in Gaza you know it's bad it's TR it's horrible news um but most people are not going to ever do anything about it they're just going to read it and then that's it then they're 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 and and you know stop the bombing um apart from maybe they're a bit more ambiently anxious about the world and the impending General sense of Doom exactly it's just going to make them feel bad a lot of the time and and there's a negativity in the news reporting as well um you know it was interesting because I think Steven Pinker recently posted a list of 66 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 know if you constantly are consuming news you're going to develop this sort of more cynicism you're going to develop great cynicism more pessimism you're going to become depressed in a sense you know you're going to feel bad because you're just going to feel like the world's falling apart whereas if you actually go to again you go to these specialized uh news outlets so you go to science reporting you know then you'll find a lot of stuff about medical breakthroughs which is actually a lot more interesting because that will allow you to predict the future a little bit better um you know if there's been a breakthrough then you can uh maybe do something about that you can maybe invest in it you know if you learn that there's a vaccine for cancer you can invest in it and you can help the people that trying to make that happen you know so um that's a lot more useful stuff is positive positive news tends to be more useful overall than the kind of negative uh engagement driven stuff that you see two of my favorite websites that I go to cost and psychology today both just phenomenal insights about human nature if you're interested in that a lot of the studies that I cite on this show come from uh Psy post or uh Psychology today they're great um do you know what the browser is are you familiar with that the browser no never heard of so the browser is it's been going for I think over a decade 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 life story in 3,000 words of like a boot polisher from 1800's Birmingham uh and here is some new drone technology that's coming out of China and here is like a story about genas Khan and whatever like it's just so varied and uh literally the only single thread between them all is the guy Robert cell I think the dude that's in charge has found it interesting and uh on the whole it's not everyone's for me but at least one to two per day it's amazing and I think it's maybe like 40 bucks a year uh and your substack something else that people should subscribe to which they can go to ginda Dos substack doccom uh I'm 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 um my most ambitious article yet which is going to be a long read it's going to be about 5,000 words uh I'm working on it for unheard but I'm also going to be posting the longer version on my substack uh and it's about gamification and uh how it can be used to control us but how we can take advantage of it that's going to be I think a very useful one for a lot of people um I've also got my my book I don't want to talk too much about my book yet because uh it's coming it's coming but uh there's something big in the works it's going to be this the first one or the second one because there's two right yeah there's two yeah the first one's coming out uh next year so not long so yeah then the one after is probably going to come the year out after so that'll be in 2025 but yeah there's going to be a book hopefully next year uh and I'm also going to be trying to uh actually start doing videos as well uh because I've had a bit of demand from that so um I think by the time this comes out I might actually have a YouTube channel I don't know uh but if you're watching this and and you're interested in hearing me ramble more then uh you might want to search my name on in YouTube and I'm gonna guess I can give you some people go to your sub stack they'll everything will be on the substack I'm going to guess everything's on the substack yeah and also Twitter I'm going to be more active on twit I've got another Mega thread coming up actually uh cuz I'm going to do one for the the winter 2024 uh Mega thread's going to be out in about a month or two so um that's going to be the next big thing on Twitter but I'll be uh I'm gon to be posting a lot more now so um because the bulk of my work on my books done so yeah I'm I'm hoping that 2024 is going to be a very productive year for me I look forward to it mans uh yeah you you want might want a bit more sleep than I get um but yeah dude look I cherish these episodes that's 2 hours that's gone by in literally no time at all uh once the next Mega threads up you will come back on we will talk about it again and and we will we will have more fun but for now ladies and gentlemen ginda Bogel thanks so much for a day mate thank you always a pleasure Chris if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe