The War on Sensemaking, Daniel Schmachtenberger

I think it's clear to probably most of

your listeners that the things called news are mostly propaganda narrative

warfare for some agency and that they aren't good sources of sense-making we would hope though that there are some

sources of high signal low noise true information like maybe scientific journals like academia so science itself

I hoped this a long time ago ago and I had the continuous kind of disappointment you know I started being like okay Kent I can't trust news to be

true because news is narrative warfare I can't trust science without actually really looking at what was the methodology employed how was it funded what were the axioms that the team was

using what were the logical transforms am i seeing all of their data or was a cherry pick data and as we as I started to kind unfold to say where are the high

signal low noise sources that I can offload some of the cognitive complexity of making sense of the world to the answer is really sad right I don't know

any sources that are very high signal and low noise or across lots of areas so they don't start being like well why is that and what would it take to fix that what would it take to make a world ahead an

intact information ecology well that requires understanding why the current information ecology is as broken as it is and we're starting to touch on a couple things here but this goes deep and how do we make good choices if we

don't have good sense making well obviously we can't but due to increasing technological capacity right increasing population multiplied by increasing

impact per person we're making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sense mate to inform those choices which is kind of

running increasingly fast through the woods increasingly blind right and so I think many of the people that you've had

on Robo wisdom have been in a deep inquiry around how do we actually fix our own sense making and it's some of what has brought us to have conversations with each other because a

part of how we work with our own sense making as we recognize the cognitive complexity of issues that the world faces is more than a single person can process a single brain that can't

actually hold that cognitive complexity so it requires collective intelligence and collective sense making but I can't just offload the cognitive complexity to some Authority because I

can't trust that they're actually doing good sense making maybe they're doing good sense making within a very limited context but then the application of that outside of the context is different and maybe there's even distortions within their context so I have to try and find

other people that are also really endeavoring to sense make well which means they have to understand what causes failures and sense making and then we have to see can we create relationships with each other that

removed the distortion basis that is normally there so I think I think what I

from what I have seen of rebel wisdom this is probably the strange attractor of what is bringing everybody to watch it is people who are trying to make sense of the world better themselves and

are trying to find sources of content of other other people that have been trying to make sense of it well which is what I'm excited about and so those are just

some opening thoughts and yeah I look forward to getting into why we have as broken and information ecology as we

have and what it would take to correct that at a at scale and how we can make sense of the world even in the broken information ecology now in terms of

practical process I've never actually shared publicly these types of frameworks before so this

feels fun and exciting and I hope that's useful as I've been trying to make sense

of the world making sense of why since making it so hard is pretty central there's a famous quote I think

attributed to Einstein make things as simple as possible but not simpler as simple as possible really the goal isn't is as clear as possible right but

simpler would mean it's wrong like it's not accurate anymore if I'm you know you're gonna have to face this doing

media work there will be pressures on you to say hey people can't pay attention more than sound bytes you got to make it five minute chunks so the word size is too big make it for an eighth grade level right which is saying

people are dumb so spoon feed them stuff that dumb people can handle which to the degree you do that and it's successful will

keep people dumb but that's what that's what like those are the pressures in in anyone doing broadcast even for a

hopefully good intention right and if we want people to actually be able to make sense of the world well you can't do it

in very short periods of time with lots of distraction and oversimplified like if you if you look at anyone who actually increased the sense making

capacity of the world you look at any scientist or philosopher they didn't do it in tweets and they didn't do it radically distracted and they didn't do

it in a dumb down process right like I have I have so many people who have written to me saying like we want to

create a new kind of Education young people we want to create a new kind of education that makes everybody

like Bucky fuller or Leonardo sits conditions polymaths and they say this because I've written some stuff on that topic and that they have some sense that

they could lead that and I'm like have you read Bucky's books like well no

we mostly don't read books and have you read the references in Bucky's books just see the amount of [ __ ] that he read and referenced to make sense of things well and so there's a there there's a

decoupling of the sense of the agency possible with what it takes to do it it's you know like that there's a saying everywhere in almost all domains to this effect of like everybody wants to be

buff but nobody wants to lift heavy ass weights or everybody wants to win and nobody wants to work harder there's something like that that happens here is if I want to be able to make sense of

the world well I have to work at that and if I want to be able to make sense of the world better that the world better than I currently do like

attention requires being trained just like muscles require being trained thinking clearly requires being trained

and anytime there's a hormetic process you know hormesis is the principle by which you stress an adaptive system to increase its adaptive capacity so I have to stress a muscle to get the muscle to

grow if I'm lifting an amount of weight that's super easy the muscle there's no input that says the muscle needs to be bigger and there's a cost to getting bigger right so it's only gonna go through that cost if it's being stressed

and the same is true like if I expose myself to more heat and more cold than as comfortable actually gain greater metabolic flexibility to deal with heat and cold which means that if I stay in an environment where I always have heating and air conditioning I'll

actually lose metabolic flexibility you have to stress the system to be able to grow the system and in a particular kind of way and not all stressors are gonna grow the system but this is definitely true cognitively which means if I keep

paying attention to hyper normal stimuli that are moving quickly so I get the stimuli of lots of novelty I'm gonna be decreasing

my attention but if I want to have any kind of nuanced view I have to be able to hold multiple partial views in working memory it's not that some people have good memory or good attention and

other people don't intrinsically it any more than some people are buff and some aren't intrinsically it's developable but it has to actually be developed so so the impulse to say hey make it really simple so everybody can get it and the

impulse to say help people actually make sense of the world well or are different things now some people will make stuff technical seeming intentionally to

obscure it as a power game right so that to encourage others to defer their sense making to them I understand this complex [ __ ] you're not gonna be able to

understand this or defer Authority to me we will we want to do something if we actually want to empower people I don't

want them to defer their sense-making to me but I also don't want them to do lazy shitty sense-making or defer it to anyone else which means I want them to grow the quality of their own sense

making which means to grow the depth of their care right anti nihilism to grow the depth of their care to grow the depth of their earnestness their own self-reflexiveness to pay attention to

their biases and where their sloppiness and thinking their own skills and capacity want them to grow their attention span and both the clarity of their logic and the clarity of their intuition and the noticing when something's coming from intuition or

logic and how to relate those like all of those things but that's actually what increasing sovereignty means so information apology is that there's a

there's a whole ecosystem of information right like we have information coming in from marketing information coming in from government sources from campaigning from just what our neighbors tell us and

our friends tell us from social media from like and we use information to make sense of the world to make choices that are aligned with whatever our goals are and our values and what's meaningful to

us and what we hope is that the information around us is mostly true and representative of reality so that we can

use that to make choices that will be effective when I say broken information ecology it means that we can't trust that most of the information coming in is true and representative of reality and will inform good choice making and

so then this is where we have to get into ok so where does information come from right signals are being shared by people and by groups of people that have

shared agency like corporations and governments and political parties and religions and whatever right and so we

want to start getting into why do people share information other than just sharing what is true and representative

of reality this is actually a really key thing to start to understand so maybe I'll actually define something that I

was just referencing which is the difference between true and truthful it's a first important distinction when we say someone's being truthful what we

mean is that what they if you're being truthful with me it means that what you are sharing maps to what you believe right that there's a correspondence between the signal that you're

communicating to me and what you believe is true so we can look at breakdowns of truthfulness which is where people are distorting information with some

intentionality and that can either be through overt lying or through lying through omission or lying through emphasis bias right those kinds of

things so that's truthful and when we say something is true what we typically mean and this is actually this gets very nuanced and we end up having to get into

like fundamental epistemology ontology concepts of what does it mean for something to be true what are our fundamental axioms about the nature of reality I'll put that on hold for now and just say in general if we say that

someone's saying something that's true we don't just mean that there's a correspondence between what they're saying and what they think but there's a corresponds between what they're saying and some independently verifiable

reality and so of course someone can be truthful meaning they say what they believe but what they believe is misinformed because they did sense-making poorly so they're

propagating information honestly but that is not true and so we need to look

at distortions in both of these there's a third thing which is representative which is it's possible for someone to be truthful share exactly what they think is going on and that what they're

sharing is actually true they've actually done good epistemology and empirically validated that what they're saying maps to reality and in some clear

way and yet the interpretation I get from that will still actually mislead me because it's not the true information is

not representative of the entire context well articles published and famous journals peer-reviewed scientific journals like Journal of American Medical Association five years later

we'll see that a major percentage of them something like fifty percent are found to be mostly inaccurate fifty percent is a coin toss right or we see

the replication crisis or we see that the things that get studied even if it's true information it can be misleading because for the most part where does the

money to fund the research come from it's gonna come within capitalism mostly where there's some ROI on the research and so some areas have moral ROI than others so even a bunch of true information but that is weighted towards

certain parts of the information ecology over others create misrepresentation through preponderance of information right so even a bunch of true information can create distortion so

then you start to say oh okay so the essence of science within the philosophy of science the essence of it is earnestness of inquiry right it's empiricism but then earnestness of

inquiry eddington defined science as the earnest endeavor to put into order the facts of experience and the essence of capitalism is see you can say the

essence of science is no bias right at least the idea the spirit of it we can get into where even the philosophy of science has built an

axiomatic bias later but then the in capitalism it is about optimizing for bias right like I actually have an agency that I'm trying to get ahead I

have intention to increase my balance sheet and so if there is capital funding of science it's going to fund the things that create ROI on that research so we can keep doing more research that

creates both a reason to distort the info and the reason to withhold information that is a source of competitive advantage a reason to create

this info to other competitors and to at least wait you know of course in biotech if I can get a patent on a synthetic molecule and I can't get a patent on a natural molecule does a lot more money

is gonna go into synthetic molecules in natural and then we look it and say well there's not that many phase 3 clinical trials on herbs and there are on Pharma meds so the pharma meds must be more accurate no this is a even true

information preponderance of data is going to create problems right and that's actually true information that is being shared truthfully that would still be misrepresentative of reality so this is where I have to say

do I have some sense of what the actual territory is and do I have a sense that the map that's being created actually maps onto the territory reasonably well

because sense making means map generation right to be able to make choices of how we navigate how we do choice making in relationships with some

actual territory so that's true truthful and then representative and we can look at distortions and all three of those so

when we look at white as an individual distort information the the most fundamental way of thinking about it is

there's this idea in terms of signaling like if I'm just nature watching and I'm watching what is happening with rabbits and trees and birds I'm getting information about them that they aren't even intending

to transmit and so the information is just reflective right lights actually reflecting off of them of the nature of reality as soon as there's an agent that

can share information strategically for an intention then I don't know if what they're sharing is reflective of reality or reflective of what they think will advance their intention and that's kind

of the key distinction is that the moment we get abstract signaling which language allows us and the ability to kind of forecast in our ability to model each other and your well-being and the

basis of your agency doesn't seem coupled with my well-being in the basis of my agency perfectly in the case of the partner wanting to cheat and get away with it right there's a decoupling

of well being an agency in the case of if I'm a marketer of a product and I want you to purchase it whether my product is actually the best

product or not whether a competitor's product is better whether you need the product or not I want you to think that you need it and to think that mine is the best right so there's a breakdown between what seems to be in my

well-being and what seems to be in your well-being so wherever there is a any misalignment in agency and there's the

ability to share signal for strategic purposes then you have a basis to have signal that's being shared that isn't just truthful right so then we look at

where is that happening and it's [ __ ] everywhere right to really gross or subtle degrees pretty much everywhere and sometimes for dreadful purposes like

I mean you got the prosaic purposes which are basically market type dynamics which most of the dynamics in the world or market dynamics or at least

influenced by market dynamics right market dynamics are fundamentally at least partially if not mostly rivalries meaning my balance she can get ahead

independent of your balance she getting ahead and definitely independent of the Commons right and so in a market type dynamic I'm going to be sharing

information and this is why buyer beware but as soon buyer beware is not just you know check to make sure that the car isn't about to break down it's also check to make sure that the information

shared is being true because if I'm actually sharing information as a service right and you're purchasing that information whether it's whether you're paying for it with your attention that's

being monetized through an ad or you're paying for it directly or whatever there's nothing that says I'm sharing true and truthful information so in market type dynamics the the goal of

marketing is that there is si as a company and from the supply side of supply and demand dynamics the goal is to compel the purchasers action in a

particular way which means as a company I want to do sense making for you because I want to control your choice making I at least want to influence your choice making I'm not actually

interested in your sovereignty and I'm not even that interested in your quality of life I'm interested in you thinking that I'm interested in your quality of life I'm interested in you believing that my stuff will affect your quality

of life but whether that actually corresponds or not I don't care in fact if I can sell you food that is very addictive or cigarettes or social media

or media or porn or whatever it is that actually decreases your baseline happiness but then makes you need another hit faster and it's addictive that's really good for lifetime revenue

of a customer and to the degree that my fiduciary responsibility is to maximize profitability for me and my shareholders and so I need to maximize lifetime revenue of my customers multiplied by

maximizing the customer base addiction is the most profitable thing I can get right where that's never in the best interest of the customer now as a corporation where I get to employ a

whole bunch of people to do market research into split-test ads and to see what works best and to use psychological insights and to be thinking about your choice making more than you're thinking about your choice

making not only is the information I'm sharing with you not just truthful and it's a form of kind of narrative warfare because that we're agents that are actually competing for what you do are you I want you to do something in

particular you want to do it for you those aren't the same thing but it's actually an asymmetric warfare because I have a lot more ongoing team

and focus now especially as you start to look at a big corporation empowered by AI and Big Data and etc it's radically asymmetric info warfare that you don't even know it's happening

right you don't even know you're engaged in so we can see that and but all the way down to the little guy in in a

market right who's just peddling where's his incentive is to compel people to buy the thing not to really adequately inform them that he just marked the price up a lot from where he got it down

the way and if they go down the way off the beaten path like the other stuff is better and so this is Rubik wa tiss

right okay and then as we're exploring reasons that people share things that

are not fully truthful and and representative there of course things worse than this this is I would say most of where the distortion comes from is agency

misalignment well it's always agency misalignment right mostly we'll call that market but any sources where you

have some agent whether it's a come a company or a country or a person that can think about their own well-being independent of the well-being of other agents and/or the Commons then there is

a basis for them to optimize their well-being at with some externality in the same way we externalize cost to the environment we X connects turn Eliza cost to the information environment in externalize cost to the information

environment is like disinformation is pollution to the information ecology right that's a kind of a good way of thinking about it and as ubiquity Bic

witness as pollution is where we see that the snow on the top of Mount Everest is full of pollution right of many different kinds I would say information ecology pollution is more

Rubik witness because it's not just big industrial players doing it it's everybody doing it and you can't even see it as clearly but even people will create distortions

and information for seemingly positive reasons like first there's kind of innocuous reasons like okay I'm gonna write a testimonial or an endorsement for my friend's book because they're my

friend even though I think there's stuff wrong in their book it wouldn't be that gracious of me to say that and maybe there's some game theoretic stuff in there like they wrote a nice testimonial for my book and I want them to keep

doing that and so my giving the endorsement of my whatever credibility that other people proxy their sense making to me I'm now you know proxying

that credibility over here is not necessarily true even if it's not that they did the endorsement on my book and I just am supportive of them taking a positive step that doesn't necessarily

mean that anyone else who sees that I offered that testimonial and is using that as a method of their own sense making knows why I did it so here's the other thing as a decoupling of the

signal that I'm sharing with the intention that I'm sharing it for and so I might be sharing something with you and I have four or five complex

intentions I might not share any of them with you or maybe I shared one when

you're getting information from a news channel and you're like oh this news channel wants to maximize my time on site and it can do that through appealing to my cognitive biases and my

emotional biases and my identity biases it can do that through things that are inflammatory it can do that through all kinds of things that are hyper normal stimulus and that hijack my attention this is where it's competing for my

attention against where I would want to put my attention because it's monetizing my attention right so I have to factor

the agency the intention of the news station and try and remove that artifact from the information to try and infer what the true information might be

basically to infer what the source of distortion might be the same of the political candidate the same with science that's coming forward and I'm looking at

okay so who's who is seeking more grant funding and what is easiest to fund and where are their standard model biases where only the things people are only

going to share the [ __ ] that's gonna get them more funding and that's gonna get tenure where they have to defend the thing that got them the Nobel Prize if they're not may not be true anymore for ego and identity biases got a factor all

of those kinds of sources of possible bias and so this is the first I would say kind of valuable thing when you're trying to do sense making is to recognize that the signal that you're

getting everywhere is mostly strategic um strategic on the part of which is just another way to say intentional on

the part of the agent sharing it for their purposes not yours and where there is a dis alignment between your well

being and theirs or at least an apparent one then what their basis for intention might actually suck for you and even if

there seems to be alignment you still don't want lied to for your good you still want your information so I would say one of the first things we want to do when we start to do sense making is

to look at why is anyone sharing what they're sharing and not assuming that they are being truthful [Music]

so basically truthful is about game theory right truthful is about the fact that people are lying all the time and okay we're actually gonna say a little

bit more about that one formula when you're playing poker you learn how to bluff because it it's not who has the best hand that wins it's who makes everyone

else think that they have the best hand and right there's there's a lot that goes on than that and so because it's a zero-sum game right that if my win does

not equal your win my win is going to equal some other players losses then I have an incentive to dis inform you

where information about reality is a source of competitive advantage this is actually the real kind of key way of thinking about because disinformation even happens in nature with other

animals you'll see a caterpillar that evolved to have something on its tail that looks like a head to dis inform birds so that they go to pick up the false head and it might still be able to live right like that's actually an

involved disinformation strategy and it's just that the disinformation in nature happens very slowly and where the selective pressures on the side of the caterpillar and the bird or coevolving

right so the bird is getting better at noticing those things as the caterpillar is getting better at dealing with that camouflage is a kind of disinformation right it's an attempt to not signal something fully because there's rival

risk dynamics between the caterpillar and the bird in that scenario but with people with our abstract replicators we

can create the distortion much much much faster we can have a symmetries in the capacity to create the distortion and

even exponential asymmetries and so it's actually really quite different so you

think about the poker bluff and you think about like even in soccer or football when someone fakes left and then goes right that's a disinformation strategy where if we're competing in

information about the nature of reality where the water is where the gold is what the market is going to do next if this company is going to make it whatever equals a source of advantage

but we're an assumed rival risk dynamic we're competing for the same money competing for the same attention whatever then first I have the incentive to withhold information

right so I don't want to tell you where the gold is or I don't want you to know the intellectual property that I'm going to monetize simply the withholding of

information [ __ ] up the information ecology so much because I'm doing cancer research and I've had some big breakthroughs but I'm not trying to share that with everyone else just doing cancer research because this is being funded by a for-profit process that

needs to be able to monetize that intellectual property right and so we can see how much problem happens as a result of withholding of information but we can also see how intractable this

problem seems within a game theoretic environment like capitalism right I keep saying capitalism I'm not going to say that any other bad economic system we've

ever tried is the answer because they aren't we have basis for disinformation and communism and socialism and fascism we're gonna suggest that new structures that have not ever happened are needed

I'm just wanting to say that here so people don't attach to me criticizing capitalism is probably going to suggest something that doesn't work so the first

thing is withholding information and we see in business how much focus is on IP and NDA's and you know those types of things but then it's not simply

withholding information it's also dissing forming right just like the poker bluff for the fake left and go right we have an instant and we can see in warfare we try and have black projects where we withhold the

information because we don't want the other side to know what our military capacities are but we also try to dis inform what our military capacities are or where we're gonna attack or whatever else as a source of advantage that's

been happening forever sons who writes about that right I mean it's just we've we've had a basis for disinformation for a long time we've had rival risk

dynamics for a long time the rival risk dynamics are a basis by which we can get ahead by war and killing somebody else or lying to them right or ruining the Commons

it's just exponential tech leads to with those same incentives leads to exponential disinformation exponential extraction exponential pollution exponential the scaled warfare

and on a finite playing field that self-destruct so the underlying cause is the same stuff that's been happening but at a speed and scope and scale and level

of complexity that forces us to have to actually deal with the underlying structures now because they they can't continue okay so that's the game

theoretic side of it now what would it take to have an intact information ecology where any information that anyone had just on the truthfulness side was being shared there was no incentive

for disinformation first let's just imagine that array like no disinformation let's give some other examples of disinformation there's not just where I'm intentionally trying to mislead you there's also where I'm

sharing signal for some purpose for me that might mislead you in it I'm not intending to I just don't care if I do so let's say there I want some increased

attention and this might be because I'm going to monetize that attention might be because I'm going to get political power might be simply because I just want attention right so let's say I

comment on what some famous person is doing let's say I disagree with him I'm instantly going to get some attention if I critique them effectively that I

didn't necessarily earn and I don't even have to believe the critique because via Association of that type I'm going to get some attention so now people have a

basis to focus on something they weren't focused on before to criticize it because that will get attention or to compliment it or to play off of it in a

way that is not actually what they care about or believe and again you look at how liquidus it is you know that kind of

phenomenon all right so the answer to getting over the truthfulness issue is actually post game theoretic world because which is the same answers like

how do we get past warfare well it's not just kinetic warfare where we throw bombs or rocks at each other it's also info warfare and narrative warfare and economic warfare right which is

basically any in-group that is coordinating to compete against an out-group in some kind of zero-sum dynamic and that's companies to companies its companies to people it's

people to people it's countries to countries its global economic trading Blox with each other it's all of those things what can people do right now

within a game theoretic world to start to create spaces of truthfulness start

to create relationships where one of the highest values is truthfulness with other people that are capable of and want and are committed to that where

people are not only not lying to each other but they are endeavouring to not withhold information which is tremendous

intimacy and tremendous vulnerability and see if you can create enough psychological safety with some people to be able to start exploring what does it

mean to actually share information honestly so that we can have that and all kind of make sense together that's

one thing and there's also something where it's like if you don't throw trash out the window of your car because you don't pollute the environment be careful

about not polluting the information ecology by rationalizing why your own miss or disinformation is okay and just start to think of it that way think of

anytime you're sharing a little lies as as polluting the information ecology and being like oh wow I don't want to do

that I would I don't want to be part of the [ __ ] up information ecology okay so now on the true side which is not

just a mapping or a correspondence between what I'm saying and what I think but between what I'm saying and what shared reality is which means there has to be a correspondence between what I

think in reality that means I had to do since making well before I share something right so this is the topic of a pistol

so one is movement past game theory the next is epistemology how do we know

stuff so even if nobody was lying and withholding information the complexity

of the world makes a epistemology hard and most people aren't even endeavoring

at it so I have if no one was lying and I could take all the information as at least truthful there would be certain epistemic processes that I could apply

that I can't apply if I can't even take the sources of signal as being signal without a lot of noise right so there's epistemology that I have to have within the context of an inn of an environment

has a lot of disinformation how do I make sense of what is true and what isn't true about signal coming in and then how do i parse from lots of Sigma

what might be true about reality and for like to just get a sense of why like how big a deal this is you take any of the

biggest issues in the world like the issues that could determine whether or not we keep existing as a species okay

so take big environmental issues like climate change there's disagreement as to whether climate change is relieved in a thing and to the extent that it is a

thing what the causes are and what the

time skills are now most people who believe fervently no climate change is real 97% of climate scientists agree

it's anthropogenic greenhouse gases etc most of the people that believe that fervently enough to kind of like go into narrative warfare for it have never actually looked at the primary data

deeply themselves and yet there's an almost religious fervor around it that was based on having proxied their sense making the people who they believe so

the UN's headed or the Gates Foundation said it or whatever it is I've heard it repeated enough times just just through repeatability like I have been programmed to believe this thing is true which is not that different than

believing a fundamentalist religion religious ideal right and let's say we take people's fervent ideas on vaccines

or their fervent ideas on the viability of market ideology or almost anything

like that almost no one who has fervent ideas has a good epistemic basis for the level of certainty they hold there's a decoupling between how much certain team they have and how much certainty they

should have through right process and then you look at who are they proxying their sense making - in most the time they're not even proxying their sense making to the people who did the original research many of whom disagree with each other and were funded by

somebody to say something that is not fully true in the first place and who maybe were employing epistemic biases themselves but typically it's somebody

else who looked at all of that and then someone else who looked at all of that so you might have like a bunch of climate scientists into someone who is speaking about that as a client's climate scientists at a more synthetic

level like a James Hansen or whatever - then like a Gore or someone who is actually speaking to the public who were proxying our sense making - and we say

okay how many steps removed is it and how good was the original data and so if we think about okay how much radiation

actually was released into the environment from Fukushima it seems like a very straightforward thing take a Geiger counter and go out and do the

studies but how many people are equipped to take a Geiger counter out and go do that or to be able to actually pay attention to how the flow dynamics and

the air and the water are gonna work or you know so many things and so we have to take other people's data to begin with and those other people let's say the data was the Japanese government or TEPCO or whoever it was or it can

a conspiracy theory group that is saying no no it's actually releasing huge amounts of ocean all the fish are totally toxified but they might just be they have a basis to dis inform because

they're getting viewership that they're monetizing through that what how the [ __ ] do we make sense of it right so we what we start to get is it's like is AI

gonna solve a bunch of problems and be relatively safe or is AI the biggest risk and going to kill us and you see the you see kind of fervent disagreement but you see a still pedal-to-the-metal

going as fast forward as we can with AI and with CRISPR biotech and with every type of exponential technology that

could be catastrophic and and so there's increasing speed of choice making with decreasing sense-making and to just

think about like okay or even what's really going on with the Chinese government and its cyber warfare relationship of the US government and

with kind of the what its actual capacities are and what its intent and agency is and those types of issues well we know that's going to be obscured we know both sides and all kinds of sites

are gonna be obscuring information and it gets even worse because it's not just that you've got this group of people called China and this group of people called the US and that they're in a game theoretic relationship with each other

but everybody on Team USA cooperates perfectly you know of course it's not that right so even within the intelligence agencies I might have two different intelligence agencies that are supposed to be cooperating but they're

competing for a bigger percentage of black-budget and so they might be withholding information from each other or even dis informing each other then I might have two agents within an agency competing

for the same promotion who might run disinfo on each other so I have fractal disinformation right at almost every place because of a game theory at a consent of system which is the balance

sheet of countries the balance sheet of organizations the balance sheet of all the way down to individual people right this separation of the of agency

- now I'm back to a game theory truth on the side but I have to factor that when I'm trying to make sense of things because I have to be able to parse signal from noise to then be able to synthesize the signal but then even if

that wasn't the case I'm just just trying to do a pistol mala Jeon good signal and I have to say ok in a complex system like we're we can't even forecast

the weather ten days out very well how do i forecast the effect of putting certain kinds of pesticides or genetically modified organisms or whatever into the environments right

it's a complex system that we can't forecast very well at all we we don't we don't know the tiniest bit of the actual information of how that complex system is going to regulate but we're going to

do stuff that affects those systems at scale what is the right epistemology to be able to make sense of is this a good choice and so you can see and we know what are all the metrics we have to

factor let's say we're talking about biotech ok so I can give you a drug that is good for some biometric that happens to be associated with the disease that

I'm taking I'm trying to get the doctors to be able to use this drug allowed by the FDA to treat a particular disease and then since the disease is identified by this biomarker I have to affect this

biomarker so let's say I'm talking about high cholesterol and so we develop a statin for it how many other metrics are this is the statin effecting well every day we're learning new biometrics we

didn't even know existed how many of those are being affected they're part of the unknown unknown set that we don't even know to be able to do risk calculation on now we could say well let's run the experiment long enough

before we release the drug to see if it affects total longevity and all cause mortality well nobody [ __ ] does that nobody's gonna run a hundred year experiments on something before they release the thing they're gonna run the

shortest ones they can so we're you have a system that has delayed causation how do I know if that's creating problems way down the road well it does all the time right so we get rid of DDT or parathion or malathion because we see that it's super poisonous after we've been

spraying it on everybody and then we bring in a new drug that we also didn't do long term Studies on I mean a new pesticide and then we outlaw it after a little while and then we bring in new one the new ones aren't safer they just haven't

had as much time to show how dangerous they are so then the question is like what would the right epistemology be how many metrics do I have to factor how do I know how to factor those metrics what

is the total information complexity of the scenario relative to how much I have actually the information complexity of the assessment that we've done so we can

get into at some depth the topic of appropriate epistemology for various contexts but the I guess the first thing

I can say is that if people aren't even thinking about that their chance of making sense well is pretty close to

zero if we think about the concept of a meme the way that Dawkins originally put it forward it's a abstract pattern replicator where a gene is an

instantiated pattern replicator which means that it can mutate and change and affect behavior and propagate much much much faster right and we can kind of say

that in Homo sapiens our genetics selected for memetics for higher-order mimetics right our genetics because most other species what the selective

pressures had them be adaptive to an environment right they there's mutation and then the mutations that survive and make the best are the ones that make it through but that's within the context of

survive in that environment and are able to mate successfully in that environment so they become more more fit to their environment so the cheetah does really well in the savanna I would not do well in the Arctic and the polar bear wouldn't do wellness it in an orca

wouldn't do well outside of the ocean right like so they they are well adapt to their environment because of our abstraction capacity which is both our capacity for language and memes as well

as tools we were able to go and become adaptive become actually apex predators in the savanna and in the Arctic and in the ocean and everywhere right we were able to go to every environment which

means that as soon as our population would normally if we were any other animals to level off in relationship with the environmental carrying capacity of an environment we just moved we were able to decimate that environment and move to

the next one right into all of them and then but that part isn't the part I want to get into it now it's that since we were gonna be adaptive to totally new environments and

since we were gonna create tools where what it was to be adaptive was changing sin since we modify our environment in ways the other animals don't we can't

come in genetically fit to a specific environment we have to come in and be able to imprint the environment that we're in so we know how to be fit two totally different environments cuz like

it's not that adaptive for us to throw Spears or even climb trees all that well but it is to be able to like text and drive and stuff that wouldn't have been

adaptive thousand years ago at all and so this is why human babies are embryonic or jnanis for so long right compared to any other animal if you like

the thing I like to do here is to think about a horse standing up in like 20 minutes and a human being able to walk in like a year and just think about how many 20 minute segments multiplied into

a year to get a sense of how much longer we are helpless than anything else is and even amongst the other primates close to us is there's really nothing like us in terms of the extended

helplessness and that's because we're we don't have inherited knowledge of how to be us since the environment is going to be different we have to imprint the environment that we're in to be able to

be adaptive to environments that we're changing right so and so this is a

saying that our genetics selected for neuroplasticity selected for memetics our hardware selected for faster software updates that could have faster

changes in adaptive basis so that we could move our environments and all those types of things so if we think about a meat and kind of like a gene as

an ax pattern replicator but as an abstract pattern replicator that can mutate much quicker there's also a big differences that the other animals are

it in an environment the mutation across genes is very evenly distributed mutations happening to the gazelles and

to the cheetahs at an equal rate right and there's Co selective pressures on both of them so they're both getting faster the slowest ones of each are dying off and so there's this kind of symmetry of power that has the

competitive pressures between them have them all up level but when we start being mostly mimetic and the other species are still mostly genetic meaning we're largely based we're getting

adaptive based on abstract pattern replicators are still in stan see a pattern replicators we can increase our per date of capacity much faster than they can increase their than the environment can increase its resilience

to our creative capacity which means that we can debase the whole substrate that we depend upon which is self terminating right you can't keep debasing that which you depend upon so

in evolution there is a selection process for the genes that make it through right but they there is this kind of symmetry of the genes that make

it through because of the evenness of mutation and because of the co selective pressures now with mimetics the memes that make it through are the memes that

win in a rival risk context not the ones that necessarily represents the true or the good or the beautiful so the propagated memes propagate more than the true memes propagate this is a super

important concept to understand which is like I was always dumbfounded thinking about the evolution of religions take Christianity for instance and you say

okay so Jesus when they brought Mary Magdalene said let he who has no sentence amongst you cast the first stone right and then when they're nailing him up he says Father forgive

them for they know not what they they do and he's like bringing forgiveness to Judaism and in his name we did the Crusades in the Inquisition and said we

will not just kill but torture anyone who doesn't accept the Lord of peace is there like how the [ __ ] did we do that how did we do the mental gymnastics

to take the guy whose key teachings were forgiveness and torture people in the name of that well we figured out how to do it right but the key is that we was super adaptive so you you've got an idea

right say you've got Jesus teachings or we can take it in any of them and then there's going to be a bunch of mutations on that idea different interpretations

of it some of the mutations say be quiet and don't push your ideas on anyone like be contemplative and you know etc and

those ones don't catch on because they aren't being intentionally propagated and other ones say go out and propagate these ideas on missions and on Crusades and focus on the not the forgiveness

parts but on the like wrath and Leviticus and who God's enemies we're like focus on those parts and that you actually get better spots in heaven for

converting more people right and and so what you end up getting is that the ideas that catch on are the ones that win and narrative warfare but they're having to catch on so then say Islam is

also competing for some of the same people right because ultimately the religions become the basis of in groups that are competing against out groups

for fundamentally political and economic and survival type basis so I can hold people together with a political left or political right ideology or a capitalist

communist ideology or racial identity ideology or religious ideologies all of those become the basis of an in-group that can be that can bind together to be more successful in competition with

assumed out groups right but what that means is that rival risk game theoretic environment is going to be selecting for what is effective at rivalry not what is

true and and definitely not what is good for the whole and the moment that anybody figures something out that is more effective at rivalry than everybody else reverse engineers it and you know

creates similar mimetic mutations on other sides and so there's not that many James right there they're lovely people

right and totally nonviolent and aren't you know aren't gonna hurt anybody but they're also not pushing their ideas on anybody so the ideas aren't spreading that fast so the ideas that have an artificial focus on the

spreading of ideas and figure out how to emotionally manipulate people into believing the idea with heaven and hell

and whatever right are going to spread more so this is a key thing to get is you know whether we're taking it it's

not just right I'm giving the example of the teachings of Jesus turning into the Crusades or the Inquisition but it's also take thinking like Darwin right so

take the context in which Darwin came about Darwin came about just following Malthus right so so we got the British

Empire's first kind of real world ruling Empire first time that a global inventory of resources was ever conducted Malthus came up with the fundamental principle of scarcity or inadequacy says

hey people are reproducing geometrically resources reproduce her thematically there's not going to be enough for everybody not everybody's gonna make it well then who's gonna make it [ __ ] that idea says compassion is not viable we can't all make it fundamentally

mathematically there aren't the resources for now this is gibberish actually today because we know that populations don't reproduce exponentially forever

they steady-state and we've already seen the population in Japan and in Denmark and another like the most economically successful countries start decreasing

right and we also know that we can recycle resources we don't have to just have a linear materials economy where we use them up and turn them into trash and that completely fundamentally changes the underlying scarcity basis we can

also share resources in different ways so the underlying thinking behind Malthus isn't true but he didn't know that at the time it seemed quite compelling so then we say okay so [ __ ] a solution

for everyone a world that works for all is not even viable those who want it are simply not facing up to reality and so

if not everyone's gonna make it who's going to and so then Darwin comes out in that context and so the idea of survival of the fittest is the idea we focus on the most even though that's not

that he emphasized early in the writing hardly at all right and so there was again taking Darwin's idea in one

context and then also taking the most propagated version of it that led to social Darwinism that basically reified

institutional sociopathy right which is okay well if not everybody's gonna make it some people are gonna be like predators other people are gonna be like prey predators don't feel bad when prey

died you have to actually call the herd sometimes like there and if you start to think about how hierarchical power structures work to get to the top of a

hierarchical power structure like a big corporation or a government or a religion that's structured that way let's leave that one off for a moment just say corporation or government I

have to win at a lot of win-lose games I have to get the promotion over or win at the campaign over other people where zero something somebody wins somebody loses right so the top is going to be

people who were best at winning out win those games so it's actually going to so if I have a lot of empathy and I don't want and I actually care about other people's loss I'm gonna do less well if

I'm a sociopath and don't give a [ __ ] about it I'm gonna do better at that if I'm willing to dis inform to get ahead I'll do better at so this is why we see higher percentage of sociopaths and Psychopaths as CEOs and in the normal

distribution of population which also means that the people have the most influence in the world are asymmetrically empowered and

asymmetrically sociopathic but the way that we interpreted Darwin was to was reifying that as a reasonable thing and even a good thing so we have to

recognize that any idea even if it started as true or good or beautiful gets put into the game theoretic mill right and what comes what propagates is

the thing that's propagated so why do bad ideas catch on like largely for this reason so oftentimes the best ideas are

not well marketed and aren't even easily marketable and best marketed ideas that are gonna catch on the most are not that true and pretty shitty results so this is again

something that people have to really pay attention to is I think Jordan in one of his interviews with you talked about the difference between real thinking and

simulated thinking so if I'm just taking memes that I've heard I'm in a conversation and I'm listening for which of the things I'm gonna say that I have

heard somewhere else I'm basically a meme propagator it's not real thinking right I'm not actually endeavoring to try to make sense of the world in a new

way that I've never done before most people hear something here a meme that comes in and because it's from Fox they

believe it or don't believe it or because it's from CNN or whatever it is they believe it or don't believe it so they basically have some cluster of memes that creates like a memetic immune

system that says which idea is to accept and which one's to reject and then once it's accepted then propagates them that's not thinking and there's no

sovereignty in that and groups that have asymmetric mean broadcast capacity are good at making memes that are sticky customized to specific audiences and

being able to split test uptake right and then being able to you know then you get into high tech things like Facebook and it's like okay I can actually pay attention to what you click on and do

profoundly deep analytics I can pay attention to mouse hover I can pay attention to all these types of analytics and customize the disinformation to everybody using the

kind of AI that beats the best chess players in the world of chess right this is stuff that Tristan Harris talks about and so the AI that beats Kasparov at

chess easily it'll nobody is as good at being strategic with themselves as Kasparov is a chess and we don't even know that we're engaged in that and yet it's competing with us for our attention

for the its purpose of maximize time on-site now it just happens to be that I'm gonna scroll and bounce unless than catches my attention short things will catch my attention more because I'm in a hurry

so just orientation for small bit size makes everyone more fundamentalists with shittier attention spans and then if the headline is more kind of sensational

it's going to attract attention more so then we get these big platforms that don't want to make people fundamentalists or how to drive politics but they do simply as a byproduct of the fact that limbic hijacks are sticky and

they're optimizing for time on sight so first thing is that individual memes don't get selected for mean memes

interrelate with other memes to create world views because I usually can't make a choice based on a meet and I have to

make a choice based on a representation of the world just going to be a bunch of ideas write a bunch of memes a bunch of data and so we get these kind of meme

complexes and so we can think about the evolution of meme complexes so let's go ahead and look at like the evolution of

religious ideas we can look at the evolution of political ideas or anything

scientific ideas so religious ideas so you'll have some kind of central meme but then you'll also have protector

memes that emerge with it that also believing them protects against the kind of cognitive processes that could have someone stop believing the primary mean because if the primary intent last so

the question isn't just what makes a meme propagate but also what makes it endure and resist change so there's the evolution of memes but also they're the

mean complexes resilience in the presence of other competing meme complexes right so we'll give these protector memes and then we'll also give propagator memes that are trying to take the whole complex and propagate it so

there's there's a whole football team of defense and offense and carrying the ball and right like that happens so let's say we get some kind of fundamentalist religion

so let's say we we look at Christianity this would be the same for any religion this just probably the one that most people here will relate to so you'll

have some kind of central doctrinal teachings about Christ and God and what good is and those types of things but

then protector memes are what could make me not believe these things and how do we protect against those processes so if we want to have say a literal

interpretation then we don't want people to doubt the literal interpretation then we start to have things memes like faith

is something God likes and doubt which is another term for critical thinking is something that God doesn't like it actually comes from the devil and you'll

burn in hell for it and so the more that you just believe in the teaching the better your chances of heaven are and

the more good you are and the more that you doubt it the more that Satan actually got to you right so that's a very strong protector meme against the kind of critical thinking that could

make you question the basis of the religion you'll also have other protector memes like if I believe this if I continue to believe this I get to

keep having a family and a community that will take care of me if I'm poor and if I'm sick and you know will help me out in times of warfare and all those things and if I stop everybody will

disown me or to various degree is that like there will be direct implications to my life regarding the change in these beliefs and then again you'll have propagator memes we need to go on

mission and share the good word with other people and convert them so you start to see a memetic ecosystem so now if I've got propagator memes coming up

against some some people who also have protector memes from a previous complex then there's an evolution there's a competition of which memes are more successful so then we look at the kind

of illusion of the types of mean complexes over time now there other people have a lot more expertise in this than I do and I don't have adequately detailed history to say this is a Rea historical

narrative it's an example of the type of thing that could happen right so ticket is that so say you look at the evolution

of the concept of Hell right Hell as a mean in Western traditions so first say you take Eastern traditions like

Hinduism or Buddhism they might have many different hell realms and nobody stays in any of them forever right like most of the interpretations have everybody gets to moksha or liberation eventually these are places

that people go to learn things as part of the liberation path so and if you look at the descriptions of Hell at

various points in Christianity hell got nastier as time went on and God also got more authoritarian and heaven got better and even if we go before that we look in

early cultures and we see most early cultures were animistic right the spirit of the Buffalo and of the tree and of the river and there was the spirit of

everything and so spirit was radically decentralized and then there was an evolution because of evolutionary

pressures on memes that correspondent with little tribes living in nature too early civilizations there is an evolution to polytheism which is now not the spirit of everything but some

smaller number of more powerful spirit or gods right so there's starts to be a consolidation of power in the religion corresponding to a consolidation of actual power and the social structures that are happening and the way that we

make sense of the world in the way that the religious idea actually supports the thing that we're doing in the politics and like that right and then we end up

going from polytheism to monotheism and if you think about control systems right some few being able to control a mini in ways that are better for the few than

they are for the many and how you have systems of kind of institutional controller oppression so

if we're having consolidation for having increasing power inequality in our social systems and we want to justify

that increasing power inequality having and we want to justify increasing authoritarian power having gods that reflect that is valuable those memes are

gonna actually be adaptive to the social systems doing that right and if you think about an authority that controls a population with reward and Punishment

and then we make we actually make a God in our image and we say okay well what would the infinite Authority be and what would infinite reward an infinite

punishment and you just take all the concepts to their logical zenith that's what Christianity did right so you have one all-powerful God beyond reproach

with an infinite punishment and an infinite eternal punishment an infinite reward if you're trying to look for maximum behavior mod that's what you end up coming to but it's almost like the strange attractor of a landscape that

just takes it to zenith right where it's so terrifying once you've been indoctrinated leave that belief system because if it because hell is so bad

that any chance of it is so unacceptable that all kind of do Pascal's wager and just stay in it just because right now

of course by believing that I might be going to the Muslim hell if they're true but that never got its hooks in me when I was young so I'm not as afraid of it unless I grew up there in which case it has the hooks and I'm much more afraid

of that than I am of the Christian hell so we can see that you get an evolution of the gods getting more powerful and more authoritarian and more propagated

and more ideology around propagation and reward and punishment and like those things that you would expect that that and specifically it's that the groups

that instantiated those memes would have actually done better in a natural selection determined in more fair

then and and also if I have a man's dominion over Earth ideology it says yes destroying the environment for us and it's okay if we destroy the environment

because God's gonna come back and remake everything you know after purgatory anyways and and treating animals badly really doesn't matter because again

dominion over like those ideas are actually going to be adaptive in terms of increasing the game of power even though they're if you take to zenith that game itself terminates it destroys

the whole world on the substrate that we depend upon so you want to think about and we can see that there there's like so we're looking at a kind of Christian worldview right but you can see that a

whole worldview of ideas comes up around supporting Trump or climate change or critical thinking and Dawkins kind of

scientific materialism or each of those worldviews have processes of doing of in-group out-group pressures right like you'll be something bad will happen if

you don't believe these things going to hell is the worst example but simply being rejected by the in-group and being called like a stupid conspiracy theorist or a pseudo scientist or an anti Beck's

or whatever it is that you know or infidel it goes against whatever the the in-group idea is there's a strong selective pressure to defect on our own

thinking to the center of the in-group and a lot of advantage will occur if I defect on my own sense making to a center of the in-group and it's not I don't trust my own sense making so I'd

rather be part of an in-group or at least I'll be safe by being part of an in-group and I can't actually because I can't make sense of the world and I can't take care of myself really in the

present blip and it's not safe to disagree with everybody right if I share views that just have me disagree with everybody and I don't have any in-group than I seem [ __ ] so what I do is I

look at which in group seems to be closest to what I think and then I defect on my thinking to normal the in-group right so we want to just

kind of pay attention to you know looking at these different information ecosystems mimetic ecosystems to seeing how they evolve into how they apply in

group out group types of selective pressures and how they apply appeal other than go to pista mala G right like

how they apply rhetorical skills and emotional manipulation skills to compel people to believe something where the

basis to believe it should actually be some better epistemic process then the key thing is if we can start noticing

this in our self and noticing where we feel a kind of bias towards or away from something before we've thought about it

well based on how it fits with the rest of our mimetic complex that we also haven't analyzed well I guess a lot of people a lot of people might be tempted

just to give up on trying to make sense of the world I think almost everyone has again it's like it's Fukushima still in risk of further breakdown or not has it

already polluted the ocean should we not be eating fish from the Pacific or not is 5g actually possibly a problem or not is climate change and coral reef die-off and eminent issue in the next five years

or not and if so what is the right way to approach it are we approaching our own doom with CRISPR with AI like these are seriously important things to have

some clarity on right these are things that we actually want to come to enough certainty on to make choices because we are making choices and by not making choices we're making choices by default

in terms the face of what market pressures are are doing and almost everyone if they really kind of think about it will admit I actually don't

know the answer to any of those things but that doesn't slow down the rate of

first to market for powerful AI or you know what anything else right and to the degree that people don't admit that they

have no idea and they think they have an idea if they're honest most of them will say I'm pretty sure I have an idea because I proxied my sense making to

other people that I trusted but I didn't actually do the foundational research and to the degree that people did the foundational research if they're honest enough they'll say the total amount of data that I looked at relative to the

complexity of the scenario was orders of magnitude too small so most people have given up on sense making about based

reality they just have an admitted bit weight where I can get ahead in a human

ecosystem by affecting what other people believe independent of what is true independent of base reality then we live

in a simulated reality where if I can if I can get you to believe something that will lead you to vote in my interest or to purchase things in my interest or

whatever game theory will have me try to optimize distortion and optimize my ability to get ahead at creating and

winning at simulations and it won't have me try to connect to base reality at all right and so we we get a world that is so constructed and decoupled from base

reality that most of the time what is true isn't even relevant and it's even further than that it's that there's a

whole class of people for whom the idea that there are true concepts doesn't even appeal to them very much now some people might think this sounds like

excessively cynical or but okay I'm gonna be careful with this because I don't want to say names that will create

conflict unnecessarily but I was talking to someone the other day who was saying that what I believe is give or take the same as what this other

person believes and what we believe on this topic couldn't be more diametrically opposite and but the the person who is saying yeah you know we

all kind of are on the same page we all believe the same thing wanted to put on an event where we would all be there that she would sell lots of tickets for

and and her orientation is what is actually going to optimize viewership and so how do we get people that are

going to be engaging mix with people who are famous enough whatever talk to Mai's viewership in and I was focused on what is actually true do we are we being

earnest and what we're endeavoring to do here and her sense that we believe kind of the same thing because like we both talked about technology and we both

talked about the future and we both kind of want stuff to be good and we both use the word exponential sometimes it wasn't that she actually thinks that what I

think is true or what this other person thinks is true she doesn't it's that the idea of true beliefs is not what she's optimizing for what she's optimizing for

is what's gonna get the most views and then there's a backfill a rational backfill that said that tries to

rationalize that it's we we believe kind of the same thing or whatever but the orientation isn't even trying to say do I believe what this person saying

it's saying do I believe that I can make money on what this person is saying so you realize that we live so much in a

simulated reality it like if I'm a venture capitalist I can make money on a product that is shittier than products

that currently exist even though the market is supposed to be a sense making mechanism within the context of demand that there will be mutation right lots

of different versions of the same product for the same service and that the one that's actually the best at the best price is the one that the market will select for and it'll be upregulated that's kind of so the first part was

mutation then survival selection and then good parts of a few different ones might combine and that's kind of mate selection right that's kind of how we think of markets as a sense making system lines of evolutionary theory but

we all know that the best marketed product will oftentimes beat the actual best product where the price of product development drops the price of marketing and customer acquisition goes up which means that it's a shittier product

better marketed that means the sense making system is broken right it's not a good sense making system so but as a venture capitalist I can invest in a company that I know is going to create a massive distortion level and market

really successfully and maybe the company will go bankrupt at some later point but I will have exited by then so I don't really care long term I care that it's gonna market

successfully and be successful financially not if it's actually a better product or service and so if the if the CEO is a really compelling

sociopath that is highly motivated and spins distortion bubbles I'm going to be more motivated by that than thinking that the product is actually fundamentally novel II better in many

cases right it's not only story but thus a story and so then my goal is to actually invest in someone else's ability to generate a distortion bubble

that will pull enough people along that me as an early investor it'll lead to adoption of customers and other investors and then I exit before the

distortion bubble pops right and so we can see like there are whole domains that are fairly decoupled from reality from base reality we're spinning

simulated realities is the whole goal and so a lot of people her it's another

thing we have to pay attention to is that the cognitive complexity of a lot of the issues we face is just much faster than most people have time for

then most people have training for and even vaster than we evolved to process so this idea of hyper objects right that there's not just plutonium but all of

the plutonium or all of climate change or all of species extinction or whatever I can't actually observe that directly but I can infer it know that it's a real thing but how do I hold the cognitive

complexity of any of those let alone all of them right as it is a very tricky thing and but I still have to feed my kids and pay the bills tomorrow and so the adaptive pressures on me are

to focus on what I need to focus on in the very small and in the short term even though what I'm doing because of globalized supply chains is affecting

the global in the long term the idea think globally act locally most of us are doing the opposite right we're actually thinking very locally about having actions that affect the world globally which means we're we're

thinking on very short timescales fairly narcissistic self-indulgent and you know timescales but with things that will have enduring and massive impact and

that is a decoupling of scale it's a decoupling of sense making and choice making a bunch of things but so for most people the idea of having the luxury of trying to make sense of the world is something they don't even feel like they

have because they're nose-down just trying to like do the next couple things they have to do and then other people who are actually trying to get ahead are optimizing for simulations and

distortion bubbles rather than trying to make sense of the world so there's a lot of people who aren't actually even trying to make sense of the world now when I ask what is meaningful what is

meaningful is going to be bound to what I think is real and if I give up on knowing what is real there's a way in

which I'm giving up on the depth of my connectedness to what's meaningful so yes giving up on sense making there's a is kind of an expression of a type of

nihilism and it and it feeds into further nihilism first thing is I stop trying to squish reality into a

perspective this is super important and then anytime I have a perspective and I am defaulting into thinking of it as the truth I become dubious of that in myself

and they become curious about the partial truth in other people's perspectives including the ones that I think are stupid and crazy right because

they none of them have no signal even if I think there's a lot of noise so I want to say why do they think it is true well this bias that bias okayed all that and some perception mixed with the bias what

is the per what are they perceiving that then with the bias is also there maybe it's not that much sense making but it's something that's meaningful right so

this is st. Francis's quote of seek more to understand them to be understood right seek first to understand that means actually seek to take different

perspectives so the Hegelian dialectic is you've got a thesis and then the antithesis I actually want to try and take this perspective and construct this

case and once I've constructed both of these now I'm stuck with either that I flip-flop between them or I'm just

confused or I just claim paradox or the next step is thesis antithesis synthesis there's a higher-order truth it is actually not paradoxical that reconciles

them it just requires a higher order of complexity it's paradoxical within too low a level of complexity Einsteins you can't solve a problem at the level of problem at the level of complexity and

so since to how is three-dimensional no two-dimensional picture will actually give me a solid sense on it if I'm looking at the cylinder we talked about this the other

night if I'm trying to collapse the cylinder by a dimension and take a cylinder which is a three dimensional object and take a 2d slice of it if I got a cylinder like this a slice like this is a circle a slice like this is a

rectangle in 2d circle and rectangle are mutually exclusive descriptions of a shape one has straight lines and corners the other has no straight lines and no

corners if I try to say well it's both that just makes no sense at all right if I say well it must be part of both so it's a rounded rectangle well that it

has no truth at all but I have to actually be able to construct a higher dimensional space in which rectangle nough sand circle misfit together in a way that is makes perfect sense called

it cylinder but this is what a level of consciousness that isn't the level that caused the problem the problem is partiality of perspective that can create then a basis for conflict right

so then there is a higher order that is able to reconcile those and so seeking that and this is where you know we're seeking clarity more than simplicity

because the simplicity can happen through reduction right and typically

the synthesis comes from novel insight that neither the thesis nor the antithesis held it's not just well it's a little bit of both so a couple

examples let's say we take kind of political left and political radiology there's a gazillion examples and what we call the political left and right today might seem actually quite different than

what it was in the past so let's take a kind of what had previous to recently been kind of some essential ideas and

Republican or Democrat platforms so we kind of have this Republican right oriented idea of wanting to empower the self responsibility and sovereignty of

the individual and more individualistic and so smaller government less social services more empowering of those who are on snoring and pull themselves up by their

bootstraps and you know that kind of thing and then you have the kind of more democratic left perspective that says well and here it's saying the collective

is actually created by the individual so we want to empower the individuals that are creative and take agency because better individuals make a better whole that's kind of the gist over here it's like well but the individuals are being

conditioned by the environment that they're born into by the whole and so even though I can't find that one story of that one guy who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps in the ghetto there's a whole lot more people that succeeded who were born into the Hamptons and born

into South Central and so let's create better environments that actually condition better people because there's top-down effects the holes create

affecting the individuals so there's there's for many people some seemingly

compelling truth in both of these and also problems right so there can be a right oriented perspective that says hey

look if we set up social services in welfare and whatever we actually condition shittier people who are less strong and resilient in the face of the environment we D incentivize those who

are most entrepreneur and creative like what and we make people who are doing badly still do well and that actually kind of down regulates the evolutionary

pressure in the whole system like why would we want to do that and of course over here we can have a kind of left perspective that says yeah but some people are getting ahead using shared services that the government pays for

from everybody's tax money that they aren't actually really accounting for and they're affecting the Commons negatively in a way that is externalizing the cost everyone else so that they're being claimed to be more entrepreneurial it just means they're extracting from the Commons and

externalizing cost of the Commons better and do we do we really want to let

people die on the footsteps of hospitals because they don't have money or insurance you know in the fully individualistic libertarian kind of idea and fully libertarian kind of ideology

can't solve multipolar traps and so like but there's there's clearly truth in both of these and they are clearly neither complex enough to actually handle reality in which there

are bottom-up effects or the individuals effect the whole and there's also top-down effects for the wholes in turn affect the individual and there's feedback and feed forward loops and neither of them are factoring those enough but the debate process doesn't

bring about dialectic right the debate processes here actually make the idea more polarized to get people on this side emphasize rhetoric over real

sense-making and emphasize winning over collectively trying to make sense together so the debate process is not a good sense making process it's a narrative warfare process dialectic is

different where it says okay I think we have some truth and not all of it I think you have some let's endeavour together earnestly to figure out the things that we're all interested in figuring out and then we start to say

okay well do we want that do we want better individuals who are more sovereign independent of environment dot nobody doesn't want that or do we want

holes that support all the individuals within them to do better well done we want that too but the way that we've done social services makes oftentimes

some of them makes the people not more sovereign but more dependent so it's actually not making better people it's making more comfortable but shittier people right and the way that we incent

individuals over here in sense people who are entrepreneurial but by externalizing costs to the Commons and creating radical wealth inequality so it's not incentivizing the most truly creative and intelligent and good people

it's incentivizing effective sociopathy and things like that so like neither of these are doing all that good at the thing they're even claiming to do so how do we create social services Collective

processes that condition healthier people who are more sovereign how do we create environments that condition people who do better in any environment right that actually conditions strength and resilience and sovereignty in the

individuals who then in turn affect the environments in ways that support the increased sovereignty of everybody else that's a totally higher-order way of starting to think about the relationship

between them that starts to recognize the inexorable failing on both of those perspectives and and that what the approach would take is more complex

right that's an example of starting to move towards synthesis from a thesis and an antithesis right and if you if you

look at even personal things in your life you're wrestling with like okay do I want to accept and love reality and people and myself as I am or do I want to like help strive to make things

better there they're similar like those types of things you'll find a thesis antithesis everywhere where the actual insight to synthesis is novel insight

not contained in either of those if I when I say accept you as you are right now or help work to change you to make

you better and I see those as as different it's because I'm seeing you as a noun and I'm seeing you as a fixed thing or accept you as you are you are

this current state whereas if I see you as a process if I see you as a verb I see you as a becoming that is different than you were yesterday and different than you were when you were two right

then accepting you as you are and includes dynamism includes the impulse to change grow and evolve so I can accept you fully as you are which in love you is you are which includes accepting and loving the impulse to grow

and expand and include and transcend so I can support you to become more not on the basis of judging you as insufficient but loving you completely including loving the evolutionary trajectory

inside of the array but that insight of you as a verb rather than as a noun was actually not captured in either of these so the dialectic process of saying like okay well how do I see the partial truth

here construct this fully and then how do I see the partial truth here construct this fully and then what new insights bring these together in the

higher order perspective that is more complex and more nuanced than either of them so that's kind of a dialectic process and it might not just be to thesis antithesis might be lots of

perspectives this is it - why would this is a process that I would love to see people start to sing out for sense-making of whenever they're talking with someone start by

seeking to understand before seeking to be understood and seek for the truth value and what people are saying not just the wrongness but then don't holistically throw out what they're saying as totally wrong or totally true

be able to separate that there is signal and noise and then be able to say if I see signal from a number of sources how does that fit together into higher order

perspective this this is another sense making process you mentioned emotion and vulnerability as key components of sense

making could you that may seem a little bit counterintuitive to people can you explain what you mean by that if I want to make sense of the world

well and I'm gonna engage in some communication processes with other people to make sense of the world with some collective sense making then I want

them to share true information with me to not dis inform nor withhold so how do I create the trust and psychological safety for them to do that well I'm

probably gonna have to do that too and so how do we create mutual trust and psychologic safety that we're not going to use the information that we're sharing with each other and game

theoretic ways with each other that's a huge part and if people don't have some spaces and some relationships where they

feel like they can actually share fully openly honestly and feel trust in that their sense making is gonna be radically curtailed right to what they can just do

on their own and without anybody's ability to help error correct them with full sharing also one of the sources of

bias is identifying with what I believe because it because I'm identifying with part of an in-group that believes that thing or because I am special or smart

or right or whatever for believing that thing so the the impulse to be right means that I won't seek to understand

other perspectives and so if I'm gonna actually seek to understand the truth value in other perspectives like earnestly try and get what they are

seeing what where they're coming from I have to stop seeing it the way that I'm seeing it for a little while and I also have to completely suspend debate and

narrative warfare and the impulse to be right and all of that and so there is a deeper human connection that's involved

there's also something there's a psychological process that almost seems like a spiritual process where for me to

really try and get where you're coming from on a topic I have to really take your perspective well what is it in me that is taking your perspective because it's not my perspective right it it is

actually having to drop the way that I see things to really try and see it the way that you see things to make sense of it so that means that it is some come there's a capacity in me that can

witness my perspective that can also witness your perspective but it is deeper than the current perspective I have and we all know we can change our beliefs and there's still something that

is us so there is a us Ness that is deeper than the belief system to be able to really try to make sense of someone else I actually have to move into that level of self that is deeper than belief systems

what do you hope that people will get from it I would like if they are looking at their own biases and saying okay where do I have emotional needs that are

affecting what I believe where do I have in-group out-group stuff happening where am I actually doing disinformation where you know like all what are my cognitive biases well how do I even know well let

me go look up the list of cognitive biases and start to inventory them keeps talking about epistemology like and what the axioms are I don't even know what the [ __ ] that means how do I actually go explore what the right steps of logical

process an axiom are can i empower my own learning so if people felt inspired to learn how to learn better and then inspired to create relationships with

other people where they actually do care about understanding what is true and real so that they can also have a better relationship with what is meaningful and being able to make choices line to that

and where they're endeavoring to understand what is true and real together and also endeavoring to create an intact information ecology where no one is dis informing anybody which is as

much or even more an emotional process as it is a cognitive one because to really create an intact information ecology involves vulnerability and

intimacy that's what happens getting out of a game theoretic context where I say oh our well-beings are shared well what if you defect on me I have to actually

create a situation and Trust to be able to share real information so then I get to see where my own wounds make it make me incapable of trusting or of or

revealing her so I'd be I mean those would be things that I would be happy if people looked at the emotional and cognitive and overwhelmed by time and

lazy and biased and whatever sources of where they aren't sense-making well and endeavored to work on those and I'd be happy if if maybe you guys with revell

wisdom took a lot of people who you interview who like maybe one thing they have in common is they're all people who are endeavoring to make sense well and started to ask them more about

sense-making processes that they employ so people can actually learn like Brett could talk about here's how evolutionary theory here's things that we know from evolution is here here's how you can

apply this as an epistemic tool or Eric could talk about here our principles in the philosophy of science and in physics that are valuable tools in understanding

reality those types of things and then if they were even not that many people who started to really think about break downs and information ecology better and

write on that more and those ideas were able to start to become better understood and be happy about that well

if we look at the framework of sharing things that are truthful true and representative we start with the

truthful side we would need to remove the incentive for disinformation and the

first major source there is kind of market it's the game theoretic dynamics that emerge from market type dynamics

and so again if I have two different branches of the government competing for budget or different representatives who

are supposedly both seeking to be in benefit of the country competing for percentage of the budget now they have the incentive to dis inform whoever's

allocating the budget dis inform the public dissin form each other which means that the total level of coordination just sucks right and this happens this is corporate politics

inside of corporations this happens everywhere so as long as we have separate balance sheets right as long as the different intelligence agencies are competing for that as long as as people

we have several balance sheets then we have a fundamental basis that my well-being is separable from and oftentimes directly rivalries with yours

and with others and with the Commons so then we will compete with each other for a lot of things

and we will engage in in at the worst case physical warfare kinetic warfare but will mostly engage in economic warfare competing against each other and at the cost of the Commons and

information and narrative warfare also at the cost of the information Commons and each other so to really get over that we would need to couple or we need

to create alignment between agencies right between what you have intention to do and what is also in my well-being and vice versa which means that we would need to have more coupling between our

well-beings which means we would need to have a different process of resource provisioning and I will say that the the

type of system that could do that adequately has never been proposed in any kind of major way because obviously

none of the systems ever proposed so far or tried do that but if we have a rival risk relationship with each other information will be part of that rivalry

and will damage the information ecology in the same way we damage the physical environment or or each other kinetically so that's a big ask

right so our balance sheets are kind of at the foundation of what create rivalries dynamics and this is at the level of corporations at the level of

individuals where it grounds above the families of the level of nations so can we still have private nation states that could benefit each other at the expense

of others or Commons that share information perfectly so like if we really want to say how do we have a perfectly intact global information ecology it couldn't happen within the

context of nation states and private balance sheets and political left's and rights and in-group out-group type structures it would take us a while to

talk about what something post game theoretic might look like but if you want to just start to intuit it you say well if we look at all of the neurons in

your brain or all of the cells in your body they're all their own agents right like the cell self-organizes and I can take it out of you and put in a be traditional keep self-organizing for

period controlled by its own internal genetic code but even it's your body something like 70 trillion individual cells those cells are organizing in a way that's best for them as individuals and best for the ones around them and

best for the whole simultaneously than either sacrificing themselves for the whole nor they sacrificing others for a game theoretic benefit and this is true at the level of cell to cell interaction but it's also a trickle of organ to

organ interaction or organ system to organ system or cell to organ right like it fractally in all these levels vertical and horizontal there is a kind

of symbiotic process that happens and if you tried to model like the organs and a capitalist relationship with each other where they were trying to the heart and the lungs were competing against each

other for scarce resource to hoard as much resource for feature as possible and you model that out and happening at the cellular level buddy dies very

quickly cancer cells are actually doing that right a cancer cell is doing what is good for it in the near term but bad for the whole and it will end up killing

the whole and killing itself in the process and but the cancer cell only happened because the body as a whole had

some Mis health that had carcinogenesis exceed the immune response capacity to deal with the carcinogenesis so the whole was already sick to make the individual sick to some degree right

there's a feedback and feed-forward process between the parts and the whole

if you think about like vision and the way that parallax error correction and parallax occurs in vision one eye

doesn't give me peripheral vision and it doesn't give me depth perception two eyes together give me something that and also the single I will have errors that

aren't corrected for the two eyes together the overlap of what they both see but also the difference of what one sees and the other one doesn't allows any error in this eye to be corrected

for Aaron this I and it allows peripheral vision and depth perception so this is a place where not only are the eyes not in competition for which one is seen as

true but the process of how they're related in the optical cortex gives me error correction on the on the imperfections in each of them and it gives me new synergistic information

that neither of them had on their own that's [ __ ] amazing to think about right and this is true like your brain is a whole processes information that no individual of the types that no

individual neuron or sub neural networks are processing and individual neurons can get something wrong but there's error correcting processes that don't propagate that but but the processes do

propagate the true information so we're like well how the [ __ ] does it work that we get that the information processing that each of the parts are doing goes

through a communication protocol that error corrects the false parts and also gives parallax on the true parts where we get not only the truth of all the parts but a way of binding that together

for synergistically higher-order information the cells our sense making and they're communicating they're signaling with each other right a hormone is a communication a

neurotransmitter like those are all signaling processes but they don't have a game theoretic relationship with each other right they actually have a mutually symbiotic relationship with

each other so they are supporting each other sense making in that way they're the lungs obviously do better if the heart's doing better as opposed to doing worse if they the heart is doing better

so if we just start to kind of imagine into what type of communication processes protocols would have to happen between humans that allowed for error

correction on any individuals perceptions but allowed the true parts of everyone's perceptions to be separated from the air parts and then all the true parts to be synthesized at a higher order of complexity than

individuals could do on their own when we think about the civilization of the future and the collective intelligence of the future we think about that one rebel wisdom is a new sense making

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