Some links to How the World Thinks - global philosophy.
Everyone can do whatever they want, if they have the power to do so.
“And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.” (Grant 2021, 24)
“Rather than try to repress the nation’s Primitive Minds, Enlightenment philosophers believed the Liberal Games would transform the fires of human selfishness into an inexhaustible, self-regulating, self-propelling steam engine. On a day-to-day basis, the Liberal Games would make high quality of life a self-perpetuating phenomenon. As Adam Smith put it, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Disagreeing with someone in an Echo Chamber is seen not as intellectual exploration but as rudeness, making an argument about ideas indistinguishable from a fight.
An Echo Chamber is what happens when a group’s intellectual culture slips down to the low rungs: collaborative low-rung thinking.
The first half of the 20th century was dominated by world wars. International war put the U.S. into “my cousins, my brothers, and me against strangers” mode, which helped the entire American “extended family” psychologically bind together as a single Us.
People are meant to be respected, ideas are meant to be batted around and picked apart.
High-rung thinking is independent thinking, leaving you free to revise your ideas or even discard them altogether. But when there’s no amount of evidence that will change your mind about something, it means that idea is your boss. On the low rungs, you’re working to dutifully serve your ideas, not the other way around. High-rung thinking is productive thinking. The humility of the high-rung mindset makes your mind a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom. On the other hand, the arrogance of low-rung thinking makes your mind a rubber shell that life experience bounces off of. One begets learning, the other ignorance.
While the Scientist’s clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Zealot’s foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions.
Weird things happen to your thinking when the drive for truth is infected by some ulterior motive. Psychologists call it “motivated reasoning.” I like to think of it as Reasoning While Motivated-the thinking equivalent of drunk driving. As the 6th century Chinese Zen master Seng-ts’an explains: If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.2
If everyone spoke out against the king, he wouldn’t stand a chance-but that takes a coordinated effort. And if just one person speaks out against the king, they’re a traitor and they’ll be executed. This traps the populace in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. Without the confidence that everyone will join them in their treason, no one will want to risk speaking out. If someone does speak out, no one will want to join them out of fear that they’ll be the only one to join in, which would spell their own doom. So even if every single citizen wants to overthrow the king, and even if everyone knows everyone else wants to overthrow the king, the censorship policies prevent the giant itself from being able to act.
The civilization you’re living in today, with all of its incredible technology, wasn’t created by humans. Humans aren’t nearly smart enough to do that. The amazing world around you was created by genies.
We think of censorship as control over what people can say. But the concept of emergence reminds us that human giants only “think” by way of conversation-which means that censorship is really control over what the giant can think. For a giant, censorship is mind control.
Not long after cells started joining together to form animals, some of the animals discovered that they could go up another level of emergence and form even bigger giants made up of multiple animals.
If the genie is the product of human collaboration, the golem is the emergent property of human obedience. Golems are what happen when humans act like ants.
But golems aren’t made to be good at thinking or finding the truth. The golem’s specialty is brute strength.
Most of us know the term “Echo Chamber,” and we’ll get to that in a minute-but we sorely lack a term for the opposite of an Echo Chamber. When the rules of a group’s intellectual culture mirror the values of high-rung thinking, the group is what I call an Idea Lab.
The Attorney treats their preferred beliefs not like an experiment that can be revised, or even a favorite sports team, but like a client. Motivated reasoning becomes obligated reasoning, and the gathering, evaluating, and puzzling processes function like law associates whose only job is to help build the case for Point B.
Over the past generation, Americans have become more educated, which has made them more mobile. The Economist notes that “45% of young Americans with a college degree moved states within five years of graduating, whereas only 19% of those with only a high-school education did.”
It’s what our Primitive Minds are programmed to do because it was the best way to survive in our distant past. Low-rung thinking, low-rung culture, and low-rung giant-building are all ancient survival behavior-behavior that was necessary a long time ago but today seems a lot like moths flying toward streetlights.
When it’s time to test the hypothesis, the Sports Fan’s bias again rears its head. If you were thinking like a Scientist, you’d feel very little attachment to your hypothesis. But now you watch your little machine box as a fan, wearing its jersey. It’s Your Guy in the ring. And if it wins an argument, you might even catch yourself thinking, “We won!”
I’ve noticed a paradox in great scientists and superforecasters: the reason they’re so comfortable being wrong is that they’re terrified of being wrong. What sets them apart is the time horizon. They’re determined to reach the correct answer in the long run, and they know that means they have to be open to stumbling, backtracking, and rerouting in the short run. They shun rose-colored glasses in favor of a sturdy mirror.
Sports Fans are stubborn, but they’re not hopeless. The Higher Mind is still a strong presence in their head, and if dissenting evidence is strong enough, the Sports Fan will grudgingly change their mind. Underneath all the haze of cognitive bias, Sports Fans still care most about finding the truth.
So the Higher Mind’s goal is to get to the truth, while the Primitive Mind’s goal is confirmation of its existing beliefs. These two very different types of intellectual motivation exist simultaneously in our heads. This means that our driving intellectual motivation-and, in turn, our thinking process-varies depending on where we are on the Ladder at any given moment.
Those who play by the culture’s rules are rewarded with acceptance, respect, and praise, while violating the culture will result in penalties like ridicule, shame, and ostracism.
This is the relationship Zealots have with their sacred ideas: the ideas aren’t rugged experiments to be kicked around, they’re fragile, precious babies to be adored and protected.
Ant behavior has two components: strict conformity within the colony and total ruthlessness when dealing with other colonies.
Living simultaneously in multiple cultures is part of what makes being a human tricky. Do we keep our individual inner values to ourselves and just do our best to match our external behavior to whatever culture we’re currently in a room with? Or do we stay loyal to one particular culture and live by those rules everywhere, even at our social or professional peril? Do we navigate our lives to seek out external cultures that match our own values and minimize friction? Or do we surround ourselves with a range of conflicting cultures to put some pressure on our inner minds to learn and grow? Whether you consciously realize it or not, you’re making these decisions all the time.
Idea Labs and Echo Chambers are more than just group cultures-they’re two very different ways to build a human giant.
The four thinking rungs are all distinct, but they fall into two broad categories: high-rung thinking (Scientist and Sports Fan) and low-rung thinking (Attorney and Zealot).
High-rung politics is the Higher Mind’s way of doing politics. It places the highest value on truth. It treats political viewpoints like science experiments to be tinkered with, via criticism and vigorous debate. It is suspicious of fervent conviction and smiles upon humility, incentivizing people to say “I don’t know” when they don’t know and reminding them to stay humble as they learn. High-rung political culture encourages intellectual diversity and independent thought among individuals and a collaborative attitude among opposing genies.
This concept-a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts-is called emergence.
In the world of ideas, boxing opponents come in the form of dissent. When the Scientist starts throwing ideas out into the world, the punches pour in.
A phenomenon that psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance” begins to set in: when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes. Over time, hearing everyone expressing the same viewpoint, people start to doubt their own beliefs and assume that if everyone is saying it, there must be something to
They feel sure they’re right about an opinion they’ve never had to defend-an opinion that has never stepped into the ring. Scientists know that an untested belief is only a hypothesis-a boxer with potential, but not a champion of anything.
Philosophers and scientists have been grappling with the “multiple minds” idea for millennia. Plato wrote about a “charioteer” (intellect) that managed the “horses” of rational modesty and passionate insolence. Sigmund Freud’s structure consisted of the “id” (primitive instinct), the “superego” (the conscience), and the “ego” that balances the two with external reality. More recently, social psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote about “System 1” (fast, involuntary thinking) and “System 2” (slow, complex thinking that requires effort). Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote about the emotional “elephant” and its rational “rider” which appears to be in control but often is not. Harvard’s Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman wrote about the conflict between the “want self” and the “should self.” Others analyze specific brain structures, distinguishing between the more rational thinking of the prefrontal cortex and the more primitive workings of the limbic system.
For most beliefs, we’re so concerned with where people stand that we often forget the most important thing about what someone thinks: how they arrived at what they think. This is where the Ladder can help. If the Idea Spectrum is a “what you think” axis, we can use the Ladder as a “how you think” axis.
If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others … you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.