our operating system for humans is essentially an emotional one and the ruling emotion is fear the idea that you can censor misinformation is a relic of the 20th century you can't censor an avalanche if you try to suppress a narrative it's going to leak out and as soon as a little bit of it
leaks out the very fact that it was suppressed is going to make it appealing to everybody else so I think the biggest impact of AI with regards to True truth is going to be to flood the the internet with false information are you just completely overwhelm the internet with false narratives in order to demoralize people because if everything's false then they just
don't know what to believe our children will grow up to basically be accustomed to seeing so much misinformation that they won't trust what they see we are all going to have to just do our own research or people attracted to they're attracted to people who speak with certainty the way I see it is that certainty is the depth of thought I can
tell you these simple truths which of course aren't truths at all be humble and be curious well hello everyone it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another infinite Loops I am literally one of the luckiest guys on the planet because I get to talk to some of the smartest
most switched on people in the world just because I have this podcast it's like magic today I have goinder Bogle who is sort of the king of the ultimate mega threads on Twitter I love all of them I was just looking uh go under G as you say others uh often call you um that you had a Twitter thread that had 1.7 million views and like over 10 000 likes tell me
your secret because I write threads in like four likes welcome yeah thank you yeah I mean I don't think there is a secret I mean I did think that I had it sort of locked down because the first few ones I did I got like four forty thousand fifty thousand likes you know and that was purely by
chance I had no sort of anticipation that this was going to blow up so much um but it was really just I think it was quite new but because I started doing it in 2020 and started doing these Mega threads of Concepts and they were very popular back then um since then they're not as popular
as they were I think because a lot of other people are doing it now as well and I think the novelty Factor really sort of you know ensured that a lot of people really wanted to read them but um yeah I just think I think there's an appetite for people to sort of just understand the world better really and particularly the digital age because a lot of my mega threads deal with the
sort of intersection of technology and psychology and how sort of you know social media for instance is influencing society and things like that and I think that's a very Hot Topic at the moment very very hot and what I did was go back through all of your threads uh I loved them all when I
read them the first time and I loved them even more actually uh in the context of this interview so if you don't mind I'm I'm just going to start out with that first famous one you did in February 2020 uh I think you called it 40 powerful Concepts and and I thought that it would be fun to talk about some of them uh because I actually I I agree with you that people uh are are really
yeah enamored of learning these kinds of things and I mean the proof's in the pudding well you you get all these likes you get um uh the number of views you get so I think it's an incredibly valuable uh thing you're doing and the first one I wanted to talk about was the woozle effect
I'm a fan of Winnie the Pooh and of course that was one of their famous uh little hunting uh uh trips where they would say beware the epilumps and Woozles and and but you you reframe it as something that I'm really interested in because I've experienced it firsthand and basically it's this idea that somebody writes an article and asserts something without any evidence at all
and then other people like what has been asserted in that article and they start quoting the person from that article and so on and so on until it builds up this huge body of so-called proof that of course this is a commonly accepted uh um fact the reason I'm so fascinated by this was a long time ago uh there was this huge jump in interest in homelessness in the United States and uh it
was seen to be this massive massive problem in the 80s and of course it is a massive problem however I started thinking I wonder where they get this number from because it was I think at the time I'm this from memory I think it was like claiming that there were 25 million people in America who
were homeless or uh otherwise unhoused and and so I I'm a research junkie and so I went and I went down the thread and I kept going kept going kept going until I found the original piece that got it all started and it was simply an assertion from a high schooler writing an essay about the potential problems of homelessness no citations just an assertion let's talk about it
yeah I mean I think it's one of the big problems with the digital age because we because obviously we live in a networked world now uh there's chains of transmission of information and what this means is that information gets repeated often um you know you'll get some it could be technical of
any form it could be uh it could be a retweet on Twitter or it could be somebody uses another information source as a citation as a sort of you know as a research source and I think you know you see it everywhere I mean uh some of the examples that have sort of stuck in my mind would be the
Iraq War would be the there was this uh this claim that was very very popular at one point which was that uh a million people had died in Iraq as a result of the Iraq War and this was everywhere I mean this was you know in very prestigious journals uh and magazines it was in the guardian in the New York Times and everybody thought oh oh my God you know a million people have been killed
by by the U.S and allies in bombing and I actually thought this was a bit of a straight I thought it sounded too much to me I thought a million people I mean you know they're just it's it just doesn't seem right to me just didn't seem you know so I basically did a bit background sort of uh research
I did a bit of digging and I followed the sort of the the chain of citations and I realized it was basically down to some kind of throwaway claim in a landsat article which was basically it was just an estimate that's all it was and it was there was no research behind it there was no you know
on the ground sort of actual hard journalism or anything like that it was literally just some guy just estimated it just off the top of his head and he just put it as a throwaway comment in a landsat article and then that because it was in the Lancet yeah all these other journals just suddenly started citing it as a fact and then as it sort of got cited and cited it became it
gained credibility and became eventually it became the sort of official statistic um so it's quite dangerous because it I think it can really um skew a person's understanding of the world I mean that wasn't the only sort of instance of this happening during Iraq war also there was the 45-minute claim
as well which was that Saturday was saying could um ready a sort of a chemical attack within 45 minutes and this was obviously this was also something that was just thrown out there just as a sort of speculative point and it eventually became the truth because it was cited so many times
um and you see it on Wikipedia all of the time you know I don't trust Wikipedia at all now I used to think that Wikipedia was one of the best information sources because anybody could edit it but the problem is is that that's not actually true this the gate basically there's a kind of gay keeping on Wikipedia edits and early certain forms of information only certain journals and
magazines are allowed and they all tend to have a certain political persuasion um and you see that there's always a lot of claims on Wikipedia which when you actually follow the chain of citations they just turn up to just be nonsense just have just basically just they rest on speculative Point
um you know a lot of the stuff that I've been reading lately uh for instance nowadays you've got stuff like implicit Association tests which are sort of stated if you go on Wikipedia you'll see a lot of stuff there about how they can be used to measure a person's implicit bias how racist they are and you know how prejudiced they are um in reality implicit Association tests are about
as accurate as lie detector tests which is to say not accurate at all at all you could say that you could give the same person uh two iats within a week and you'd get completely different results and but the thing is if you go on Wikipedia that's not really mentioned very much I don't
know if it's mentioned at all but you'll see that they use it it will basically say that these are used to measure a person's implicit bias then you actually follow the citations and it just you end up activism basically you don't there's no real research there it's just some activists um you know A diversity and equity and inclusion Specialist or whatever you know like uh is
basically just saying that you can determine how racist someone is by one of these tests so this is just one example but I mean Wikipedia is filled with it and it's one reason why I actually think Wikipedia is probably the world's largest source of misinformation uh but it's
it's ignored it's ignored I mean governments and businesses and things don't seem to care very much about Wikipedia it seems to always whenever they're talking about misinformation they tend to think of stuff that's on the fringes stuff on the far right um occasionally stuff on this island left but it's mainly stuff on the far right that is
labeled misinformation whereas mainstream sources of misinformation like Wikipedia tend to be overlooked because they're just because they tend to gel with the current consensus um but this is the problem of the wizard effect is that you can't rely on citations because you can't you can't really trust citations in a networked
age because citations have citations which have citations which have citations so you always have to do the research you always got to look at if there's a claim that seems too strange to be true always check the citation and read it and see where the original source of that information is from because the amount of times that I've just found information to not
reflect what is actually being cited it's just it's too much to to count could not agree with you more one of the core principles of propaganda 101 is repetition repetition repetition and it hijacks our human OS our human operating system because that was the way that most of all over Evolution that we learned right we learned by copying we learned by repeating repeating
repeating and so it's right there on our base code to oh well I've seen it everywhere it must be true there's so many threads to hold on here um the the one that I'm interested in is how do you think AI will impact this one one of the yeah is I think for AI of what I would call neutral AI
um is you you could set AI loose on let's say every published scientific study right and and say okay the objective function we're going to maximize for is this [ __ ] or not my guess would be that we'd probably find more than 20 percent maybe that was like outright fraudulent I think of Ansel keys and his fraudulent research
at the University of Minnesota but there's there's tons of examples do you think that a a neutral AI could help us fact check this type of thing um I don't think so um because I've I've kind of I've been experimenting with AI I think AI is probably gonna increase the amount of misinformation in the world rather than reduce it
um because I think it's very easy to leverage AI to create false narratives but it's quite difficult to leverage AI to destroy those narratives um and I mean you know we live in an age now where sort of falsehood is is not um just something that it's not just like disinformation is not just false narratives it's it's basically something called fire
hosing which is a new form of disinformation which is where you just completely overwhelm um the internet with false narratives in order to demoralize people because if everything's false then they just don't know what to believe and you know so this is something that I fear is
going to be a big uh sort of implication of AI I think because AI can sort of do the work of a thousand troll Farms to just completely flood the internet with misinformation I think this is gonna be probably the biggest impact of AI with regards to to falsehood and I mean I've been um I've actually been using certain AI apps uh that purport to be able to distinguish between
human uh generated text and AI generated text and unfortunately they're very unreliable I mean pretty much every single one that I've I've used has accused me of being an AI when I uploaded my my work to it you know because I basically had a few essays that I wrote in 2017 and I I uploaded
them into this into these websites and basically they they run a few programs you know they check the perplexity of the of the text and they just assume that that basically was written by an AI um I've looked at some of the techniques that people believe that they might be able to determine what's true or not one of them is a stochastic method where they basically check
the statistical makeup of the the letters in this in the sentence using things like Zips Zips law um but those are have already been gamed there they can be gained quite easily because the problem with a lot of these um AIS that purport to distinguish between human and AI generated
texts is that they rely on metrics that are very easily gamed things like perplexity so perplexity is is a measure of how indicative the output is of the input so if you have a um training data which consists of um lots of letters beginning with I and then you basically perplexity would measure
the the proportion of letters in the output in the sentence the output sentences which begin with I compared to the uh import but that could be easy game because um all it takes is just somebody to write like an AI which is essentially saying all it takes is for a human to write like the average human because these language models these large language models are essentially writing like
the average human that they're writing like the average writer is probably more accurate um and so if you just write like the average writer you can gain the algorithm on that front um there are probably I've heard other people suggest techniques like putting information on the chain on blockchain which I suppose could work um I don't really know very much about blockchain
technology so I wouldn't be able to determine whether that could work or not but that's another option that's been thrown out there but aside from those two methods I mean there's there's something Quantum cryptography could perhaps be something down the right line but again I don't know much
about that um from what I know is aie AI is is not very well equipped to distinguish between human and AI generated text because of the very fact that AI is so good at mimicking human text um you know essentially recycles human text and that's what makes it so hard to to distinguish
between two and so I think the biggest impact of AI with regards to truth is going to be to flood the the internet with false information I think that it's going to be leveraged by governments and by uh activists to create huge amounts of misinformation um but I actually think this is a good thing I don't think this is a bad thing at all
um and I mean I'll probably have to go on another tangent to explain this I don't know if you want me to but please um yeah so I mean I think that the idea that you can censor misinformation is is a relic of the 20th century I don't think it works in the 21st century it only worked when narratives were centralized because then you could you could
nip it in the bud you could basically cut it off at the source and nobody would know about it but when you try to apply this 20th century technique to 21st century technology you end up with things like the Streisand Effect so if you try to suppress a narrative what happens is
because you can't completely suppress it due to the network nature of the world in which we live um it's going to leak out and as soon as a little bit of it leaks out the very fact that it was suppressed is going to make it appealing to everybody else everybody's going to want to
know what was suppressed and so it will incite people to find out more it will incite their curiosity and eventually it will blow up and it'll go viral so it usually backfires and now you you have a completely different problem which is that the entire internet is gonna be flooded essentially with false falsehoods I mean you know you're just going to have ai
pumping this stuff out um it's already happening I mean if you've seen on Twitter there was a lot of photos of trump being arrested and things like that you know there's loads of these fake sort of uh images going around so this stuff's going to be all over social media uh and it can't really be it can't be um it can't be censored you can't censor such a huge amount you can't censor an
avalanche basically you know if this is going to be an avalanche of of misinformation but I think this is good and the reason I think it's good is because there's only one way we can be we can find true in such a world in a world that's teeming and misinformation and that is to become acclimatized
to a world that's filled with lies to be exposed to lies so often that we stop trusting what we are seeing now I like to draw an analogy with um who was he was King he was a Persian king of pontus in the ancient world and he was enemies with the Romans and um he feared that Roman agent was going
to poison him because his father had been poisoned so what he did is he had his servants cultivate a garden of toxins of poisons every known poison that he from all over the world he had brought to his garden and planted in his garden so he basically had a garden store with poisons and each day he would create a drink it which consisted of a highly dose of each of the poisons from
his garden and he did this every single day to cultivate immunity it was a something known as homiesis where you basically you expose yourself to small amounts of a stressor over a long period of time and gradually build a community and according to I don't know if this is history or if it's Legend because some say it is and some say it isn't but apparently when the Romans did
invade and when they uh destroyed his kingdom he tried to commit suicide when the Romans were coming for him by drinking poison but the poison had no effect on him so he was he found himself in a bit of an awkward position and he had to get his bodyguard to to kill him with a sword but that's
the general um idea that I think we need to take towards misinformation is we need to cultivate a kind of Garden of mithridartis in which we slowly and gradually expose ourselves day by day to to just the information landscape we don't need to do anything we just need to uh sort of see
the information as it is uncensored and because there's going to be so much falsehoods online we will grow up to be uh at least our children will grow up to um basically be accustomed to seeing so much misinformation that they won't trust what they see and this this sort of speaks to um an idea that was originally thought of by the computer scientist met blaze in the 1990s
um he had this idea of this thing called the um it was called the encyclopedia disinformatica and it was basically like a kind of Wikipedia but what it was is that precisely 50 of it was true and fifty percent of it was false and the purpose behind it is that it's supposed to encourage you to do your own research because you don't know what's true and what's not so you go on onto this
kind of thought this sort of misinformation sort of Extravaganza and you kind of read you know you you might read about history you might read about the second world war for instance and it will give you precisely half of the truth but for you to actually determine what half is true and what half
is not you actually have to do your own research so it's an idea that basically is Stokes your curiosity and gets you to do your own research and that's essentially what I think AI is going to turn the internet into it's going to turn it into a giant encyclopedia disinformatica and we are all
gonna have to just do our own research we're going to have to use the internet actively rather than passively we can no longer trust anything we see online we're going to have to you know sort of we will have to be the fact Checkers ourselves and I think that that's a good thing because it will make us more robust at determining truth whereas if we were to live in a world where
everything was censored it would be like being in a quarantined environment you know if if somebody is built is if they ended their whole lives in a quarantined environment then their immune system doesn't ever get exposed to pathogens and so it weakens and so when they are finally released
into the wider World they get ill and they succumb to their illness so this is a way of I I suppose strengthening our psychological immune system and ensuring that we are that it's robust enough to handle this kind of new world that we're going to be living in I I love that idea I'm re-reading
uh one of the better science fiction books from my perspective called the fifth science um and he's got a line in there called a narrative collapse and and he said when a world becomes hyper connected hyper networked uh and everything that you see could be a fake uh that everything collapses into a form of sameness and it is incumbent upon you as the human being confronting
this world to become curious to dig to become uh skeptical if you will so um I I think that that is a really interesting use case I'm I'm a former Quant right so I'm always building algorithms in my head and and one of the ones that I build is I wonder if like we could approach it in
the Claude Shannon sense of information right so information is that which uh surprises you right so uh according to Shannon uh a political speech would have zero information in it right uh whereas a poem could have a great deal of information because you can express it as a formula which he did which gave us cell phones and gave us this communication uh device that we are chatting over
um but I I actually think that that's it's a very interesting way to look at it we have this sort of Gap generation of which I am a member um where uh a lot of people my age still default to belief and uh I think it was Malcolm Gladwell uh who wrote a book about how we humans default to belief
because it's societally and evolutionarily a really good thing to do right if we don't default to believing our fellow uh humans uh you you suddenly get a kind of a Mad Max environment right so I think that it will be interesting and the inoculation effect that you're talking about like I have four grandchildren uh fifth on the way and I suspect that they will be far
more inoculated against this you know tsunami of falsehoods uh because of exposure and and I also think a bit about the idea of I I've spoken to many people who came out of uh totalitarian systems and literally that's what happened with them right there's even a joke uh about the old
USSR about the guy who goes to get bread um and uh stands online for a long time and then says there's no bread here and he's approached by the guys in the trench coats and they're saying comrade don't you dare say that and he says all right he goes back to his wife and she goes how are things and he goes even worse than I thought and she said why and he goes because they've run
out of bullets in other words they would normally have chilled me in the past or taking this very uh the emperor has no clothes but now they don't even have the bullets to kill me anymore that's how kind of cynical they became which is I think one of the interesting reasons why you see many of the
a former totalitarian countries embracing uh much more aggressive Freedom if you will um but on this on this um topic also uh you have you have uh another piece where you call it an emotive conjunction uh and it makes me think of loaded language and and how our language can sometimes be used misused and and I thought of the Bertrand Russell uh quote in which he says I
am I am firm you are obstinate he is a pig-headed fool we're saying the same thing right but we're we're orienting it differently the complexity of language how do you think we're going to conquer that if AI is flooding the internet with all of this misinformation and then we add the
complications of language especially English but all languages really uh tune to the mix yeah I think this presents a unique problem I think with language because often you can tell whether something is biased by the use of qualitative terms you know and superlatives and and adjectives and all that kind of stuff but with this Russell conjugation
the you can actually you can you could write a statement and not actually tell a lie not tell a a sort of something that could be fact checked and still say something that's dishonest uh or at least deceitful uh and that's the that's a very unique problem that's it's a different order of
Deceit to just outright saying something that's false it's more nuanced and I do believe that AI would probably be able to capture this nuance eventually I mean I know that search engines do use this when they're determining how biased um a sort of newspaper article is for instance they will check that the emotic conjugation but um I don't know how AI would probably how it would
react to it I mean I suppose it would you probably use it in much the same way as humans are I mean if it was trying to uh if you were trying to get it to do something it would probably Resort that because it's obviously going to be a reflection of human behavior isn't AI is going to be reflective
human behavior so it will essentially mimic the way that human beings use it I think really the only defense against it is going to be for people to understand that it's actually a thing that people can lie without actually explicitly telling a lie that you can just just from your choice of words you can create a completely false picture in somebody's mind
um and I think really the only I think solution to that is for people to again become acclimatized to it to see that this is what happens to and a good thing is that AI can be used to teach people this as well um you know you can you can get the AI to for instance right the exact same article
but use different conjugations and in doing so present different pictures even though the two articles that are essentially the same the word choices will be pretty much the same apart from just a few here and there so you know if you you could for instance have one in one article
you'd have steadfast and then in the other you'd have stubborn instead of steadfast so it would create a completely different picture but still the two articles would be next to near the same um so you could I do believe that Al will be used to teach people about these techniques I think it it will be able to teach people in a way that's far superior to human teachers
um because it will be able to do this kind of thing like generating two sets of Articles you know with these little changes and so that you can compare them and contrast them um I I do believe that that's probably going to be the best hope uh just to teach people about it I agree and and I think that um that kind of constant um reinforcement if you will uh but did
you think about it this way um and I I love your example here's the original article here are just a few different words being used do you feel the same about both of these articles and and people I think will react at least if they breed both and they consider both they'll understand wow
I had a very different reaction to the article where the words were just a few words got changed um so I think that that is one of the things that I I'm certainly hopeful about in terms because I mean I think that is the main source of media bias I do believe that it's something called poultering
where a journalist will be able to essentially deceive you without technically telling a lie and they use this to get go beyond so that they can essentially feed you a narrative without sort of falling foul of fat Checkers or uh any kind of regulator uh it's very clever what they do but essentially it's through word choice that's how they manipulate people rather than telling out
outright lies yeah I think if people would be very very useful I I agree and um it also reminds me of what you said at the opening of our conversation uh about uh you know using tests to see how racist somebody is how X somebody is uh first off as you mentioned that they don't replicate which I think
is pretty important if if someone is is making uh grandiose claims about the efficacy of something that it doesn't replicate that's a problem right um and and so the but the other thing that I think about constantly is this idea of and I love your theme of it inuring people to these things so for
example back to racism for a minute it has been you in when I was young to I'm 62 okay so I was born in 1960. um when I was young calling somebody a racist was like one of the worst things that you could imply or infer about somebody and you had because in my mind you saw the clan burning the
crosses and all these horrible horrible things right now with the the amount of uh times that that Epitaph is hurled like there was an article recently coffee is racist and and it it I just I started to laugh really because like if coffee is racist then everything is racist and nothing yeah it's racist right absolutely I mean I think it should be news if something is not racist now
you know because everything is pretty portraits you know so it's no longer news you know air conditioning of races everything's racist you know so it should be news if something is not racist but yeah I completely I completely understand your point I mean I too remember that racism
was a much more serious and a much more specific word when I was young as well and I mean I think really what one of the things that has happened is is the world is the world has just become completely devalued now somebody calls somebody a racist you don't know whether they're planning the system systematic genocide of non-aryan peoples or if they just dressed as a Cherokee
for Halloween you know you quite you know it could be anything in between those two things so I mean um the word just doesn't have much much stock anymore I think unfortunately but it's uh it's a it's one of the sort of issues I think is is that when when the New York Times for instance puts the
word racist in a headline it just makes people want to read it and not just um not just people on the left also people on the right as well conservatives also want to read it because they want to mock it and they will mock it on social media I mean I was talking about this with Chris Williamson recently he's a great podcaster as well it's a good friend yeah he's brilliant yeah yeah
um yeah so there's this idea where um basically the the New York Times uh has massively because I think since 2012 the terms racist and sexist have increased like 400 we were talking about this on his podcast have increased 400 but there hasn't been a concomitant rise in actual racism
or sexism and I think the reason for that is that the New York Times realized that uh by leveraging the word racist and sexist they could actually just hugely expand Their audience and they have um because it's such a controversial topic that where people see it the people on the on the left will probably read it and they'll be like oh my God you know we need to do something
about this and then the people right will see it and they'll they want to mock it um I think the New York Times deliberately calls things like coffee racist or whatever because they know that people who don't normally read the New York Times are going to see it and they're going to want to mock it because I certainly get the edge to Market when I see it you know I get the
edge all the time and they'll post it on social media saying look you know the New York Times has lost its mind and in doing that we share it and so it's essentially there's no such thing as bad publicity for them you know um they'll just they'll get people to share it whether they're
on the left or whether they're on the right and obviously you know people like took a Carlson Will Mock it on Fox News and he'll introduce that article to his audience and then they'll go online and talk about it so it's like nowadays you know there's a there's a great race called um uh what's
his name uh Scott Alexander and he he's got this idea called the Toxoplasma of Rage which is that um narratives that that do the best in in the digital age are not those that everybody thinks are true but those that divide people the most so those are the ones that spread the furthest and the reason that that's the case is that by debating the idea people spread it and make it go
viral everybody wants to take part in that debate you know whether if something's just true then it tends to just be forgotten you know people see they know they agree with it and then that's it they forget about it but if something invokes strong feelings for or against then it creates a front in the culture War and the culture War dominates social media at the moment and so people
you know want to take aside and they want to they want to signal that commitment to a certain tribe by arguing for that side and so by turning an article into a kind of battleground it becomes it just inflates the sort of impact of it and it just basically goes viral and everybody wants a
piece of it so I think that that's a large reason for why you get articles like coffee is racist and things like that I think that the people who write that stuff I think they know that they're being absurd I think they know it I think some of them do anyway perhaps some of them don't but I think
some of them do definitely and they do it because they know that people are going to react strongly to it yeah I agree uh on the intentionality um and you know again I always try to think I always try to put things in evolutionary biology psychology and why we do things the way we do them and I think that we are basically are our operating system for humans is essentially an emotional one
and and the ruling emotion is fear and especially fear of Novel fears right um and and again that makes a great deal of sense evolutionarily speaking because uh the world was a very very dangerous place and so the fact that we evolved to be fearful made a lot of sense they it makes much less sense now and and one of the things that concerns me is back to racism
real racism and you made the point eloquently real racism is a horrible toxic thing and by debasing it we are creating a perilous situation whereby if we if we lack the ability to to distinguish between genocide and somebody's uh affinity for coffee that's a really bad place to be and and
so the ability to hijack human emotional systems is it works and it works because it's our ruling OS and and we're going to keep doing it until we degrade the ability hopefully with the constant you know assault of it but where where does that kind of leave us because you had another one that
I love which is um the bandwidth tax and and you made the point uh that poor people for example who are economically poor uh they they have to devote so much cognitive energy to just figuring things out that they don't have a lot of uh calories cognitive calories left to like uh look and understand other things I think that that actually can also be extended greatly right so if I if
you're a huge sports fan you're using cognitive real estate for that and I'm not saying that's bad or good it's just a fact right you're you are using a lot of your your uh cognitive calories to follow you know football or whatever sport you love or you know celebrity gossip Etc uh that that
occupies those calories and you can't reorient them if they're expended so how how you know it's kind of like the George Costanza effect I don't know if you're a Seinfeld fan but George Costanza is kind of this loser right and and who's always thinking about women and sex and everything and
he in one of the episodes decides he's gonna give up sex gonna give up thinking about women and of course he immediately becomes a genius [Laughter] um what do you think how do you think this plays out in this environment that we're discussing with with people's we have bandwidth problems I I think it's something that some people may be able to remedy with AI I think going
back to AI I think um one of the great things about AI is that it allows us to do monotonous things and sort of routine things very very well um you know it's it's got that down on lock basically so what people can do I think is that it can they can devote some of it you know they could free up some of the bandwidth by delegating tasks to AI
um I think this is something that should probably be taught to people from a very young age how to delegate tasks to Ai and I think it will be because that's going to be bringing up it will free up so much not just time but also cognitive bandwidth as well and it will allow people to just focus on things that are that matter so if people need to um budget for
instance budgeting can be done by AI That's a very simple task it can be done by AI quite well um I mean you don't you don't even need AI to do it but I think a or make it more more attractive and more easier for most people and it will allow people I think to focus on things that
they really want to do and things that they're passionate about I mean you know there have been arguments that Universal basic income could be a possible remedy to the bandwidth task attacks um because it will obviously it will give people that that Baseline that they need to just not
have to worry about whether they're going to be able to pay their next bill or whether they're going to pay their rent on time or whatever so that they will be able to free their mind up to to think about other things and and try to advance themselves as a person rather than trying to just scrape the barrel and just you know survive um I mean I don't know I'm still
torn on that's great Arguments for it I think there's great arguments against it um but it's a possible solution to the bandwidth attacks um I think yeah I think personally I think we're moving in a situation we're moving towards uh this kind of trajectory now where the Sundowns the vicissy tunes of Life have less of an impact on an individual because though they
can be dealt with by an automation many of the things that we that were responsible for a lot of our sort of uh our problems in the past you know can now be remedied simply by automating them um so I think I do I'm quite positive even though you know like I said I do believe that um AI will
fill up probably a lot of social media with even more misinformation I think on the whole it's going to be very good for people I think it will allow people to just not have to worry about mundane things as much as they used to have to worry about them mundane tasks will take up less of the average person's life and freedom to think more about the kinds of things that they really
want to do in life and you know they can focus on their Ambitions rather than just on Surviving and so I think that is probably the best hope I I agree that's actually one of my uh main uh hypotheses about AI um is that it will allow for a flowering of human creativity because of the cognitive calories that
are no longer being expended on cut and paste type activities that have uh honestly if you look at human history occupied a great deal of our time and attention um it also is one of the reasons I changed my opinion on universal basic income I used to be opposed to it primarily because most of the empirical tests that I had seen had had some pretty serious problems but I
changed my opinion on it simply because we in my opinion we have to and again this is an opinion this is not a fact this is a hypothesis that we should test in my opinion because we have to um we it's it's been around for a long period of time and we now have a situation whereby
we're moving from a society that was devoted to basically a Bayesian distribution pattern to to a more mandible brought chaotic distribution pattern which is much peakier in the middle and has very long tails and so I think AI is going to be really amazing for this side of the tale and I think it's
going to be a real challenge for the other side of the tale and I think the reason I changed my opinion on universal basic income is as as cool as I think these Innovations and tools are we are really facing a situation where people who through no fault of their own that's very important no
fault of their own are going to have to come up to speed and it's going to be like older people it's going to be hard hard and you know you already see the scammers are are using AI to scam older people because they still believe that voice on the other end of the phone is an actual human being and often it's not it's an AI voice the classic fishing techniques and so sadly you
know the the con artists and and the the scammers and grifters uh know how to take advantage of this uh very very well but I do think that you're correct in that if we can get into a situation where people once they get up to speed on it no longer have to devote their time and attention to
um pedestrian type tasks that hopefully that that will free up the ability to to be more creative to think more deeply about things um and then use the tools in that way right um You have another one that I love and I'm going to bring it in here because it it just fits right now is the the idea
of a golden Hammer which is intellectuals uh who get cult like followings uh they they they feed off of that cult like following and then they they feel like okay I've got this golden Hammer I can hit every nail with it and it doesn't matter if I got famous because I was a good Quant uh investor I'm gonna now hold forth on uh you know the democratization of um whatever in Uganda
just typically pick one randomly right and and there is no way that I should be given the same um uh attention on something I don't know anything about really uh and yet it's another of our human chunking systems we chunk things together and you make the point I think quite well the cursive
dementia dimensionality whereas the more detailed you make your data it it makes it less valuable and and one of the things that I love about that is a it's true right I in in like quants are really guilty of it well this compounded historically at 14.31 and you know no wait what what you should be saying is directionally this is how this tends to behave now lots of uh
caveats lots of ways that it doesn't behave you should maybe take a look at all of those uh but it's again it's part of our human makeup right we we suck at exponential functions we just we we can't rock them because like with your average human mind it goes one two three a lot and and so I'm not saying yeah that that yeah I think a lot of our problems are to do the
fact that we can't comprehend large numbers um because I mean you know for 300 000 years we lived in small tribes uh and we kind of I really need to count up to ten really you know we didn't really need to count any further than that in most cases um we certainly didn't need to count over a
thousand or anything you know and it was really um only recently that large numbers entered Our Lives um really it was it was mainly sort of in the 20th century um that the very large numbers began to impact their lives when we you know astronomy started making huge leaps
and microscopic World um and you know we started sort of globalizing and soon we didn't have to worry about not just our tribes but people on the other side of the world um now you know we sort of have this kind of global village thing going on where we have to comprehend billions of people um at once when we're making decisions and um we're just not used our brains
are just not made for that and that's why we have all these these sort of simplification all these heuristics that we use now to sort of try and shrink the numbers down um which is the only way we can comprehend them we can only comprehend them by you know we might have to compare something to
something else for instance use a metaphor to try and understand how big a number is um like you know the classic um there are more um stars in the universe than there are um grades of sand on every Beach on the earth you know we have to use heuristics like that to try and grasp really big numbers um essentially what we're doing is we're just using poetry there
um but I mean you know it's I do believe that this is responsible for a lot of problems that we have because we can't because we can't comprehend large numbers when we go on to our fields for instance and we're looking at events that are occurring we look at sort of outliers you know your Twitter
feed rarely shows you a conventional uh event because if it's conventional then it's not news it's only news if it's an outlier so we see these outliers but because we can't compute the fact that there are millions of certain events going on in that we're only seeing the outliers uh we can't
comprehend the Rarity of the event and so it seems like it's just this is how the world is to us you know we see outliers and we and we think of them as conventional because we don't have anything to compare them to we don't have them to we don't have the thousands of other events to compare
them to that are conventional and so we end up just sort of you know getting completely deluded by by these outliers and and it it that that uh bleeds through to so many different aspects of society and social organization um you know we were mentioning tribalism again evolutionarily speaking uh you gotta understand tribalism because it was a massive part of all of human history up
until just as you point out the 20th century really and um so our innate programming is one to tribe up it is to okay I'm gonna seek My Tribe and what do you do in tribalism uh I think it was Will store uh who has written extensively on this idea who said you know when it's it's just part of our human nature if you want to be part of a tribe first first off you what you want to
do is fit in so that you're not exiled because for most of human history Exile equal death and so you want to fit in but then you want to stand out which are two very uh conflicting uh desires Victory and and very and very contradictory and yet it does explain a great deal of human behavior
um in terms of the status seeking in terms of uh all of the things and you make this point many times in your threads and elsewhere that I love which is the way I look at it is are you are you thinking objectively or subjectively I think that one of the big problems in the world and in communication is often formed by people not understanding whether they're being
objective or subjective I don't think that I think there there's a place for both but if you are um confusing your subjective opinion on something with a fact and then you are attaching it to your sense of self-worth well then you're gonna have a lot of problems and if you are externally
motivated or oriented versus internally oriented you're going to do things very very differently and in terms of you know like one of the things I've been reading loud Sue and the dowdy Jing for since I was 18. and and one of the things that he points out in there and you know it's not only
loud Sue it's da Vinci for example the greatest deception man suffers from are their own opinions and what you start thinking about are you getting your opinions from other people in other words I think you reference coolly and the Looking Glass self uh where where you're making your your judgments based on what you perceive other people saying or thinking about you which by the
way you could be wrong that's the other there's so many ways for that to go wrong and you get all of these compounding errors because you don't actually know what they think about you you you have an idea right you're guessing and I thought of the laosu quote uh that you know he who knows
uh much maybe learn it but understanding yourself you're much more intelligent uh you know you if you have power over others okay that's great but if you have self-control you're much mightier and then he finally ends it with you know if if you gain your happiness from others you might be considered rich but if you have self-contentment you have inexhaustible wealth so this idea of
objective or subjective external versus internal you you seem to weave this in to a lot of your threads talk talk a bit about that for a bit yes I think there's a important concept to add to that which is intersubjectivity which is when people form kind of conventions on what is true
and then they they follow this so it's a little bit more than subjective but a little bit less than objective so it's like an intermediate uh form of knowledge and I think a lot of um information as you point out is subjective you know it's it's people trying to work out what other people believe but then what happened what happens when this occurs at scale is that we
get into subjective into subjectivity so this is um this takes the form of social norms uh culture um things that are generally considered to be true by you know consensus and we have all these swap systems and I think the majority of the truths that we have are essentially inter-subjective
they're not quite objective uh they're not quite subjective but they're a little bit in between and I think that this really harks back to our tribal past because you know as you pointed out people want to belong to a tribe right and one of the ways that people belong to a tribe is by having the same beliefs as the members of that tribe so we're kind of configured in a way not
to believe what's true but to believe what the people around us believe so that we can fit in um but then we also do have a capacity to essentially argue for that belief as well in a way that might be slightly unconventional and that will help us to stand out as you also
point out we need to do you know so we might argue for something more vigorously than other people and that will allow the people around us to say wow this person really knows what he's talking about you know he believes what we believe but he's arguing even better than we can so then they can Elevate you to a leader so we we're sort of our minds are not trained
to argue for what's true but to argue for what we want to believe and what we need to believe in order to be part of the tribe that we want to be part of and I think a lot of um this is why you know I wrote an article recently about how why intellectuals believe why intelligent people believe stupid things and I think a lot of a lot of that is really due to the fact that
um rationality is not just a tool for finding truth it's also a tool for rationalizing and for convincing ourselves of things that we need to believe are true even if they're not actually true so that we can fit in um you know if you were sort of uh if you were in in the Khmer Rouge for
instance uh and Pol Pot was you know um asking you what you believe you know the people who believe who said what they really thought would probably end up getting killed but the people who could convince themselves that Pol Pot really was you know the kind of uh Messiah essentially who was going to fix everything and you know bring everything back to year zero and completely
equalize society and make sure that nobody ever was poor again if you could convince yourself of that then you had a much better chance of survival in that Society so you know even though it's not true even though it's a complete falsehood if you could just convince yourself of it you would more
more likely to survive so there was a survival value in believing things that are not true um and so a lot of our mental Hardware a lot of our sort of rational Hardware uh reasoning uh sort of capabilities have been configured to just convincing ourselves of things that are true and I think we see this all the time online we see it you know people form these
kind of echo Chambers and they form these tribes on Twitter and you see people just engaging in in things that just are completely dishonest you know perhaps not consciously dishonest but subconsciously dishonest where there are certain things like um you know confirmation
teaching bias for instance where people ignore information that doesn't fit their narrative and remember and focus on information that does you know this is I don't think this is um this is not something that people do consciously sometimes they may you know that you may get bad faith actors doing it consciously but generally it's an unconscious process and this is one of the sort of
problems of the human mind is that it's not really configured for truths it's configured for a kind of Truth vertical truth um vertical truth is is the truth that helps you to survive but it's generally it's it's a social system the brain is a social system that tries to ingratiate humans
into tribes and Order and also to increase their status within that tribe and this is always I think whenever anybody is going to try to work out human you know some kind of human behavior make a prediction about human behavior yeah uh they need to begin from that promise I think the fact that
the human mind is not configured for objective truth it's it's configured for intersubjective truths and in some cases subjective truth um but it's it's I think you know we are we are at heart tribal breaches and that needs to always be factored in whenever you're trying to make a prediction about human beings um because it it's just so it's just much better than this kind of
idea that humans are rational actors you know and you know they kind of always do the right thing and if you give them enough time but you know history has shown and that's not the case so yeah I I I agree and it's been a keep part of the way I look at things for a long time the the idea that
um we we uh and and we've seen it explode with the inter and networking effect that we're seeing online Internet being the largest variance amplification system in human history and and so you suddenly are seeing a great deal of preference falsification um people uh you know that the whole idea of uh private knowledge versus public knowledge
and and how quickly it switches when somebody says that the emperor is naked and other people like start believing that um you know I I enjoy the speculative philosopher Jed McKenna who says uh crazy crazy is a numbers game and and he his conversion says what do you mean he goes uh when somebody says something that's crazy and then the
and goes it's not crazy and he responds if you can get enough people to believe it not crazy anymore so so it's it's like if you are designing a system uh as you just eloquently outlined where it's inner uh subjective you're you're gonna see all sorts of preference falsification
you're gonna see cult-like Behavior Uh bringing up Paul Pott is quite interesting uh I was in Cambodia and actually met one of the few survivors of his horrendous genocide um and literally that's what his parents got him to do was to learn to pretend that he didn't understand French and that he didn't need reading glasses because glasses meant you were literate
meant you were dead because in Paul Potts Cambodia it was year zero as I'm sure you're familiar with is it uh yeah and and and the the one thing that just is troubling to me is that historically at least we see these death Cults that have taken over society's uh Stalin in the USSR Pol Pot
Mao in China and and I look at all of these as emotional plagues that that infect the the minds of a society and you you see it everywhere like it it happened here you go all the way back to witch hunts and then you say well that was crazy those people were idiots well in the 1980s a a mind virus took over California that convinced uh majority of people that their children were being
molested in uh preschool situations people went to jail people committed suicide none of it was true hmm so yeah I mean it's like the panic panic and all that kind of stuff yeah yeah I mean humans are prone to sort of moral hysterias and um I think the one of the concepts in one of my mega threads
I can't remember which one it was I've got this one called the Purity spiral yeah in fact I'll read it um already up to you if I can just get it so it's uh so members of political tribes inevited inevitably be begin competing with their fellows to be the most ideologically pure the constant
one-upmanship toward moral superiority causes the whole group to gradually become more extreme and then there's examples of giving Mao is China and Twitter Echo Chambers so I think uh when you combine like a sort of a moral Panic with with a purity spiral this usually results in a sort of a totalitarian movement because everybody like you know as you pointed out people want to
excel within their tribe they want to have higher status within their tribe and they want to avoid dying as well they want to avoid being executed so it creates this kind of game of brinkmann's [ __ ] where everybody's trying to be more uh pure be more morally pure by you know denouncing the
The Outsiders denouncing scapegoats more than everybody else so you know you see this you see this happening in Stalin's uh Russia where during the purges for instance you know you had people who would go out there and they'd call out other people to be you know accusing them of traitors in order to make themselves less likely to be killed because you know it does
it's a signal to say look I'm loyal I'm pointing out this this law person here you know don't kill me kill this person here and so this this kind of Purity spiral is I think it's like a kind of uh it has a runaway effect where everybody's trying to be more more pure than everybody else all competing to be more morally pure and it basically just lifts everybody up towards
more and more Authority authoritarianism you know that um everybody wants to be more communist than the next guy if they're living in a communist Society you know so you know if you're like a somebody in North Korea I mean this is happening in North Korea you know you want to you want to
respect the great leader more than everybody else and so you'll be more enthusiastic and you'll do even more but then other people are doing that as well so everybody's now acting far more insane than they normally would it's like a kind of contagion you know except it's it's driven by um competition rather than Conformity so it's a very interesting Dynamic
at play but I think that Purity spirals explain a lot of why movements become extreme over time and also I think it explains Twitter Echo Chambers to a certain extent as well uh where people want to Signal their commitment to the tribe and Signal how pure they are um and in doing so they make everybody want to compete with them who's also in in the tribe and
then they also do the same thing and everybody begins to just begin signaling like crazy um in order to be more you know seen as more sort of pure than everybody else um so yeah I mean I think that's that explains a lot of it you know I I think you would enjoy will stores the status game uh because that is part of his Central thesis in the book is that
it's part of our uh OS to to want these things um it can be easily hijacked by Bad actors um and your your point about Twitter I think is is bang on um and you know I I am perhaps uh ill-advised still optimistic about the chances for a Global Communication Network actually being
a good thing ultimately but we need it to evolve uh probably uh in the way you said earlier in our conversation with this with this dump of massive amounts of disinformation younger people uh will probably be able to become inoculated against it hopefully and and then combine it with
um the ability to think more creatively about it but I I wonder you know we we call the uh generation that fought World War One The Lost Generation because so many men died in that war which was a pointless and you know well all war is mostly pointless however but that one was particularly pointless and and the concept of a Lost Generation became quite
popular among thinkers and writers and whatnot do you think we're facing a Lost Generation here uh I don't think so no I think um you know I'm not sure in what it's what sense it would be a Lost Generation if you could clarify that for me sure um the the the people who have not yet
had the ability to tune in I bucky Fuller had a great line which is uh don't don't get angry with people because they don't grok a particular subject it might just be that they're just not yet tuned into it and and so and he used as an example the first uh microscope user um and uh he looked in the microscope and he was like holy [ __ ] there's a whole different
world down there but it took like hundreds of years for the rest of society to understand that because they weren't tuned in because they didn't have that particular tool the microscope to to see the microscopic world and so my worry and uh I'm not overly worried I'm just I find it interesting to discuss is whether the the the people trained on the old models the
old way of looking at the world the default to honesty or the default to believing other people Etc whether given this new environment uh in which we have pretty much made the case I think successfully although Others May differ but that there is so much misinformation now that these
people aren't appropriate appropriately equipped cognitively to interact with that and that's what I mean about the kind of lost Generations yeah okay um I don't think that there's going to be a Lost Generation the reason for this is that I think that people are quite adaptable even you know no matter what age they are I think people can adapt to information uh pretty quickly because
we've evolved to do that we've evolved to you know living rapidly changing environments and I think that's one thing and another thing is that I think people's families will help them out a little bit so the younger Generations will be able to help the older Generations a little bit you know I mean
so I help you know my my uh aunts and uncles and stuff sometimes if they're they're stuck on technology you know I can help them out and I'm sure that when I'm a bit older than younger Generations will help me out as well so I think you know by working together I think uh we can we can sort of overcome any kind of uh potential Moss generation effect um combined
with the fact that I think people probably don't need it anyway because we're all quite adaptable so I think you should be all right I I I agree and I'm I'm happy to hear you give that answer um because well it is something I do think about I do share your uh more optimistic view that
um that the various Generations working together uh can do that um one of the other things though that you know we we are kind of programmed to like complex explanations as opposed to simple explanations right so Occam's razor the principle of persimony yeah I'm sure you're very familiar with it which is generally speaking the
simpler solution that meets all of the criteria is correct and yet there's a wonderful study um that impacts um the way people um make repeated errors in thought and and it has to do with um you know Smith and Jones and Smith and Jones are brought in as uh the subjects of a study and they're told that their goal in this study is to look at a series of pictures of a human cell and
to guess whether that human cell is healthy or sick and what they are told is that only Smith is getting accurate feedback from the system in other words if he guesses that it's sick and it is sick he gets a green light if he guesses it is not sick and he's correct he gets a green light but if he
gets the guess wrong he gets a red light Jones on the other hand is being given a green light or a red light based on Smith's guesses okay so as one follows the research along Smith who's getting accurate feedback is soon getting about 85 of his guesses right whereas Jones it's still a flip of
a coin but here's what's fascinating and why I use this example quite a bit when they're brought out they're together and they first turn to Smith who's getting 85 percent of his guess is right and say well how do you do it and his answers are quite direct and quite simple he says well you
know I I noticed that if it's got broken edges or if there's a discoloration it's probably a six cell otherwise it's healthy and a couple other real simple uh rule of thumbs right and then Jones of course not getting any right he launches into this incredibly Baroque tapestry of words about how sometimes it's this way and sometimes it's that way Etc but the payoff is when asked who
got more right all of the Joneses who don't get any right and almost all of the Smiths say Jones why because Jones's explanations are so much more elaborate are so much more complicated and I use it as an example of how the human mind is constructed to prefer actually that that complex
or at least is now that that complex uh argument when in fact it's it's Occam who's getting more of them right what do you think about that that's very interesting yeah I never heard that study but I think um that kind of can be explained I suppose by The Narrative fallacy to a certain extent where we tend to prefer elaborate stories as explanations rather than systems and and
these so I think because they're easier to kind of grock you know um we're sort of we're storytelling beings and I think perhaps again this goes back to our evolutionary history you know the kinds of information we used to get from each that was traditionally told in the form of stories
around the campfire or whatever you know and so we've kind of we've learned to glean information reformer stories and to also think in story form we tend to We tend to convert systems into stories and I think what was happening here is there was a conflict between systems and stories a guy who's getting his guess is uh correct more accurately he was using a system so he was he was
finding the broken edges and blah blah you know and he was using that as a way to get to the truth because the system is usually a better way to get true the other guy was using a story you know he was creating this kind of okay well this happened and then this happened and this happened and then
this happened and I think people have a more of an affinity to stories than they do to systems which is why if you have a look at sort of pretty much any explanation nowadays the only ones that tend to sort of go viral are ones that tell a good story uh whereas the ones that are accurate the
ones that are just written in system form or as a model those tend to not get as much uh you know sort of traction online because people are just not compelled by systems and models uh they're far more compelled by by stories and narratives and stuff so I think really just kind of sums up
the way that we prefer information we prefer it in narrative form we kind of have to fictionalize information before it appeals to us which is one of the kind of great paradoxes of the human mind I completely Concur and again uh as a quantitative investor I always favored systems and processes over narrative and like I I I can get a great reaction out of Market people by uh simply
saying narrative follows price not the other way around and and and people get quite angry with me when I say that because of our in innate uh uh preference for stories right because that it's kind of the way our OS works and yet you know you also have a great point in one of your mega
threads that the the more intelligent a person the better the [ __ ] narrative they can build because they convince first themselves then after they've convinced themselves they go out and they just tell a better story I used to when I was giving speeches about our way of investing I used to say I am going to tell you a series of stories about why you shouldn't listen to
stories when making investment decisions and and yet it is so ingrained in what we do and you make the the point that people who are masters of debate right are are drawn to things like law politics media where theory is much more important generally than practice right and there was an old
joke in my field which is well we know it works in practice but can we make it work in theory yeah and and yet Theory now is is becoming much more dominant primarily maybe because of this idea that everything is the narrative and and what do we pay attention to the unusual right and so you you got to be more and more provocative now ultimately that has a half-life right like we
were talking about racism right we have so taken the terror out of that word and it should have a lot of Terror in it in my opinion uh because it's horrible things done in its name yeah absolutely I think a lot of what is happening with people calling things racist is this narrativization uh
you get clever people who will you can choose a random object like um like for instance air conditioning and then to try to make the case that that's racist it's quite difficult but it can be done you can you can make the case that pretty much anything is racist and I think a lot of people do this as a kind of exercise you know when they're writing for the New York Times like
can I can I make the case that air conditioning is racist and then they will go on you know and talk about how it's you know it's it fits the native temperature of Europe rather than of Africa or you know and then you could just make a penny nonsense about it but like um that's essentially what's happening is it maritalization the way I look at it is it's like the constellations in the
sky you have facts which are like stars and then you draw connections between them like the ancient Greeks did in the night sky where they would draw these lines between these dots in sky and form shapes that that comported with their mythology so they would find Perseus uh in the sky or you know
um ariadne or one of the other you know Greek gods or whatever and um I think that's essentially what's happening with this kind of racism thing is that people are getting isolated pieces of information like facts and then they're constructing a narrative of racism by joining the dots in a certain way comport with their mythology of you know say the West
as being inherently and irredeemably racist um and so essentially they're doing essentially the same thing as the Greeks the ancient Greeks did with the night sky they're just they're finding these isolated facts and I think that's one of the big problems with having so much information
available at our fingertips is that you with enough imagination you could cherry-pick any stars as it were any facts and you can construct almost any narrative you want just by joining them together in a certain way which is really I think this is responsible for so much of the the
false narratives and conspiracy theories and moral panics that were subjected to in the information age I agree and I think that again just making the point on the New York Times and and how um when I was growing up the New York Times was called the its nickname was the gray lady uh and it was the most authoritative uh source of so-called facts um and yet you could also solve
for the New York Times by uh the simple approach of follow the money why did the New York Times do what it did well they were maximizing for revenue and if you're maximizing for revenue and Donald Trump gets elected in the United States what are you gonna do you're gonna do what the New
York Times Did you're gonna you you're gonna go you know what we if we're gonna maximize Revenue we're going to become Pravda here and we're gonna be the not loyal uh opposition and we are going to be inflammatory and we are going to just outright say [ __ ] to get people people worked up and and yet like most people say that's awful that's horrible well yeah it is
but if you're thinking about the problem as I'm the head of the New York Times I'm responsible for maximizing shareholder value how am I gonna do that I'm going to do it by maximizing Revenue to maximize Revenue I'm going to in blame people and then they're going to want to join my tribe
because they want their own confirmation bias right and I'm not just picking on the times here Fox News does exactly the same thing and and so it's it's like of course of course they're gonna maximize on those if if that's what they want maximized not truth not understanding not Nuance but rather Revenue well of course you're gonna maximize for things that inflame somebody
and then you add to the problem the thing you rightly point out which is this smarter you are the better the seeming steel man you're going to build based off these disparate things that you're just picking out of the air right that's how a lot of these belief systems get going right and you
know then you get distribution I used to joke why did we have a thousand years of Darkness uh after the fall of Rome because the Catholic church had a better distribution Network than everybody else and because on top of that they had really great memes in the Dawkins sense of memes not the memes we see yeah on Twitter but the the um these ideas that that transfer between human Minds
uh quite easily right and and so I think that the idea that you your solution is kind of curiosity and humility which I completely Embrace because Hey listen the market has humbled me so so often that if you're still doing anything in the market and you're my age you just by your very nature
you've got to be humble in the face of it because it is it is such a humiliating thing for people who like have I think I'm right no no actually you're not if you listen to Mr market and the market says you're wrong ultimately well then you would make the case but I'm only wrong in the short term I'll be ultimately right now if you're wrong and you put your money in it has
an expiration date and it goes to zero you were wrong now you could be right in the future with a similar argument but the idea of marrying curiosity and humility is one that really intrigues me talk a little bit more about how you would inculcate that more in people
yeah so I mean the way I see it is that certainty is the death of thought so yeah you know so the moment you become certain about something you stop thinking about it you don't grow anymore you know it that you're basically putting a dead end on your learning um and so I think it's it's helpful to always be have that little amount of uncertainty
about everything and to know that you don't know everything about that thing to just that awareness alone I think can really really help with both curiosity and humility and I think another good way to increase curiosity in particular is through this thing called The Curiosity Zone which is a
kind of mental model uh which I found on the internet which I think is very helpful which is uh you basically learn as much as you can about as much as you can or not necessarily as much as you can but you just learn as as little even as little as you can about as much as you can you just learn a little bit about a lot and by doing that you create these kinds of signposts in your
mind that you want to hang things on that you want to learn more about you know you want to um you know if you learn a little bit about uh for instance uh terraforming for instance just take some random you know if you just by chance just read about that then that will create
thoughts in your mind which will make you want to read more about it at a later date because your your generate questions from learning that little bit about it you're generating new questions and there's new questions will itch at you until you you want to scratch them by learning more and so it's by learning a little bit at a time you you grow you don't like people don't
um like curiosity is not the desire to fill your head with knowledge it's the desire to fill gaps in your knowledge so if you can create those gaps by having little bits of information then you know you'll want to fill those gaps in by sort of being curious and learning new
things and so that's a good way to to learn new things it's it's quite a strange phenomenon but the more that you learn the more that you want to learn so it's something that you know if you can start off and just start learning slowly that will create these new questions you'll want to learn more and then you know you gradually fill out your mind with information
um and I think that Curiosity and humility go hand in hand I think that they help each other um you know that when you're sort of humble that makes you curious because the humility makes you realize that you don't know as much as you might have thought you would and so that Spirits you want to learn more and likewise being curious makes you humble as well because you feel
like if you're kind of um when you learn you you realize how little you know again you know so it's it's kind of like a symbiosis between curiosity and humble and humility the more humble you are the more Curious you will be and the more Curious you are the more humble you will be generally
um so I think that it's a good thing to practice sort of both at the same time to sort of maximize this symbiosis and ensure both of them sort of you know hit the ground running yeah so yeah I think because I've seen plenty of intelligent people um just completely get things wrong you know
I often use the example of um of taleb Nassim Nicholas celeb he's a brilliant man brilliant man very intelligent and I love his books but when you see him on Twitter and you see the certainty with which he makes pronouncements he he gets things wrong a lot and he the reason he gets them wrong is because he has no humility and he doesn't appear to have much heuristic
I mean he might have curiosity I don't know but he certainly doesn't have humility you know he's very very certain about everything he believes he will usually insult people who disagree with him um and he's just very very sort of abrasive and sort of you know he turns a lot of people off and I think by doing that but I think it's because of that that he gets things wrong I think if he was
less certain about his beliefs I think he would be far more intelligent even than he already is and I do like I said I do think he's an intelligent man I just think he would be even more intelligent if he was more humble you know so I think I think if you try to be intelligent that usually leads to
stupidity yes but if you try to be hot I'm curious that leads to intelligence yes and and uh a writer who I think you would love has a great his name is Robert Anton Wilson he was 50 years ahead of his time right and he has this great quote which is if you think even briefly that you're just a
cosmic schmuck that makes you briefly less of a cosmic schmuck yeah absolutely yeah because I I completely agree that certainty is Brenda in my opinion that that like and and I don't mean it you know the pedantic would come in and say whoa are you not certain the sun isn't going to come up tomorrow and like okay I think it has a super high probability of happening so I don't
concern myself with it right the probabilities are so overwhelmingly in its favor that I it's not something I have to worry about every time I go to bed at night but but the fact is if if you can frame things more as a Continuum more as a well what the probabilities would suggest would be you know this and and try to frame it that way the you're you're gonna become
wiser you're going to become uh in it and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy right they you the the more you're willing to admit I don't know I don't know like but again it it who are people attracted to they're attracted to people who speak with certainty they're attracted to you know I can
tell you these simple truths which of course aren't truths at all they are opinions for the most part but it's it's uh it's really interesting to me because it just just seems like a feature not a bug in our OS right and and so uh my friend Tim Urban has a new book out called what's our problem a self-help book for societies and he he shares your idea of uh he I think he calls it a
thinking ladder right and and at the bottom rungs of the thinking ladder are tribalism are you know Flat Earth societies are uh Heaven's Gate Cults uh are all of the conspiracy theories that you that are so popular on social media and and one of his ideas is can can we have a space where people can
just agree that they don't know that they will con have conversations about these things that will be ongoing it's something that we're exploring with O'Shaughnessy Ventures with a with our uh Discord um and and it it's interesting because you that I believe that the way you generate better knowledge and better Innovations is to have a great deal of cognitive diversity
um and let it work you know against first and but then with and then building um so I I think that um it's it's really interesting and things like your mega threads one of the things that make makes me really happy is how popular they are because yeah essentially it's it I I'm like I love the fact that he he had this many and
this many likes for those kinds of ideas I I yeah what's what's what's next for you are you gonna because I was thinking boy I'd love to publish you could publish just a great book uh filled with all yeah well I'm watching I'm working on one yeah excellent one at the moment so that's uh it's still quite a long ways off yet but uh I'm quite hopeful that it's going to be
something that a lot of people enjoy and I think if you like the mega threads then you're gonna love this yeah because it's going to be something on a new scale yeah well I'm I'm looking at at our time here and I have the tendency to go on um and I I've only covered about half so I would love it
if you'd come back at some point uh because this this has been super fun uh I love your work um and we close off all of our podcasts with uh with the following uh question and and that is we're gonna wave a magic wand and we're gonna make you the emperor of the world or one day you can't be like
pot and want to kill everybody uh nor can you send anyone to a re-education camp but what you can do is we're gonna hand you a magic microphone and you can speak two things into it and that those two things will be incepted in the world's entire 8 billion pop plus serve minus uh several million uh
population and everybody Whenever there tomorrow is is gonna wake up and think I just had the two greatest thoughts and I'm gonna pursue them what are you gonna accept in in the world's population be humble and be curious boom I love it nice and simple nice and simple and if you if we can incent
that we're gonna have what's the what's the meme that shows the futuristic world uh like you know life without lawyers [Laughter] this has been yeah terrifically fun thank you for coming on uh and uh can't wait to have you on again to talk about the other half of the stuff that we didn't even get to absolutely yeah it'd be my pleasure yeah cheers lovely chatting with you thanks a lot