Ep138 "Why do our political brains mistake opinion for truth?" with Kaizen Asiedu

What if your confidence in your political beliefs does not correlate with their accuracy? Why does a pundit's outrage often feel so convincing and nuance so unsatisfying? Are conspiracy theories a predictable feature of human brains? Is there any way to stop ourselves from mistaking our feelings for conclusions? How can we come to be clearer thinkers? Today we speak with political commentator Kaizen Asiedu about how we arrive at our hot takes on the world.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
What if your confidence in your political beliefs doesn't have
that much to do with whether they're true when you're
watching a pundit. Why does outrage often feel so convincing
and nuance seem so unsatisfying? Our conspiracy theories a predictable
feature of human brains? And is there any way for

(00:26):
us to stop ourselves from mistaking our feelings for conclusions?
How can we become clearer thinkers? Today we're going to
speak with political commentator and proponent of clear thinking Kaisen
Asiadu about how we arrive at our hot takes on
the political world. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman.

(00:51):
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
these episodes we sailed deeply into our three pound universe
to understand how we see the world and how we
all see different worlds inside different heads. Every moment of

(01:18):
your life, your brain is running its one main job.
It's collecting up tons of scraps of sensory data, things
like sounds and images and words and social cues, and
it's using these to build a model of the world.
This is what you'll often hear me refer to as
the internal model. Your brain is locked in total darkness,

(01:42):
in the silence of your skull, and it's trying to
figure out what is going on out there. As it
gets better and better at building this internal model, then
it can make better predictions, and it can do all
sorts of other things like fill in gaps and smooth
over uncertainty and make inferences about things even when they're

(02:05):
quite ambiguous. Now here's the really important part for today's conversation.
Your brain does not build a perfect model of the world.
First of all, it can't. You wouldn't have nearly the
processing power that you would need to represent the actual
world that's out there. But there's an even more immediate

(02:25):
reason why your internal model is so impoverished, which is
that you only have a very limited lens on the world.
You have followed a thin trajectory from your time and
place of birth to right now, and you've only seen
a vanishingly small fraction of the things you could have seen,

(02:48):
And for that matter, you've only even heard about a
small fraction of the things you could have heard about.
And you have grown up embedded in your particular family,
in your neighborhood and your culture, or in your moment
in time, and if any of those were different, you
might have slightly different opinions about plenty of things.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
So, in other words, what your.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Brain constructs is not actually a perfect model of the world,
but a very rough working model. It's generally good enough
to help you predict what might happen next and make
choices about how to act, but it is not a
mirror of the world, not even close. I love this
line by the Nobel laureate Rabindronath to Gore, who said,

(03:32):
most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more
or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing
on the contrary, that the mind is itself the principal
element of creation. So your internal model of the world
is not perfect, and it doesn't have to be to

(03:53):
stay alive and to conserve energy and to get by. Now,
what all this means in today's context is that the
brain didn't evolve to be an objective truth seeking machine.
It evolved to be a subjective machine, and, by the way,
a very social one. All of us with human brains

(04:13):
are exquisitely sensitive to approval and rejection and in group
signals of inclusion and outgroup signals of threat, and as
a result, a lot of our internal models of reality
are shaped a lot by what keeps us aligned with

(04:33):
the people around us. Now, this creates a fundamental tension
in how we understand ourselves, because we like to think
of ourselves as rational agents. In our flattering view of ourselves,
we carefully weigh the evidence, and we update our beliefs,
and we follow the facts.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Where they lead.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
But on the other hand, we know from decades of
cognitive science that our brains are vulnerable to all sorts
of cognitive biases, things that we'll talk about today, like
framing effects or confirmation bias, or motivated reasoning, and on
and on. And something that I've talked about a lot
on other episodes is that brains are not data processing

(05:18):
devices that just take in statements and decide true or false. Instead,
there's so much more to the beliefs we hold, including
social issues like defending whichever team we're on. Now, throw
modern media into that equation. You get the inputs to
our internal models arriving at high speed, and they're optimized

(05:40):
for engagement, and they're often designed to provoke, and as
a result, outrage travels fast and bold claims are cheaper
to make than careful refutations, and it takes a lot
more energy to debunk misinformation than it does to create it.
So we find ourselves in a strange moment with lots

(06:02):
of questions to chew on, like how do social incentives
bend us away from accuracy even if we're well intentioned?
What does it mean to think clearly in an ecosystem
that rewards outrage and tribal loyalty? And there's also a
question about feelings. Feelings are signals about what matters to us,

(06:24):
about perceived threats and values and injustices, but they shouldn't
alone give us our conclusions. Our job is to interpret,
And the danger comes when we stop at the feeling
and we mistake that for the full story and never
ask what else might be going on. So when we
look at the big picture, I think the most important

(06:46):
thing we need is what's known as epistemic humility. What
is that While the word epistemic just refers to our knowledge,
and humility, of course is keeping a modest view of it.
So systemic humility is about recognizing the limits and fallibility
of our own knowledge. It's about acknowledging that for all

(07:10):
of us. Our understanding is always incomplete and provisional. And
as we'll talk about today, epistemic humility is about challenging
your own assumptions and being willing.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
To say, you know, I might be wrong. And this
brings us to education.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
If our brains are so easily influenced by framing and
emotion and social pressure, then what should education really be about.
Is it about transmitting facts or about training minds to
notice their own blind spots? And this issue, of course,
reaches past the classroom into our daily lives, and it

(07:49):
underlies our debates about free speech and protests and conspiracy
theories and the way we subscribe to political ideologies. So
today we're going to talk with someone who has made
these questions central to his work, someone who's not trying
to tell us what to think, but instead to help
us see how we're thinking and how easily that process

(08:10):
can get steered or manipulated. Kaizen ussia Do is a
philosopher by training and an Emmy Award winning producer and
now he has a million followers on Instagram where he
talks about politics and free speech and epistemic humility. And
what I love about his videos is that He works
very carefully to get people on all sides to slow

(08:33):
down and consider other points of view and to steal
man those points of view and just generally try to
understand the assumptions that live underneath their conclusions. Kaisen is
the creator of clear Thinker, where he helps us all
to understand how what we believe can get shaped by

(08:53):
the way it's framed, or our own cognitive biases, or
even our own social incentives. So in today's conversation, we're
going to explore why it's so difficult for people to
agree on the truth and how we might cultivate clearer
thinking in our own brains which are spilling over with
cognitive biases. So, Kaysen, something that you and I both

(09:20):
think a lot about is conspiracy theories, And the question
is why do people get so much certainty in some
idea and how can we get ourselves eventually as society
to epistemic humility.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Well, I think with conspiracy theories they thrive in an
environment of uncertainty, and humans don't like uncertainty. Uncertainty feels
very unsafe. So I think that when there's something that
has a lot of uncertainty, particularly something's very emotionally relevant
to them, like, for example, the Charlie Kirk assassination. That's
very emotionally relevant to a lot of people because many
people looked up to him as a leader or felt

(09:56):
that he represented their values. So when he died a
lot of people were struggling to reconcile with his death,
and for them, there were things about the official narrative
that didn't line up, which created uncertainty. In order to
sort of close off that uncertainty. People seek certainty, and
they'll look for certainty wherever they can find it. They're
not very particular about it. So the thing with conspiracy

(10:18):
theories is often it's just a giant exercise and motivated reasoning.
And motivated reasoning is essentially when you form the conclusion
and then look for evidence to justify the conclusion rather
than the other way around, which as a scientist you
know is the way it's supposed to be done. So
if you can find that certainty, even if it's not
evidence based, you'll form an emotional attachment to it, and

(10:41):
once that emotional attachment takes hold, especially in the era
of social media and the Internet, you can keep on
reinforcing that attachment with information, because you'll always find someone
on the internet who will tell you what you already believe.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
And to what degree do you think our beliefs have
to do with our identities?

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Also, as in a group believes this, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
A ton, a ton because when people have a belief
and they're getting social validation from it, like you're getting
likes online or your friend group is praising you, or
you're making money off of it. And I know this right, Like,
I'm someone who is a thought leader. I make content
for a living. I have an incentive to say things
that fit my tribe's bias, and everyone has a tribe.

(11:25):
I try to go out of it, but it's algorithmic
echo chambers that we're all existing in. So yeah, a
big part of this is just wanting to have a
co congruent identity, both socially and psychologically, because sitting on
uncertainty can create a lot of cognitive dissonance. And that's like,
it's like psychological suffering when you go through that. And
I know that because I'm always having to deal with them,

(11:46):
like say the right thing, like what about this angle?
That sounds like a good argument too, And I do
that because for me, it's really important. I like to
be responsible for the things that I say. But most people,
especially if you're not thinking about these things deeply, like
politics and culture and conspiracy theories, they're not going to
want to do that, and instead they're more interested in
the social signaling and social approval that comes from having

(12:08):
a certain identity. So it's a really nasty chap that's
hard to get out of.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
You know.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
One of the things that I really appreciate about your
social media channels is that you put the effort into
presenting different views, entertaining different hypotheses, at least having them
on the table, and then you point out where the
weight of evidence seems to sit the most. But it's
very inclusive in that way, and it draws people in.
How do you find that sort of strategy working as

(12:37):
opposed to the Hey, I'm going to pretend to have
absolute certainty about this particular theory.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I've only been talking about
politics for like a year and a half. I didn't
really even pay attention to politics before that.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Wait, can I ask a quick question?

Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, your Instagram you have how many followers know Instagram,
like around nine hundred thousand, and how many did you
have a year and a half ago, like five thousand, okay, yeah,
so okay into something, Yeah, tapped into something, okay, so
keep going.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
And I think that meteoric rise is evidence of the
fact that people actually are increasingly tired of the emotional
sensational approach to discourse, I think in general, but especially
in politics. And you know, if I honestly don't know
if I would have thought that that was possible, that
there was really a market for that, if I didn't

(13:24):
experience it, because all we pretty much ever saw was
talking heads getting hated, attacking each other at hominum, name
calling constantly. But I think we've reached a point where
the pendulum I don't know if it's fully swinging the
other way, but at least some people are swinging the
other way and say, I'm just tired of this. I
don't want to be baited into being angry, I don't

(13:46):
want to be misled. I'm not actually that politically convicted
about anything. I just I want people who feel calm
and reasonable and are willing to actually be leaders, not
people who just have a lot of followers. And there
is a difference. There's plenty of people who have a
lot of followers and don't actually act like leaders. They're
just feeding their group what they actually want to hear.

(14:09):
So yeah, I feel grateful that it was not very
intentional me talking about politics and all this stuff happening.
But it's actually been really inspiring for me personally because
it's like, okay, cool, I'm not the only one who
just wants clear thinking, calm discourse, and sane conversations.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
Yeah, so what do you mean by clear thinking?

Speaker 1 (14:29):
Because that's really your brand is saying, Look, we're going
to think about this clearly, and I'm so inspired to
see that it's working.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
Well, so what do you mean by it?

Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah, so let's talk about maybe what the conditions for
clear thinking are. And before this, we were talking about the
idea of epistemic humility, and I want to talk about
that second word first, humility. Right, the more attached we
are to any particular outcome, the harder it is to
think clearly, because what's happening is we're engaging in motivated

(14:59):
reasoning otherwise, because we're looking for a conclusion that gives
us emotional validation or social validation, whatever form of satisfaction
we're looking for. So I think one of the preconditions
for clear thinking is emotional detachment and actually trying to
view even your own personal beliefs scientifically and not being

(15:19):
so identified with your beliefs and recognizing, yeah, well I
don't know, Like I believe something, it doesn't mean it's
the truth. I don't know, and just holding that as
a fundamental axiom I think would get everyone so much further.
But what's happened is, especially in politics, we've conditioned people
to believe that not knowing is cowardice or it's a

(15:39):
sign of weakness. I mean, when a politician changes their opinion,
what do people call.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Them flip floppers? Exactly?

Speaker 3 (15:47):
Like the fact that that's even a term, like I
get obviously to steal man that actual term. I think
it's usually intended to refer to someone who just changes
their opinion with the way they're blow Yeah, but I
think that also gets misapplied to people who are actually
growth seeking and trying to be scientific about their thinking.
And I'm not saying emotions aren't valid data their data,

(16:10):
but they're not conclusions. So the more emotionally attached you are,
the less.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
Clearly you're thinking, yeah, agreed, And I just want to
come back to one thing you said. So I understand
it about being a leader, because there are plenty of
leaders who speak with conviction and say I know the
truth and they have some opinion and they are leaders also, right,
how are you thinking about a leader being somebody's who's

(16:37):
willing to be swayed by new data?

Speaker 3 (16:41):
Well, the distinction I have between a leader and someone
who just has a lot of followers is someone who
just has a lot of followers will always tell their
followers what they want to hear. Leaders will break with
their followers to bring their followers to a new place,
and they say, hey, I have a vision. You don't
see where I'm going. I'm going to help you get there.
Of eight, and your willingness to be rejected even by

(17:05):
your own tribe, albeit temporarily, but even by your own tribe,
I think is the prerequisite to actually being a leader.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Otherwise, why do we even need you?

Speaker 3 (17:15):
You're just a mouthpiece for every something everyone already believes.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
That's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
I just want to stick on this distinction for a second,
because let's think someone like Candice Owens. The question is
is she a leader? It seems to me she is,
but you know, she's telling a particular kind of story.
It happens to find resonance with her large audience. I
think you and I both find the aspects of her
storytelling concerning.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
But the question is is she a leader under this definition?
I think she is.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
I think she's had a long track record of willing
to be to go against her audience. Right, Like, I
don't know her political journey too intimately, but as I
understand it, she really started getting big as a conservative commentator,
and she stood out because she's black and a woman,
and that's unusual in the conservatives base, you know. Then
she went to the Daily Wire and that was more
kind of mainstream conservatism relatively recently. Actually, she left them,

(18:07):
started taking opinions that would not be sanctioned by the
Daily Wire and therefore not be sanctioned by the audience
that she built at the Daily Wire. That takes a
tremendous amount of courage. That requires actually going against your group.
So I don't think she's someone who is one of
these people who just has a lot of followers, even
though I disagree with some of her methodology.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
Okay, fair enough, So coming back to conspiracy theories, So
what do you suppose this satisfies in people when they
hear a particular idea that says, look, mass media is
telling you X, but I know the truth. It's actually
why what is that feeding in them?

Speaker 3 (18:45):
Well, I think it satisfies your desire to be part
of an in group, because if I know something that
other people don't, they're the outgroup. I'm the in group
with special knowledge. And we talked before about the social
approval and validation that you get from that. You're getting
the social approval from other people inside that in group,
and every group has a status hierarchy. So the more

(19:07):
conspiratorial you can be and the more dogmatic you can be,
the more you get celebrated by other people as yeah,
you're just a truth seeker, and the other people they
don't know the truth, they're just sheep. They're people who
believe the mainstream media, believe the narrative. And look, mainstream media,
there's tons of criticisms we can levy against them. I
think since twenty twenty, they've broken trust with a lot

(19:27):
of people, and we've seen a lot of these outlets.
We see the clear evidence of ideological capture and these institutions.
But the solution is not to go from one extreme
to the other, where we're just replacing mainstream media bias
with podcast bias. No, the solution is to think for
ourselves rigorously and don't dismiss something just because of where

(19:48):
it came from, and also don't accept something just because
of where it came from. We want to look for
what can be true, like objectively verified close we can
get to there, or at least what everyone seems to
agree on, like can we even get to a shared
sense of reality even if we don't know if things are.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
True, and you proceed from there.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
But yeah, with conspiratorial thinking, you get to feel like
you're better than other people, and it's intellectual hubris. Actually,
it's the opposite of epistemic humility, and it's very dangerous
because now it's not actually about pursuing the truth. It's
about reinforcing your position in the dominance hierarchy, or reinforcing
your sense of an identity as someone who knows more

(20:29):
or better than other people. And the problem with conspiracy
thinking is often it's unfalsifiable too, so you're not actually
making a claim, you're demanding that someone else prove the negative. So,
for example, right, if I sat here and excuse if
it's going to triggering into your audience, and I said, oh, so,
why do you beat your wife? And you're like, wait

(20:50):
a second, like any I haven't even proven that you
beat your wife. But I'm already telling you you need
to explain. You need to prove that something didn't happen.
How do you prove that something didn't happen? That's much
more difficult than proving a positive claim.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
And it touches on Brandelini's law, which I've heard you
bring up in your videos about when a conspiracy theorist
is putting out and lots of stuff. If you try
to address each aspect of it, it would take too long.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
So tell us about Brandolini's law. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
So, Brandelini's law basically states that it takes significantly more
energy to debunk a claim than it does to make
the claim. And it basically creates a game of whack
a mole, especially when we're talking about conspiracies, because the
more claims that the conspiracy theorist puts out, it's actually
not a proportional relationship between the conspiracy theorists and a

(21:44):
person making the counterclaim.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
It's like a log of rythmic relationship.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
So if someone puts out thirty hours of content, I
might need to spend three hundred hours of content actually
refuting that. And even once I've refuted that, it's not
actually a refutation because all I've done is created skepticism
around the skeptic. I haven't actually proven a thing unless
we're at a point where there is certainty about something.

(22:08):
But even when there is certainty about something, because people
have not been trained to think about things from first principles,
what they'll instead do is default to do I trust
the person?

Speaker 2 (22:19):
Right?

Speaker 3 (22:19):
So as they say, well I trust Candice Owns, but
I don't trust the FBI, it's like, okay, well how
can I falsify that? Then it doesn't really matter what
I say that you're just gonna accuse me of being
a fed or bought off or whatever.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
And it's like you're the tribe of the truth seekers.

Speaker 3 (22:33):
So yeah, that's how Brandolini's law operates, and it creates
an incentive where if you're making a conspiratorial claim, as
long as you just make as many different claims as possible,
it comes overwhelming to even engage with.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
So this brings us back to this issue of how
we all assess truth. I saw a political cartoon some
years ago. It showed a bunch of people walking along
a road and then there's a fork in the road
and one direction said complex but correct, and the other
said simple but incorrect. And most of the people were

(23:05):
going in the direction of simple but incorrect and falling
off a cliff, and there were a few people following
this more complicated road up. Now here's the interesting part
about the cartoon. I got curious who had made the cartoon.
Was it somebody on the left or the right politically?
So I started I just started examining who was liking
the cartoon online, and it turns out that everybody liked

(23:27):
the cartoon no matter what your political position. Everyone thinks
they are the complex but correct thinker. And so I've
been very interested in this issue of why we all
think that we have the truth and it's obvious to us,
and we can't understand why all those idiots and trolls
can't see it. They're misinformed, they're disinformed something like that.

(23:49):
What's your thoughts on that.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
Well, it's so scary to think that you don't have
the truth. Yeah, right, Like I imagine you realize you
don't have the truth, and then you start to reflect, Oh,
my god, who have I told that falsehood to? What
decisions have I made based on this bad information, on
these bad beliefs.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
It's very ego threatening. Oh that's a really good point.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
And the fact is each of us has a very
thin trajectory through space and time, and we collect up
little facts and data through our lives. But the world
is big and complicated, right, and so each of us
ends up with an internal model of the world where
we think, okay, like I pretty much got this, I
know what the truth is, and you're totally right. It's
ego threatening to think that might be wrong. So your

(24:32):
mission is to teach people how to think better. So okay,
so how do we go from this thing of having
this small internal model to questioning the fence lines?

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Well, first, let me talk about like what quality thinking
even looks like, because like, why should anyone believe me
when I say, like this clear thinking or I'm a
clear thinker?

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Right?

Speaker 2 (24:52):
How arrogant?

Speaker 3 (24:54):
I remember when I was in school, I took a
philosophy class. As a philosophy major, I took a intro
philosophy class for intro to logic. And I don't even
remember if I actually even finished the class, to tell
you the truth, but I still remember very clearly having
a moment where I was sitting in class and I
just had this light bulb moment. I was like, wait,
a second, Logic is a thing, Like It's not just

(25:15):
a description like be logical, be rational. No, it's a
formal discipline that's been developed for thousands of years, dating
back to Aristotle. And Aristotle developed it because he was
looking at what Plato and Socrates were doing and he's like, Okay,
we need to like formalize this basically the truth seeking process.
And when I realized that, I think it just raised

(25:36):
my standards for thinking, because it's not now the arbiter
of good thinking is not oh, how passionately I feel something,
It's no, does that abide by the formal principles and
rules of logic. There's actual rules of logic like this
contrapositives and converse and to contradictory statements can't be both true.

(25:57):
And if you actually look at formal logical notation, it's
like math. It actually looks like math. And I don't
think most people are even acquainted with logic at that level,
like you don't need to take a whole logic class.
But even realizing wait a second, this is a formal discipline.
It's not something that people are just hand waving about.
It's not some sort of swear word that people use

(26:18):
when you're like, you're illogical. It's like no, no, no,
it literally does not conform to the rules of logic.
We need to be introducing kids, actually, like very early,
to logic. I mean, just like along with math. I
think logic is kind of like verbal math when you
think about it.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
Yeah, I think that's very good to get that into
schools at a young age. I also think the whole
issue about in groups and outgroups and what drives these
sorts of things, and issues of moral pollution and issues
of are they on my side or not? All these
things would be worth getting into schools at a very

(26:52):
young age so that we find what are the potholes
that we fall into? Coming First of all, do you
have confidence that this would be useful, could be useful
at an educational level?

Speaker 2 (27:07):
Absolutely? Yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:08):
I mean I actually made a course. It's called Clay
Thinker Course. What age is that aimed for? Yeah, so
it is more aimed for probably like young adults, and
my audience that gravitates toward tends to be more conservative
because I just have a more conservative audience that's older.
But I designed it in a way that I'm speaking
pretty simply, and I think even someone in probably high

(27:30):
school could get it. The only concern I'd have is
the subject matter can be very emostly charged because we're
talking about politics. But it's not just a logic course.
It's about logic, it's about psychology, like modern psychology, cognitive
biases applied to the political and informational realm. Just because
if you just talk about this stuff in the abstract,

(27:50):
it's bloodless, so it's hard for people to feel excited
to engage with it. But if I phrase it, if
I'm talking about group attribution error, for example, right, like
projecting the opinions or beliefs of a minority group on
the entire group. And I talked about that in the
context of Gaza or Israel Palestine, all of a sudden,
like wait a second, Okay, now people have an emotional connection.

(28:13):
They're like, okay, now this is actually relevant to me.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
Give us an example of that. Yeah, So one straw
man that people do of each other.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
So this is bipartisan straw manning is the left will
call the right evil or fascist or lacking empathy for
wanting to deport people who are in the country illegally. Right,
and they'll say, you're anti immigrant, you actually just hate immigrants.
And of course you can always find some subset of
a group that actually fits the straw man. But a

(28:47):
lot of people on the right, it's like, no, it's
not they hate immigrants. They just want people to come
into the country legally, and they think it's a fundamental
matter of fairness to have people only be here if
they came here legally, and even address a hard case,
like the argument for deportations is, hey, this is about
trust in the rule of law and order. And if

(29:08):
you don't deport these people then and you just like
naturalize them for example, you actually fundamentally broken trust in
the system. I mean, if we're not going to follow
the principles for that someone has to follow upon entry
into the country, why should I even pay my taxes?
So that's a straw man that people on the left
do to the right. The straw man that people on
the right do to the left is, oh, you're just
open borders communists, you don't care about America. You want

(29:32):
anyone here, you want them to vote and take over
the country, which is again, of course, is a subset
of the left that yes, genuinely does believe in open borders,
But a lot of the left is as moderates who
want to have a immigration policy where people can enter
the country legally, relatively easily, because as I understand, it's

(29:53):
actually pretty difficult, and for people who are here illegally,
we want them to be treated humanly with compactis with
you know, as little ice raids and forced deportations as possible.
So they look at some of what the right is
doing and they say, well, okay, we get that we
need to close the border, and there's disagreements on how

(30:15):
we should deal with the people already here, but can
we not be making like trailers set to Pokemon theme
music of doing deportations, which is the thing that's actually
happening right now under the Trump administration. So that's an
example of straw manning.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Right. This is a I.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
Think it's a logical fallacy where you misrepresent the argument
of the other side and then you attack that caricature
rather than addressing the strongest version of the argument from
the other side, and it's very easy to straw man because,
as I said, you can always find straw men in
real life.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
You know, it strikes me on social media. I happen
to be a defender of social media in general, just
on the grounds that when people talk about polarization, there
is nothing new about polarization. And in fact, if you
just look at the twentieth century with you know, communist
revolution in China and Russia, and Nazism in Germany and
fascism in Italy and what happened in Rwanda and Cambodia, you.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Know, the last entry is so bloody pre social media.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
So that's why I feel like social media doesn't necessarily
have that much to do with what's going on. But
one thing that I do see is what I'm calling
the fringe amplification effect, which is people will make a
video and they'll stitch into somebody's video from the most
extreme on the other side.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
So somebody on the other side who is all.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
The way to the left or the right will make
some stupid video and that video will get lots of
attenson on the other side because it gets so amplified.
So those are the faces we see off of the
other side.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
I love that you said that social media is a
bit of a red herring. I think we have a
really bad relationship with social media, But I think the
issue is more the relationship than the tool itself, because
as you pointed out, we've had polarization all throughout the
human history, eatment in the twentieth century, we saw how
bad it can actually get. Ultimately, we can't outsource our

(32:22):
responsibility technology. We have to take personal responsibility for the
information that we take in, for the biases that we
all form, for the echo chambers that we're all in.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
On.

Speaker 3 (32:38):
Two biases, so there's negativity bias, our tendency to focus
on information that's the most negative, and availability bias, so
our tendency to focus on information that's just present to
us and what will happen is because of social media.
This is something that's unique to social media. Someone that
you never would have heard because they represented like one
percent of the population now can get pushed out to

(33:02):
thirty percent of the population.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
And then that thirty percent of the population is.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
Like, whoa, that's what those people believe. And because of
a social media echo chamber effect, you might not get
exposed to a counter example from the other side. So,
for example, going back to the whole left versus right
immigration thing, let's say you're on the right and you
live in Texas, like rural Texas. You don't live around liberals,

(33:29):
You've never interacted with one. Maybe in your life in
real conversation, you might see a video from like a
Black Lives Matter, blue hair, you know, trans endorsing open borders,
genuine communist, and say, what is going on in California?

Speaker 2 (33:48):
Right, That's all you've ever seen?

Speaker 3 (33:51):
And of course you're just getting conservative media on your side.
You're not seeing this version of a different reality, that's
a normal version, and you're just getting the abnormal version
pumped to you. And of course same for the last
versus the right. So that's part of the problem. We're
using these social media algorithms, and we're using them very unconsciously,

(34:11):
and we're not being we're not really scrutinizing the data
as it comes in.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
It's just you watch a real you get.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
Outraged, or you think it's funny or whatever, haha, you
share it, you move on to the next one, next one,
next one, next one, and a single sitting session, you
might go through ten videos and not actually think deeply
about any of them.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
Do you see that there is a cognitive problem with
us or an algorithmic problem with what gets served up?

Speaker 3 (34:34):
I look, I think if it's tough, it's a little
bit of chicken or egg. But I think the algorithms
are designed to exploit cognitive biases. So I think it's chicken.
We're the chicken. Social media is the egg. And ultimately
the algorithms are just meeting our need for engagement, like
they're just giving us what we're going to engage with.

(34:55):
If we all said, look, I'm gonna instantly unfollow anyone
who's reage evading me. I'm going to instantly unfollow anyone
who is willfully lying to me, the algorithms would change
pretty quickly. Yeah, or rather what the algorithms serve would
change pretty quickly. But again because of like a negativity bias.
I mean, we had that prior to social media. So

(35:17):
of course in a social media environment, negative content is
going to get more engagement, so we have to individually
take more responsibility.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
You know, I just recently patented a new social media
algorithm that I'm trying to get implemented right now, which
is a very simple idea. It's just okay. So the algorithm,
of course knows lots about you and me and so on.
So the idea is people get connected. They see each
other's videos, if they have things in common that they like.

(35:47):
You know, we both like surfing and this kind of dog,
and we like traveling to this place and so on.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
There's all these things we haven't come.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
All that stuff gets surfaced, and people can become pals
that way they feel in group ye on these other things.
Only later, as a matter of temporal sequencing. Only later
does anything political or hot button get surfaced, such that
if you and I already feel like god, we've got
all these things in common, we dig each other as pals,

(36:16):
and then we find out, oh wait, I didn't know
you felt that way about abortion or gun control or something.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
Then then we're more apt to lean in and talk
about it. I like that.

Speaker 1 (36:26):
If the out grouping is the first thing you hear
about somebody, then that's the first reaction. But if the
conservative in Texas met the blue haired transliberal in California,
but first knew all this other stuff about them and
only later discovered that.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 3 (36:43):
I mean I think the insight here is to humanize
people to one another first and establish common ground, build rapport,
show where you're similar before you expose where you're different.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, exactly, that's the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
Yeah, because in terms of you, we've got these these
networks in our brains, specifically the medial profonal loobe, which
have to do with humanizing somebody else. And it turns
out when we're dealing without groups, these networks are dialed down.
We essentially don't see them as humans. We see them
more like objects. So, by the way, this is, of

(37:14):
course one of the big tricks about propaganda is that
you dehumanize it literally, you know, you say, look, they're
a virus. There, an animal, they're an insect whatever. Yeah,
So the idea is to make sure you crank up
these media profrontal lobe in terms of the way you're
seeing somebody else.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah. I like that.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
You know, I'm very passionate about we got to fix
our education system, so it's equipping people for the social
media landscape.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Yes, Okay, so let's come back to this, because right
I was really curious how we can get education into junior, high,
high school, those sorts of levels.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
I know.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
One of the things that you and I have both
thought about is ideological capture at the college level, maybe
the high school level as well, I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Tell us your take on that.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
Yeah, well, I was actually reading today. I think it
was in Australia they banned social media access for kids
sixteen and under.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Exactly really interesting move.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
I'm still not honestly sure what I think of it,
But thinking about this in real time, it's like cool,
I get the idea right, And increasingly resources coming are
out coming out out about the corrosive effect of social
media on the brain. But what happens when they're seventeen?
Do they just throw them off the deep end? And
they just got to figure it out. So we got

(38:31):
to figure out how do we train people so that
they are not ideologically captured from the jump or they
understand the difference between the online world and the physical world.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
And I think part of it is you.

Speaker 3 (38:45):
Actually, one of the things I really loved doing in
high school was debate.

Speaker 2 (38:49):
Yeah, I love debate.

Speaker 3 (38:51):
It was such a formative experience doing the debate in
high school. And one of the reasons why it was
It wasn't even because it just made me good at debating.
It just forced me to consider the other side. Yeah,
because the way debate competitions would work is, let's say
you get an issue like healthcare. You have to go
in on that hour not knowing what side of the

(39:11):
debate you're going to take, So you have to be
equally prepared for the pro and the con as opposed
to I'm going to go in and prove why I'm right.
It's like, no, it's actually not about you at all.
So I think it's one of those exercises that I
thought was fun. I think it builds a lot of confidence.
I think it demands critical thinking. I think it demands
that you steal man on the other side, and I
would love to see that. I mean even earlier than

(39:32):
junior high. Like, I think pretty much for the moment
kids are having disputes, it's like.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
Oh cool, let's set up debates.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
Yeah, you know, I'm super enthusiastic about the possibility for
AI to improve our education system in this very specific way.
Because teachers don't have time to do one on one
debates with each kid, you can obviously set them up.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
In pairs and so on. But the real opportunity here
is for a student to sit in front of an
AI and have a debate on whatever high button issue
they The student presents the side argus, the AI ends
upgrading them predicated on how well they argue their side,
and then you switch sides.

Speaker 1 (40:10):
Now you read the other side, and the AI of
course can present calm empathic arguments in the other direction
at all times to really so kids can hone their
skills against this digital grinding stone. And I just think
if we get every kid into that so that they
see both sides, so they see the switch ability, the nuances,

(40:33):
the subtleties, that would be a really important move for education.

Speaker 2 (40:36):
I totally agree.

Speaker 3 (40:37):
And they haven't sponsored me yet, but I'm talking to
this app company. They're called Gabble, so I'll shot them
out just because I like what they're trying to do great.
This is not endorsement. I don't know if the app
is good. I haven't tried it, but I liked them
so far. Where they're actually trying to create a matchmaking
app where you log on and let's say you get

(40:58):
thrown into a lobby to debate immigration, for example, you
got like maybe three minutes to say your piece, and
then the other person does a piece, and then there's
an AI doing voice transcription so that it has a
transcript of the conversation and it'll rate it super cool.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Based on what on how rational the arguments were.

Speaker 3 (41:16):
I don't know too much about what their their rubric is,
but I assume something like, yeah, the quality of your logic,
the persuasiveness of your rhetoric. And it's video based, right,
so you actually hop on you get to talk to someone.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
I think it's an amazing idea personally. And wait, let
me just get it one thing straight.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
When you said a match making app, I assumed you
meant romantic dating, but you don't mean it like like
an intellectual match.

Speaker 3 (41:38):
Making Yeah, intellectual debate. I don't know what the business
model is or who they're trying to attract, but the
idea is you hop on to debate. Cool And I
think it's a certain type of person who likes to debate.
I'm one of the people who actually enjoys it. I
know not everyone's like that. But the point is not
even debate so much is let's get into a conversation

(41:58):
where there's tension that needs to be resolved and we
get comfortable sitting in that tension because people become so
hyper sensitized to disagreement, like every disagreement is a death match,
and that is certainly a byproduct of social media.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
I do not.

Speaker 3 (42:13):
Remember disagreements being so scary for people growing up.

Speaker 1 (42:18):
Oh interesting, I wonder about how much that is retrospective
romanticization though, really, because right it's always been the case
that our identities are tied to our political beliefs, and
when certain things are threatened with argument, people feel defensive
about that. I interpret that as something quite ancient. Interestingly,

(42:40):
there's a subreddit where people come to debate or debate points,
and if you successfully change the other person's mind, then
they will tell you and you get karma points for that,
and so people sort of compete to see when they
can change other people's mind. Now, the really interesting thing
that happened this past year is that a Swedish research

(43:01):
team released some AI bots surreptitiously onto this channel, and
it turns out the AI bots did about six times
better than the average human in terms of convincing the
other person. And there was a huge uproar about this,
and people got really angry about it. But I thought
there was something interesting there, which is the AI bots

(43:25):
did not win by spreading misinformation or fear or overwhelming
with noise. Instead, they convinced the other person by presenting
good arguments that were rational and calm and empathic. And
I thought, boy, how great that. Maybe that's just going
to set the bar higher for us.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
It's just going to teach us, Hey, that's the way
to debate, and an analogy to chess and go.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
We're all good players now train with AI and they're
playing a much better game than anyone did thirty years ago.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
Maybe that's what's going to happen with debate as well.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
That I mean, I'm not surprised to hear that people
were outraged to get people. I think, you know, the
relationship with AI and everything, it's like doomerism. People are
afraid of it. But that's what I do. I'm constantly
I mean, dude, I gotta be one of the top
AI subscribers in the world. I got pro on Claud,
I got pro Grog, I got pro Gemini. It's like
I'm constantly talking to AI to refine my ideas and

(44:24):
clarify my thinking. I mean, for me, It's like the
videos that you see me put out. It takes me
a long time to make just about three minutes because
I want to nail every argument in there and make
sure I've anticipated any counter arguments or blind spots. And
I changed my mind as I think through these things,
and AI has absolutely revolutionized my thinking.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
Yes, and think about it.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
You get ex You get essentially an omniscient, rational, unemotional
debate partner in your pocket. There's no shortage of tools,
it's just the willingness to use them.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
I'll tell you something that scares me, and I talked
about this on a previous podcast, but I'm afraid that
we might be in a golden era of AI right now.
And what's going to happen eventually is that it's going
to balkanize, where people will say where liberals will say, well,
I don't want that conservative garbage in the training set,
and the Conservatis say I don't want that liberal trash
and the training set, and so we'll start getting ais that.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
Agree with us more. Now.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
I think the people like us and lots of other
people don't want that. They want what you just described,
where it refines your thing and it presents counter arguments
to you that you hadn't thought of. But you know,
a lot of people will want something that just says, hey,
that's a great argument.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
I agree with you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
Yeah, so it may be that this thing that AI
does where it's just look, there are two sides of
this arguments. Some people think this, and here's why some
people thinking that. Yeah, a lot of people complained about that.
I think it's one of the greatest features of what
A I can tell.

Speaker 3 (46:10):
You absolutely, and I don't know how to solve the
problem that you identified, because yeah, they will just be
market incentives to give people sycophantic AI and not to
punch down on them. I think that's what chatchypt has
been doing.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
Like, although although it should be noted that, you know,
some months ago a version came out that was more
sycophantic and people didn't like.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
That, and actually they pushed back a bit.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Yeah, so there was some correction there, but I remember
that there there was a specific update. I was like,
this became a lot more people pleasing. Yeah, And at
first I kind.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
Of liked it. I was like, oh, yeah, I am right,
that is brilliant. And then I was like, wait a second,
you're like always telling me this.

Speaker 3 (46:47):
So for me, my solution has actually been to use
multiple different ai right, so I'm constantly shifting between right
now is Claude Grock and Gemini, and it's you know,
sometimes about throw chatchypete in the mix too. But of course,
I mean, I think that's part of the education solution,
because we need to teach people about their own bias.
We need to teach people epistemic humility and to be

(47:09):
skeptical of themselves first and foremost, so that no matter
what tool they're using or information environment they're in, there's
always a piece of them that recognizes, hey, I am
a human, I am susceptible to manipulation. The blanket solution
to that is just to be more humble.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
It's to understand first of all, the limitations of our
own models and I am This is actually the topic
of my next book called Empire of the Invisible. It
will be on in about two years, But it's about
the limitations of our internal model and the fact that
we think we're seeing everything on the map, even though
we're so limited in what we can actually see, and
that's why we interpret everyone else as being misinformed and

(47:51):
disinformed and so on. So the first thing is understanding
the limits of our own model. The second thing is
doing what it takes to try to understand someone else's
model better. Yeah, and that's so that's so rare that
people and it's not the same thing you have to
agree with someone else, but really trying to understand is
you know, you talk a lot about steel manning somebody's argument,
and just in case the listener doesn't know, that's instead

(48:12):
of straw manning and trying to come up with the
weakest version of their argument and take it down, it's saying,
how can I best defend their How can I represent
their argument in its strongest form. It's a very lovely
habit to get into. I would love to see this
built into junior high in high schools where they're learning
that kind of stuff. They're learning about their own biases.

(48:35):
This is what you spend a lot of attention on
in your videos about what are the biases that we have,
the identified psychological biases that we have.

Speaker 2 (48:43):
How can you come to just have a list of
those at hand all the time?

Speaker 1 (48:49):
So you say, oh, okay, yeah, I get what I'm doing,
not what the other person is doing, but I get
what my problem is here.

Speaker 3 (48:56):
Yeah, I love that you point it out to steal.
It's my favorite practice for this sharpening one's thinking because
it basically like, you don't need to know every list
of logical fallacies and cognitive biases if you can literally
just try to make a good argument for the other
side and incorporates so much of that, it really gets you,

(49:17):
as you said, really aptly out of your own model
and into someone else's model. And the nice thing about
that is it actually refines your model right because now
you can see the vulnerabilities.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
In your argument. You don't have to abandon your argument.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
You might still be right, but you'll be better at
being correct as opposed to being dogmatically correct. And if
we just got students doing that and also having this
is another thing I think we need to incorporate it
into the education system. More emotional intelligence, and not even
I mean obviously directed on other people, but around one's self.

(49:53):
I think a lot of people they don't even realize
when they're bothered by something. They don't even realize when
they're angry, they don't realize when they're triggered. And emotion
is not compatible with logic like emotion is important too,
as I said, but it often gets in the way
or is used as a substitute for logic, so people
don't recognize when they're mostly compromised, or they'll even use

(50:14):
that emotional capture that they're in as justification for why
they're right. It was like, oh, it's well, it's my truth.
It's like, no, that's it's your feelings. There's no My
truth is just the truth. And your perception of the
truth might be different than other people. Your belief might
be different, but there's the truth, and then there's your
relationship with it.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
That's interesting. I'm not sure I believe in a truth
at all. Oh, let's get into that. That's right.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
I'm interested in this notion about truth because there are
certain facts in the world. We can call those true
or not true. Didn't this person say this thing? Did
this person stab that other person with a knife? That
stuffs true. But the larger things about the interpretation and
the context and the societal view of it, and the
legislation around that and so on, it's hard to say
that there is a correct position on.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
Any of this. What's your take on this?

Speaker 3 (51:04):
Well, I would even point out what you said, the
interpretation of it. So there's still something being interpreted, yes,
and that's the.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
Truth, agreed. So this guy stabbed that guy. Was he justified?
Was it not justified? Yeah, that's the part where it's
a little harder to say, well, there's a truth to that,
there's a correct view on it.

Speaker 3 (51:21):
Yeah, And I think that's when we get into the
realm of the subjective. But even then it's like it
depends on what level of analysis we're trying to do this.
Like if we're saying is that justified, well, what's justice?

Speaker 2 (51:33):
Right? Justice is?

Speaker 3 (51:35):
It relies on your view of like what even as reality,
and what's human's place in reality, what's role of civilization,
what's the role of the individual?

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Right?

Speaker 3 (51:44):
But there's not a question of whether the guy got
stabbed in physical reality. There's a question of how should
we respond to achieve the goal that we have. I
think the reason I'm talking about the whole my truth,
your truth stuff that is very popular in California where
we are, is because I think often what happens is
people are using those terms as a way to avoid conflict,

(52:08):
to find the truth, and it's like a it's like
epistemic cowardice.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
Actually, when people say I have my truth, you have
your truth.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like, no, you have your beliefs.
I have my belief that the truth. I don't own
the truth. You don't own the truth. We're both trying
to seek it and we need to get there together.
But if you have your truth and I have my truth,
how can we get to the truth together? It actually
gets in the way of coordination and I think a
durable harmony, and I think the way we know if

(52:43):
something is true or the way we get at least
close to it. And I'm not convinced we can ever
get to the absolute truth. But truth has a predictive power.
So you know, you're a neuroscientist. If you run an
experiment and you predictably get certain results, you're like, okay, cool,
this is like more true than the thing that was
correct five out of one hundred times, because we got

(53:03):
there seventy out of one hundred times, or even ninety
nine out of one hundred. We didn't get there one
hundred out of a hundred, right, but we're still a
lot closer to the truth.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
You know.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
Just as a side note, scientists never actually use the
word truth at all interesting. If I have a theory
that makes perfect predictions about what's sext, I still don't
call it true. What I say is the weight of
the evidence really supports this. It's got great predictive strength.
But I'm always willing, as soon as you know, someone
presents a new theory tomorrow to say, oh, well maybe
that maybe.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
The weight of the evidence shifts over to that one.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
Yeah, And I love that, And I think that's actually
the correct disposition to have toward the truth because the
way I like to think of truth is, look, we're subjects.
We don't have direct access to truth, where everything is
mediated by our senses and our experience. So you can
think of truth of getting the truth as the destination

(53:54):
on the other side of the bridge. We can get
closer and closer on the bridge, we're never going to
fully arrive. So we should always have this level of
humility where we say, well, this is where they weighted
the evidence points. But there might be new evidence that
completely changed the model. And I think that's a healthy
way to regard it. And I mean this is more
of a I guess a philosophical question. I still believe

(54:17):
that there is a there there there's still a truth
that there. I just might not be able to get
all the way, and that's okay.

Speaker 2 (54:24):
Like Moses not being able to arrive to the Holy Land.
Get yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
What are the top cognitive biases that you think are
affecting political discourse right now?

Speaker 3 (54:36):
Confirmation bias it's probably the biggest one, because we talked
about motivated managing. Yeah, So confirmation bias is our tendency
to notice information that confirms our existing beliefs and ignore
information that goes against our existing beliefs. So it's like,
if can make a little trite example, if I say.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
The room is green, everything in the room is green.
Everything in the room is green. I just tell myself
that over and over.

Speaker 3 (55:04):
I'm going to start going into the rooms and only
look at the things that are green. It's not that
there's not other things here, but it's like, while his
shirt's green, and thus plants green, and those are the
things I saw, so it was green, yeah, and out.
The algorithms really feed that too, like they're designed to
feed confirmation bias.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Become confirmation bias.

Speaker 3 (55:22):
When we've had something confirmed, we feel really good about
it and we become very emotionally invested in it, and
that's what then produces more motivated reasoning. And then when
we have motivated reasoning, we start to straw man other perspectives.
So I think confirmation bias is probably the single biggest one.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
And how can people fight that in their own life?
How do you fight that?

Speaker 3 (55:42):
I actively look for the arguments or information or evidence
to the contrary, So I literally we talked about AI.
I will literally ask my AI what am I missing?
Or give me the best arguments for and against here?
Or if let's say I have a view, I've become
suspicious of myself, like, okay, this sounds too convincing. What's
just be a devil's advocate? Or what's the best argument

(56:03):
against what I'm saying? Because if you prompt any AI
explicitly to give you what you're looking for, it'll give
it to you. It's just if you're not precise with
your prompting, then you get into issues with the bias
of the AI. And how I was trained to but
confirmation biases really quickly.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
So what's the proper way to prompt it to give
you a good count argument?

Speaker 3 (56:23):
Just ask what are the best arguments for and against X?
Excellent okay, yeah, Or if you're looking for specific counter
arguments or something, what's the best argument against.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
Okay, yeah, good, okay, so confirmation, but any others that
really strike you as being a big problem.

Speaker 3 (56:37):
I think this kind of speaks to the dehumanization you
pointed out, which I agree is a huge issue. Group
attribution error is a huge one because it would be
one thing, if you know, before social media and the
internet more generally, you would not really get exposed to
extreme people. So when someone would form a caricature of someone,
it would really seem so ridiculous that it would be

(56:59):
hard to belief. It would beggar belief that someone actually
exists like who you're describing. But now there's nine billion
people on the planet, you can always find someone who
fits this extreme straw man model that you've presented. But
they exist, and what will happen is people will project
the attributes of that one member or few members of
the group on the entire group, and that contributes to dehumanization.

(57:25):
So yeah, I think group attribution is a really big
one too. And then there's actually I wouldn't say this
is among the biggest, but we talked a bit about
conspiracy theories earlier. I think that I mean conspiracy theories
incorporated all the biases, one of the tools that people
don't even know to apply or fail to apply.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (57:45):
Where two of them actually are OCAM's raiser and Handlan's raiser.
So Okham's raiser essentially posits that the most simple solution,
or rather the solution that requires the fewest assumptions is
most likely to be true. Doesn't mean it's always true,
but most likely to be true. And Handland's raisor states
that incompetence is more common than malevolence, So don't assume

(58:08):
evil when you could assume stupidity. Again, one of the
things with social media is that it's constantly exposing us
to really negative scenarios. So what people will do is
they'll say, wow, I saw this example of someone who
being actually evil, and therefore everyone who's doing this thing
must also be evil, as opposed to, Hey, we're all humans,

(58:29):
we're all a bit absurd. We all make mistakes constantly.
I make mistakes every day. I don't know anyone who doesn't.
A lot of the things that we see are just
catastrophic breakdowns in human coordination. So yeah, people don't apply
Handland's razor. Often they or they don't apply auctionins razors.
They look for needlessly complex explanations for things that actually
have a very boring explanation a lot of the time,

(58:53):
And you ask about biases, go back to one more
biased negativity bias. So I think it was Stephen pay
wrote a book years ago basically making an evidentiary case
for how dope the world actually is.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Yeah, the better Angels of our better Angel of our natue.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Yeah, it's like, because of the Internet or raither, the
way we engage with the Internet, it can seem like
things are a lot worse than they are, and no
matter how bad things are, you can always.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
Make them look worse.

Speaker 3 (59:21):
Yeah, And negativity is a mind virus. It's spread so
quickly it causes people to act in a really negative way,
and it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
So negativity buyas is another huge one.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
You know.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
I'm just I want to follow upon one thing which
is making things needlessly complex, which obviously with let's say,
with conspiracy theories, instead of saying, hey, you know it's
likely to be this, it's the drawing strings between all
the things. And yet people often interpret that as being
more simple in a way. Yeah, the audience really likes that.

(59:54):
I'm just trying to figure this out why. I've actually
been a little heartbroken because I just saw a former
student of mine who's very smart, lovely kid, just announced
on Instagram that he's starting a new news organization to
finally tell the truth because we deserve the truth, and
it's incredibly biased and the things he's saying, he's just

(01:00:20):
pouring out the you know, his very miased opinion on
stuff and his story though to the listener is I'm
finally giving you the truth which they won't give you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
Yeah. Yeah, you must see this all the time, all
the time, dude.

Speaker 3 (01:00:37):
It's funny because this will seem like a contradiction, but
it's really not. I believe that there's the truth. I
don't believe that I have it. Yeah, there's a difference
between the two. There's a big problem when we become
attached to our identity as the truth sayer the truth teller,
because now there's a whole identity wrapped up in me

(01:00:58):
knowing something that other people don't. It's super dangerous. It
gets in the way of being humble and actually curious.
So I don't even like to say personally that I'm
like a truth teller aware of it. Yeah, I also
have a clear thinker that's good enough for me, right,
And even that's like a bit of a stretch. I
think it's like aspirational still, because the truth is something

(01:01:19):
arrived at collectively, ideally, because you have a subjective experience.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
I have a subjective experience. We all have pieces of
the puzzle.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
Actually, we're all interacting with reality from different perspectives. We
need to bring the perspectives together. But what happens a
lot of time is people believe they know the truth
and they're delivering it in a way that's actually weaponizing.
And it's not that they don't have some things correct,
but often they're missing a lot of other things that
are also true because it doesn't fit their narrative of

(01:01:48):
the truth. So, yeah, I see it all the time. Frankly,
I see a lot of the conservative space. I mean,
I'm sure it happens on the left as well, but
that's where my algorithms are. It's conservative media, and it's like, yeah,
well the mainstream media is not to you the truth.
I am, Yes, It's like it's such a great way
to grandize yourself and it's a great business model, frankly. Uh,
and it blinds you. It blinds you. So the I

(01:02:11):
like what that you said, Like, Hey, in science, we
never talk about truth. We talk about the weight of evidence.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:17):
And I think that scientific mindset would be great if
it was applied to media. And I honestly I think
it would be great to someone. Maybe I'll do it
one day. Just created a media organization where it's like,
we're not going to tell you the truth, We're going
to tell you the spectrum.

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:32):
Right, and then we're gonna have the spectrum, like have
healthy conflict right in front of you, and you decide.
You decide what resonates you, and let's see if you
can even arrive at a shared sense of reality.

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
You know, on this podcast, I had again named Isaac Sahl,
who's a journalist who started this media organization called Tangle,
which represents the right and the left and all the
positions and you really get to wrestle.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
With the idea every day.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
I love it and I can't wait to see even
more projects that are like that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
Yeah. I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
So if you could give listeners one north Star for
political discourse, what.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
Would it be.

Speaker 3 (01:03:12):
Just understand the other side, Just really try. It's not fun,
but it is really expansive and it will grow you
in ways that you value. So it's not just about
being a responsible citizen, although I think that's important too.
I think it'll just help everyone improve the quality of thinking.
And your decisions are downstream of your thinking. So if
you have better thinking, you have better decisions, you have

(01:03:32):
a better life. So just try to understand the other side.
You don't need to agree with them.

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
That was my interview with Kaisen Aca do So. One
useful way to think about the brain is this It
never has direct access to the territory. It only ever
works with maps. The important part is that neurons don't
touch reality. All they ever receive are electrochemical signals representing

(01:04:01):
patterns of light or vibrations in air, or chemicals or pressure,
and from those signals, the brain draws a simplified representation
of the world that helps us navigate. Most of the time.
That map is good enough to keep us alive, but
it's never the territory. And if you're a regular listener

(01:04:23):
to the podcast, you've heard many examples of this. For example,
the way that memory is reconstructed or perception is an
active inference, and as we revisited today, beliefs are compressed
summaries shaped by experience and emotion and social context. So
one of the greatest illusions we have, and we see

(01:04:44):
this in politics every day, is mistaking the map for
the territory. In other words, we mistake a clean, emotionally
satisfying story for a complete one. That illusion is especially
tempting in all social domains, where maps guide us and
they bond us together such that shared maps become shared identities,

(01:05:09):
and once a map is tied to belonging, then questioning
becomes something that we generally stop doing. This is where
epistemic humility matters as a navigational skill. Humility is the
recognition that your map is incomplete, that it highlights certain
features and leaves others out, and that other people, even

(01:05:32):
those that you disagree with, may be operating from different maps.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
Not necessarily from bad faith.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
Epistemic humility calls us to remain open to learning from
other viewpoints, rather than being overconfident in our own current beliefs.
You're never gonna throw away your map. You wouldn't be
able to navigate without one, but humility means holding on
to it lightly enough to revive when new information comes in.

(01:06:02):
I think one of the most important takeaways from today's
conversation has to do with education. Our schools have to
be much more than the memorization of a single authoritative map,
but instead the development of cartographic skills. We need to
teach people how our mental maps are made, how framing works,

(01:06:24):
how incentives distort scale, how emotions highlight some landmarks and
obscure others. In other words, we don't need to be
telling students what to think, but giving them the tools
so that they get good at redrawing.

Speaker 2 (01:06:39):
Their maps as they go through life.

Speaker 1 (01:06:42):
And that's the thread running through today's conversation with Kaisen.
Let's take this as an invitation to examine the processes
by which beliefs form, and to notice when feelings are
being promoted to conclusions. Our job is to slow down,
zoom out, and ask better questions about the maps we're carrying.

(01:07:06):
Because none of us is ever going to reach the
territory itself. We're all navigating with approximations. The best that
we can do is to make our maps a little
more accurate, a little more flexible, and a little more
honest about their limits. Go to eagleman dot com slash

(01:07:29):
podcast for more information and to find further reading. Join
the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out and
subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each
episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman,
and this is Inner Cosmos.