I completely agree that certainty is brain death, in my opinion. If you can frame things more as a continuum, more as a well, what the probabilities would suggest would be this and try to frame it that way, you're going to become wiser. And so my friend Tim Urban has a new book out called What's Our Problem? A self help book for societies. He shares your idea of, I think he calls it a thinking ladder. At the bottom rungs of the thinking ladder, our tribalism, our flat earth societies, our heavens gate cults are all popular on social media. It's something that we're exploring with O'Shaughnessy Ventures with our Discord
Gurwinder Bhogal is a writer and programmer who writes about the myriad ways in which technology and psychology conspire to fool us and how we can withstand the covert assault on our senses. Gurwinder is known for his epic Twitter ‘Megathreads’ which set out a series of powerful concepts for understanding the world. He joins the show to discuss our tendency to narrativize information, how to overcome the bandwidth tax, why Wikipedia is the world’s largest source of misinformation, and MUCH more! Important Links:
Show Notes:
- Megathreads & the Woozle effect
- AI, the Encyclopedia Disinformatica, and cultivating a garden of Mithridates
- Capturing the nuance between dishonesty and lying
- The Toxoplasma of Rage
- Overcoming the bandwidth tax
- Brandishing the golden hammer; why we can’t comprehend large numbers
- Tribalism & intersubjectivity
- The purity spiral
- Are we facing a lost generation?
- We are programmed to like complex explanations
- Narrativizing information
- “Certainty is the death of thought”
- Climbing the thinking ladder
- MUCH more!
Books Mentioned:
- The Fifth Science; by Exurb1a
- Talking to Strangers; by Malcolm Gladwell
- Tao Te Ching; by Lao Tzu
- What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies; by Tim Urban