The Pro-Hoss Discussion: The Primitive Mind Versus the Higher Mind

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In part what makes someone pro-house is that they're agreeing on a certain method for discussion. It involves debate, logic, reason, evidence, and that's what ties you together with these people. So bring this back to the sort of primitive mind versus higher-mind idea. Yeah, I think it's more like, what does the primitive mind do when it's on a collective scale? And it's when it's the primitive mind mentality, that middle school tribal mentality gets a hold of a whole group.

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What's wrong with society? And what can we do to fix it? Centuries ago, a person's grandparents lived in a world that was basically identical to that person's world; but what are the implications of living in a time when the rate of technological change is such that our grandparents' world was almost nothing like ours, and ours will be almost nothing like our grandchildren's? How do Tim's concepts of the "primitive mind" and the "higher mind" map onto System 1 and System 2 thinking types? What thinking styles exist along the spectrum from primitive mind to higher mind? Why are there either lots of Nazis or virtually none at all? Are there more "golems" or "genies" in the world right now? Are the American political left and right wings just equal but opposite groups, or are there significant asymmetries between them? How does social justice activism differ from "wokeness"? What is "idea supremacy"? Does liberalism need to be destroyed and rebuilt from scratch (perhaps as something else entirely) or merely repaired and revamped? Is illiberalism the biggest threat facing the world right now — bigger even than AI, climate change, etc.?

Tim Urban is the writer/illustrator and co-founder of Wait But Why, a long-form, stick-figure-illustrated website with over 600,000 subscribers and a monthly average of half a million visitors. He has produced dozens of viral articles on a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to social anxiety to humans becoming a multi-planetary species. Tim's 2016 TED main stage talk is the third most-watched TED talk in history with 67 million views. In 2023, Tim published his bestselling book What's Our Problem? A Self Help Book for Societies.

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