What's Our Problem?

Author: Tim Urban

• If every page of The Story of Us covered 250 years of history, the book would be about 1,000 pages long.

• The Agricultural Revolution starts around page 950 or 960, recorded history gets going at about page 976, and Christianity isn’t born until page 993. Page 1,000, which goes from the early 1770s to the early 2020s, contains all of U.S. history.

• It’s natural to assume that the world we grew up in is normal. But nothing about our current world is normal. Because technology is exponential.

• Technology is a multiplier of both good and bad. More technology means better good times, but it also means badder bad times.

• Humans are supposed to mature as they age—but the giant human I live in has been getting more childish each year. Tribalism and political division are on the rise. False narratives and outlandish conspiracy theories are flourishing. Major institutions are floundering. Medieval-style public shaming is suddenly back in fashion. Trust, the critical currency of a healthy society, is disintegrating.

• A.D. is over 2,000 years long, which sounds like a long time, until you realize that humans have been around for over 2,000 centuries.

• Animals are just a hack these outlier genes came up with—temporary containers designed to carry the genes and help them stay immortal.

• Genes can’t talk to their animals, so they control them by having them run on specialized survival software I call the Primitive Mind:

• Philosophers and scientists have been grappling with the “multiple minds” idea for millennia. Plato wrote about a “charioteer” (intellect) that managed the “horses” of rational modesty and passionate insolence. Sigmund Freud’s structure consisted of the “id” (primitive instinct), the “superego” (the conscience), and the “ego” that balances the two with external reality.

• More recently, social psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote about “System 1” (fast, involuntary thinking) and “System 2” (slow, complex thinking that requires effort). Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote about the emotional “elephant” and its rational “rider” which appears to be in control but often is not. Harvard’s Todd Rogers and Max H. Bazerman wrote about the conflict between the “want self” and the “should self.”

• For your genes, what’s important is holding beliefs that generate the best kinds of survival behavior—whether or not those beliefs are actually true.

• The Primitive Mind’s beliefs are usually installed early on in life, often based on the prevailing beliefs of your family, peer group, or broader community. The Primitive Mind sees those beliefs as a fundamental part of your identity and a key to remaining in good standing with the community around you.

• That’s why perhaps the most important skill of a skilled thinker is knowing when to trust.

• Most real-life sports fans want the games they watch to be played fairly. They don’t want corrupt referees, even if it helps their team win. They place immense value on the integrity of the process itself. It’s just…that they really, really want that process to yield a certain outcome.

• Confirmation bias is the invisible hand of the Primitive Mind that tries to push you toward confirming your existing beliefs and pull you away from changing your mind.

• A Sports Fan wants to win, but when pushed, cares most about truth. But it’s as if it’s an Attorney’s job to win, and nothing can alter their allegiance.

• Most of us know the term “Echo Chamber,” and we’ll get to that in a minute—but we sorely lack a term for the opposite of an Echo Chamber. When the rules of a group’s intellectual culture mirror the values of high-rung thinking, the group is what I call an Idea Lab.

• The problem is that inviting some bias into the equation is a bit like closing your eyes for just another minute after you’ve shut your alarm off for good—it’s riskier than it feels.

• An Echo Chamber is what happens when a group’s intellectual culture slips down to the low rungs: collaborative low-rung thinking.

• Even in the smallest group—a married couple, say—if one person knows that it’s never worth the fight to challenge their spouse’s strongly held viewpoints, the spouse is effectively imposing Echo Chamber culture on the marriage.

• This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We

• This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can visualize it using an Emergence Tower.

• This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is

• This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can visualize it using an Emergence Tower.

• Take ants and spiders. Ants are furiously loyal. They always put the team first. The ants I’ve gotten to know in my life have a long list of bad personal qualities, but “individual selfishness” isn’t one of them. Meanwhile, two rival spiders will compete with each other ruthlessly, both entirely self-interested.5 So what’s the deal? Are ants nicer than spiders? No. It’s just that spiders stop doing the emergence thing at the individual organism level, while ants go up a level higher—to the ant colony.

• Early humans were similar to other complex animals—limited to small, tightly knit tribes. But at some point along the way, we figured out how to hack the system. By uniting through shared beliefs, shared culture, shared values, or shared interests, we shattered the previous ceiling on giant size and achieved something other complex animals couldn’t: mass cooperation.

• In case you’re thinking, “I’m a really smart person, so I’m safe from the low rungs,” Adam Grant has bad news for you: “Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.”

• In case you’re thinking, “I’m a really smart person, so I’m safe from the low rungs,” Adam Grant has bad news for you: “Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.” (Grant 2021, 24)