What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

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what’s important is holding beliefs that generate the best kinds of survival behavior (whether or not those beliefs are actually true). a set of coded instructions for how to be a successful animal in the animal’s natural habitat (the coder is natural selection). Altogether, the media and social media perpetuate the narrative of Republicans vs. Democrats, right vs. left, Us vs. Them, and exacerbate the polarization. the ladder (of truth seeking) seemed to me to have a massive gap between levels 1 (Scientist) and 2 (Sports Fan). I'm also not sure that most scientists would fit the bill as a scientist. We need to stop the Primal thinking and strategies of both far-right and far-left, and we need a lot of awareness and courage to do so. Denying free speech and science is not productive for progress, so we need to speak up when we see people doing so. Criticizing scientific approaches is one thing, every research method has flaws and areas of improvement, but claiming that science as a whole is an oppressive tool we need to dismantle is too radical. We should also move away from the cancel culture because it only polarizes society more since people start being afraid of saying what they truly think, and thus the only opinions we hear in public are either far-right or far-left. And cancel culture also ruins the lives and careers of people - what they think is only one aspect of who they are. After all, if you’ve ever had a piece of meat, there is a chance you’ll get canceled by your grand-grand children because it’s likely that eating animals will become morally unacceptable (or maybe it won’t, but the point is that our moral views continue evolving, and so many of the things you do now might become a taboo in a hundred years). Instead, let’s turn to Higher-minded thinking - let’s use evidence, data, and diplomatic argumentation to try to seek the truth rather than to seek power and the feeling of righteousness.

I felt truth and accuracy were sacrificed for expressing interesting concepts without the payoff of some important insight gained. Some of the neologisms obfuscated as much as they clarified, and became a bit wearisome after a while - "primitive mind vs higher mind" "golems vs genies" etc the need to engage and not leave our intellectual discourse to extreme viewpoints, to not be silent, even though it might mean some discomfort. We should try and see it as a moral good to encourage people to speak their mind, rather than leave the discourse to the 1% that post. The book glosses over an ivermectin-peddler (Weinstein) and a (partially) Koch-funded institute (FIRE) and hopes that readers don't notice. The anecdotes/data from those sources may still be valid, but from the reader's perspective it feels dishonest to not hang a lampshade on the anti-science/conservative bias that immediately comes to mind. This book lays out several clear and present social trends, describing them not in terms of left and right, or right and wrong, but on an axis of thought vs. fear. I walked away not reveling in confirmation that Trumpism is a huge threat to our country, but that SJF is its doppelgänger, and I am complicit in supporting it. I am not cheering for my side quite as hard, and see better how well-meaning movements have created a narrative for the Right that is real and valid. Mom was right: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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But due to the evolutionarily recent explosion of literacy and technology, we’ve created a world that this primitive mind isn’t really made for. This is where the higher mind comes in. Our higher minds control our ability to think objectively, analyze the world, and learn from experience. But remember, these are all complex topics with much more nuance than we can go into here. The point that Urban is making is that there are a great number of people thinking on the lower rungs of the ladder, and they seem to have a substantial influence. Human nature is constant – and mostly consistent. It’s when human nature is put through different environments that people’s behavior starts to change.

Human nature is a constant, and when you put that constant into different environments, it produces different behavior. That makes environment the independent variable. And human environments are complicated—they include the physical environment, the surrounding people and cultures, the prevailing beliefs and belief systems, and the laws and rules.” Practice thinking ‘vertically’ about your society, its industries, its cultures, its politics. Slap the Ladder onto all these things and see what they look like. Where do you see high-rung and low-rung psychology or behavior playing out?”sees beliefs as a fundamental part of your identity (and a key to remaining in good standing with the community around you). Go down to the next rung on the ladder and your higher mind is still in control but your primitive mind is having a bit more of a say. Let’s think of this as “thinking like a sports fan”– you know and respect the rules of the game, but you really want your team to win. You’re no longer impartial and you’re subject to the confirmation biases that a first-rung thinker would avoid.

I also wish he would have written more about his solutions. While he's right that we need both awareness of our fallibility and courage to confront it, he gives very little actionable advice on how to become more aware or courageous. This chapter also has very few notes compared to the previous chapters. Which is puzzling, considering that many of the sources he used throughout the book have written about topics relevant to raising awareness and becoming more courageous. For example, Urban cites both Adam Grant and Peter Boghossian earlier in the book, but he doesn't bring up Grant's book about learning how to question your opinions and open people's minds (Think Again) or Boghossian's book on how to have productive conversations with people who disagree with you (How To Have Impossible Conversations). I wrestled internally with how to rate this book. What wins me over is that the book calls itself out on the things about the book that piss me off, which I appreciate. It makes it feel more like a conversation than a presentation, which is nice. So now we have echo chambers – the breeding ground of the low-rung thinker who doesn’t want to have their sacred views challenged. And this homogeneity leads to people becoming more extreme in their views – the hypercharged tribalism we see today. it was more American-centric than I'd expected. Lots of deep discussion of American political events.We need to change the way we think. We live in a world unsuited to the methods and motivations of the primitive part of our minds, but too many people are letting that part of their brain control their beliefs and actions. This has resulted in extreme tribalism, particularly in US politics, which is delaying, stopping, or reversing any positive progress in society. Courage level 3: Go public … Class. Work. Church. Book clubs. Dinner parties. This isn’t an encouragement to become the insufferable person who always brings up politics. But if you’re in a setting where a conversation is happening and your Inner Self is screaming ‘I disagree!’—start saying, ‘I disagree.’ I can almost guarantee that at least some other people in the room will secretly be harboring the same thoughts, and they’ll respect the shit out of you for saying it out loud. You could go even bigger. Start a blog. Start a podcast. Write a book. Tweet a tweet. Spend six years writing a 120,000-word ebook/audiobook. If you already have a platform, start laying your Inner Self on it.”