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A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .
Source of the Meaning Crisis: Contradictions Between Societal Progress and Global Crises
Summary:
The current societal malaise and victimhood culture are attributed to a complex interplay of factors, including a disconnection from the positives of societal progress and the simultaneous awareness of global crises like climate change.
The author explains that while the world is objectively getting better, the incessant exposure to negative news triggers hyper-vigilance and threat response, leading to a cognitive dissonance between feeling alive and needing to practice triage. This contradictory experience fosters a sense of confusion and psychological distress in individuals, creating a state of being 'crazy making.'
Transcript:
Speaker 2
You because you wrote a book recently called recapture the Rapture, which is trying to address the seeming sort of psychological ills of our society. Can you try and sort of summarize what your thesis is on why it seems like victimhood culture has become so dominant? Disconnection, general malaise people are having, is it, is it a function of, you know, fear of the future? We've been hearing, you know, doom and gloom from climate change and all these other growing risks? Or is it something more fundamental going on inside a psychologically that is giving rise to this? I mean, I think without a doubt, like, what on earth is going wrong these days? And why are so many people sad, suffering, disconnected?
Speaker 1
I think that's just a massive, multi-variable situation. But one of the things that I mentioned in that book was just things are getting exponentially better, and things are getting exponentially worse at the very same time. And trying to map to intersecting, contradicting, overlapping, exponential curves. Confusing. Back as the imagination. I mean, with the whole three-body problem in physics, which I know you must be deeply aware of, everybody, it's very hard to be like sun and moon and stars, you know, like you get you. Panotales, ah! Yeah, and we are eight billion bodies, all with volition, you know, and pesky human nature. So trying to map what is going on as things are simultaneously Stephen Pinker and Hans Rosling, and all the lot of like, if it bleeds, it leads, you've been massively misled. The world is safer, better, cheaper, more prosperous than it's ever been. Ta-da. And you're like, oh, thank God. And then you click over to polar bears and, you know, throw it to Glacier and all of these things, you're like, oh, no, which is it? Right. So as we have that initial experience, which naturally triggers hyper-vigilance and threat response, oh, shit. Right? Are we coming alive? All this wonderful stuff. My own personal life, my personal growth, my relationships, my career, where am I coming alive? That's the inquiry I'm in. Or are we staying alive? And I need to be practicing triage, right? And in a threat response and toggling back and forth between those two is crazy making.
#11 - Jamie Wheal — Tackling the Meaning Crisis
Win-Win with Liv Boeree
The danger, and you see it often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like – so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise. No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time. Always asking, “Why is this happening?” and expecting there to be a rational answer. Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened.
The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a neverending chain of absurdity, confusions, messy relationships, and imperfect people.
Does Not Compute
collabfund.com
People have more accurate models of people in close proximity than they do of people far away (socially)
Summary:
People have a good understanding of their friends and are accurate in predicting their behavior.
This is shown by their ability to accurately predict election results based on their friends' voting preferences. However, biases arise when people are asked to judge unfamiliar populations.
These biases can be attributed to the structure of their personal social networks.
The more biased their social networks are, the more biased their estimates of the general population will be.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Oh yeah, after seven years of research on this paper, that people actually have a quite a good idea about their friends, family, acquaintances, people that they meet on every day basis And then we'd whom they need to cooperate with, learn from or avoid. And that they're actually not that not as biased as a traditional social psychology would like us to think. And we see that because when we ask people about their friends, we see that this predicts societal trends quite well. So in one line of research, we asked a national probabilistic sample of people to tell us who their friends are going to vote for. We average those things across the national sample and got better prediction of election results than when we asked people about their own behavior. And this would not have happened if people were biased in reporting their friends. They must have told us something that must have given us information that's accurate and that's goes beyond their own behavior in order for that to happen to predict the elections better. And by now we saw that in four further, so we five elections all together in the US 2016 in France, the Netherlands, the Sweden and US 2018, and we hope to predict again 2020. So things like that tell us that people are actually pretty good in understanding their social circles and then the apparent biases show up when people are asked to judge people that They don't know so well. So when I'm asked to tell you something about people in another state or another country or people from another socioeconomic cluster, which I don't know well, then I am likely to have Some biases. But these biases we show can be explained by what I know about my friends. So if you ask me something like that, I will really try to answer your question honestly. And to do that, I will try to recall from my memory everything that I know about our social my social world. But you know, if I'm surrounded by rich people like here on the East side of Santa Fe, it could be very difficult to imagine in what poverty people can live in other parts. And so even if I'm trying my best to recall, you know, the most poor person I know, I might never recall such poverty that actually exists in the world. And when asked about the overall level of income in the US, I'm likely to overestimate the overall level. And similarly, if you are poor, you're people who are poor might have problems imagining the wealth of really rich people and they will typically underestimate the wealth of the country. So okay, so let me let me summarize this. So this piece actually suggests that people are not that biased when it comes to judging their immediate friends. They have a lot of useful information about their friends and pretty accurate. The bias is show up when people are asked about other populations that they don't know so well. And they can be mostly explained by the structure of their own personal social networks. The more biased your social networks are, the more biased your estimates will be about the general population.
Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-Making
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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