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

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Keep this ladder in mind; we’ll refer to it in the next sections as we look at the causes and implications of this troubling trend. Where It All Went Wrong Now let’s have a look at the political left. It’s hard to argue with the basics of the liberal social justice movement – striving to right the wrongs of an unequal system has to be a good thing. The problem comes with what Urban calls Social Justice Fundamentalists. These thinkers see society as run by a fundamental social force – patriarchy or heteronormativity, for example – that’s as present and undeniable as gravity. A Social Justice Fundamentalist wouldn’t ask, Did racism happen here? They’d ask the loaded question, How did racism happen here? 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. Alas, this seems to me to not take seriously how deep such problems go. What you “really think” is substantially created by your social world, and need not come from your high mind. So encouraging everyone to ignore social context and just say what they “really think” just isn’t obviously going to induce a world dominated by high minds. Nor does it have much chance of actually happening.

The thesis is clearly laid out and is compelling. That is, there is more to politics than a simple right/left divide. There is a full matrix, with progressive and clear thinking on each end of the spectrum, as well as emotionally driven argumentative silliness on each end of the spectrum. I totally agree! It makes sense. And the illustrations are a lot of fun and fully inspired. Tim lays out good examples of this thinking, and he even touches on the recent downward slide of the Republican Party into the emotionally driven argumentative ridiculous stuff that we have all witnessed since about 2015. I thought he was brave for going there, as I feared it might alienate half of his readership to do so. Now, both of these fundamentalist movements are examples of lower-rung thinking. This kind of thinking is unscientific – there’s no room to test hypotheses or welcome alternative ideas. It also encourages echo chambers. Members who don’t accept the core beliefs are shunned from the group. Finally, it’s morally inconsistent. Discrimination is given different weight for individuals from different social or racial groups.The intro starts with an argument about technology becoming more risky as it becomes more powerful, and then doesn't really talk about it again as far as I can see Have you ever seen a moth flying uselessly into a light? Stupid moth, right? Well, what’s causing the moth to do that is its primitive instincts – an urge to fly toward the light of the moon. Unfortunately for the moth, its instincts haven’t caught up with changes in the world – the relatively recent introduction of many nonmoon lights. 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.

While the world might feel particularly divided these days, Urban still has hope. To form an upward spiral out of the low-rung-thinking bog, we need 2 things, he suggests: awareness and courage. When you apply this ladder to the world, you can start looking at divisive problems in terms of how people think, instead of what they think. Whether the issue is climate change, abortion, or whatever drama is going on in politics, if you look at it in terms of what rung the person is operating on, things start to make a lot more sense. There's a tiny typo in a quote from a historical figure that drove me disproportionately nuts (The quote from Peggy McIntosh). It should be "status" and not "statues."

From the creator of the wildly popular blog Wait But Why, a fun and fascinating deep dive into what the hell is going on in our strange, unprecedented modern times. humble (the humility of the high-rung mindset makes your mind a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom). In contrast, the low mind prefers “echo chambers” and is hypocritical, overconfident, oversimplifies, dislikes skepticism, uses fallacies, has confirmation bias due to motivated reasoning, prioritizes conformity and loyalty, treats ideas like sacred objects, sees those who disagree as bad people, and divides the world into us vs. them. Let’s apply our ladder metaphor to extreme political views. It’s easy to look at fundamentalist attitudes and talk about the far right or far left, but a better way is to think of them as lower left, or lower right on the ladder – it’s how they think, not what they think.

I broadly agreed with all the ideas in the book - including the arguments against social justice thinking, so perhaps that is part of the reason that I didn't rate the book more highly. And perhaps that's unfair? As the authors of The Story of Us, we have no mentors, no editors, no one to make sure it all turns out okay. It’s all in our hands. This scares me, but it’s also what gives me hope. If we can all get just a little wiser, together, it may be enough to nudge the story onto a trajectory that points toward an unimaginably good future.” The most important concept from the bookis what Urban calls “the Ladder.” The Ladder is a 4-rung, vertical framework showing that how we think is more important than what we think. what’s important is holding beliefs that generate the best kinds of survival behavior (whether or not those beliefs are actually true). sees beliefs as the most recent draft of a work in progress, and as it lives more and learns more, is always happy to make a revision (a signal of progress of becoming less ignorant, less foolish, less wrong).

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The first part of our solution is awareness, and the gateway to awareness is humility… The most important thing for us to remember is that we do our rational and moral thinking with a not-that-smart tool that was designed to keep an ancient primate alive. Staying aware of this can help us be our wisest selves and reach our potential… So the first call to action is: Put your own mask on before helping others.” Tim encourages us to try to be High-Rung thinkers, and here are some takeaways I found the most important: The next three chapters and two interludes lay out his thinking on Social Justice Fundamentalism (SJF), which is his term for wokeness. Far from being today's version of the Civil Rights Movement, SJF is a radical political ideology inspired by Marxism and postmodernism. It is hostile to liberalism, viewing it as just another tool that white people have used to oppress people of color. Despite its obsession with eliminating racism, in many ways SJF is itself racist. And perhaps worst of all, SJF has infiltrated many of the institutions that society relies on to function (universities, journalism, and some government agencies, to name a few) causing them to act in some truly loony ways, and making much of the non-SJF population lose trust in them.

I wanted to read this one very badly. But I didn't want to start it w/o taking a look at the 1st book by the same author ("Wait, but why") & it had put me off immediately - I've found it sometimes too obvious, sometimes oversimplified, and I had an impression it tries to be funny & smart, while failing in both these depts. Oh, well. Update 2: FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) which this book cites for a lot of its data in chapters 5-7, is funded in large part by the Koch brothers and other right-wing foundations (read https://www.alternet.org/2016/09/what... for more details). Hence it seems that Tim Urban has fallen into the very trap that he is warning us for in this book - he has joined one side of the tribal battle on "free speech". While I still can recommend reading this book, I would take chapters 5-7 with a large grain of salt and view it as a cautionary tale that just knowing about these problems does not stop you from falling into the very same trap yourself. Zealot — We are no better than religious zealots, refusing any dissenting information. We hold on desperately to our beliefs and defend them viciously. No amount of facts or differing opinions will change our mind. forms hypotheses from the bottom up and follows evidence wherever it takes you (default position on any topic is ‘I don’t know’). In a way, we’re all not much different from a moth. We all have a primitive mind, concerned with our primitive and immediate urges – eating, reproducing, and surviving. This mind has always been there, and it’s done a pretty good job of keeping us alive up until now.One precaution about the book: you, as a reader, need to remember that the concepts and distinctions the author presents are just thinking frameworks for simplifying the analysis. No one is ultimately just a Higher or Lower thinker, and there is no binary High or Low mindedness in our brains. Someone might be a more Higher-minded thinker than you on one topic, and you might be more Higher-minded on another. You might be a Low-rung thinker about one topic now, and maybe after some research, you will understand the complexity of the situation and will start being more Higher-minded. And the same applies to the SJF grouping that Tim defines - it’s useful to characterize the movement, but don’t fall into the trap of characterizing anyone who has a far-left view on a topic as a cultish radical Social Justice Fundamentalist - maybe once you start talking to them, they actually have valid evidence and arguments. Think about how people think rather than what they think. a set of coded instructions for how to be a successful animal in the animal’s natural habitat (the coder is natural selection). 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. 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.”