https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=toXbCpNRNmk
Most of the cognitive biases, in fact, there’s a growing argument that a lot of the cognitive biases, confirmation bias, blah, blah, blah, blah, a lot of them are actually versions aspects of the my side bias, egocentrism. I won’t make that argument here. I think it’s a good argument. But let’s say even if it’s only partially true, this is an important point. And Spinoza got this, right? This orientation, self-relevance, how things are relevant to me, right? That sort of fundamental egocentrism, a fundamental way in which you’re prioritizing your perception on the world, right? You can’t reason your way out of that. But Spinoza, the most logical of the philosophers says, no, no, the only thing that will invert the arrow of relevance is love. This is Murdoch’s point. Love is when you recognize something other than yourself is real. Okay, so let’s okay. Let me ask you about that, because I’ve been thinking about the idea of being selfish. Yes. You know, well, psychopaths are selfish, but they also betray themselves. Yes. Because psychopaths don’t learn from experience and they doom their future selves. And so I kind of wonder if that love that lifts you out of this self-orientation, what it does in some sense is that it’s the way you see the world. If you see beyond this narrow selfishness, because I don’t really think there’s any difference technically in me, in me taking care of the multitude of future selves that I will become and me treating you properly. I think your relationship to your future self is ultimately an agapic relationship. And I think that’s the only way you can deal with a lot of empirical research. Okay, so you do you do? Yes. Oh, why the empirical research? Because I think the empirical research shows that like the I mentioned it in the Cambridge talk that I sent you the link. Right? What if you do this? This is one instance among many experiments, you go into a bunch of academics at a university, the people who are supposed to be the best at taking data and processing it, you present them with all the evidence that they should start saving for their retirement right now. Right? And they won’t do it. You come back six months later, they will they will they you ask them at the time. Is this argument a solid solid argument? Great evidence. Yeah, come back six months. Have they changed? Not at all. The behaviors behavioral therapists know that perfectly well. Right? Yeah. But so if you but if you do the following, you say I want you to imagine your future self as a family member that you love and care about, right, right. They will start to save and more importantly, the vividness of that imagery predicts how well that’s so cool. Look, you know, this this program that we worked on future authoring programs. Well, it’s predicated on the idea of developing a love for your future self. So it’s an exercise is in a real sense. It’s like here. And it’s the ethic that’s underneath it. Although this wasn’t particularly conscious in my mind when I built it was knock and the door will open. It’s like, okay, let’s play a game. You get to have what you want. And need. But the rule is, first of all, you have to accept it. And second of all, you have to specify it. And so but let’s just play it as a game. Yeah. If you could if you could envision a future that would justify your suffering, that’s a really good way of thinking about it, justify your suffering. What would that entail? And then people and then I make it practical. It’s like, well, what do you want for an intimate relationship? How do you want to treat your family members? What sort of job or career like I break it into seven practicalities, you know, to nail it down to the ground. And I do. Believe that. See, one of the things we found, we thought, well, what predicts whether or not this works? Because it really works. We dropped the dropout rate of young men at Mohawk College. Fifty percent. It should. It should. Well, it did. Yes. And it had the biggest effect on those who were doing the worst, which is not very common for psychological interventions. But one, the only thing we could find content wise that predicted how well it would work was number of words written. And so my sense was, well, that just was an index, a rough index of how much thought they put into it and how vividly and then it would be. Did they treat their future self with some love like genuinely? And then did they differentiate that? So it wasn’t just an abstract mountaintop conceptualization.