https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=PBU2ptAj-XE
Well, I think there are two different questions. The slavery issue is the very uncomfortable idea that if a parent is supposed to mirror the adult environment that a child will have to get along in, then a person whose children will mature into an arbitrary environment needs to understand that it’s an arbitrary environment rather than being protected from it, right? In order to properly avoid running afoul of the arbitrary authorities in a slave environment, one has to be developmentally brought into how you navigate below the radar, how you play that game. Anyway, you would expect the parenting to look very different. This idea that childhood is a joyous time where you should be free of all of those adult influences is exactly wrong. It’s prep, it’s preparation. Though now if we take this model that I think you and I are agreeing on here about the fact that the, and I like your point here, that there are three stages. You’ve got, I assert my identity independent of the world, then the world and I negotiate over what my actual identity is, and then I’m not an apprentice anymore and I get to be who I am in the adult world having been informed by that process. And you imagine that you’ve got generations now, one and a half of them maybe, for whom the online environment was so compelling and so much the source of most of their affirmation that its rules have become sacrosanct to them. And those rules really do look like, you know, it’s a childish world, right? You join some community of people, you tell them who you are, there are rules about them having to respect who you’ve told them. You know, it is, if I say I’m Pocahontas, who are you to say I’m not? Right? And that in some ways… Well, the answer to that question in the real world is I’m someone you have to get along with in repeated interactions, but that may not be the case at all online. That constraint’s gone. You can just pick up and move to the next community. That’s another thing we should talk about, because another thing that’s happening online is that I’ve detected this recently, is that the online environment is also making everyone acutely paranoid. And I think the reason for that is that everyone… It’s easy for our thinking to go astray. And as we talked about earlier in this discussion, other people tap you back into shape. And you’re surrounded by a kind of random assortment of other people in the real world, because you didn’t select them. So because it’s random, it provides you with what is in essence, relatively unbiased feedback information. But online, you can choose your compatriots. And it’s likely to be the case that at your weakest point psychologically, you choose the least demanding compatriots. And so your craziest ideas are the least likely to be challenged. All right, so there’s so many interesting threads here. One of them, my guess is you and I will fall out in the same place here. But if you give me a choice between a community that believes everything I believe, and one in which people believe very different things, I’m not going to choose the one in which people believe the things I believe, because for one thing, it’s the end of growth. Stop. I want to object slightly. Okay. I’ve had, and you’ve had this experience too, I’ve had the experience of being in an environment where a very large number of people don’t agree with me vociferously. And what I would say is a little of that goes a long way. Even if you’re a courageous thinker, I’m not going to put myself in that category. Even if you’re someone who wants to be able to tolerate dissent, there’s a limited amount of dissent that you actually can tolerate. You are going to seek out an environment where most people agree with you, but some people don’t some of the time. And it’s kind of like listening to music. You’ll like music that’s optimally different from what you are enjoying right now. If it’s exactly the same, it’s boring. If it’s too different, you can’t hear it. There’s an amount of novelty that you can tolerate, but it’s not that large. And so even people who have been trained to look for evidence that disproves their own theories, they’re only going to be able to tolerate a tiny bit of that at a time. It’s too destabilizing. It’s too destabilizing. Well, all right. So I want to link this back up to what you said before about the three stages. So my experience as a scientist is that my most valuable characteristic is the ability to be completely indifferent to the prevailing wisdom on a given point. And I think this is- No personal stake in it. Well, I may even have a personal stake. I may come up with an idea that compels me that it’s probably right, a hypothesis. And I may advance it and have every single one of my peers say, that’s garbage. And my sense is not one of, oh crap, I’ve said something bad. My sense is, well, wouldn’t that be delightful? If I’m as right as I think I am, then the fact that everybody else doesn’t get this makes it even better, right? So my point is that’s not normal. I know that’s not normal and it’s not normal for evolutionary reasons that are easy to understand. It takes a lot of training to accomplish that. Yes, or a developmental environment that rewards it, right? If you have the right experiences- But then again, you said yourself, again, at the beginning of this conversation, think about the preconditions for that is that in order to open yourself up to that sort of criticism, you have to be supported in all sorts of ways. You know, and even so when I’m functioning as a scientist, I am trying to disprove my presuppositions. You know, I’ll test them. It’s like something manifests itself in an experiment. Then I design three or four experiments to see if I can make that effect go away. And I do that because I don’t want to propagate nonsense and I don’t want to pursue nonsense in my own career. But in order to tolerate that, think about how we set up the system is you have to be a tenured professor to do science. Or have the equivalent position in a research lab. But your economic situation is stabilized. Your social status is stabilized. Like you’re protected on 50 fronts and then you can open the door and say, okay, let’s have some novelty come my way. And that’s assuming that you’re at a point where you can tolerate any novelty at all. You know, and more curious, more open, more emotionally stable, more intelligent people are more compelled by novelty and can handle it better. But still, our ability to handle it is pretty low. And we will find environments that mostly reflect back to us what we want most comforting. Well, actually, this is this is fascinating. I wonder if there’s not effectively a budget for discordant interactions. And, you know, if we go back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation, the fact that not only do Heather and I have a great relationship, but we also speak the same language scientifically. So, you know, it’s a kind of across the board sounding board and ability to, you know, I feel no vulnerability there because there’s no place where our world views aren’t compatible. And, you know, I could say similar things about about Eric. So what that means is that my budget for discordant interaction is probably larger when I get to the outside world because I haven’t spent it at home or in the context of family or friends. And you know, you spend it is definitely a budgetary phenomenon. You spend like you produce a unit of psychophysiological preparation for every unit of uncertainty. And the size of that unit of expenditure varies with your trait neuroticism. Because that’s like evolution’s guess at how dangerous the environment would be. It varies with your position in the social hierarchy, because if you’re at the top where you’re protected, the consequence of an error is attenuated compared to what it would be at the bottom. And that’s why social position modulates serotonergic output. So the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more serotonin dampens your negative emotion to uncertain events. And that’s in keeping with your with your actual fragility. Neuroticism determines it. Social hierarchy determines it. Intelligence determines it to some degree, because you’re a more effective problem solver if you have a high IQ. But you do pay for uncertainty, because if something’s uncertain, you don’t know what to do. And so you have to prepare to do everything. And that’s unbelievably costly psychophysiologically. It ramps your cortisol production up and it starts to eat away from future reserves. It’s definitely a budgetary process.