https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JykpxetJCYU
All right. So what I’d like to cover today is outsourced cognition. Now, outsourced cognition for me is linked to distributed cognition, which is something that John Vervicki talks about. This idea that our cognition, our ability to think, right, is wrapped up with other people’s ability to think. And by doing that, wrapping up by conversing with people, communicating with them, we create ideas that are bigger than we could have created by ourselves. And fairly simple concept, right? It’s not quite one plus one equals two, but it’s one plus one is greater than one, at the very least. And, you know, maybe not all the time, but maybe on average, you know, when you have people working in harmony and cooperation and good participation with one another, you can end up with a circumstance where the cognition, your ability to solve problems, is greater. And this has been proven experimentally. Now, what I want to propose is that mere distributed cognition is not necessarily the best way to think about it. It’s a good way to think about it. But I think all distributed cognition is in some sense outsourced cognition. And that’s why I’d like to focus on that aspect today. Not not the distribution of the cognition, but outsourced cognition. Why would I make this this distinction between distributed cognition and outsourced cognition? Well, first, let’s start with distributed cognition. And John Brevecky talks about this quite a bit, right? It’s one of his big things like, oh, look, there’s a way in which you can, you know, they’ve done this experimentally. And wire rats brains together, which is kind of horrific sounding and prove that they can solve puzzles better when their brains are wired together. It makes sense. I don’t know how much better. I think that it’s probably not, you know, again, and plus plus one better, right? It’s probably more like 20 percent better, but that’s still better. So and maybe it doesn’t always work like maybe distributed cognition is worse sometimes. Right. I mean, there’s always that designed by committee thing like giraffe is designed by a committee where more minds is not better. Right. And that’s probably because of conflict and competing interests and all this other stuff. But in general, two people working together can solve problems faster and better than you can by yourself. It’s not true for all people, but if they communicate well and they have good intention, it’s certainly true. So I want to I want to take the negative aspect away. Right. Just for the purpose of describing why I think distribute cognition is important, why I think we should call it outsource cognition instead. So let’s just assume, you know, there are benefits to doing this distributed cognition that distributed cognition has a positive valence. Right. It’s positively it’s more prone to positivity than we’ll say negativity. So what I wanted what I want to get through here is working with other people to think through problems if you can communicate clearly. And that’s a big bugaboo. But we’ll cover that in another video for sure is a good thing. Right. It’ll help you and it’ll help them. And you’ll be able to do things that you couldn’t do apart. This is one of the reasons why John Vervicki is so on board with the logos right with with this cooperative discussion technique that he’s using. I don’t I don’t think that’s the only way to distribute cognition. I don’t think it’s the best way to do distributed cognition. It’s certainly interesting. It’s good stuff. Right. But not not a silver bullet. The aspect that I want to focus on on distributed cognition, however, is this idea around. Well, when you’re distributing cognition, a lot of the times you’re outsourcing it to. Right. So one way that we do this is currently people will say things like, well, we have to follow the science. Well, what is the science with science really distributed cognition for all these scientists? And that’s why it’s important that the science is settled or that scientists agree. You know, because we have agreement. We clearly have distributed cognition and we should listen to that. Now, I didn’t participate in that cognition, so it may be distributed cognition, but. Maybe because I didn’t participate, it’s not mine. And if it’s not mine, I’m borrowing it or I’m outsourcing it. Right. I’m outsourcing that cognition. Cognition and taking its result. Now, that’s dangerous. That’s very dangerous because intersubjective agreement, which is what most scientists agree, is not reality. It’s not the truth. It’s not even necessarily a good proxy for reality because there’s things like mass delusion. Right. There’s ways in which it is easy once you get people into a frame for them to come to the same conclusion as you. That happens all the time. If I drag you into one of my frames, I can make you conclude anything I want. And I mean that literally. Doesn’t mean I can drag you into any arbitrary frame, but I can usually drag people into frames if I really want to. Not a big fan of doing that. Right. I like to drag people into frames by way of breaking them out of their existing frames. Right. Which really isn’t dragging them into any particular frame, but at least showing them the limitations of their frame. So this is important because if I’m going to think with you, I want you to know why I’m thinking that way and how I’m coming to my conclusions so that distributed cognition is transparent. Then it’s not outsourced or then it’s not as outsourced. So if you’re coming to a conclusion with me, we are in some sense outsourcing part of our cognition, but not all of it, right, to the other person or people because it can be more than one person. And we can have checks and balances on our own thoughts using others and on other people’s thoughts using the other people and our thoughts. And that’s why distributed cognition is better. But that’s also why it’s outsourced. So we have to be careful when we’re engaging with distributed cognition and outsourcing it at the same time, because if all we’re doing is outsourcing it and it’s not our we’re not in the distribution network of the cognition, we have no intuitive knowledge sense of what’s going on. Now, I talked about intuitive knowledge previously in a couple places, but this is just one on the framing. All right. Framing is important. We need to know one way we know is our intuition. You can have intuition about outsourced cognition. Absolutely. I have it all the time. A lot of people give me these stories and I go, yeah, that doesn’t sound right. Right away. I know right away. Don’t ask me how. It’s the thing I do. I know right away. I’m usually right. Not always right because nobody’s always right. That’s not a thing. So don’t don’t hold people to the standard that can’t exist. Bad idea. I’m not always right, but usually my intuition on bad frames is right because I have all these tools that I’ve built up over years to sense bullshit, roughly speaking, in the technical sense. Right. So when you when you’re not involved in the outsourcing, you have less access to this intuitive knowledge and that puts you at risk. Maybe your intuitive knowledge isn’t very good. Right. It’s not well tuned. Right. In the sense that the poetic is not is not really sharp. You know, in artists, it tends to be. That’s why they’re artists, roughly speaking. But it’s not in most people, especially nowadays. It’s very dulled. Artistic people, we suspect, have no access to poetic information and therefore they don’t have very good intuitive knowledge, which isn’t to say they can’t be intuitive, but they can’t communicate their intuitions well. And I think that’s a problem for that. A lot of people are having is just communicating your intuitions and and understanding your intuitions in your head like by yourself without communicating them. I think that’s a problem. So we need to be careful of this outsource cognition. Outsource cognition is inevitable, though. There is no way that you are going to understand significant chunks of this world without the brains of others. Now, you may object and say, no, no, but you’re standing on the shoulders of giants. You’re reading things written by people in the past. Right. Those things were filtered by other people. There’s lots of distributed cognition going on in a book. First of all, one person, generally speaking, can’t really write a book for the most part. They need editors. They need publishers. Right. Or if they wrote a book, you wouldn’t see it. Like, there’s lots of books people have written that are, I’m sure, are genius that no one’s ever seen because they never got published because you can’t do things on your own. So the very act of reading a book means you’re engaged in distributed cognition from the author, the editors and the publishers. Definitely happened for almost all books, maybe not all books, maybe all books, but certainly almost every book you’re reading. So that’s important to know. So because of that, because of our need to understand the world and the complexity of the world, of nature, of ourselves, right, of others, there’s lots of complexity around. We need to engage in outsourced cognition. We need to trust that the books we’re reading are, you know, have more good than bad, we’ll say, or have something really important that we need to know. And that was gotten out by distributed cognition. Now, when we read a book, we are engaged in distributed cognition with at least the author. So let’s suppose it’s a book written by one author and published by one person. When you read that book, that is distributed cognition. You are outsourcing part of your cognitive power to that other person by engaging with their ideas. That’s happening. It’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So we shouldn’t get upset. We should say, oh, should we cognition bad or outsource cognition bad? It’s a thing that has to happen. So we just need to be aware of it. Once we can pay attention to it, we can say, all right, is this good? Is it leading me in a good direction? We could pay attention to our intuition, right? Does this feel good to me? Does it make me happy? Does it make me angry? Does it make me sad? Does it make me feel, you know, all powerful? That’s not good, by the way. You know, what is that? How is this cognition affecting me in the moment? And can I ask other people about it? Like, what do you think of this book? What do you think of this person’s ideas? What do you think of the news story I’ve heard? What do you think of this headline? What do you think of this white paper? You know, there are methods to further outsource your cognition to see if your intuition is correct. So I meet a lot of people who are very intuitive, whereas I tend to be less intuitive. I mean, I have a lot of intuitive abilities, but I rely more on communication. So I rely very much on logic, reason, and rationality to communicate with people. It’s not always a good strategy, by the way, but it’s the strategy I make work as best I can. So they will often say, oh, I didn’t think there was something right about this. And then what happens quite a bit of the time, actually, it’s rather impressive. I don’t know how I do it, is I will be able to articulate their feeling in a way that they couldn’t. Because their articulation skills clearly are mine. That’s why I’m on YouTube. That’s why I do what I do, because I can. I can articulate things well, or at least better than average. So it’s very flattering when this happens, when they say, oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I felt. That’s wonderful. It makes me feel good. And I hope I’m right, because maybe I’m not. But it seems like I’m right. So these are ways in which the distributed cognition is everywhere. When you ask somebody their opinion, distributed cognition, you’re outsourcing something. And it’s good to do that. But that only provides you with intersubjective truth in the moment. And that intersubjective truth is not truth. It’s not absolute truth. It may or may not be real. There’s lots of ways in which the flat earthers have told themselves that flat earth theory is viable. There are ways in which it is, by the way, because wherever you’re standing on Earth, it’s relatively flat. You know, you don’t need… You can use flat earth to get rockets off the ground. The math is a little different, but it can be done. So there’s all sorts of ways in which distributed cognition can go wrong or lead us astray. That’s what you have to be aware of. You just have to be aware. Distributed cognition, outsourcing your cognition is inevitable. You do it all the time in lots of ways you’re not aware of. Once you become aware of it, hopefully, I believe, that you’ll be able to not only engage with it better, but also use your intuitive knowledge and other people to do better distributed cognition, to understand outsourced cognition better. And you can go back and look at some of my other videos and then fit that in. Like, how am I using this for sense making? What sense making is being given to me that I’m sort of just accepting without questioning it? Right? Like, oh, is this outsourced cognition that I should have taken a look at? Do I listen to CNN? Probably not, by the way. Or if you do, you should just assume everything they say is a lie. You’ll be right more often than you’re wrong. That’s just a statistical verifiable fact, by the way. I can do that math if you’d like, but I don’t feel like it. I think you can do it yourself. The number of times they contradict themselves is roughly the number of times they’re wrong. That’s going to be well over 50% all by itself. Has been for years, by the way. You didn’t notice. Neither did anybody else. Fair enough. But it happened. This is important. Or maybe you did notice, but you knew something was wrong, but you didn’t know how. Yes, so did everybody else. Twenty years of declining news engagement sort of proves that for 20 years people have known something was wrong. Maybe they couldn’t articulate it. There’s a way in which outstretched cognition is pernicious, but is sensed by us. And we vote with our feet. And that’s a good case. In the case of the media, declining, watching viewership for 20 years, good indication that something was wrong 20 years ago, and people noticed it, and they didn’t know what it was. They didn’t articulate it. Maybe they couldn’t. Fair enough. They got this intuitive sense, and they took off. And they went elsewhere for their information. That could be good. That could be a bad thing. But it was indicative of a problem that’s been long ignored for too long, I would say. So this distributed cognition, outsourcing of your cognition, is everywhere. Everywhere. When you ask somebody, hey, what do you want to eat? Again, not a bad thing. We need it. We just need to be aware of it so that we can adjust it and we can understand our participation, our role, our responsibility. You can take things for granted that other people say. You have to put your trust somewhere. You can do that. That’s not a problem. I’m not saying don’t do that. I’m saying be careful when you do that. And be careful what you do it about. There’s plenty of people in this world that can be trusted with certain things and not other things. I would say that’s all the people in this world. But maybe it’s not all. But it’s close enough that you should just assume it’s all and go with that. There are ways in which I trust some of my friends with certain things and not other things. That definitely happens. Some of my friends are completely untrustworthy with anything. That also happens. You have to know that. And your outsource cognition is one of those things. Would you trust this person with 1 million, with all of your possessions? Maybe you shouldn’t trust their opinion on something. Or maybe you shouldn’t believe them when they’re spinning a very complicated or complex story. A good sign that somebody’s enchanting you is the complexity level of the story. If it feels right, but you can’t quite get your head around it, maybe it’s okay. Maybe it’s not. It’s worth engaging with. I really just want to give you a sense. You’re doing this, you’re outsourcing your cognition constantly, so you need to keep your eyes open. Be vigilant. Pay attention to what’s going on in your head. Don’t trust yourself entirely, because you’re not entirely trustworthy. You don’t know what you’re up to, to quote Jordan Peterson, roughly paraphrasing. But you do have tools, and you can hone those tools. I usually do this. I encourage people to meditate. Why? Because it can get you in touch with yourself. I like John Vervecki’s meditation series. I think it’s great. I think you should probably watch at least the lessons, if not the sits. That can help you. I think body scans help. Mindfulness type practices help, although I’m not a fan of the mindfulness movement. Like John Vervecki, I’m a little skeptical on it. But it’s better than nothing. You don’t want to get wrapped up in it, because you can. You don’t want to be too inside your head. You might become an artist. Then you could draw. I can’t. So that’s what I want you to be aware of. You have tools here. There are things here you can pay attention to. There are things here you can do. If this isn’t clear. And this is wrapped up in frames and framing. What cognition am I outsourcing? What frames am I taking for granted? If this isn’t clear, let me know in the comments. Like, subscribe. I’m trying to grow the channel a little bit more. I need to get over 300 subs so that Odyssey will take all my content and mirror it for me. So I’ll have to enter it in slowly, one video at a time. And I’m trying to help you, and I’m trying to help you to help others. That’s still the goal. So I need these ideas to be clear. And if they’re not clear, I’ll do more videos. I’ll do more videos on the same topics. I don’t mind if I can. Maybe I can’t. Maybe I can only make it so clear. But I only know with feedback from you. I’m on the Discord servers. I’m on Wiccan for Meaning Crisis. I’m on the Bridges of Meaning Discord server. I’m on my own Discord server. So I’m out there on Discord. I’m available on Clubhouse. We do a Meeting Mondays every Monday at noon Eastern. That might be changing. But for now, that’s what it is. There are some recordings online. I’ve got YouTube videos on here. I’ve got YouTube video with Andrew with the bangs. I’ve got videos with Chris Petcow. I’ve got videos with Paul VanderKlay. And I’ve got at least one video with Grail Country. Great stuff. So engage with my ideas. Ask me questions. Put stuff in the comments. I know which direction to go in, what things are landing, which things aren’t. Catch me up on the Discord servers. Reach out to me there, wherever you can find me. Hopefully, if we can get this stuff understood better by more people, they can pay better attention to it. And we can make it better for everybody. That, I think, is the goal. That’s the thing that we need to do. That’s the thing that we can do. We can exemplify the things we want to see in the world. Hopefully by making ourselves better people. And other people will see us making ourselves better people. Get curious. They’ll be like, hey, how do you do that? We can give them some tools. We can point them at a YouTube channel, maybe. We can get them engaged with Jordan Peterson, with John Breveke, with whoever resonates with them that is on this path of wisdom. And that’s a good thing. And the thing that enables me to participate in this way with you all, and for you to participate with me, is basically the thing that you’re giving me that I value the most, which I’m very grateful for, which is your time and attention.