https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=B75qEXbtQjA
So today I thought I’d try to address framing. What framing is, why it’s important, maybe a little bit about how it differs from mere perspective, and this is gonna be one of many videos on framing because this turns out to be a difficult concept. I’m gonna show you, hopefully in this video, why the real problem isn’t merely the framing, but the fact that we have sort of an oversimplified view of how things work, so we’re not really appreciating the level of complexity that we’re embedded in. So I wanna start with a definition of what framing is. And this is all about how we see the world, or more properly, what’s available for us to see the world with, right? So your framing is bigger than your mere perspective. So you can have the same frame and different perspectives, and that can make a difference. And I don’t wanna get too far into perspective because I can cover that elsewhere. So the framing is what we use to make sense of the relationships between things, and at the same time, how we determine what things are within the space of our awareness. Now the tricky part here is that it’s not just the field of your attention, and what can enter your awareness is also affected by your framing. So if you don’t believe in plants, you won’t see plants, ever. You may think that’s a silly example, but things like this happen. And you can say, oh, well, there are extreme exceptions in neurological conditions, yeah, sometimes, but maybe not so extreme, and maybe not so rare. And that, I think, is part of the problem with understanding the significance of framing. So again, it’s helping you to determine what things are valid in the world, like what an object is, whether or not there’s a chair, but also helping you put that in relation to other things. And that is a reciprocal relationship. It’s a back and forth sort of a thing where neither comes first. They both sort of come at the same time, at least for the purposes of my explanation here. Now, I’ve talked about framing before, right? I have other videos on frames and framing. There’s a video on frames and framing in general. There’s another video on the three frames, right, which I think are important. So if you haven’t seen those, you might wanna check them out. So, well, let’s take some common frames and see how they stand up in terms of our understanding of the world and what might be wrong with them. And I’m gonna cover good versus bad framing in more detail. So I’m not trying to tell you in this video good versus bad frames. If you get some of that out of this, then that’s great. But I’m gonna go into much more detail, I think, in a different video on that. So you could frame the world in terms of politics. And sort of the first problem with that is politics is a low resolution frame to understand anything with, right? It’s just a bad map because it’s only got two things, left and right, or a conservative, Republican, Democrat, liberal, like these are low resolution ways, you know, it’s two buckets, right? It’s low resolution by definition. Jordan Peterson talks about low resolution, right? Not good. And another problem with politics is that, you know, it’s assuming a bunch of things that those groups are coherent, that because you’re in a group, all of the beliefs follow all of the other beliefs, right? That’s the low resolution aspect or part of it, right? And if you try to understand why things are happening in the world and you think that politics is the reason, you’re just gonna end up confused with all kinds of exceptions that don’t make any sense. Now, you could use the same framing, you know, you know, for economics. And it’s slightly better, but it’s very complicated and it doesn’t map, right? So you could say, well, what really motivates people is, you know, what party they vote for. And so the reason why they don’t engage in buying, you know, shoes, you know, to Nikes or something, is because they don’t believe in that sort of thing, right? Because of how they vote. Okay, I mean, you can map things that way. It’s a bad map. And you can go, oh, no, no, no, economics is better because it’s really about whether or not they can make money on those shoes or whether or not those shoes are cheap enough for them to buy that they can save money to buy something else. Those are both ways of looking at the world and looking at people’s motivations for doing things, but they don’t map very well, right? It’s hard to see how economics explains behavior very well because, and I think I’ve talked about this before, if you go with John Nash in Game Theory, for example, he found out very quickly and I don’t think he, you know, I think he figured it out, like, well, this doesn’t really work. You end up doing calculus in your head to buy groceries. I can’t do calculus, I don’t do calculus in my head to buy groceries, it’s absurd. So we’re obviously using a different system. Now the fact that calculus maps it after the fact is interesting, important, significant, and helpful, but it doesn’t explain the world, it only describes the world. And another frame you might use for, you know, how things are going in the world or how to map behavior is sort of what people know, which is really the rationality frame. So it’s a really big problem to use this frame because you could say, well, everybody knows, right, because it’s on the news, and then you realize almost nobody watches the news, right? The news media has been in decline for 25 years. Nobody’s watching, basically. Nobody was watching before and now really nobody’s watching. So their effect is, you know, unless you cast it into politics, all the politicians watch CNN, you know, like, I don’t think so, but also it doesn’t matter to some extent because it’s not working anymore, right? The news is getting louder and trickier because it doesn’t work. So what people know is sort of hard to determine. You don’t know what they know or what they see. Plus, you don’t know how they’re interpreting the data. So if people watch CNN and they think CNN are a bunch of liars, what do they know? Maybe they just know that whatever CNN is saying is wrong in their minds, whether that’s true or not, is not relevant to this discussion, right? You can replace CNN with MSNBC or Fox News or anyone else. And so, you know, you have to have the information sent to you and agree with it and agree with the rationality behind the implications of that information, which relies on a goal, basically. So you need the interpretation and you need the goal and you need the cognitive capacity. So in other words, if you tell somebody, well, look, a comet’s about to hit the earth in six months. And what that means is that we need to spend all of the free capital that we have in the market right now on sending a spaceship up there to blow it up. And they go, no, we need to spend all the free capital right now on doing drugs until the earth gets blown up. Neither of those is irrational or unreasonable, by the way. It depends on your end goal. If your goal is to try to save the earth, even with a low likelihood of success, you’re gonna put your money on the long-term bet. If your goal is to say, well, screw it, we’re probably gonna die anyway, which is actually likely in this scenario. So we might as well just enjoy ourselves, okay? Those are matters of goal and interpretation. And so you can’t rationally figure out what another person is going to do, even if they’re rational. Like that would never work. So the knowledge frame or the information frame or the rationality frame is a better way to think about it, doesn’t work, it doesn’t really map. And you can’t really hope to calculate these things except after the fact. And worse yet, what is it to know? Like we don’t really understand what knowledge is. Do we know only what we’re conscious of? Do we only act on conscious knowledge? Because I don’t think so. And I have a video on your unconscious. Might wanna check that out. Because that affects how we behave. Whether we like it or not, right? There’s an unconscious doing things, right? Helping or not helping our emotional state. All of this is going on in our heads. And we’re not really sure, even though we may think we are, well, we resist it first. Of course I know exactly what I’m up to. We’re not sure what we’re up to, right? Jordan Peterson talks about this. You sure you know what you’re up to? Right, so is everything conscious? And then is knowledge just one thing? Just a set of propositions? So John Breveke talks about the four types of knowing. I’ve got my own model. You can see that here. Four types of information, two types of knowing. But irrespective, I think people confuse knowledge and information. Propositionally, those are words. Those are things people say. They may or may not be true. Determining truth is hard, obviously, right? So I think this is bad framing. I mean, if you read a book on how to farm, that doesn’t mean you know how to farm. Like when you go to farm, it might fail. If you fail to farm, no matter what you know, propositionally, do you know how to farm? I’m not sure. I’m not sure what knowledge means in that context. That’s why I think it’s information. I have all the information needed to farm, right? But there’s another set of information needed in the form of experiential information or participatory information in our model that is also required in order to make it work, in order to implement it, in order to make it happen. There’s a difference between implementation and mere book smarts. And people talk about this all the time, right? Those who can do, those who can’t teach. And often those people who can do something can’t explain to you what they’re doing or how to do, how you can do it better. That happens all the time. Some people are really good at teaching things that they’ve never done. And some people are really bad at teaching things that they do really well. These, this spectrum happens, and everything in between, right? The spectrum happens. So you have to be aware, like what is knowledge? Why is this important? What is rationality? If you don’t know what knowledge is, how do you understand how rationality works? Again, it’s a problematic way of thinking about the world. It’s a problem. These modes of framing all suffer from certain features. They’re descriptive. They’re very good at mapping something in the past. So you can look at the way a vote went and say, oh, well, people voted this way because of their politics. But it doesn’t actually give you a good way to predict the vote, right? Or prescribe how to make the vote go a certain way. It just doesn’t work, like reliably. You just look around at all the efforts and all the time and all the, you know, Frank Luntz spends all this time doing things, right? And a lot of the time, it doesn’t have the intended effect. Let’s not say it doesn’t move the needle, and that isn’t important. Of course it is. But it doesn’t really have the outsized effect that you would expect if the world really worked that way. And granted, a lot of things in the world are, you know, 1% away from being different, right? And so the 1% matters a lot, whether it’s the 1% at the top or the 1% in the middle or the 1% at the bottom. Swaying 1% of a population, and there’s more than one population out there, is a big deal. But these things are descriptive. They’re not prescriptive, and they’re not predictive. And models are of one of those three types, or possibly more than one of those three types. But they can have one of those three, one or more of those three, one or more of those three qualities, right? So that’s important to know. It’s important to understand that. It’s important to embrace that. And then the interesting thing is, all of these things are not only merely descriptive of past events, but they’re not necessarily good representatives of these past events. So you can take almost any event and put it in terms of politics. That’s easy to do. You could say, all right, well, look, the reason why the Congress voted this way or the court ruled this way is because they looked at a poll of people and saw this, right, and that’s what moved them, right? But you can do the same with economics. You can say, oh, no, no, no, the reason why that happened is because economically it became unviable for the courts to rule any other way, right, or for the Congress to rule, you know, to make any other law. Those are valid ways to think about things, but they’re non-exclusive. And I think this is the problem, right? We need to re-enchant the world, right? We need to understand that the world is much more complicated than we’ve been led to believe. We’ve been given these oversimplified narratives about how things work and oversimplified systems for understanding. And then we’re trying to stuff a very big world into a very small box. And all of these things are sort of closed systems, right? They’re all part of a larger frame that you likely didn’t even notice. And you may say, what do you mean? You’re talking about a bunch of different frames, like three different styles of framing. But they’re all based on the postmodern power narrative. Every single frame I outlined is based on the postmodern power narrative, where effectively power comes from above and a single factor determines the majority of the action of the agents involved. So I’ll invoke John Verveckis’ agent arena relationship. Right, that there’s some good framing right there. It just, you have to understand that there’s never one agent in the arena. And then it’s much better framing. There’s no way in which you can reduce everything to politics or economics or knowledge or rationality or whatever, you can’t do it. And you can’t mix and match and apply for whatever reason. I don’t wanna go into the reasons here. I’m gonna talk about bad frames in another video, hopefully. But that’s important to know. It’s important to understand that. It’s important to grasp that concept that when you think there’s one factor that’s moving the needle more than all others, you’re probably in a bad frame. And that’s the postmodern power narrative says that. And what it’s basically doing is there’s a single value, economics, and that determines the majority of people’s behavior. Or there’s a single value, politics, and that determines the majority of the behavior. But it only follows very simply that if you are in a situation where, say for example, there’s a vote and it doesn’t go your way, the economics and the political party have an impact on why that happened. And also what information they had. In other words, what their rationale was, right? What their reasoning. So there’s your knowledge frame. What knowledge did they act on? Did they act on the knowledge of the corrupt official? Or did they act on the knowledge that was given to them, you know, the rosy news by the news? I don’t have a way to determine that. All of those are factors, but they’re not even the main factor, in my opinion. And I think that’s where the problem is. The postmodern power narrative says it’s just power, and then you can cast power as money. You can cast power as information or knowledge. You can cast power as politics. You can. I don’t think any of that maps to anything useful or important. I don’t think that’s how power works. I’ve sort of talked about that before in another video if you wanna check that out. And so I think that’s important, right? You know, effectively the postmodern power narrative is a disenchanted view of the world. It’s a low-resolution, disenchanted view. It’s a small, closed system. All the subsystems within that system, even though it’s a very simple way to understand the world, look, I don’t think the postmoderns were very bright people, honestly. I really don’t. Like, I think they were a little on the dumb side. They stole a bunch of work. They recapitulated a bunch of things. But I don’t think they were all that sophisticated at the end of the day. Yeah, they used big words. But I hang out in Harvard Square and MIT and stuff, and I’m not impressed by big words. I’m just not. It’s just, like, whatever. If you can’t say something simply and clearly, maybe you know nothing about it. That’s my first assumption. I never say, oh, you use big words. You must be important. That’s not how I do it. So it’s a low-resolution, disenchanted view. It creates a small, closed system. It’s not representative of what we see in the world at all, as it turns out. And then people scramble to explain, oh, well, the reason why the vote didn’t go this way, or the reason why the boycott didn’t work, or the reason why people won’t be part of my silly climate change religion, right? They always come up with these exceptions to exceptions to exceptions to exceptions. That’s a good hint. Look, at a certain number of exceptions, maybe you just have a bad map. Like, maybe your description of the world is just insufficient to describe the world in a way that’s useful to you. And that happens. Like, most descriptions are terrible. It’s OK. It’s not a bad thing. But it’s good to notice that that could be the case. So I did want to say a couple words about perspective. Perspective can change without changing your framing. So one way this can happen is you can go, oh, well, there’s a political frame. And the minute you take the perspective of the libertarian or the independent voter, for example, suddenly you can see the world in a new way without changing your framing of politics. That’s true. But again, if you’re in a bad frame, you’re in a bad frame, and all the perspective in the world won’t help you. And so there’s a way in which people trick themselves into believing, no, no, no. The frame is salvageable because I can just add things to it, or perspectives to it, places to stand, ways to look at, places to look from, and sort of revivify it or make it work. But again, you’re really just adding exceptions into the frame and adding detail. And at a certain level of detail, cognitive overload happens. And then it’s not useful for you to know how to act or for you to understand how other people are acting. And so it’s something to watch out for. So perspective doesn’t solve problems. It can create more problems than it solves, at least in that model. So framing is important. We have to pay attention to it and look out for it and understand it and understand the limitations of the frame that we’re using. And look, I don’t think it’s a perfect frame for everything. And I think you need more than one frame to see situations clearly because we need to look at things from more than one level. We can’t not worry about the political future of a country or of the world. But we also can’t only worry about the world from that perspective in that frame because we don’t have that much control over it. The most control you have is local. And so you need to pay attention to the local stuff. So you need to pay attention to yourself, that self-care. You need to pay attention to your family, those are the people that are close to you that can support you when you grow astray, tell you that you’re growing astray, hold you up when you get sick, when you make a mistake, when a bad random thing happens or this bad random things happen. And you need to pay attention to your community because that’s where you’re embedded. That’s where your family’s embedded. Then you can start paying attention to your town or your city, to your state, to your country. And that’s the proper relationships, the same relationship that Jordan Peterson lays out in Maps and Meaning. Of course, he does a far better job than I do. But it’s all right there. And yeah, obviously if you haven’t seen Maps and Meaning, you have to watch Maps and Meaning because it’s fantastic. But that’s what I’m on about when I talk about framing. And I think that when Jonathan Pigeot talks about the world as attention, you’re talking about what’s in your field of awareness that you can attend to. So there’s the framing, there’s the field of framing helps to determine your field of awareness, your field of awareness helps to determine your framing. Those two have a reciprocal relationship with each other. They depend on one another and they shape and change one another. And then that’s what you can pay attention to and you have to direct your attention because it’s slightly smaller or maybe a lot smaller than your awareness. And then from there, you can move that around, that attention around to create the world that you have the most control over, right? You can do the most good in and then that will spread out naturally and you can see the effects at higher levels, at higher frames. I think that’s the proper way to approach things. So I’m hoping that this video on framing has been helpful. It has been probably a year in the making. This is very hard stuff to talk about. Maybe that’s on me, I don’t know, but I’ve been getting a lot of good help with this by watching other videos and talking to people and sort of realizing how other people are seeing things relative to how I sort of take them for granted. And now I’m hopefully being able to express them better. And I know that you are rewarding me by watching my videos and giving me the thing that I value most, which is all about your framing to some extent, which is where you put your time and attention.