https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bBs0NZsiWfU
I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but you’ve been lied to. No, you have. It’s true. It’s true. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. What the lies are, who told them to you, and why it’s important. Join me. Wow. Well, incendiary title, lots of click beat, really sort of out front opening there. But it’s true. You’ve been lied to. You’ve been lied to quite seriously about a lot of very important things. And that’s what I want to talk about. The things that you’ve been lied to about are probably not what you expect. That’s how good lies work. They go under the radar. Nobody sees them. And I think that’s actually important to realize. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’ve debunked conspiracies twice on my channel. Check out at least one of the videos. I’ll link it here if I can remember. So what are you talking about, Mark? What’s with the quick click bait title? It’s true, though. I think the problem is we’ve largely been sold the bill of goods that has led us astray. And that bill of goods goes something like this. You are a rational creature with amazing capabilities. You can do anything you want. Anything. Anything you can imagine, you can do that. There’s a reason for the things you see around you. They’re all rationally connected. And we can train you to be competent at something. Doesn’t matter what it is. Doesn’t matter what it is. We have a school for that or a way of teaching you that. And once you’ve been taught it, you’ll be good at it. And you’ll be able to compete with everybody else. All of that is false. Every single statement I just made is completely 1000% observably incorrect. Look, evolution is true. What that means, however, is that we can’t all have the same capacities. We can’t all have the same skills. We can’t all have the same abilities. We can’t all learn the same things. We can’t even learn the same way. We know all of this. We know all of this. But you weren’t really told that. Or at least it wasn’t explained to you clearly in a way that you could really get to understand and take to heart and engage with. And I’m sorry that that happened. I think it’s terrible. We’ve told people they’re a lot smarter and they’re a lot more capable than they are. We’ve told people that we can make them good at things. Maybe you can make most people better at most things, but maybe you can’t make them good enough at those things. I don’t know. On the other hand, almost everybody seems to have something they’re just good at. But the other side of that coin is sometimes if you want to be good at something, if your goal is to be like genuinely stand out at something better than average at something, you may have to do a thing that you don’t like. That’s another thing people lied to you about. They didn’t tell you any of this. Why does this matter? Other than just been lied to and deceived. It matters for a lot of reasons because one of the problems with telling people that they are rational is that they assume everybody else is rational. First of all, you’re not rational. We’re just not ruled by rationality. I’m sorry. The science is very good on this actually. People are almost never rational about anything for any length of time. Just the way it is. It’s not to say we can’t be rational. Most of our rationality is about hindsight bias. It’s about counting for something in the past that already happened. In other words, and this is well known, and I ran across it today in a computer science video that Gerald Sussman put out. If you’re into computer science, you don’t know Gerald Sussman. Get some catching up to do there. There’s a channel, Strange Loop. It was from 2011 and he’s basically talking about almost nobody knows anything about programming anymore. Yeah, well, true. He mentioned this. You don’t do the math to figure out how to catch a baseball. You just catch the damn ball. That’s what you do. It doesn’t take rational thought to catch a baseball. You learn it at a sub rational level, at a pre rational level. The way you move is you don’t learn that through rational. You learn through trial and error. There’s nothing rational about trial and error. Trial and error implies non rationality and rationality implies basically some sort of perfected system that you’ve thought through and understand. That just isn’t most of the things you do in your life and most of the things you’re ever going to be able to do in your life because we just don’t know a lot about the world and we can’t know a lot about the world. Most of us can’t know most of anything about the world. Like the amount of stuff people know about the world is vanishingly small when you start digging in, especially if you get into details on things. And that’s the problem we’ve been lied to about this. So we think that not only are we rational and we’re not, so we can’t explain our own behavior most of the time. And that gets us into trouble because then we do things that we didn’t want the consequences for and then we can’t explain them and then we get angry and upset at everybody else and ourselves and we project that onto other people and then we start blaming the rest of the world. And then the double whammy comes in, well, the rest of the world is rational. So why did I fail? Well, the education system did this to me to make me a slave. It’s a perfectly reasonable assumption, irrational assumption and logical assumption if the education system knows you, if the education system has a goal of making you a slave, which it doesn’t seem to. And if it’s rational and if it’s competent, because those are different things, then maybe. But none of those things are true. They’re all provably untrue for the most part. There are exceptions, but not very many. A lot of people are just not good at their jobs. They just suck at them. Just is the way it is. Competence is rare. And some people are competent in one area of their job, but not in other areas of that same job. That happens all the time too, because a lot of people appear to have competence at things that are sort of surprising. And we’re fooled by the outliers. You see Elon Musk or we see Jeff Bezos or we see some person that seems to have a bunch of fingers and a bunch of eyes and has no problem sounding really good at them. Some of this is they’re just articulate, but they have no idea what they’re talking about. Some of it is people are con artists. There are quite a few of those in the higher levels out there in the world. And some of them aren’t con artists, but they’re articulate idiots. They’re very, very smart at some things, but they’re good at fooling you into thinking they’re smart about a bunch of things that they know absolutely nothing about. And that’s good to know. Those people are also lying to you. They’re probably lying to themselves. They don’t know you. They probably don’t care about you. They’re probably not trying to manipulate you personally or even people in general. They’re probably trying to manipulate themselves. And they’re just dragging everybody else along for the ride. That happens a lot with people. If you hang out with people who drink, they’ll often try to get you to drink. Why? Because they want more people to drink with them so they don’t feel as bad about drinking. It’s that simple. If people want to feel articulate, if they want to fake it till they make it, and they realize that faking it feels a lot better when a bunch of people believe you in your faking, they’re going to do that. Fair enough. And look, there’s a point at which you don’t know anything, and so you have to pretend you know in order to get there. You do. But that can go too far. And so we just need to keep that in mind. Because what it means is you don’t know yourself as well as you think you do. The systems that you think are going to protect you or that are doing things in the world probably don’t really have the power that you think or the control that you think. And the things that are happening within them are not intended. That happens a lot, especially in government. You intend to solve the homeless problem. You buy everybody a place to live, and it doesn’t work. That’s happened many, many times in recent history even. It’s an experiment that people regularly embark on when they’re idealists and other people let them because it’s generally cheaper to buy people housing than it is to manage them when they’re homeless. It’s just that they’ll go right back to being homeless on average, so it doesn’t work. And there’s lots of reasons for that. But government often, even though it should know better, and government’s very slow moving and it’s very behind the times, and companies are too. Anything larger than one person doesn’t have the time frame of one person. And so individuals can see things better than governments or corporations for sure. That doesn’t mean they’re right either because again, those individuals may not be rational and may not be competent. You can see the same thing and a competent person will see something different from somebody who has less competence or no competence. A fraudster will see something different from both of them, by the way. They may see an opportunity like an AI to tell people a bunch of things and get a bunch of investment money, even though those things are not possible. These things happen. And yeah, you have been lied to. You’ve been lied to about the rationality of the systems around you, the ability and competence of your education system. We tend to believe that things are much better controlled than they are because we’re kind of told like, oh, we’re given this nice narrative. It’s top down power from above, baby. And so when somebody says something, everybody jumps. Or well, really, there’s this economic frame and these are bad ways to think of the world. There’s a lot going on. understand, you know, very much of it at all are virtually zero. And that’s why we need other people. So the thing you’ve been lied to about is that you can be an individual. You cannot be an individual. That is insane. Actually, sanity is outsourced. So if you were an individual, you can lock yourself in solitary confinement and not go insane. But you know what? I bet you can’t. You can’t sit and stare at a wall for 20 minutes quietly. I bet you can’t. Most people can’t. It’s OK. But that’s part of outsourcing sanity. You need other people. You need to outsource your cognition. This distributed cognition is required to understand things that are outside of yourself. Need multiple perspectives. And while you can switch perspectives to some extent, you probably can’t switch to all of them because you can’t. And you don’t know what they are. You haven’t experienced them yet. And that’s why you need distributed cognition. Because if nothing else, it has perspective. You do not. And it can use them in parallel. Ooh, parallel processing. Humans, that’s distributed cognition. And there are some downsides for sure, right? Because distributed cognition makes bigger mistakes because it’s more people. But you can’t do without it. So it’s not optional. You need to outsource your sanity. You need to outsource your ability to understand something to other people, groups of people, right? You need to do these things. This is why book clubs work and are so restorative, informative for people. Because they get together with a bunch of people and they see stuff in the text they never would have seen otherwise. And it happens fast. So look, you can say, oh, I can see all that in the text. Yeah, if you read the book 10 times over 10 years. Or you can do one book club in a few months. Up to you. I’m just saying. Like one’s way more efficient and probably better for you. And the other one is stupid and unnecessary. But yeah, you can do stupid and unnecessary things. You don’t have to be rational. You’re probably not anyway. This illusion that we give ourselves and the things that people and systems and governments are telling us, and they’re not doing it on purpose consciously, right? They’ve been fooled too. I think we’re all sort of living in an illusion from one another because we outsource our sanity whether we like it or not. Right? That things are competent. That things are rational. That when the government does something, it knows exactly what that result’s going to be. And it always gets the result it expects. That almost never happens. Almost everything the government does is a complete disaster for the initial goal. That’s just the story of creating of laws. And it takes a long time for the government to figure this out. So in the US, prohibition went on for 10 years before they figured out this is never going to work. We need to stop being stupid. Yeah, it took you 10 years to first of all, you shouldn’t have passed the stupid law in the first place. Any idiot would have known better. And yet, not the idiots running the government at the time. Right? And then 10 years, really, it took 10 years to back out of that mistake. It was a catastrophe from day one. No one was following it. People were going blind and dying of methanol poisoning and all kinds of things. A catastrophe. The mafia was all over the place. It almost caused a second civil war. Wow, what a disaster. Criminals got super wealthy. The Kennedy family made all their money rum running. And look, good can come out of bad. Granted, it was only Jack invested in Kennedy’s were not good, but that’s okay. Jack did enough good. This is the lie. These things are the lie. You can’t just do anything you can imagine. Sorry, I can’t just train you to be a good software engineer. Sorry, maybe, maybe you can be trained to be a good software engineer. I don’t know. But a lot of people can’t. They can’t ever be a good software engineer. It doesn’t mean they can’t write code. It doesn’t mean they can’t write decent code, but they can never be a good software engineer. Or maybe they can never be a good software architect, no matter how many years they have in the field. Because their cognition is just not built that way. Or maybe it’s capped off long before you get to the level of cognition you need to be an architect. I have no idea. I suspect both are true, by the way. But, you know, can’t prove it. Don’t need to. Obviously, observably true. Many software architects and many companies are… They can’t even code. I wouldn’t even call them programmers. They’re just terrible. And they certainly don’t understand the abstract concepts needed to be a software architect. Or an architect of anything, really. Because architecting, finding things in the future, designing things, is some set of cognitive skills apart from all your other cognitive skills, somehow. At least as near as I can observe. And I think it is observable. And I think that’s been written about. And I think those people are right. So, you’ve been lied to. That’s true. You need other people. You need a community that you can rely on. You need to be together with other people. You need to be able to engender cooperation with others. You need to submit to the fact that you cannot do it alone. You need to submit to the fact that even though there will be mistakes and you will not achieve the personal perfection in your head, which may or may not be correct, by the way. It may or may not be as good. That things can be better than you can imagine. That’s for sure. They can also be a lot worse than you can imagine. That’s also for sure. Cooperating with others, submitting to the mistakes that will be made along the way that will frustrate you because you will see them and the group will not, even if that group is just the other person you’re working with, is hard. But it is really good for you. It’s really good for the world because you don’t know what’s possible. No idea. None. There are amazing things that have happened because of collaboration, because of cooperation, because of the ability to stop competing with people. Although no problem with competition. A little healthy competition is good. Problem defining healthy competition, granted, not that hard for me, but sorry if it is for you. That can manifest things. That are valuable to everybody. It’s way harder to do that as an individual alone by yourself. Because other skills need to be brought together and you probably don’t have them all. Even if you did, you can’t do them all at once. So it’s very inefficient even if you can do them to do it that way. And inefficiency, look, these things cost. Everything costs. Time is a factor. So yeah, I mean, what you’ve been lied to about is basically how much humility you need. I can tell you one thing about that. You need more. You need more humility. That’s what you need. That will help you to cooperate with other people. That will help you to submit to the right authorities, to get things done that are important to you and to everybody else. You can’t change the world, but you can change yourself. And the best way to change yourself is to be humble, because being humble engenders in you the idea that change is a thing that you should go through. That you can get better, because if you already know it all, you can’t learn more. But that’s your fault. The only one holding you back is you. And largely, when we blame these other systems that are rational and competent, the government’s supposed to look out for us and all this other nonsense, the education system is supposed to tell me what I need to do, then we cut ourselves off from our own potential, from our own possibility to manifest in the world. And look, some people are unlucky. It’s not going to work for them. I get it. But you don’t have a better answer. I’m going to state that unequivocally. I can prove that you don’t have a better answer. You just have to do the best that you can do, because that’s the best that you can do, no matter how disappointing it turns out. And if it’s not struggle, you’re doing it wrong. And it takes humility to realize that you should be struggling. I don’t care how good you are at something. It should be a struggle. I don’t care how long it takes you. It should be a struggle. I don’t care if it’s instant for you. It should be a struggle. And maybe not every piece in every moment. But doing the good in the world is a struggle. It’s way easier to do evil in the world. Way easier. And sometimes that’s how we do it. We do it by doing nothing. And we come up with excuses to be angry and resentful. We can blame other people. We can blame things that didn’t go our way. We can blame other people for those things. We can blame people who are judging us. We can blame the judgment of the world. The world is judging you. That’s what evolution is. You can be on the wrong side of Darwin. Darwin’s going to judge you to some extent. Like, yeah, if you wipe yourself out, you’re done, kid. You got judged. Congratulations. Could be anything. Could be anything. And that’s the problem. We’re not humble enough. We don’t have enough humility. And that’s what you’ve been lied to about. You shouldn’t be so hubristic. You shouldn’t think you know this stuff or could know this stuff. Or even when you have a level of expertise that you do know this stuff. I still watch videos from very smart people about software engineering. Because there’s so much to learn. And I know a lot about software engineering. There’s so much to learn. You know, eight programming languages, there’s so many programming languages. Eight is not that high a number, although it’s a lot higher than most software engineers. There’s so much to learn. And that’s good. Because it gives us something to do. Something to struggle for. So that we can enact the good. And I think it’s important to look towards the good. And I appreciate that you watch my videos. Because I think that’s good. Especially because it’s giving me the thing that I value the most. Which is your time and attention.