https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0wO_2P1NhPM
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. Today what I’d like to talk about are observations and why they don’t necessarily matter and by observations not necessarily mattering I mean most of them. So again as always these are my definitions I use them I like them they’re cool they work for me if you don’t like them check them out or maybe modify them for your own use. So why am I on about observations? I think the problem with this is we run into the situation where people make an observation and it’s one of these things that maybe we put a little too much faith in. They can make you sound intelligent and then you can make intelligible predictions about the world but stating something like the grass is green doesn’t make you smart and I know that’s hyperbole but we kind of treat people this way sometimes right we revere them for the things they found the observations they’ve made but sometimes these things are obvious right you’re like kept an obvious moment where it’s like well duh but sometimes they’re not obvious to you even though they are obvious and you think oh well that person saw something I didn’t therefore they’re a genius and we really do do this in our heads quite a bit. So an example of this might be you know capitalism enables greed which is a correct statement nothing wrong with that statement that is true. Unfortunately all economic systems enable greed because the greed has nothing to do with the economics or the money or the monetary system or how it’s managed or what laws are put in place greed exists in people that’s where it exists you’re not gonna get rid of it by changing a monetary system because the monetary system has a limited amount of control over people you can reduce greed maybe maybe not you can try to squeeze it out maybe maybe not but the greed’s in the people not gonna happen. So making conclusions from something like well capitalism enables greed is dangerous the reason why it’s dangerous is because it is obviously true across all economic systems and it implies that the capitalism and the greed are connected when in fact they’re not and a lot of people don’t make the statement that capitalism enables greed they make seem that it causes greed it’s certainly impossible that’s impossible it may seem obvious right it may seem obvious we may assume it’s obvious it may be intelligible to us it may make total sense that that is true but it’s it’s not true in order for that to be true the other economic systems would have to not make greedy people or produce greedy people or have greed in them but of course they do so to the extent that capitalism makes people greedy all monetary systems all systems of of money movement of economics of whatever because the greed’s not in the system the greed’s in the people so the fact that if you only apply it to capitalism means that it’s a obvious and be unimportant because if it doesn’t matter what system you’re talking about because the greeds in all the systems why are you talking about it like why are you stating the grass is green why are you stating capitalism enables greed what’s the point and we get lost because you can spin a pretty good story you say aha if we could just get rid of the capitalistic system the greed will go away which is again obviously a false statement but we’re not pointed at that the person telling us this story is not pointing us at that they’re telling us the story to point to something else on purpose right and it’s usually something like well if you give me the power I’ll enact a system that doesn’t have greed well that sounds great and to realize you have to give them the power that doesn’t sound so great maybe you don’t want to do that maybe they’re the greedy ones a lot of people psychologically project so these obvious things lead to these bad axioms these bad starting points for arguments and we’re very easily fooled by a good story right we we really like an easy narrative an easy explanation or a narrative with a pleasing level of intelligibility so for more on that just see my video on conspiracy theories that’s what I talk about right intelligibility is more important than control to us right because as long as we can make predictions we feel better or at least as long as we can make predictions about things that could kill us and how to avoid that that’s usually good enough and so you know there’s other ways that this is used just to bring up another example though the government is corrupt yeah no kidding like almost everything becomes corrupt like you’re not saying anything it’s just an observation that’s obvious it’s an obvious observation that doesn’t mean anything all governments are corrupt all forms of governments are corrupt why because people are corrupt people become corrupt they don’t even start out corrupt that’s the worst part it’s like oh if we could just divide the world into corrupt and non-corrupt people problem solved but people change over time and people become corrupt and systems become corrupt when you don’t revivify them or when they lose their aim for example people can lose their aim systems can lose their aim institutions can lose their aim either one causes corruption if you don’t have an aim you’re probably corrupt you’ll just drink or use drugs or whatever you’ll live that hedonistic lifestyle you’ve lost your aim that’s a form of corruption and you know what we tend to do in those situations for example is we use an objective frame right so we say all right this is a true statement and usually it is a true statement there’s lots of true statements most of them are irrelevant that’s the problem there’s lots of grass the screen thanks i’ll use that to help the homeless tomorrow but when we engage with an objective frame we have to do some kind of comparison and the comparison that we usually do is to an ideal and you know fair enough ideals we have to work towards an ideal otherwise we lose our aim so but when we make the ideal part of the objective frame we say okay well objectively there’s a perfect system and here’s something in the system that’s not perfect in the system that’s not perfect and therefore we have something to fix and if we just observe this thing we can move towards the ideal well none of that is true we can’t necessarily move towards the ideal we usually fail to define it right so it’s easy to point at something bad and say oh this is a bad thing but the conclusion that we can do away with the bad thing is usually incorrect the bad thing will pop up somewhere else or some other way or like i said like corruption exists everywhere corruption is not going to go away corruption is somewhat a function of entropy unless you’re going to get rid of entropy in the universe i don’t think it’s going to happen so we always get stuck in these little narratives that we can build off an observation off an obvious observation that doesn’t matter there’s a lot of stories you can tell but most of them are not helpful not important and not true and you can start from a truth and build an untrue story easy to do people do it all the time and you know like i said that works right and so we have to be careful because another trick that happens and this happens with government is corrupt you’re observing an individual instance rather than the mean right so on the whole is government mostly corrupt or are they only little corrupt and most of what they do is good like this actually matters it matters with all institutions it matters with people right it matters with people so we need to make those determinations and making them off single instances right even if they’re loud and obvious signals and boy i could bring up a bunch of them just from my own personal experience um we could we could very easily talk about corruption in the courts to such a degree that the court should probably just be wiped out in the u.s i can make that case to you from personal experience very easily but on whole our courts are a not bad relative to others not using the objective frame using a relative frame to our other court systems we can compare aha well we’re not so bad in the u.s maybe we’re not the best but we’re not the worst good to know maybe you don’t destroy something that’s better than the average first you got to determine the average this is why it’s important again to look at means and averages rather than individual instances because you can draw lots of conclusions that don’t hold most of the time and if they don’t hold most of the time they’re not helpful they’re not pragmatic they’re not utilitarian and lie by omission that’s effectively what we’re talking about oh this one guy got sent to prison for no reason and maybe that actually happened but if it’s only one guy you know like perfection’s not a thing and the number of people that get sent to prison for no reason in other countries is much higher but maybe we should just be a little grateful right and correct the mistake because you can correct individual mistakes but it’s much harder to correct institutional mistakes or structural mistakes much harder and we need to be careful when we do that because we break the institution of the structure not only will it be corrupt but it’ll be corrupt and out of control and corruption plus out of control now you’ve got bad news because you’re going to spread the corruption everywhere perhaps to other organizations or other people this happens all the time people in a family become corrupt the rest of the family falls apart and becomes corrupt happens with institutions all the time so what do we do about this like this is great mark thanks for the awesome news what we need to do is we need to do some work some hard work we need to find out what matters and why and how although maybe we don’t need to all the time right maybe we don’t need to do all this you know research and you know maybe it’s too scary or maybe we just don’t have the cognitive capacity to do it fair enough but what we can do is pay very close attention to what people are saying when they make the observation why they think it matters how they think it’s connected if they’re not making those connections we should be skeptical we should say wait a minute why aren’t you making these connections we need to look for the relationships and make sure the relationships are intact and reasonable and that’s the way to hopefully get out of this trap right notice the observations long enough to question them and apply some critical thinking is that true does that match what i know does that match what i see does that match the things in the world that i talk to people about you know and if we don’t have those answers assume the rest of the story is not valid because usually people are talking about making big changes to things they don’t understand or to things you don’t understand and it’s fair enough that if somebody asks you to make a big change to something you don’t understand that you say no because the same limit to cognitive capacity and finding out whether or not they’re telling the truth especially somebody’s big-brained intellectuals is going to lead to problems with the implementation and you’re not going to know if they implement something good or bad if you can’t even tell if the story is correct how can you tell if their changes are good or bad right and so it’s good to have a little humility to engender that that sense that jeez if i don’t know maybe i shouldn’t get involved maybe i’m not qualified and that’s okay because you can’t fix everything and it’s always good to remember but where are those handing out easy solutions to hard problems just watch those people watch them like a hawk another thing we can do is because it’s a common trick we can look for things which have always existed or exist everywhere it’s easy to say that income inequality has increased but knowing when it started and relating it to the past well maybe you’ve got some new insights revealed so for example yeah income equality increased particularly in the u.s interestingly mostly around the time that the aca bill was passed the obamacare bill the quote free health care bill and it mostly affected the bottom third of income earners and now i can sit here all day and pick this apart and complain about the aca the free health care that isn’t the fact that none of that works like it didn’t fit its goal but what’s important here is that we understand income inequality got worse at a certain time and it got worse for the bottom third income earners this is in the federal data you can just go look it up you don’t need any more to interpret for you just look at the chart it’s clear as day so the people in the middle and the upper were tracking the bottom third fell off they were tracking all three the bottom third fell off the other two kept tracking that’s what happened it’s it’s in the data just look it up but if you want to talk about income inequality you really need to think about this longer term from when and how bad like hmm the reason why we have income tax in the united states is because 12 families in the us controlled all the money and i mean like all the money and so people thought that was unfair they enacted income tax look what’s happened not a very good solution looked like a good solution to take their money away and redistribute it to the government and the government will redistribute it fairly for sure so that’s how we get into this mess the families that owned all the money the 12 or so families um really did like own all the money in the u.s like it was ridiculous i think it was 90 percent of the income or something 12 families granted the population was smaller but it’s still a much smaller percentage back then than the people who own you know who own most of the stuff in the u.s now john rockefeller the the first one the guy who made all the money was something close to a trillionaire we don’t have anybody close to a trillionaire anymore no one’s been that wealthy yet worldwide hasn’t happened so income inequality since late 1800s early 1900s we’ve gotten a lot better scale matters right so you know and income inequality has always existed it’s always existed you’re not getting rid of it it’s not going to happen there’s lots of reasons for this maybe i’ll go into them in another video so when we start relating things like that we learn things and you know it’s useful to know that just because something’s a new observation or a new way of looking at something doesn’t mean it’s relevant doesn’t mean it’s important doesn’t mean it’s something we can fix doesn’t mean it’s that the story that’s told about it is true and that’s what you have to watch for you have to watch for the story and the connection to the observation you have to figure out what kind of observation it is you have to decide if the source you’re talking to is trustworthy and you have to discuss it with other people and not just with your own little bubble i always ask disagreeable people things i have lots of disagreeable people around me i’m disagreeable it really helps to have disagreeable people around you they really make you think which is really annoying but useful so i hope you’ll like all my videos give this one a real good think and some time because it takes time to sink in a lot of these concepts are a little difficult or a little new and my presentation is probably not the best but it’s the best that i can do for you and i hope that’s enough and on that note i just want to thank you for your time and attention