https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_qfVn-8HrwU
Hello there and welcome back to Navigating Patterns. What I’d like to talk about today is intelligibility. And I want to go over what is intelligibility, why I think it’s important, and what it means to us, what it means to others, and why I think intelligibility is a good way to understand what’s going on with the people around us today. Now, when I talk about intelligibility, what do I mean? What is this intelligibility? What intelligibility is for you is a sense that you understand enough about what’s going on, about a given topic, maybe about the world in general, that you can either ignore something, you have a reliable predictor, a person or an organization to make predictions for you, or that you’re getting information, good information, that allows you to make a prediction. And I put those three in that order for a reason. The thing we prefer is to not have to worry about something, because that takes the least energy. There’s no harm, no foul. I don’t need to worry about that. Maybe we’re in Afghanistan, or the pullout of Afghanistan. Don’t need to worry about that. That’s over there. Not to say it won’t have consequences down the road, but I don’t need to worry about that right this minute. Or maybe I know somebody in the military and I can just reference them. And so if I need to know something about Afghanistan, I can just call them up or email them or whatever and ask them, hey, what’s going on? And they will give me a reliable prediction. Like, oh, no, you don’t need to worry about that. Or, oh, yeah, the only things you need to concern yourself with are if they’re shipping refugees to your town. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. Or I need a source of information to allow me to make a prediction. Like, oh, well, I call up my buddy. He doesn’t know anything about the refugees. But he told me all this stuff about how many are coming across and which groups in the State Department are handling the refugee relocation. So which websites to look at and whatever it is. Right. And then I can go look and then I can do my own research and find out that’s the most expensive kind of thing to do. And so when I’m looking at the world, what I’m seeing is a breakdown in intelligibility. And people feel like either they can’t get the information they need to make a prediction. They don’t have people making predictions for them that they can trust. Right. And they can’t tell whether or not they need to worry about something. Like they hear about something that’s like, oh, this is like the most important thing right now. That part of that is the attention hijacking, say, online or with your phone or this thing’s just buzzing all the time going, oh, this is important. I’m like, I know it’s so I don’t but I don’t know. Sometimes it’s like, oh, well, it just went off in the middle of the day. And I don’t know. Right. And so we’re constantly being bombarded with this stuff that’s breaking down intelligibility or really taking intelligibility and making it much, much more difficult. And so what does that mean when a person doesn’t feel like they have intelligibility? Well, intelligibility is the thing that gives us a sense for the things we do and do not have to worry about the things that that we can handle and can’t handle. And part of that is just the overall load. Like if I’ve got five things going on that could take me out financially today, which has happened before, then that’s too many. Right. That’s like four too many. You really worry about one thing, you know, because you have other things to worry about. Right. So one financial disaster is enough to kind of like occupy your thoughts for the day on the panic side of your life. So that might cause me to be afraid. It might cause me to be angry. It might cause me to be inauthentic, right, to try and garner help when I’m angry. I’m seeming like I’m not angry, trying to make friends with you, even though I don’t want to be friends with you because I got bigger problems in the world. Right. It can manifest as seeking behavior. Right. You’re just looking to fit in. It can it can manifest as as egoism or overconfidence, like, oh, I know what I’m doing, even though you’re, you know, really fearful inside. So there’s all these manifestations of that core uncertainty, right, that inability to find intelligibility. And again, a lot of the times with intelligibility, what we’re actually doing is trusting something and then that trust is broken. And a lot of our trust networks are just broken. And we kind of know this subconsciously. We actually usually know when people are lying to us. We can tell when predictions start to go wrong and we’re like, OK, am I making bad predictions or am I getting bad information? Because all predictions rely on information. And, you know, you can try to source all the information you need yourself. Good luck with that. That’s hard to do. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but you can’t do it for a lot of things. You can only do it for a few things because time and energy and effort are limited. Right. You only have so much in you. Even I can only research like three or four things in a given day to find enough, quote, good information that I think I can make reasonable predictions or get a reasonable understanding of right and intelligence something. So if you’re not spending your day doing that, by the way, I don’t recommend trying because there’s lots of stuff to do during the day that’s more important. And that’s the problem is that there’s so much to do. We have to we have to outsource. We have to get rid of some of this stuff. Well, most of this stuff. So hopefully most of the stuff in the universe we can ignore. That would be great. Right. Some of the stuff we can outsource to an expert who can make predictions for us or tell us what’s important to us or what we need to worry about. But the rest of it, we have to take in the information. It better be good information. And if it’s not, then when our predictions go wrong, was it our predictive power? Am I in trouble because I’m stupid because I’m always stupid about something constantly or is it bad information? In which case, oh, no. Right. Like, no, I need a source of good information. And so when we don’t have this again, everything breaks down, everything breaks down. And when things like that break down, if you don’t have a community to rely on, that makes it worse. And right now we have a community crisis. We’re not in communities. We’re not getting together. And the reason why communities are important is because they build trust. The people you interact with in person on a regular basis. It’s not that you can trust them or you can. It’s not that you can trust them. You know, absolutely. It’s not that you can trust them, you know, with everything or with a lot of things, but there’s probably something you can trust them about. Right. So you may have that friend who’s always late. Almost everybody knows somebody always late, always late, but they’re always there. That’s a big deal, because I know a lot of people who are always on time, but only when they show up and they don’t always show up, irrespective of whether or not they said they were going to show up. In other words, they’d rather not show up than be late. In some cases, in other cases, they’re just flaky and unreliable. And that’s OK. And maybe when you need them, they come in spades like they’re there. They’re coming with everything they got. Like people have all these funny tradeoffs, right. And in our friendships with them. But another reason why community is important is because you’re in person with somebody. And that’s actually really important because if you’re getting information fed to you from like a personality on YouTube or an organization on TV or, you know, some kind of report or a government organization, that’s probably the worst. Then the problem is that that’s usually one way information. And it’s almost certainly, you know, prone to prone to go astray. So maybe the news media doesn’t go astray very often, but when it does, it’s completely off the rails. And that’s a problem because you don’t want to be completely wrong. And as is often the case, those are bad conditions. When you’re with somebody in person, you have extra information. First of all, two way communication. So you get the information customized for your brain. Right. They know you, you know them. You know how to ask the question to get the information that you want. They probably know how to answer in a way that’s better for you, or at least there’s a higher likelihood of that. Plus, just body language. Body language is very important. So one of the things that body language allows us to do is to understand things like performative contradiction. So if I say to you, I say, don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine. You’re not going to believe me. My tone says everything’s not fine. My body language says everything’s not fine. I’m screaming to you panic in two other languages while I’m telling you everything’s going to be fine. Right. And so what do you believe? Right. And often, you know, we sense that. Now, that doesn’t always bubble up to our consciousness in the moment, but we sense that and those things build up. So if somebody’s just hysterical all the time about everything and probably know people like that, I know I know a lot of people like that, unfortunately, then, you know, when they’re hysterical about something like that’s kind of their normal state, just kind of going to ignore it. But maybe they’re trustworthy in that they’re always like that. Right. And so there’s something trustworthy there. But if if their body language or their tone doesn’t match what they’re telling you, that builds up in you and you either learn this is the person who always cries wolf or you learn, oh, this is the person who always overstates everything. Not inaccurate. Just an overstatement. Right. So one way to say to put out an overstatement is to say, well, no one who takes aspirin ever gets sick from aspirin. Well, obviously not no one because absolutes don’t exist. So no one is not going to happen. Right. So there are people who get sick from eating aspirin. Usually they don’t because they get sick. But like they’re out there. And so that’s just an exaggeration. And it’s a perfectly reasonable exaggeration to you. You get to afford people a little looseness with the language or with their understanding or expression to because there’s all the all three issues exist. But you’ll get a sense for that if their body language and their tone matches what they say, that’s reliable. And if it’s also consistent, that’s great. So reliable might be when their body language and their tone matches what they say that you can count on. Right. But it might not be consistent because they might not have the ability to do that. Right. And all the things they talk about. Fair enough. And so there’s something about reliability and consistency that contribute to intelligibility. But we don’t necessarily need both, although obviously having both is great. And that’s important because when we feel the world is intelligible to us, then we’re more calm. We don’t panic. Our anxiety baseline anxieties lower. Right. We are able to deal with more stuff because we’re not constantly worrying about the most most important stuff, the stuff that needs to be intelligible to us. And we have more cognitive space. Right. Our cognitive load is lower. So we have more cognitive space to think about other things. Maybe other things are important to us because we’re always kind of on the verge of being overwhelmed. Or many of us are anyway. And and it really is about that ability to trust that communities give you a lot more information. Right. Also, when you’re in a community, usually like if if you need to worry about whether or not you know, town hall is going to do something funny. But but Jerry is on the board. Right. Or something. So he knows what’s going on. But then you talk to Jerry and you’re like, hey, Jerry, how about Bill’s farm? And Jerry goes, well, you know, I don’t know much about farming. Right. It’s like, oh, maybe if there’s a farming thing, even though Jerry’s at town hall, right, he won’t he won’t notice that town hall is doing something that affects a farm because he doesn’t care about farms. Fair enough. Right. So there’s a lot more information there. Of course, you have to engage with your community as though people are not just vending machines for one thing. Oh, I only talk to Jerry when I need to know something about town hall. Bad strategy. But this is what communities are good at getting you mixed up, you know, in other things so that you can tell how reliable people are, how consistent they are, how much their body language, their tone matches what they’re actually saying, how much what they’re saying needs to be translated into your language. Right. All of these things. And then once it is translated into your language, there’s a lot there that can help you out. And so that is what’s really important to us is having that intelligibility. And when those trusted sources break down, and that’s very much where we are today, and we don’t have that personal sort of high touch interaction that we need, that’s when things get funky. And, you know, I’ve actually I’ve I’ve I’ve talked about this before. Right. So in my conspiracy video, I talk about what people are looking for is intelligibility. They don’t need to control it. They don’t need to predict it necessarily. They just need to know whether or not they need to worry about it. Like, is this something I need to pay attention to? No. Then get it out of here. Nice and low energy, as I mentioned before. Right. Oh, OK. Maybe I need to be able to predict it. And in that video, I used lizard people running the government. If the lizard people running the government, that might be OK, because maybe you maybe you know the lizard people aren’t out to get you, but they might be out to get those other guys. And that’s fine, because those are the other guys. I need to worry about me first with lizard people. I can confirm that, by the way, if there are lizard people worry about you first. You know, but but but if it’s a situation that might affect you directly, that you can’t have a trusted, predicted advisor on or hopefully you do have people that can predict. And also, you look at the good information yourself and you have a source of good information. Now things are intelligible. But that’s our least preferred, because, again, if you’ve got to do the work yourself, that’s a lot of energy. And we don’t want to we don’t want to use that energy up. So the real problem is when the information breaks down, when we have too much information, we also have too much bad information, but too much good information can overwhelm our ability to sort the information. So when information comes in and we need to make a prediction for ourselves, right, and then that prediction goes wrong. Did we make a bad prediction or did we have bad information? That’s a big problem, because if we can trust the information, then we know we’ve just made a bad prediction and that’s something under our control to address. Maybe we can’t fix it, but maybe we can fix it. But if our information bad, that might be totally out of our control. How do I find out what good information is? Because good information will give me good predictions. But if I’m a bad predictor, all the good information in the world isn’t going to work. Like this is a problem. This is a big problem. And that’s sort of the problem we’re having today because we’re overloaded with information. There’s lots of bad information out there. We can’t sort information ourselves. We have a lack of trust in experts, right? We have a lot of people who weren’t experts telling us things and making bad predictions. And we know they’re bad predictions because a lot of times these things play out over time and we’re like, oh, yeah, that guy definitely lied about that. Or, oh, yeah, I said this and then he said that. These are contradictions. And maybe in the moment you’re OK with the contradiction because you have to be because you’re in the moment you’re like, oh, I’m seeking to not be afraid or anxious or whatever. So I’m just going to believe this for the moment and we’ll sort it out later. And then maybe later never comes. Maybe you never think about it again. Right. And that will cause you anxiety whether you realize it or not. Right. And so all these things need to be taken into account. But as intelligibility breaks down for you, it breaks down for other people, too, in general. And that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a lot of people are very anxious, very afraid, very angry, faking their way through relationships to feel better or to at least make sure that they’re not caught off guard in the moment. Right. And we see a lot of people sort of overconfidently just charging into the world and saying, no, no, no, this is the way it is. Absolutely. Because sometimes we just give ourselves intelligibility. We say, no, the world is going to go this way and we get stubborn about it. All of these things can happen. And I think you’re seeing all of these things. But the good news is once we have a handle on what intelligibility means to us and what we’re doing when we’re when we’re looking for that intelligibility and even just the fact that we’re looking for intelligibility and it comes in sort of three flavors that can help us to to give us a way to cognize and think about these things. And sort of roll them around in our head and intelligence and go, oh, OK, right. This is this is why these people are panicking. This is why I’m feeling anxious. Right. And then what do I need to do? Oh, well, I need to either find a better information source, stop trying to make predictions because I’m either bad at it or I have bad information. I don’t know. Right. Get in a community where I can find some high trust or just ignore more stuff. If you’re worrying about climate change and you’re already anxious, that’s making you more anxious. Don’t do that. It may be important, maybe the most important thing in the whole universe, but it can’t be the most important thing to the whole universe to you right now because you get other things going on and you need to prioritize what you’re worrying about. And so trying to make everything intelligible or too many things intelligible is just going to overwhelm you because we ignore most of the world. Most of the world we ignore. There’s so much going on. There’s planets whipping around the sun. There’s sun flares going on. There’s neutrino particles bombing us. There’s cosmic rays causing bits to flip in our computers. It just goes on and on and on. And, you know, there’s all kinds of countries at war and there’s probably a genocide happening somewhere at the moment because there’s always one of those going on. Luckily, there’s small scale and even more luckily, I don’t have to hear about them, which is good. There’s people starving. There’s people starving in your neighborhood. Like all these things are happening and we’re ignoring almost all of them. And that’s a good thing because we can’t pay attention to everything and we have to be careful with our attention. And so when we feel like we have a way to, you know, to reach an intelligibility about things that are important to us, that’s when things get better for us. That’s a more calmer. Right. And as long as we’re as as everything’s going OK and, you know, that’s never going to always be the case because there’s a there’s a catastrophe, a black swan event happening somewhere, then we’re then we’re fine. But not only does it help you, it also helps you understand other people. Why are they panicked? What is it they don’t find intelligible? You can kind of find out. You can ask them. Now, you can’t understand directly somebody else’s intelligibility just the same way they can’t understand yours. But what you can do is you can find out from them what they think about a topic and how they’re making sense of it. And when we talk about the breakdown of sense making, we’re really talking about the tool that allows us or at least one of the tools that allows us to have intelligibility about the world. The sense making what’s good information, what’s bad information, what’s good, what’s a bad prediction, what’s something I have to pay attention to, it’s something I don’t have to pay attention to. Those are all types of sense making operations. And so you can talk to people about how they’re making sense of things, what they’re finding into. Oh, I don’t I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on in Afghanistan. Fair enough. Like they don’t find Afghanistan intelligible. That’s OK. Won’t ask them about it. They don’t have any confidence that they know anything. So we’re not the you know, we can take them off the list for experts to talk about that topic. Right. And and you can find out what information sources you’re using and you can also help them to say, oh, well, you know, I I understand that you’re upset about Afghanistan. But you know what? We probably don’t have to worry about it. And I know I’m not worrying about it. Maybe you don’t have to worry about it either. And that might may bring down their levels of stress. And so we can all help each other in this. And we can look for communities, local communities where we can have trusted sources, high touch interactions, personal interactions, interactions not just around the things we want to know in the moment, but around all kinds of other things that give us more information about the consistency, reliability, trustworthiness, accessibility of other people around us. And that’s really important. So I hope this sort of clears up intelligibility gives you a sense for why it’s important, why I think we’ve lost it. Right. And why it’s broken down and and how to create more intelligibility for yourself. Like, at least you know what you’re up to. And I’ll probably be doing more stuff on this in the future in terms of, you know, how how we resolve some of these issues or at least resolve them to the best of our ability, our limited ability. And again, we can’t pay attention to everything. And that makes attention very valuable. And this is part of intelligibility, because again, if you try to overwhelm yourself by trying to make too many things intelligible, you’re just going to hurt yourself. You’re going to make yourself more stressed, more anxious, more, more afraid, more fearful, right. Or overconfident or whatever as a way to get out of that situation. And it’s important that we spend our attention carefully and intelligibility helps us do that. And and because, you know, you’re taking the time and attention to watch my video. I’m very grateful.