https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EHOXCuQ8t3Y
Hello and welcome to Navigating Patterns. This is another video on my sense making series. I talked about weaving together two different themes in this series. This one isn’t so much about models that people are using to map the world. This one is a pragmatic video. These are tools that I use to help myself make sense of the world that I’m hoping that you can use. I’m going to try to define my terms. Feel free to throw out my definitions if you don’t like them. Use them if you do, or better yet, modify them to suit your own needs. One of the things I’d like to discuss is this critical thinking tactic that I’ve trained myself to use. Now, to be fair, I’m disagreeable. One way to think about disagreeability is when you’re disagreeable, you’re a contrarian. You’re a natural skeptic, right? There’s a tradition around skepticism. There’s training out there somewhere for being skeptics. And in this ethos of being disagreeable, being a contrarian, is this idea that when somebody makes a statement, you question the axioms that they’re using. So you can ask your question if A is true, then what else would have to be true? And this is just the process of breaking down the axioms, right? Because there’s almost never one conclusion. Multiple things are usually tied up in one another, right? They’re all wrapped up together. And when somebody makes a statement about something, that’s going to affect a bunch of other things. And that’s what we’re trying to get at is does this match all of the expected effects? So it’s important to be able to break down axioms and figure out, well, then what? What would go on? What else would happen, right? And that’s really the heart of critical thinking. And critical thinking is kind of wrapped up in this mindset because we sort of have two modes. In our mind, the primary mode is information gathering mode, where we’re just like, oh, what’s this? What’s that? And when you’re in gathering mode, you’re taking things in and you’re assuming that they’re correct and then you’re proceeding from there, right? But there’s another mode, which is information exploration mode, where you’re taking in ideas and playing with them. You’re taking in ideas and playing with them, right? You’re not accepting them right away. You’re saying, huh, well, I’m going to play with this. I’m going to fight with this idea. I’m going to really wrestle against this idea and see if I can break it. Because good ideas don’t break, right? They sort of go as far as they can go and they do a good job. And maybe they don’t go all the way. You can always push something too far. But it’s kind of easy to see in some sense or easier to see. In some sense, when that might be the case. And unfortunately, getting ourselves out of information gathering mode and into information exploration mode is not easy. It probably needs training for people who aren’t naturally disagreeable. And I’m disagreeable. I train in this sometimes. I deliberately take the devil’s advocate position in arguments on purpose and defend things I don’t agree with. A lot of people call this steel manning. I think the steel man straw man things kind of played out actually. Not that you shouldn’t use them, but let’s be a little more careful instead of throwing these terms around. When you’re steel manning, you’re really playing with someone else’s ideas, right? You’re really wrestling with something. You’re adopting a position and trying to find the best way to explore it for yourself. And that’s a great thing to do. That’s part of the training, this whole contrarian idea. So you should train in that when you get a chance with people that you can train in. There’s a long tradition of this in debate clubs and such not. They used to do things like that. So take the time to play with ideas, to fight with them, to wrestle them to the ground and see where they go. And see what breaks and what doesn’t. And usually things break really quick when they’re not good. And so it’s easy to find when things are wrong. And this is the way science works, right? Science says, look, we’ve got this idea. We’re going to put it to a bunch of tests. If it passes all the tests, we’re going to proceed as though it’s the best idea out there until we find a test that contradicts the idea directly. So they’re wrestling and playing with ideas, but the whole principle is based on being wrong. You put something out, you try to prove it’s wrong. You don’t put something out and try to prove it’s right. You put something out, try to prove that it’s wrong. And when you fail to prove that it’s wrong, you move to the next step. So that’s the movement from idea to hypothesis to thesis basically in theory. That’s an important part of science, is this wrestling with ideas. But of course, we’re not natural scientists. This is all over the literature. So we have to train ourselves to do that. And we have to keep in mind that bad ideas break quicker than good ideas. And that’s a good thing to know because a lot of people will tell you things like, well, that’s a straw man argument. Yeah, but if it’s true and it’s a simple argument against your idea, maybe your idea is just bad. Like that’s also possible. Just because it seems like a straw man idea, because it’s too simple, doesn’t mean it’s a straw man idea at all. So what’s an example of this that we can conjure up? What does this process look like? So sometimes I hear an argument, maybe not directly, maybe indirectly, that capitalism causes greed, right? Like capitalism is some dragon or some demon that just like once it gets a hold of you, you just become greedy. And it’s probably worth putting forth a definition of greed here if we can. So greed in this context might be something like holding on to something that we don’t need to hold on to or having something we didn’t earn. A lot of times is what people consider greed to be. And in the case of money, people will just hoard money. That’s what they would do. They wouldn’t waste money, wouldn’t spend money on things, unless they were going to get more back, right? And this sort of isn’t the normal condition. And then what would have to be true if capitalism were some kind of greed machine that drove things? Well, I think it’s fair to say that nonprofits are a tough sell. Now you can make a pretty fair argument that nonprofits can be greedy, because you can overpay on salary and things like that. And people make those arguments and fair enough. But it seems odd that in a world where you can have a for-profit, super efficient greed machine, I mean for-profit corporations, definitely if there’s any such thing as a greed machine, they’re up there. They’re at the top of the list. So why would you even waste your time on a not-for-profit, right? So it’s kind of maybe. Another one is religious giving. Wealthy people aren’t going to give to religions. It’s not going to happen. If capitalism rules the day, why give your money to a religion? Total anti-capitalist right there, if capitalism is a greed machine. So that’s kind of worth thinking about. That’s a tougher one. And charity, charity is gone. There’s no charity in a world where capitalism and greed are wrapped up that tightly. There certainly seems to be something else going on. And then you can ask yourself, well, what else would cause this greed to kind of show up? Well, look, everything we do is wrapped up in capitalism. It just touches everything because that’s our main mode of transferring money. But greed existed before capitalism. Greed existed in feudalism. Greed existed in ancient Rome. Greed existed all the way back because you can be greedy with more than your money. You can be greedy with your time. You can be greedy with your emotions. You can withhold love that’s being greedy with love. There’s all kinds of ways that we can be greedy that aren’t wrapped up in capitalism, money, monetary systems, nothing. And the thing is, again, capitalism shows everything that we do. So greed seems to be the product of the person. And because it’s the product of a person and because people engage in capitalism, capitalism is going to show you greed because it makes things easier. It makes lots of things easier. It makes trade a lot easier and more fair. So when people are greedy, you’re going to see it’s going to show up in capitalism. And also, because capitalism wrapped up in everything we do, the way that it shows up is going to be very, very bright to us. Because it’s easy to see money and it’s easy to make assumptions about who’s using their money wisely because you don’t know where they’re using their money. You can just look at the worst possible case. So this is a case, again, of asking if A is true, what else is true? What else would have to be true? If you’re taking this axiom like that, if you’re saying, look, greed is caused by capitalism. Greed is caused by capitalism. That’s the axiom. What would that world look like? And truth be told, look, we’re humans. We’re greedy. It shows up in capitalism. The capitalism doesn’t make us greedy. We were greedy before capitalism. We’ll be greedy long after capitalism. Greed is just a thing that humans do. And there’s another example of this sort of thing, this sort of if A, what else would have to be true? So you can take a situation like YouTube and you can say, I know that YouTube drives right-wing thinking. It just, it grabs people. It sends them down this algorithmic rabbit hole. And then, you know, the next thing you know, they’re fully right-wing. They’re right in there. They’re white supremacists all the way. And it’s tempting to believe that because it’s a believable story, because we can believe because it’s partially true. And this is all good lies are based on partial truths that our lives are being driven by algorithms. Absolutely true. That’s happening. But they’re not being driven only by algorithms. And they’re not being driven primarily by algorithms. So what else would have to be true if YouTube were driving people far right? Well, one thing you might expect is that you wouldn’t find far left content at all. Certainly not extreme far left content. And you can look at the numbers for YouTube. I haven’t looked in a while, but the last time I did look, definitely wasn’t driving far right content or driving people far right. I know there’s a bunch of charts out there with conclusions. I think if you read the conclusion of the study, it might not match the conclusion that the person that showed you the study said. It’s a little got to dig, but reading the source material helps. The other thing that you see is you don’t see a lot of right wing organization on YouTube. You just don’t see an overwhelming amount of right wing content on YouTube. And if the algorithm were driving it that way, there’d be no left wing content. It just wouldn’t be there. And so we kind of have to find a new boogeyman for that. So again, this is another example of if a axiom is true, what else would have to be true? What are the things with this effect? What impacts would you see out there? And this is all about wrestling with ideas, playing with things, and really trying to break them. And knowing, oh, well, maybe this doesn’t make as much sense as I thought. And not that there’s no truth in it, because there’s a little truth in a lot of things. It’s just not enough truth to make a difference. And that’s part of the problem. And this method isn’t perfect. It’s not meant to be perfect. I’m not a perfectionist. I’m a realist. A good pragmatist is always a realist. But you know what? It’s right most of the time. And I’ll take that. So if it’s right most of the time, then what else do I need? I hope that this helps you to do some embodied critical thinking on ideas that you engage with. And hopefully you can find partners to engage with in these processes, like devil’s advocate, contrarian thinking, skeptic behaviors. And I hope that this helps you to think about this. And I do want you to ruminate on it, too, because it’s helpful to play with ideas. It’s helpful to really sit with it and consider the ideas seriously, instead of barreling through the videos and trying to get all of the wonderful information, I hope it’s wonderful, that I’m putting out. Really sit with it, maybe for a day or two even, before you go to the next video. Like, get used to this idea. These ideas, in critical thinking in particular, and pragmatic ways of sense making, are very powerful. And I think we really need them in this crazy, mixed up, confused, information overloaded world in which we live. Thank you for your time and attention.