This idea is brilliant by John Brockman

Key ideas & Notes

• Relative deprivation

  • People feel disadvantaged when they lack resources or opportunities of another person or social group.

  • When everyone gets richer, no one feels better off because everyone is richer.

  • People want to feel richer than everybody else

  • Assigning high value to a relative status is irrational, but has evolutionary origins as high status in a community used to determine if one can eat and how much one can procreate

• The illusion of explanatory depth

  • Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence and depth than they actually do

  • Understanding IOED helps to fight political extremism

  • Ref: Dunning-Kruger Effect

• Fundamental attribution error

  • Failure to sufficiently account for the environment a human is in when evaluating his/her behaviour

  • Overestimating the role of traits and underestimating the importance of situations

• Russell Conjugation

  • Bertrand Russell

  • The human mind is constantly looking ahead, well beyond what's true or false and asks: What are the social consequences of accepting the facts as they are?

  • Most words defined by 1. factual content and 2. emotional content

  • As readers/listeners, our minds generally mirror the emotional state of the sources we read/listen to

  • E.g. illegal aliens vs. undocumented immigrants

  • As narrators, we use different language to instruct listeners on how we expect them to colour their perceptions

  • Words can be considered synonyms if they have the same factual content regardless of their emotional content

• Intertemporal choice

  • A type of decision where the consequences of choices change over time

  • Includes element of irrationality as humans tend to excessively discount the value of future rewards

  • Solving intertemporal choice requires being future oriented and delay gratification

  • Ref: Tragedy of the Commons

• The second law of thermodynamics

  • In an isolated system, entropy never decreases

  • Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organised, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes and slide into grey, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there

  • Order can be characterised in terms of all microscopically possible states — Only tiny fraction of these states are useful to us

  • Defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy

• Exaptation

  • One important phase of evolution

  • Initial stage in which old organs are put to new use for which they are typically only barely functional

  • Subsequent normal natural selection of small variants then gradually shape and perfect exaptations to their new function and which point they become adaptations again

  • First, Adaptation for some function, then Exaptation for a new function and finally further adaptive tuning to this new function

• Construal

  • Our attitudes, opinions and choices pertain to things NOT as they are in the real world, but as they are represented in our minds.

  • This representation is not complete and neutral but a selective and constrained rendering - a construal

  • As a result, we often see violations of rationality. These are often caused by inconsistent judgements and preferences based on construals in our minds.

• Motivated reasoning

  • When we are exposed to information to meshes well with what we already believe, we are quick to accept it as factual

  • When we re exposed to information that contradicts our beliefs, we tent do scrutinise it more, ask more questions, pay more attention

  • "Can I believe this" vs. "Must I believe this"

• Adaptive preference

  • Happens when we bend aspiration towards an expectation in light of experience

  • We come to want what we think is within our grasp.

  • We tend to downgrade the value of previously desired outcomes as their realisation becomes less likely and upgrade the value of previously undesired outcomes as their realisation becomes more likely

• Substrate independence

  • Alan Turing: Computations are substrate independent

  • Consciousness is the way information "feels" when being processed in certain complex ways.

  • Consciousness is substrate independent

  • It's only the structure of the information processing that matters not the structure of the matter doing the processing!

  • If the information processing itself obeys certain principles, it can give rise to the higher-level substrate independent phenomenon we call consciousness

  • Asks us to reject "carbon chauvinism"

  • It's not the particles that matter, it's the patterns that matter

• Fallibilism

  • We can never be 100% certain that we are right and must therefore always be open to the possibility we are wrong

  • At the heart of scientific enterprise

  • A guiding principle of free, open, liberal secular societies

  • Gives us license to tear everything up and start again if we need to

• Type I and Type II errors

  • Type I: False positives

  • Type II: False negatives

  • In some contexts, we aim to avoid accepting Type I errors even if it means committing Type II error and failing to accept results that are true. E.g. criminal trials, scientific efforts

  • In other contexts, Type II errors are more dangerous e.g. competition in business

  • We need to consider not only the outcome we want, but also the type of errors we want to avoid!