YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Urban

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2023-02-20
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2023-02-20
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  1. “Culture, kind of a defense of liberal spirit in order to truly have the liberal games going on. And so that's vulnerable because free speech, you can have the First Amendment. That's the laws part. But if you're in a culture where anyone who speaks out against orthodoxy is going to be shunned from the community, well, you're lacking the second piece of the puzzle there. You're lacking liberal culture. And so therefore you might as well be in it. You might as well not even have the First Amendment. And there's a lot of examples like that where the culture has to do its part for the true liberal games to be enjoyed. So it's just much more complicated and much more nuanced than the power games. It's kind of a set of basic laws that then are coupled with a basic spirit to create this. Very awesome human environment that's also very vulnerable”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Benefits of it are obvious, right? Freedom is great. It seems like it's the most fair. That equality of opportunity seem like the most fair thing. And equality before the law, due process and all of this stuff. So it seems fair to the founders of the US and other Enlightenment thinkers. And it also is a great way to manifest productivity, right? You know, you have Adam Smith saying it's not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we get our dinner, but from their own self-interest. So you can harness kind of selfishness for progress. But it has a vulnerability, which is that because the laws, it's like the totalitarian laws, they don't have an excess of laws for no reason. They want to control everything. And the US, you know, in the US, we say they're not going to do that. And so the second, it's almost two puzzle pieces. You have the laws, and then you've got a liberal culture. Liberal laws have to be married to liberal.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “That's really complicated. How do you define harm? And the idea is that everyone has a list of rights which are protected by the government. And then they have their inalienable rights and they're protected, you know, those are protected from an invasion by other people. And so you have this kind of fragile balance. And so the idea with the liberal games is that there are laws, but it's not totalitarian. They will build very clear, strict laws kind of around the edges of what you can and can't do, and then everything else, freedom. So unlike a totalitarian dictatorship, actually it's very loose. There's a lot of things that can happen, and it's kind of up to the people, but there are still laws that protect the very basic inalienable rights and stuff like that. So it's this much looser thing. Now, the vulnerability there is that...”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “America or modern times, but America's kind of was like the latest crack at it yet, which is this idea. Instead of everyone can do what they want if they have the power to do so, everyone can do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Have spent a lot of time in essentially that environment. So when you have a totalitarian dictatorship, and so what's the rule of the power games? It's everyone can do whatever they want if they have the power to do so. It's just a game of power. So if the bunny gets away, the bunny actually has more power than the bear in that situation. And likewise, the totalitarian dictatorship, there's no rules that dictator can do whatever they want. They can torture. They can flatten a rebellion with a lot of murder because they have the power to do so. What are you going to do, right? And that's kind of the state of nature. That's our natural way. You know, when you look at watching mafia movie, we do a lot of, we have it in us. We all have can snap into power games mode when it becomes all about just actual raw power. Now, the liberal games is something that civilizations for thousands of years have been working on. It's not invented by...”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, the power games is what I call the like, basically just the laws of nature as the, when laws of nature are the laws of the land, that's the power game. So animals, watch any David Attenborough special. And when the little lizard is running away from the bigger animal or whatever, I use an example of a bunny and a bear. I don't even know if bears eat bunnies. They probably don't, but pretend bears eat bunnies, right? So it's like in the power games, the bears chasing the bunny. There's no fairness. There's no, okay, well, what's right? What's legal? No, no, no. If the bear is fast enough, it can eat the bunny. If the bunny can get away, it can say living. So that's it. That's the only rule. Now, humans”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yes. People who are really strongly on one side or the other hate centrist people. I've gotten this myself and the slur that I've had thrown at me is I'm an enlightened centrist in a very mocking way. So what are they actually saying? What does enlightened centrist mean? It means someone who is Stephen Pinker or Jonathan Height gets accused of is that they're high fallutin world and they don't actually have any they don't actually take a side. They don't actually get their hands dirty and they can be superior to both sides without actually taking a stand, right? So I see the argument and I disagree with it because I firmly believe that the hardcore tribes, they think they're taking a stand and they're out in the streets and they're pushing for something. I think what they're doing is they're just driving the whole country downwards. And I think they're hurting all the causes they care about. And so it's not that, you know, it's not that we need everyone to be sitting there refusing to.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Not just about, oh, I think we should be in the center on this, but another way to be in the center is if there's some phenomenon happening, you know, there's a And one side wants to say this has nothing to do with Islam. And the other side wants to say this is radical Islam. What's in between those is saying this is complicated and nuanced, and we have to learn more, it probably has something to do with Islam and something to do with the economic circumstances and something to do with geopolitics. So in a case like that, you actually do get really unnuanced when you go to the extremes and all of the nuance, which is where all the truth usually is, is going to be in the middle. So yeah.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “yourself in a prison on the horizontal axis and saying that whatever the on the on the different topics i'm right in between the two policy wise that's not where you are so yeah that's what we need we're badly missing this other axis”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Well, the problem with centrist is that would mean that in each of these tax cuts bag, tax cuts good. It means that you are saying, I am in that, I think we should have some tax cuts, but not that many. You might not think that. You might actually do some research and say, actually, I think tax cuts are really important. Don't mean, oh, I'm not a centrist anymore. I guess I'm a farmer. No, no, no. That's why we need the second axis. So what you're trying to be when you say centrist is hirung, which means you might be all over the place horizontally. You might agree with the far left on this thing, the far right on this thing. You might agree with the centrists on this thing. But calling yourself a centrist actually”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “There's a lot of I don't know, and people are all over the place. You know you're talking to someone who has been subsumed with low rung politics when if they tell you their opinion on any one of these issues, you know you could just rattle off their opinion on every single other one and if in three years it becomes fashionable to have this new view they're going to have it that's you're not thinking that's echo that's echo chamber culture”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Reason I had this checklist is that this is a low part of the low rung politics world, right? Low rung politics is a checklist. And that checklist evolves, right? Like Russia suddenly is popular with the right as opposed to, you know, it used to be in the 60s, the left was the one defending Stalin. So they'll switch. It doesn't even matter. The substance doesn't matter. It's that this is the approved checklist of the capital P party and this is what everyone believes. That's a low rung thing. The high rungs, this is not what it's like. High rung politics you tell me your one view on this. I have no idea what you think about anything else, right? And you're going to say I don't know about a lot of stuff because inherently you're not going to have that strong an opinion because you don't have that much. These are complex things.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, when you say it's a book about politics, it's interesting because it's a book about the vertical axis. It's specifically not a book about the horizontal axis, and that I'm not talking, I don't actually talk about any of these issues. I don't put out an opinion on them. Those are all horizontal, right? But when you so rather than argue, you know, having another book about those issues, about right versus left, I wanted to do a book about this other axis. And so on this axis,”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Tells me that they call it way stronger tribalism right now. I think that that white racist guy Loves the black Conservative guy compared to the white woke guy, right? So to me, again, not that racial tribalism isn't a thing. Of course, it's always a thing, but like political tribalism is the number one right now.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Even a kind of a racist white conservative guy, I think takes the black conservative over the woke white person any day of the week right now.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, I think where we're emotional about is my side, the side I've identified with is in power and making the decisions and your side is out of power. And if your side's in power, that's really scary for me because that goes back to the idea of who's pulling the strings in this tribe, right? Who's the chief? Is it your family's patriarch or is it mine? You might not have food if we don't win this kind of whatever chief election. I think that it's not about the tax policy or anything like that. And then it gets tied to this broader, I think a lot of our tribalism has really coalesced around this. We don't have that much religious tribalism in the US, right? It's not the Protestants and the Catholics hate each other. We don't have that really, right? And honestly, you say people like to say we have racial tribalism and everything, but.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “The rational, like the prefrontal cortex type areas were lit up. When the political beliefs were challenged, and I'm getting over my head here, but it's like the parts of your brain, the default mode network, the parts of your brain associated with introspection and like your own identity lit up. And they were much more likely to change their mind on all the beliefs, the non-political beliefs. When that default mode network part of your brain lit up, you were going to, if anything, get more firm in those beliefs when you had them challenged. So politics is one of those topics that just literally, literally lights up different part of our brain. Again, I think we come back to primitive mind higher mind here. It's like it gets our higher, this is one of the things our primitive mind comes programmed to care a ton about. And so it's going to be very hard for us to stay rational and calm and looking for truth because we have all this gravity towards it.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “When it comes to anything political, right? Religious, certain things. Are bottom heavy for our psyche. They have a magnet that pulls our psyches downwards on the ladder. And why? Why does politics pull our psyches? Down on the ladder because For the tens of thousand years that we were evolving You know, during human history, it was life or death. Politics was life or death. And so there's actually an amazing study where it's like they challenged like 20 different beliefs of a person and different parts of the person's brain. And he had an MRI going. Different parts of the person's brain lit up when non-political beliefs were challenged versus political beliefs were challenged. When political beliefs were challenged, when non-political beliefs were challenged,”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “To compliment you again, don't you think that your Twitter to me is like, I was just looking down. And I mean, it is just high-mindedness. It's just high-mindedness down, down, down, down, down. It's gratitude. It's optimism. It's love. It's forgiveness. It's all these things that are the opposite of grievance and victimhood and resentment and pessimism, right? There's, I think, a reason that a lot of people follow you because it is contagious. It makes other people feel those feelings.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “A lot of times, what's happened is they have slipped into a very common delusion that dehumanizes others. So that doesn't mean they're a bad person. We all can do it. But they're dehumanizing you or whoever they're being nasty to because in a way they would never do in person because in a person they're reminded that's a person. Remember I said the dumb part of my brain when I'm doing VR like won't step off the cliff but the smart part of my brain knows I'm just on the rug. That dumb part of our brain is really dumb in a lot of ways. It's the part of your brain where you can set the clock five minutes fast to help you not be late. The smart part of your brain knows that you did that but the dumb part will fall for it, right? That same dumb part of your brain can forget that the person behind that screenle is a human.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “It comes out of a good place because he really cares about what he, you know, it comes out, but it's just I can't square the two. And that's it. You have to, once you know someone like that, you can realize, okay, apply that to everyone because a lot of these people are lovely people. And it just brings, even just, you know, back in the before social media. You ever had a friend who like... Was just like they had this dickishness on text or email that they didn't have in person. You're like, wow, like email you is like kind of a dick. It's like it just certain people have a different persona behind the screen”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I know someone personally who is one of the best people. I love this guy. Like, one of the best fun, funny, like, nicest dudes. And if you looked at his Twitter only, you would think he's a culture worrier, an awful culture warrior. And biased and just stoking anger. And it comes out of a good place. And I'm not going to give any other info about specific, but like you described.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Because you know them well and you know that that talk because yeah friends shit talk all the time playing us playing a sporter game And again, it's because they know each other well enough to know that this is fun. We're having fun. And obviously I love you. Exactly. And that's important online. It's a lot harder.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Thinking that if Lex reads that, he's going to be interested. He's going to want to post more stuff, right? Because he's going to like that. If I see someone being like, wow, this really shows the kind of person that you become or shows. I'm thinking that person is making Lex want to be on Twitter less. It's making him. And so what's that doing? What that person is actually doing is they're actually chilling discussion because they're making it unpleasant to, they're making it scary to say what you think. And the first person isn't at all. The first person is making you want to say more stuff. And those are both disagree. Those are people who both disagree with you.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “You can also, one metric is a respectful disagreement. If I see just to say someone else's Twitter and I see you put out a thought and I see someone say, you know, I don't see it that way. Here's where I think you went wrong. And they're just explaining.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Guess everyone thinking about that other axis too. You're not just looking at where do you stand horizontally, you're saying, well, how did you get there, and how are you, you know, are you treating ideas like machines or are you treating them like little babies?”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “High rung disagreement good low rung disagreement bad, right? And so it gives us like a language for that. And so what I would say is I would, you know, I would have my readers understand this axis. And then I would specifically say something like, please do the do it, but why a favor and upvote regardless of what they're saying horizontally, right? Regardless of what their actual view is, upvote high rungness. It could be tearing me apart. They can be saying great, they can be praising me, whatever. Uproot hiergness and downvote low rungness. And if enough people are doing that, suddenly there's all this incentive to try to say, no, I need to calm my emotion down here and not be personal because I'm going to get voted into oblivion by these people.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I wonder if it's making me think that I want to because a much easier way for me to do it just for my world would be to say something like, you know, here's this axis. This is part of what I like about the ladder is it is it's a language that we can use. It's like specifically what we're talking about is.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “That's who you need to block. Those people need to be blocked. You're not being thin skinned. You're not being petty doing it. You're actually protecting an idea lab because what really aggressive people like that do is they'll turn it into their own echo chamber because now everyone is scared to kind of disagree with them. It's unpleasant. And so people who will chime in or the people who agree with them and suddenly like they've taken over the space.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Noticed this in my blog. One of the things I pride myself on is my comment section is awesome, everyone's being respectful. No one's afraid to disagree with me and say, you know, tear my post apart, but in a totally respectful way where the underlying thing is like, I'm here because I like this guy in his writing. And people disagree with each other. And they get in these long, and it's interesting. And I read it and I'm learning. And then I have a couple posts, especially the ones I've got written about politics. It's not like it seems like any other comment section. People are being nasty to me. They're being nasty to each other. And then I looked down one of them and I realized almost all of this is the work of like three people”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Thanks for all the criticism. I love you. And That's actually an amazing response because it just what it does is it that it unrials up that person's primitive mind and actually wakes up their higher mind who says, oh, okay, you know, this guy's not so bad. And suddenly civility comes back. So it's a very powerful.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “You do a lot of like when I think when primitive mindedness comes at you, at least on Twitter, I don't know what you're feeling internally in that moment, but you do a lot of like. Going to meet that with my higher mind, and you come out, and you'll be like”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And so they see it as some kind of hypocrisy because, again, they only see the thing on the right and they're not understanding that there's two axes, that I see it as two axes. And so you seem petty in that moment, but it's like, no, no, no. This is very specific what I'm doing. You're actually killing the conversation.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “You're an asshole. I'm not look at the other 50 people in this thread that disagreed with me. Respectfully, they're not blocked.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Or they'll say some annoying thing like, oh, so he talks about he likes, you know, if I'd done this, they'll say, oh, he says he likes Idea Labs, but he actually wants to create an echo chamber. I'm like, nope.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Well, because look at the thing on the right agreement and decency are the same. So if you're in that mindset. Bigger the asshole, the better. If you're agreeing with me, you're my man. I love what you're saying. Yes, show them, right? And the algorithm helps those people. Those people do great on the algorithm.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Well, political Twitter to me is one of those parties. It's a big party where a few assholes have really sent a lot of the quiet thinkers away. And so if you think about this graph again. Place like Twitter, a great way to get followers is to be an asshole with a certain pumping a certain ideology. You'll get a huge amount of followers. And for those followers and the followers you're going to get, the people who let the people who like you. Are probably going to be people who are really thinking what their primitive mind because they're seeing an asshole, but because you agree with them, they love you. And they don't see any problem with how you're being.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Totally. You don't get personal. You're not getting personal. People are respected in an Idea Lab and ideas are disrespected.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Kind of joint being that we've made. Now bringing a third person in, fourth person in, right? It starts to scale up. This is why science institutions can discover relativity in quantum mechanics and these things that no individual human was going to come up with without a ton of collaboration because it's this giant idea lab. So it has an emergent property of superintelligence. An echo chamber is the opposite where it has the emergent property of Stupidity. I mean, has the emergent property of a bunch of people all paying field to this set of sacred ideas? And so you lose this magical thing about language and humans, which is collaborative intelligence. You lose it. It disappears.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Makes you seem boring in an idea, but you want to be yourself, you want to challenge things, you want to have a unique brain. So that's great. And you also have people criticizing your ideas, which makes you smarter. It doesn't always feel good, but you become more correct and smarter. An echo chamber is the opposite, where it's not good for the people in it. And your learning skills, atrophy, and I think it's boring. But the thing is, they also have emergent properties. The emergent property of an ideal lab is like super intelligence. Just you and me alone, just the two of us. If we're working together on something, but we're being really grown up about it. We're disagreeing. We're not, you know, no one's sensitive about anything. We're going to each find flaws in the other one's arguments that you wouldn't have found on your own. And we're going to have epiphany, double the epiphanies, right? So it's almost like the two of us together is like as smart as 1.5. It's like 50% smarter than either of us. So you have this 1.5 intelligence.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “So, my college friends, we love to argue, right? And no one thought anyone was an asshole, for it was just for sport. Sometimes we'd realize we're not even disagreeing on something, and that would be disappointing. We'd be like, oh, I think we agree. And it was kind of like sad. It was like, oh, well, there goes the fun. And one of the members of this group has this. She brought her new boyfriend to one of our hangouts. And there was a heated, heated debate, you know, just one of our typical things. And afterwards, you know, the next day he said, like, is everything okay? And she was like, what do you mean? And he said, like, after, you know, the fight. And she was like, what fight? And he was like, you know, the fight last night. And she was like, and she had to, then she was like, you mean like the arguing? And he was like, yeah. And she, and so that's someone who is not used to ideal lab culture coming into it and seeing it is like that was like this is like are they still friends right and idea lab is nice for the people in them because you're it individuals thrive you you don't want to just conform that does”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Like you're waffling and you're flip-flopping or whatever, showing conviction about the sacred ideas in Echo Chamber culture is awesome. If you're just like, you know, obviously this makes you seem smart while being humble makes you seem dumb. So now flip all of those things on their heads. And you have the opposite, which is Idea Lab culture, which is collaborative high-rung thinking. It's collaborative truth finding, but it's also just a totally different vibe. It's a place where arguing is a fun thing. It's not no one's getting offended and criticizing like the thing everyone believes is actually makes you seem like interesting. Like, oh, really? Why do you think we're all wrong? And expressing too much conviction makes people lose trust in you. Doesn't make you seem smart. It makes you seem stupid if you don't really know what you're talking about, but you're acting like you do.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, well, first of all, both of these we think of an echo chamber as like a group maybe or even a place, but it's a culture. It's an intellectual culture. And this goes along with the high rung lower. So, high rung and low rung thinking is individual. That's what I was talking about, what's going on in your head. But this is very connected to the social scene around us. And so groups will do high rung and low rung thinking together. Basically, it's collected. So an echo chamber to me is a collaborative low-rung thinking. It's a culture where the cool, it's based around a sacred set of ideas. And it's the coolest thing you can do in an echo chamber culture is talk about how great the sacred ideas are and how bad and evil and stupid and wrong the people are who have the other views. And this, and it's quite boring. It's quite boring. It's very hard to learn. And changing your mind is not cool in an echo chamber culture makes you seem wishy-washy. It makes you seem like, you know,”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “And the group that had been shown car accidents, they still prefer the groups from white countries, but much less so. And so what does that mean? It's because the discussed impulse makes us scared of sexual practices that are foreign, of ethnicities that are not looked, that don't look like us, it's still xenophobia. So it's ugly. It's just really ugly stuff. This is, of course, also how the Nazi propaganda with cockroaches, or it was Rwandan was cockroaches, you know, the Nazis was rats. It's a dehumanizing emotion. So anyway, we were talking about COVID, but I think it taps deep into like the human psyche. And I don't think it brings out, I think, like you said, I think it brings out an ugly side in us.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Who in two groups, the control group, was shown images of, and I might be getting two studies mixed up, but they were showing images of car crashes and disturbing but not disgusting. And the other one was showing rotting things and just things that were disgusting. And then they were asked about immigration. These were Canadians. And the group that had the disgust feeling pulsing through their body was way more likely to prefer immigrants from white countries.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Definitely true, yeah. I mean, talk about the primitive mind. I mean, one thing that we've been dealing with for our whole human history is pathogens. And it's emotional, right? It brings out, you know, there's really interesting studies where, They studied the phenomena of disgust, which is one of these smiling is universal. You don't have to ever translate a smile, right? Certain, throwing your hands up when your sports team wins is universal because it's part of our coding. And so it was discussed to kind of make this like, you know, face where you wrinkle up your nose and you kind of put out your tongue and maybe even gag. That's to expel expel whatever's because it's the reaction when something is potentially a pathogen that might harm us feces, vomit, whatever. But they did this interesting study where people...”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “And then very quickly, the whirlpool sucked it in. And in a way where I think it damaged the reputation of these, a lot of the trust in a lot of these institutions for the long run.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “But because I'm not trusting anything that Trump says. Trump wants me to take it. I'm not taking it. I'm not taking it from this CDC. Was it Trump was almost out of office, but at the time, if Trump had been, it would have been, I'm pretty sure it would have stayed right likes vaccines, the left doesn't like vaccines. Instead, the president switched. And all those people are suddenly saying they were actually specifically saying that if you, you know, that like if you're saying the CDC is not trustworthy, that's misinformation, which is exactly what they were saying about the other CDC. And they were saying it because they genuinely didn't trust Trump, which is fair. Now, when other people don't trust the Biden CDC, suddenly it's this kind of misinformation that needs to be censored. So it was a sad moment because it was a couple of months, even a week or so. I mean, a month or so at the very beginning when it felt like a lot of our other squabbles were kind of like, oh, I feel like they're kind of irrelevant right now.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “COVID seemed like, oh, that's one of those that will unite us all. Let's fight this not human virus thing. Like obvious, there's no sensitive. No one's like getting hurt when we insult the virus. Like let's all be, we have this threat, this common threat that it's a threat to every one of every nationality in every country, every ethnicity. And what it didn't do that at all, the whirlpool was too powerful. So it pulled COVID in and suddenly masks. If you're on the left, you like them. If you're on the right, you hate them. And suddenly lockdowns, if you're on the left, you like them, and on the right, you hate them. And in vaccines, this is people forget this. When Trump first started talking about the vaccine, Biden, Harris, Cuomo, they're all saying, I'm not taking that vaccine. Not from this CDC.”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Well, because We live in a current society where the political divide. Has subsumed everything. And that's not always like that. It goes into stages like that. We're in a really bad one where it's actually in the book, I call it like a vortex, like a almost like a whirlpool that pulls everything into it. It pulls. And so normally you'd say, okay, immigration naturally going to be contentious. That's always political, right? But”

    2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source