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Venkatesh Rao

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2016-01-28
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2016-01-28
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  1. “For is that our mental models don't become these perfect idealized, leak proof buckets inside which we live in, like Taliban or religious fundamentalists through which no reality data can leak at all. And if we sort of have slightly looser mental models and universes, there's hope that reality can occasionally seep through the cracks of your perception and disturb your mind and cause disruptions and then you learn.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “That we actually play with. And the only thing we ask of this toy universe inside our head is that it be much, much simpler than the world itself and that it be internally consistent, which means if you close your eyes and shut off input and sort of wind up your mental universe and run some simulations in your head, things should not fall apart. They should be coherently put together so that you can say, close your eyes and analyze the decision like which university should I attend and what major should I pick. You're not processing that in the real world of information and bits about universities and majors and careers. You're processing that in a little toy universe in your head that's like a billion times simpler. So that's sort of the function of mental models. Simplicity and coherence. And I think that's the only way they can work because the real world is there's just way too much information and the best we can hope.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Don't think really mental models are so much about how the world works as much as they are about internal consistency. Think of the world, the universe you live in as an extraordinarily confusing place that's throwing huge amounts of information at you in like an extremely high bandwidth way. I think I read somewhere. I think it was in Daniel Dennett's consciousness explained where he actually looked at the raw information rate coming through your eyes alone, for example. So your pair of eyes, the retinas, the amount of like raw bitrate information they can take in across the frequency band in which eyes are sensitive, that's a certain amount of raw information and it turns out if we actually had to process that amount of raw information it would make our heads explode basically. There isn't enough processing power in the brain to handle that input raw. So our brain is basically layers and layers of processing that throughout most of it and map it to a sort of toy universe inside our heads. And it's the toy universe.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Model than the author must build the mental model, and that's what happens with science fiction and fantasy. But the interesting thing is when you read, say, extremely foreign fiction, so fiction that's very alien to you in terms of mental models, the author may assume you understand the mental models, but you may not. So for example, Japanese comic books, the couple of times I've tried to read them, they just feel so bizarre to me. They're sort of conventions for indicating emotions and actions and so forth. They're just so unintuitive to me that the world kind of that should be in the background and implicit and I should just be able to reference it like an operating system, it sort of becomes a little too visible for me to read the fiction seamlessly. So it's like I'm trying to run a Windows program on a Mac computer without realizing it. So I think that sort of is the best way to understand mental models for”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Fictional universes with a few rules that are different from our own. But the same thing is true for much more realistic worlds as well. So take the law and order franchise. I don't know if it is popular around the world as much as it is here, but you've got this franchise of TV shows, criminal intent, special victims unit and so forth. And this sort of gives you a sense of an entire universe of police work and crime and a sense of the world as a very dangerous place where you've got these brave defenders protecting you. And that's a mental model, right? So while you're watching law and order episodes, that mental model is active in your head and it allows you to make sense of the stories you're being told very efficiently. So mental models allow you to very efficiently make sense of stories. And if you are not familiar with the mental”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Whereas Harry Potter is a little bit more heavy handed where a lot of it is very clearly world building and you kind of get the tedious sense of reading a geography book or being asked to memorize a list of countries that's sort of explicitly learning a world in which stories set but if you look at the movie versions you realize that in a way JK Rowling is a product of her time where she's not really the author of a book so much as a media property that she was at least at some level aware would turn into a movie an online world a game and so forth right so it could be that she's just a product of our times and there are two very different works but that's basically my idea of what a mental model is it's your sort of implicit understanding of what the world is and it's very easy to see in the case of like”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “They're not interesting. So, for a mass audience, I would say the best definition of a mental model is a world in the sense of science fiction or fantasy, right? So you've got, say, a universe like the Harry Potter universe or the Lord of the Ring universe. And so there's the world and then there's the story that's told in the world. And look at the way the most popular science fiction and fantasy is written.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Well, I have a sort of technically inspired definition in the book, as you may recall. So I use something called the belief, desire, intention model of Michael Brockman, who's a philosopher at Stanford. And it's been the basis of a lot of artificial intelligence research. So that's one sort of effective way to get at defining what a mental model is. It's a set of beliefs, desires, and intentions. But I think that sort of definition is useful for certain narrow technical needs. UI people have similar sort of technical definitions. Politics people have similar definitions. Like you've mentioned, George Lakeoff a couple of times in your writing, I think, and Lakeoff has one based on conceptual metaphor. All these narrower technical definitions of mental models, they're useful for certain questions that are honestly a little, I don't know, too detailed and deep for general mass audience.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Evolutionary primacy order. I think tribal affiliational is the sort of most ancient of our decision making frameworks. The good and evil framework is slightly more recent in evolutionary history because you need a certain capacity for abstract thought before you can frame good and evil as categories. And then the kind that you and I try to promote in our writing and thinking is the most recent of all. It might be, I don't know, no more than 500 years old.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Whereas humans, a great deal of their survival depends on other humans. It's how do I get along with the group? Does the leader of the troop of monkeys like me or not? What will happen to me in a tropical environment if I'm kicked out of the monkey troop versus a temperate environment versus an Arctic environment, right? So 90% of our consequential survival behaviors as a human social species depends on things having to do with other people. And good and evil if you think about it is a very, very good way of simplifying that whole area of decision making where if you simply decide that a certain group is good and other groups are evil, everything else gets massively simplified. So that's how you get, I think, the abstract good and evil approach to thinking. It's a ray fight form of tribal affiliational thinking. So if you want to stack them in sort of...”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “A question of context and what you mean by better. But to your other question of good and evil types, I don't know. I've been thinking about it for quite a while yet and at a philosophical and a practical and a reasoning kind of level and an epistemological level of are they actually exploring the truth about the way the world works. I think they're kind of full of shit on all those fronts. But there's something hardwired deep in human nature that seems to work very well with good versus evil reasoning frames. And I think here's my hypothesis on why that is the case. Why is it that this is better so deep in our firmware? If you think about most species of animals, their survival concerns all have to do with their material environment, which is can I get enough water? Can I get food? Can I hunt my prey, right?”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Traditional Asian cultures, the reverse might be true, where everything is framed with respect to the context of the social environment, and that might be a much better survival strategy if you want to actually succeed in that environment. So I'd say whether or not one is better than the other is”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Well, first, I would resist the temptation to conclude that the first approach to thinking and decision making is the best. It's the one most suited to certain personalities, certainly. And in certain situations, it makes for much higher probability of survival and success and thriving. In, say, the American context because of whatever the social operating system for the country at large is, for better or worse, Americans tend to believe in individualism, the myth of individualism, even though Americans are not super individualistic. But if you believe in the myth of individualism, the first approach to decision making where you kind of maintain this fiction of processing everything on your own and staying away from tribal pandering and so forth, that tends to work very well. Whereas if you go over to like a strong”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Activities and habits that define my life, therefore, I'm going to pick the optimal tribe to join. No, it's not like that. It's more a process of emotional resonance. And after that, you basically are partisan in a predictable way on all issues. And to people who are more individualistic and discriminating thinkers, this seems kind of stupid. It's like, how could you possibly take this huge set of like 50 different issues with very different contexts and considerations? And basically agree with one tribe on all 50 of those issues. But if you look at just how tribal reasoning works, it is possible, and that's kind of how it does in fact work. And I would say that this is my total, I know nothing kind of guess that each group is a third, a third, a third. It could be that tribal thinkers are actually much more numerous than the other two kinds.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “I think it's the latter because if you're talking about being like the tribe on particular issues, you're way too individualistic. You're making decisions based on the merits of a particular case. You might say that on capital punishment, I am with liberals and I'm against it. I'm referring to a US context, of course, here. So you might say on capital punishment, I've thought through the issues and I'm against it. Therefore, I'm with the Democrats. But on gun control, I've thought through it and I'm with the Republicans on that. That's too much thinking. It shows that you're not a tribal thinker. For a tribal thinker, it would be who do I want to be with as sort of the operating system of my life? Who do I want to have barbecues with? Who do I want to hang out with? Who do I want sort of as my friends in my bowling league? That sort of issue. It's not explicit. They don't sit through and say, all right, these are the 50 acts.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Or tribal thinkers, whatever you want to call them. These are the people I understand the least. Because in a way, understanding these people individually is The wrong thing to even attempt. You have to understand sort of how their groups or tribes think and think of these individuals only in terms of which tribes they choose to join. So that's the only decision that ever matters in their life, which is which tribe should I join. Every other decision or thought process they go through is really somewhere in the collective consciousness.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Phrased as affiliational thinkers, people for whom every decision basically boils down to, which group do I want to be like? Which group do I want to belong to? And they do that by saying, all right, let's take an issue like abortion or is Trump good for being president. And I'm not going to process that through examination of the issue itself. Which group can I belong to that their views on the topic are comfortable for me to be socially? Does that make sense? It's your social skin. That's your first consideration. So those are my three big buckets of types of human decision making. And you and I, I think, represent the first kind, which is explored quite a lot in Tempo and your blog. The second is these people who start with good and evil, who I understand a little bit now, a little better four years down the line. And the third is affiliational thing.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Invariably, when I disagree with people very strongly about something, it's usually the fact that they're starting from good and evil premises. And it's not as unsophisticated as we tend to think, that these are just not very sophisticated religious thinkers, for example. That's a subcategory of people who use ethical reasoning as a framework. But it's much broader and it can get much more sophisticated. So I think that's a big blind spot in my own thinking that I've only slowly become aware of and explored a lot more. And the other, which I would say is the second third of the category of people I don't truly get is people whose entire decision making process and framing is based not on something that goes on in their own heads, but in the sort of collective consciousness of the group they belong to. So these are what a friend of mine Greg Rader, he”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “The two categories that I've realized that I'm very, very unlike are one is what I would call ethical reasoners. And ethical reasoners very sincerely and honestly start with a very deep and intuitive sense of right and wrong. And these people, in my opinion, right and wrong or in the sense of good and evil, not in the sense of true or false. So these people who start with the framework of good and evil, not only do I not resonate with them, I often really struggle to understand why they're thinking the way they're thinking.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Say, but it's a very conceptual approach where you think in terms of mental models, what frames am I looking through, what metaphors am I using, what is the sort of significance of my decisive actions versus my random actions, what narrative is sort of framing the unfolding of events. So that's an approach that's very natural to me. It's why I think I ended up becoming an engineer. It's also an approach that's very natural to you. Farnham Street, I think, explores that in a great deal of detail from a variety of different sources. So I don't know what to call it, but let's call it sort of conceptual reasoning as a framework for decision making. And I would say maybe a third of humanity operates that way. It's their operating system for life. But the other two-thirds does not operate that way.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “I would say that writing that down actually helped me move beyond it because right after I wrote the book, some of the more interesting criticisms that I encountered actually helped me see what the book didn't cover well and exploring that ended up being a very fruitful thing for me. So I'll just point out a couple of those things. One was the idea that there are a couple of major categories of decision making styles, so to speak. And the book really is strongly focused on one of them. And I was sort of unaware of the sort of structure of the other approaches to decision making that were equally big. So the big one that I've concluded in my mind is there's this approach to decision making that you could say is based on not reasoning.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Actually, make decisions how we frame questions and so forth. So tempo was an effort to capture that part, which was sort of not the sort of thing you'd publish in an academic journal. So I needed to put it out in some other form. So that's how I ended up writing it as a book. And I think it shows because it's not It's very idiosyncratic. I didn't really bother to explore how other people thought of the same topics a great deal. I just sort of wrote down my own conclusions from that work.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “So, Tempo was kind of an interesting project compared to a lot of my other writing projects because I think it was the one thing I've done that was almost entirely for myself. So the work it's based on was based I did in grad school and my post joc. And it was kind of unsatisfying to do that work and just have it published in the sort of academic literature without sort of exploring the parts of the work that really interested me, which is how does it apply to thinking. Like a lot of the things I learned along the way to applying the ideas in tempo to things like command and control and military situations, that was the actual context where the work was done. It was unsatisfying because what I personally enjoyed the most from it was just a chance to sit and reflect and think about how we act.”

    2016-01-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #7 Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT