!August 26, 2019By Tim Urban The Story of Us: Intro Chapter0:IntroductionChapter0:Introduction This is society. Now let’s zoom in on the left arm. Further. Follow these special men 412,637634,264130,240 Popular Posts Join 608,367 other humans and have new posts emailed to you. email address SEND ME NEW POSTS The AI Revolution Why Procrastinators Procrastinate The Fermi Paradox The Elon Musk Series How to Pick a Life Partner Why Gen Y Yuppies Are Unhappy "1,097 Like11K "550 Like5.1K "1,366 Like4.9K "491 Like811 "333 Like2.6K aboutarchiveministhe sheddinner tablestoresupport wbwSearch#$ 237 Shares
Okay see those skin flaps on the elbow? Let’s zoom in on the bottom one. Little more. tiny dots that make up the skin flaps of the stick figure's left elbow There! See me? Come closer. Follow these special men 412,637634,264130,240 7 Ways to be Insu!erable on Facebook Putting Time In Perspective How to Name a Baby Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think Religion for the Nonreligious 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys The Tail End "1,203 Like2.2K "956 Like4.9K "550 Like1.9K "325 Like440 "334 Like3.3K "821 Like909 "662 Like494 "293 Like25K
Hi. I’m Tim. I’m a single cell in society’s body. U.S. society, to be specific. So let me explain why we’re here. As a writer and a generally thinky person, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about the society I live in, and societies in general. I’ve always imagined society as a kind of giant human—a living organism like each of us, only much bigger. When you’re a single cell in the body of a giant, it’s hard to understand what the giant’s doing, or why it is the way it is, because you can’t really zoom out and look at the whole thing all at once. But we do our best. The thing is, when I’ve recently tried to imagine what society might look like, I haven’t really been picturing this: Giant stick figure: "I am grown up." Based on what I see around me, in person and online, it seems like my society is actually more like this: Individual humans grow older as they age—but it kind of seems like the giant human I live in has been getting more childish each year that goes by. So I decided to write a blog post about this. But then something else happened. When I told people I was planning to write a post about society, and the way people are acting, and the way the media is acting, and the way the government is acting, and the way everyone else is acting, people kept saying the same thing to me. Don’t do it. Don’t touch it. Write about something else. Anythingelse. It’s just not worth it. They were right. With so many non-controversial topics to write about, why take on something so loaded and risk alienating a ton of readers? I listened to people’s warnings, and I thought about moving on to something else, but then I was like, “Wait what? I live inside a giant and the giant is having a six- year-old meltdown in the grocery store candy section and that’s a not-okay thing for me to talk about?”
%Previous Post&Next Post It hit me that what I really needed to write about was that—about why it’s perilous to write about society. I ended up going with some combination of both of these things: society’s current situation and why it’s an especially bad idea for me to write about it—and how those two things are related. I knew this would be a deep rabbit hole. Did I think I’d follow some sick-ass rabbit down a hole for three years,deep into U.S. history, world history, evolutionary psychology, political theory, and neuroscience, through dozens of books, hundreds of datasets and articles, and into literally thousands of conversations, some very pleasant and some that made me want to pull my head o!and throw it into the trash? No I didn’t. I ended up going so deep because as I read through studies and watched the news and read opinion pieces and listened to podcasts and heard people’s life stories, I kept feeling like in each case, I was only seeing a small part of what was happening. And I became obsessed with trying to wrap my head around whatever the bigstory was that all of these smaller stories were a part of. So I went farther and farther down the rabbit hole, trying to get in a mental helicopter and zoom out far enough to see the complete picture. After many months of listening and learning and a torturous amount of thinking, I’m finally ready to share my ideas with you. Sometimes, certain topics become hard to talk about because our conversations get stuck in a rut. We hear the same arguments, using the same wording, again and again, until we become numb to them. When the words we use become too loaded with historical baggage, they stop being useful for communication. That’s what I think may be going on here. We’re all a little stuck in our viewpoints about society and we don’t seem to have a way to make forward progress. So part of what I’ve spent three years working on is a new language we can use to think and talk about our societies and the people inside of them. In typical Wait But Why form, the language is full of new terms and metaphors and, of course, lots and lots of badly drawn pictures. It all amounts to a new lens. Looking through this lens out at the world, and inward at myself, things make more sense to me now. This is the introductory post in a series of posts that will come out throughout the next few months. In the early parts of the series, we’ll get familiar with the new lens, and as the series moves on, we’ll start using the lens to look at all of those topics a sane blogger isn’t supposed to write about. If I can do my job well, by the end of the journey, everything will make more sense to you too. There’s a pretty worrisome trend happening in many of our societies right now, but I’m pretty sure that if we can just see it all with clear eyes, we can fix it. The Wait But Why community is full of people determined to make the future as good as it can be for as many people as possible. The goal of this series is to enhance the clarity of that community, helping us better understand ourselves and the world around us so that we can do our part in nudging the future in the right direction. As with all Wait But Why posts, everything in this series is open for debate—it’s my latest draft in a never-ending work in progress. As the posts come out, reading your comments will help enhance my own clarity. One last thing. When I took this topic on, I decided to do my best to force humility and open- mindedness on myself, even in places we’re all terrible at being humble, like politics. It’s amazing how much intellectual progress you can make when that’s your starting point, and working on this post has felt like an awakening in more than one area. So before we start, see if you can take your existing convictions about all of this stu!out of your head. I’m not asking you to throw them away—just maybe put them in a drawer somewhere nearby. If you still want them when you’re done, you know exactly where they’ll be. And away we go… Chapter1:Chapter1:TheGreatBattleofFireandLightTheGreatBattleofFireandLight RECOMMENDED POSTS
!August 26, 2019By Tim Urban The Great Battle of Fire and Light Note:This is the second post in a series. If you’re new to the series, start with theintro post. Visit the series home pagefor the full table of contents. Part1:ThePowerGames There is a great deal of human nature in people.– Mark Twain Chapter1:TheGreatBattleofFireandLightChapter1:TheGreatBattleofFireandLight The animal world is a stressful place to be. Follow these special men 412,637634,264130,240 Popular Posts Join 608,367 other humans and have new posts emailed to you. email address SEND ME NEW POSTS The AI Revolution Why Procrastinators Procrastinate The Fermi Paradox The Elon Musk Series How to Pick a Life Partner Why Gen Y Yuppies Are Unhappy "1,097 Like11K "550 Like5.1K "1,366 Like4.9K "491 Like811 "333 Like2.6K aboutarchiveministhe sheddinner tablestoresupport wbwSearch#$ 40 Shares duetoviolenceforfoodshatterprogoney
Follow these special men 412,637634,264130,240 7 Ways to be Insu!erable on Facebook Putting Time In Perspective How to Name a Baby Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think Religion for the Nonreligious 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq's Full Story "1,203 Like2.2K "956 Like4.9K "550 Like1.9K "325 Like440 "334 Like3.3K "821 Like909 "662 Like494 "320 Like167
The problem is that the animal world isn’t really an animal world—it’s a world of trillions of strands of genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality. And in a universe that wants to turn order into chaos whenever possible, the immortality of anything—let alone a delicate and complex genetic code— is a constant uphill battle. Most of Earth’s gene strands don’t last very long, and genes that weren’t talented enough at the immortality game are long gone. The genes on Earth today are the miracle outliers on both the motivation and talent front—such incredible survival specialists that they’re currently almost four billion years old and counting. Animals are just a hack these outlier genes came up with—temporary containers designed to carry the genes and help them stay immortal. If genes could talk to their animal, they’d probably issue a few simple commands: But genes can’t talk to their animals, so instead they control them by having them run on specialized survival software. Squat orange blob with stick figure arms and legs carrying a fire torch. Label: Animal Survival Software thisiswhyyourparents caresomuchaboutyou it'smoreofabiological ratherpsychological orsocial
In simple animals, the software is an automated program that runs the animal on instinct. In more complex animals, the software also includes a number of feelings—higher-level behavior-manipulation tools like pain punishments, pleasure treats, and emotion manipulations. By sliding the animal’s feelings up and down, an animal’s software uses the feelings like reins to keep the animal’s goals and the genes’ goals perfectly aligned. Genes need animals to conserve all the energy they can, so the software’s default settings will have “exhaustion” in a raised state. Lizard lying flat on a rock When everything is going smoothly, the software will run in the background on low-power mode. But at some point, the animal will start to run low on energy, so the software will kick into gear and shift the “hunger” setting steadily upwards until it eventually overpowers the “tired” setting. animalcannotthink duetoinsificent neuronstheyonly havehormonesfor theirfunction
Lizard pushing itself up from the rock Lizard walking out of frame The genes need their animal to protect itself, so the software ratchets up the fear feeling when it senses danger and hits the animal with a physical pain punishment when it does something that damages itself. yourhormonesjobis tomakeyoualive nomatterwhatif forthatithastomake youhungryhorney angrystressedso beso
Lizard getting hit in the head with the falling acorn Orange software blob sliding Pain up on the control panel
Sad lizard But genes value reproduction above all else, so whenever mating is a possibility, it’ll crank up the horniness high enough to override everything else. Girl lizard enters the frame
Lizard with neck bent backward to look at girl lizard leaving the frame Life on Earth is a long succession of temporary animal containers passing genes along to newer containers like a baton in an endless relay. It’s an odd survival system, but so far, it’s worked pretty well —at least for those genes still around. And that’s great for genes. But it’s stressful for animals. The problem is that genes themselves aren’t alive, they’re just a force of nature—and forces of nature don’t give a shit about anything. Gravity wants to smoosh matter together, so that’s what it does. It has no concern for the well-being of the atoms it smooshes. If the hydrogen atoms in the center of the sun can’t handle the smooshing, they’ll fuse into helium atoms. Gravity doesn’t care. But the important thing is, atoms don’t care either. In the center of the sun, no one cares about anything, so everything’s fine. Atoms in a cluster; not caring; vaping.. Genes are like gravity—they don’t care. They want to stay immortal, and they’ll pursue that goal as relentlessly as gravity fuses atoms inside stars. Just as there’s finite space in the center of a star, there are finite resources in the animal world—finite land, finite shelter, finite food, finite mates—which makes gene endeavors a zero-sum game. One species doing better almost always happens at the
expense of other species doing worse. And just like gravity relentlessly smooshes, genes are relentlessly greedy—a successful species will grow and expand as far as it can until it exhausts its advantages. When you have a relentless force consuming finite resources, something’s gotta give. In a star, atoms give, fusing into bigger atoms. In the animal world, animal species give, morphing into new, mutated species—or, more often, going extinct. So genes are like gravity—but animals aren’t like atoms. Mindless evolutionary innovation brought survival tricks like feelings and subjective experience and higher sentience into animals, which means animals are like atoms in the center of a star…if the atoms hatedbeing smooshed. To genes, animal su!ering is simply a useful tool—so the animal world is full of su!ering. Genes have no higher principles, so neither does the animal world—no such thing as rights, no concept of right or wrong, no concern with fairness. Animals woke up in the heat of a universe pressure cooker, playing an unwinnable game they never signed up for, and that’s all there is to it. At least that’s all there wasto it. A few million years ago, the genes that inhabit a particular population of great ape started innovating in an unusual way, trying out an animal container upgrade that had never quite worked before: super- high intelligence. All previous genes had passed up extra high intelligence in their housing because it requires a ridiculous amount of energy to maintain. It’s like running a small business and considering whether to hire an employee with a rare skill set who will only work for $1,000,000 a year. Doesn’t matter how good the employee is—no one is worth a million a year to a cash-strapped small business. But these ape genes tried it anyway. They evolved into a variety of hominid species, all of whom have since been discontinued, except one— a saucy one called homo sapiens. For them, the advancements in intelligence proved to be a major survival asset, so their cognitive capacity rapidly increased, developing into an array of shiny new tools that no animal had ever possessed before. Through an accident of evolution, humans had gained superpowers. They had gained the superpower of reason, which gave humans the ability to solve complex problems, invent fancy new technologies, design sophisticated strategies, and make real-time adjustments to their thinking based on changes in their environment. Reason sharpened human thinking, introducing nuance and logic into the process. It also a!ected human motivation—by illuminating the distinction between true and false, reason made truth a core human drive. Humans had also gained the superpower of imagination, making them the world’s first animal that could fantasize and tell stories and dream of places they had never been. thisisyoushouldn't beinanimalwor beinganerdisbetter thanbeingabody builder
Girl laying in grass, staring up at the sky imagining herself flying But the real power of imagination came when it was combined with communication. Humans now had the power to communicate with each other using a complex language full of sounds that represent things or ideas—human language is humans imagining together. Communication plus imagination is why humans can think in the big picture and make long-term plans in a way no other animal can. Reason and imagination, combined together, lead to something even more incredible. Without imagination, animals have a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that animals other than themselves are full, living creatures who experience life just like they do. They can’t put themselves in another animal’s shoes. Without reason, animals can’t follow the logic that concludes that the lives of others are just as valuable as their own, and their pain and pleasure just as real. These two superpowers produced a third superpower—one that, above all, makes humans human: empathy. With the power of empathy came powers like compassion, guilt, pity. Evenclueyness. Most significantly, with the groundbreaking epiphany that all animals have worth came the concept of right vs. wrong. These superpowers took their place in the human mind as powerful new enhancements. g reasontimagination empathy
But none of that is the really weird part. The craziest thing about the new human superpowers was their unexpected side e!ect. Each of the advanced capabilities was like a new stream of mental potential, and when combined together, it was as if they formed a glowing orb of light in the center of the human mind. This light was so bright and so clear and so powerful that it was as if it had its own awareness—an awareness of itself, of the human it lived in, of the ancient software running beside it. The human brain had grown a mind of its own that could think for itself.
Up until this development, the early human mind was like all animal minds—powered by genetic will and run by ancient software, with one purpose only: genetic immortality. But this new mind was something di!erent entirely—something running independentlyof the human’s survival software. Not only could this mind within a mind think its own thoughts, it could actually overrulethe will of the genes, override the software’s commands, and drive human behavior. For the first time in early life history, an animal was more than just an animal—it was an animal plus… something else. Let’s call our ancient animal software, which is still very much in our heads—our Primitive Mind. And let’s call this highly advanced, independent new consciousness our Higher Mind. As any human you’ll talk to can attest, two minds in one animal is an odd situation. Especially since the two minds often don’t get along. The Higher Mind is rational, reasonable, and thoughtful. On his sta!sits the light of higher consciousness, and when the Higher Mind is in the driver’s seat of your being, the light fills your mind with clarity and self-awareness. Wisdom flows through the Higher Mind’s head, and love and empathy radiate out from his heart. When the Higher Mind is doing the thinking in your head, these rays pass directly into yourmind and heart and light them up with the warm glow of high-mindedness. The Higher Mind spends most of his time on the right side of the control panel with the superpowers, absorbing their energy and feeding them with his consciousness. When he thinks about it—and he does think about it, sometimes—he wonders whether this is all a mistake and he ended up in the wrong head. Because he can’t help but notice that next to him at all times is a hectic ball of orange fuzz that was living here when he moved in. Over the years, the Higher Mind has come to see the Primitive Mind as a not-very-smart pet. But he also understands that it’s important to the whole system to let the Primitive Mind get what it needs from its little pet life—to an extent. The Primitive Mind is endlessly greedy, completely untrainable, and the Higher Mind has learned the hard way that the Primitive Mind mustbe kept in check. As the only grown-up in the room, the Higher Mind does what he can, trying to keep an eye on the Primitive Mind and make sure that whatever it’s doing over there makes sense and fits with the overall plan.
Meanwhile, the Primitive Mind doesn’t know the Higher Mind exists. The Primitive Mind doesn’t even know the Primitive Mind exists. The Primitive Mind is software—programmed by evolution to serve the will of your genes. In its hand, the Primitive Mind carries your primal flame—the raw will of your animal genes to survive. The Primitive Mind doesn’t care about you any more than gravity cares about atoms. It’s just a truck driver delivering precious cargo from one place to another—and you’re just the truck. The only concern it has with the truck is to keep it well fueled and out of accidents during this segment of the eternal voyage. The more prominent the Primitive Mind is in your head at any given time, the less you’re like an independent entity and the more you’re like a truck being driven by automated software. The di"culty with two minds is that there’s only one brain—leaving the two minds in anongoing power struggle. When the Higher Mind is empowered, his sta!lights up the room with self-awareness, o!ering a clear view of the Primitive Mind in all its silliness, which makes it hard for the Primitive Mind to do anything sneaky. But when the tides turn, the Primitive Mind’s torch grows along with his influence, and the room gets increasingly smoky. The more smoke there is, the more it blocks the Higher Mind’s light, cutting o!his access to his human and making it hard for him to do his job. PrimitiveMindHighermind
%Previous Post&Next Post The human, with smoke obscuring its self-awareness, doesn’t realize its mind has been switched over to software automation, leaving the Higher Mind pretty helpless to take back the controls. This is when humans start trouble, for themselves and for others. The never-ending struggle between these two minds is the human condition. It’s the backdrop of everything that has ever happened in the human world, and everything that happens today. It’s the story of our times because it’s the story of all human times. We’re gonna go to all kinds of places in this post series—and wherever we go, remember to remember the great battle of fire and light. Chapter2:Chapter2:AGameofGiantsAGameofGiants ___________ To keep up with this series, sign up for theWait But Why email listand we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. A huge thanks to our ridiculously generous (and patient) supporters on Patreon for making this series free for everyone. To support Wait But Why,visit our Patreon page. ___________ Three Wait But Why posts about fire and light: Religion for the Nonreligious Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think Why Procrastinators Procrastinate RECOMMENDED POSTS The Big and the SmallA Sick GiantNeuralink and the Brain’s
!August 29, 2019By Tim Urban A Game of Giants __________ Chapter2:AGameofGiantsChapter2:AGameofGiants Billions of years ago, some single-celled creatures realized that being just one cell left your options pretty limited. So they figured out a cool trick. By joining together with other single cells, they could form agiant creaturethat had all kinds of new advantages. The downside was a major loss of individuality— Follow these special men 412,637634,264130,240 Popular Posts Join 608,367 other humans and have new posts emailed to you. email address SEND ME NEW POSTS The AI Revolution Why Procrastinators Procrastinate The Fermi Paradox The Elon Musk Series How to Pick a Life Partner Why Gen Y Yuppies Are Unhappy "1,097 Like11K "550 Like5.1K "1,366 Like4.9K "491 Like811 "333 Like2.6K aboutarchiveministhe sheddinner tablestoresupport wbwSearch#$ 81 Shares
