Gurwinder Bhogal's Guide to Modern Survival
Strap yourself in for some heuristics...
Scroll down for a mental model cheat sheet “We have created for ourselves a world that we didn't evolve for.”
“If you want to be more rational, if you want to develop your agency, and if you want to, essentially whatever you want to do, you can do it. It's just a case of having the willpower”
Today, he returns to the show to discuss how willpower and good old-fashioned human agency can help us reclaim our mental sovereignty and escape the “constant avalanche of concerns that are being vomited over us through our laptop screens, our phones, our TV screens, and in conversations.”
Gurwinder and I both agree that our old friend Mr. Pareto (80/20 rule) is one of the defining trends of modern society. Consider this episode a toolkit for ensuring that you operate in that top 20%.
We’ve summarized the episode’s key concepts, provided Apple/Spotify links, and shared the transcript below. You can also watch the episode on our YouTube.
As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice. In the meantime, here’s a sizzle reel to whet your appetite:
Heuristic Corner
Gurwinder is like the Batman of mental models: he always has one tucked away in his utility belt, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.
(As an aside, I found his in-episode argument for the utility of heuristics pretty neat: using them as shortcuts to grasp complex concepts without having to rely on a great memory).
Anyway, here’s a cheat-sheet for you summarizing the key concepts from today’s episode.
Scope Neglect: “We evolved for the small scale of tribal life, so we can't comprehend the big numbers that recently entered human life. We can appreciate the difference between 50 and 100, but not a million and a billion. It's why we often treat geopolitics like family politics.” (Source)
Dunbar’s Number: The theoretical maximum number of stable social relationships a human can maintain simultaneously, which is typically around 150. Named after the anthropologist Robin Dunbar.
Belief Perseverance: “Our opinions are like bricks in masonry; each supports & is supported by others. Changing a belief means tearing down all beliefs atop it. Such demolition is painful, so people won't let 1 bad brick budge, opting instead to live in a crooked belief system.” (Source)
Filter Failure: The breakdown of an individual’s or system’s ability to filter information, resulting in a flood of irrelevant or harmful data and/or the rejection of useful or true information that challenges core beliefs.
Gamification: The integration of game mechanics into everyday activities. These systems are designed to incentivize users to perform specific actions. Often, like an addict returning for another hit, these actions conflict with the user’s long-term interests. (Source)
Locus of Control: “The degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to external forces (beyond their influence), have control over the outcome of events in their lives.” (Source)
Principle of Least Effort: “Human behavior tends to favor the path that requires least effort. People will accept the first idea that comes to mind, get their info from the first relevant search result, etc. This makes them easy to predict and vulnerable to error.” (Source)
Pareto Principle: “Pattern of nature in which ~80% of effects result from ~20% of causes. E.g. 80% of wealth is held by 20% of people, 80% of computer errors result from 20% of bugs, 80% of crimes are committed by 20% of criminals, 80% of box office revenue comes from 20% of films.” (Source)
Futarchy: “A form of government proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in which elected officials define measures of national wellbeing, and prediction markets are used to determine which policies will have the most positive effect.” (Source)
Hyperbolic Discounting: “Just as objects far away seem smaller, so do things far into our future. As a result, we are inclined to choose immediate rewards over future ones, even when these immediate rewards are much smaller.” (Source)
Episode Links
Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello everybody. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today's guest is one of my favorite thinkers, Gurwinder Bhogal. You defy categorization, which I love. You're a modern day William of Ockham, right? Because you've become quite well known for your razors and for your trenchant observations on just what the fuck is going on. That seems to be the question of the decade to me, what is going on? We have the saturation, using your term, the saturation of idiocy. We're seeing it on social media. My idea is that one of the effects, one of the reasons that this is happening is we're emerging from a very long period of human history where many societies were essentially closed.
I.e If you lived in Alabama in 1910, you didn't probably know what was going on in India in Nepal. You might know a little bit of what's going on in the UK, but probably not too much. And every society had its village idiot. And then of course, we invented social media and made it the worldwide town square for all of the village idiots. Into this new world you stride with some, I think, wonderful advice. And so I guess my first question for you is let's go into this emergence of idiocy and the politicization of Babel versus what I call the human colossus. And I want to get your ideas of how we can change the politicization of Babel into the human colossus. Welcome.
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. We had a great conversation last time, and I'm sure we'll have a great one this time as well. So yeah, I mean, yeah, I think you summed up the problem I think quite astutely there. And I think really it all comes down to the fact that we have created for ourselves a world that we didn't evolve for. And what you were just mentioning, there is something called scope neglect, which is this idea that we evolved for the small scale of tribal life, we evolve for small numbers. There's this thing called Dunbar's number, which is apparently the cognitive limit of the number of people you can have a relationship with. And Robin Dunbar, who's a sociologist, I think he said the number was about 150. So it's not exactly 150. It varies from individual to individual, but there's a certain cognitive limit to the amount of people we can consider in our everyday existence.
And the number of people we can have compassion towards, empathy towards, even hostility towards. Because obviously we spent 300,000 years of our lives as hunter-gatherers in small, tight-knit communities. And that's where the majority of our modern evolution really occurred was in that environment. So now suddenly, as you mentioned, we now find ourselves in a world where the doors have been thrown open and we're suddenly exposed to this massive world that our brains just can't comprehend. We're now, as you put it, dealing with issues in India and China and Russia, and even across Europe. And it's bad enough, even looking outside of our town, even that is too much. But we're now looking at the whole world. And I think most of our problems really stem from this mismatch between the world that we evolve for and the world that we now find ourselves in.
And so I think what my interest is, is in trying to recalibrate our minds to this new world that we've created to try to find a way to live in this world where we're just exposed to far too much information. Where people are always trying to get us to care about various things going on in the world, this constant avalanche of concerns that are being vomited over us through our laptop screens, our phones, our TV screens, and in conversations. So I think that is, for me, the crux of all of the problems. It's where all of the major problems that are novel to our age, so things like polarization and the misinformation, pandemic and alienation, and all of these issues, I think really stem from that mismatch. So I think that is the thing that I'm trying to navigate, I think.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, one of the things, as I was getting ready and reading back through your stuff, I came across a tweet from one of my colleagues, Dylan O'Sullivan, who works for me-
Gurwinder Bhogal:
He's great. He's great.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
...at Infinite. He's one of our top editors at Infinite Books, and it's a W.H Auden quote, which is... I'm going to botch it here because I just scratched it out really quick. We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in dread than let our illusions die.
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Yeah, very powerful. I think that's very true. I think the way I look at it is people, when they form beliefs about the world, it's like erecting a tall edifice. They have these little bricks, and each opinion is a brick. And what happens is that once a crude edifice has been built, if you disabuse somebody of their illusions, that's essentially the equivalent of pulling out a brick from under the edifice. It means that the entire worldview topples. And that is such a huge burden to bear, to have everything fall, all of your life's beliefs to crumble like that. And so we have these defense mechanisms which protect us psychologically from these kinds of things happening. And that is that we find ways to essentially rationalize beliefs even when they've been disproven. So there's a concept in psychology known as belief perseverance, not a particularly imaginative name, but it does the job.
It does what it says on the tin. And it's this idea, I think there was experiments that were conducted with a group of essentially religious extremists called The Seekers who were around in the 1950s, and they believed that the world was going to end. They believed that the aliens were going to come down and they were going to beam up the faithful, and then there was going to be a huge flood, and it was going to wipe out all life on earth. So it's going to be like a second biblical flood. And what happened is when the date came, the event didn't transpire. So they were there, they were all in this one lady's house, and they were waiting for the end to come. They waited through the night, and they were like, "Any minute now, any minute it's going to happen." But it never happened. And instead of doing the obvious thing, instead of adopting Occam's razor and believing that their whole worldview had been wrong, that their prophecies had been wrong, they instead decided to rationalize why it hadn't occurred.
And they came up with all kinds of weird explanations. One of them said that, well, maybe the aliens essentially got stuck in traffic, that there might have been an asteroid field, and it got in the way of them coming to earth. And then another one said, "Oh, well, maybe they changed their minds about destroying the world. Maybe they saw us and they saw how pure we were and essentially how virtuous we were and they decided, oh, maybe there's hope for humanity after all." So they came out with all these different explanations except for the possibility that they were wrong.
And it shows that the imagination is essentially put into the service of the delusion. So people have this kind of defense mechanism. The first thing they will always assume is, it's not that I'm wrong, it's that the facts must be wrong. It's not my beliefs that are wrong, it's the facts that are wrong. That's always the first instinct, and that's why it's very dangerous and very hard to try to get people to change their minds because we have this reflex to become a lawyer for our own beliefs and to try to find some loophole that will allow us to keep believing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Adam Grant has a great book called Think Again, I think is the title of it. Will Storr, I love his work because he dives very deeply into this. I sometimes think humor can be helpful. I was reminded as I was getting ready of this hysterical Monty Python sketch, which is like, I don't know, 40 or 50 years old. So by the way, this is nothing new. Eric Hoffer wrote a book called The True Believer back in I think the 1950s. Brilliant book. But these types of behavior patterns have persisted throughout humanity's history. The Monty Python skit though was it shows all these guys sitting around in tuxedos and they're drinking this beautiful wine, and then they get into, well, who would've imagined 40 years ago us sitting drinking this fine wine? And then they get into this competition over who was poorer when they were in their youth.
And they take it to absurdist levels. Like the one guy says, "Well, yeah, our house didn't have heating or any refrigeration." Then the other guy goes, "You had a house? We had to live in the gutter." And then it just progressively goes down to, "Well, we only lived in a hallway." And then finally the other guy, "Well, we had to live in a water tank." And they had this competition to see who could win the prize of being the biggest victim. And the reason I thought of that one was that seems to also be part of what I call this mind virus that seemed to have gotten released around 2017, 2018 in earnest, right? It's always been there, but it started actually affecting people.
And one of the theories on schizophrenia, for example, is that it's filter failure. Essentially as you know, we're bombarded by millions of stimuli and our perception filters in a healthy mind get rid of 99.99% of them, and they try to go here around the ones that make sense to them. The theory states that schizophrenics, their filters have failed, and literally they're taking in every bit of information. And that would drive anyone crazy with the amount of stimuli that come into our minds. But I was also listening to a conversation you had with our mutual friend Chris Williamson, and Chris said something interesting because you were talking about the idiotic things people post on Twitter or other social media. And I loved your explanation. It was like, people don't... It's an afterthought. And they're like, "Oh, God it, I'm going to..." They're responding to the game as it were, and they're not thinking about it.
They're just in haste putting up some random thought. Chris said, "Well, maybe that's because they're boomers." Which I thought was funny because I'm marginally a boomer. I still dispute it because I think that the boomer generation is too big. They say 1946 to 1964. I'm more of a fan of Jonathan Pontel saying, "No, the people born between 56 and say 64." He had a horrible name for us called Generation Jones. But when you... Awful, awful right. He needs somebody to help him retitle that. But his thesis is really interesting because what he does is he contrasts attitudinal surveys, experiences, etc. And I'm the youngest in my family. All of my sisters are real boomers.
And the difference between what they experienced in life and what I experienced in life, very, very different, very different takes on a ton of things. But I'm wondering whether it's generational or whether it's that we've essentially gamified everything. You've talked a lot about that. I want to get your opinion on first off, they maximize the objective function for the wrong thing in my opinion. They maximize the objective function to get you to give them money. I think that you can use the same techniques that gamification uses, but to do good things. What do you think about that?
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Yeah, the gamification thing is, I think that's probably more of a more modern issue. I think it's something that really only took off with the advent of the digital revolution. So there was a stage where the early social media companies began to gamify products. This was around 2004 with dig.com, and then later on Facebook and Twitter and all that. But really it really took off with smartphones and with social media. I think those were the two things that really drove gamification, but particularly smartphones. So this was just a massive change in the ways that people lived because now people could keep score of anything in their lives. Just they were carrying around this thing that could just keep score of anything. And I think that really allowed gamification to take off, I think.
But going to your earlier point, I think that there was a generational difference before this, and I think it probably has less to do with gamification. Because I think although there was gamification in the 20th century, for instance, with the frequent flyer points and buying, getting... Putting little toys in cereal boxes in happy meals and all that kind of stuff, even boy Scout house points and things like that, but it wasn't as endemic as it is now.
I think there were probably different generational differences which we're responsible for the kinds of culture that we're seeing now. I think Jonathan Haidt actually, and Jean Twenge have this great piece where they talk about how there's been a gradual change in the ways in which we approach problem solving and just problems in the world. Whereas prior to 1970, people tended to have what is called an internal locus of control. So I'm sure you know this, but just for your audience, a locus of control is the degree to which you believe that problems in your life are due to your own actions or due to external circumstances. And also the degree to which you believe you can affect your destiny or determine your destiny versus external circumstances. So people who have an internal locus of control, they tend to believe that they are in charge of their destiny, that their actions are what determined the trajectory of their life.
Whereas people who have an external locus of control believe that no matter what they do, they don't really have much power. Their fate is already sealed by external circumstances. And what Haidt and Twenge found based on their analysis of the American survey data through the decades, was that they found that school kids, when they were asked in questionnaires whether they believe that they are responsible for their own fate, there's been a gradual externalization of the locus of control. So this began around in the 1970s, and it's become much worse over time, and it gets way worse with the advent of smartphones and social media. So there's a huge jump in the externalization of the locus of control. People believe that they are now essentially powerless. They believe that the events that occur, that the bad things that happen in their lives are not their own fault.
They can't do anything about it. They have to just live with this kind of system. And I suppose this dovetails with what you were saying earlier about the mind virus. Some people might call it the woke mind virus, but it essentially boils down to this kind of excessive victimization, self victimization where you believe... Where there's almost like a kind of this championship to be as victimized as possible. And some people call this the Oppression Olympics, and it's a form of purity spiral where people are trying to essentially be... It's almost fashionable to be oppressed. But I think this dovetails nicely with the externalization of the locus of control, because when you believe you are not in control of your own actions, when you believe that all the bad things that happen to you are a result of social systems, or whether it be systemic racism or the patriarchy or capitalism, there's some kind of system in place which is preventing you from proceeding in your life, and nothing you do is going to be able to overcome that.
So you're basically doomed if you're a certain race or if you're a certain gender, or if you're a certain socioeconomic class. And I think that this really feeds into this kind of victimization mentality that people have nowadays where it's much easier to just assume that you just don't have control. It's much easier to relinquish responsibility to the external world and just say, "Look, I could make my life better if only the systems were in place to allow me to do so, but it's not my fault." And it's true that it's not always somebody's fault if something goes wrong in their lives. But the thing is that this kind of thinking makes this a lot worse. It makes the problem a lot worse. If you believe you don't have control in your life, then you don't. And it prevents people from actually rectifying any environmental problems that may be preventing them from achieving what they want to. And so, I think that this issue, I think, is probably a much greater issue in the 20th century, particularly when it comes to the ways in which culture changed the kinds of problems we're having now with regards to this woke mind virus. I think a big part of it is due to this externalization of the locus of control.
But I think what's very interesting is to ask ourselves why this has happened. Why has there been an externalization of a locus of control? And I think, well, Jonathan Haidt in his essay, he posits that it's due to the kinds of culture that we have allowed to essentially proliferate within our school systems, within our university systems. Which teach a distorted view of history and which teach distorted science, particularly distorted social sciences, which essentially...
For instance, the social sciences that we have now, they tend to downplay the effects of individual agency, and they tend to over emphasize systemic issues. So, that could be, again, systemic racism. It could be the patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, many of these isms, which apparently are these overarching systems which are preventing people from accomplishing their goals. And this is very prevalent in the social sciences. And the problem is that this information, it tends to leach out from the social sciences and the humanities, and it tends to infect the school system generally. So, the preschool system, the primary school system, the college system, and of course the university system.
And so, it seems like we've allowed a culture to proliferate unimpeded. And this happened beginning in the 1960s with a guy called Herbert Marcuse, who was, some people would say he's a cultural Marxist. But if you type in cultural Marxism into Wikipedia, it would tell you this is a far right white supremacist, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Which is kind of strange because cultural Marxism was used as a term by academics until very recently, to describe the shift away from economic Marxism to a more identity-based Marxism when Marx's economic prophecies failed. So, they needed something new to latch onto. And this was how the Frankfurt School and all that came about.
But yeah, I mean Marcuse is widely credited with starting these kinds of revolutions that are similar almost to the kinds of campus revolutions that we've seen earlier. A few months ago, the campus protests against the Gaza war. These kinds of protests occurred 1968, 1969, primarily against the Vietnam War, but generally against what was seen as a excess almost rigidity, moral rigidity. There was this sexual revolution and all these other things that occurred in the 1960s. And that created a culture on campuses, which very much was about fighting the traditions that were the foundation of western culture. And this tradition has been kept by all the big universities.
There's a great article, I think it's in the Atlantic by Tyler Austin Harper, in which he describes how the recent Gaza protests, which were completely out of control in some parts of the US and across the west. These were actually encouraged initially. They were encouraged by the universities. And the universities glorify. For instance, I think at Brown University and at Stanford and Berkeley, and a lot of these other universities, they glorify the 1960s protests because they saw it as a fight for liberation. And even there are actually some people who have gotten into the university who have actually been admitted into the university, not because of their academic qualifications, but because they showed that they were interested in social justice issues.
There's actually one guy who managed to get into Stanford University because during his admittance essay, I can't remember what the name of it is, but the essay that you write to get admitted into a university, he wrote Black Lives Matter a 100 times and that was the winning essay. And that was basically that got him into Stanford. And this shows that there's a culture of essentially victimization. And I'll be clear, self-victimization. So, it's a culture of self-victimization, and it's one that's been proliferating since the 1960s. It's gotten much worse over the past 20 years. Particularly, I think social media did a lot to really amplify it because a lot of the lettered class, the literati are sympathetic to this view and they obviously have a lot of sway over the publishing world, the broadcasting world, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, all of that stuff, all the knowledge producing institutions of the west.
And so, I think what happened is this culture that was initially a revolutionary culture, and it was initially about just about straightforward equality, it really began with the civil rights movement. But then it became something worse. It became something a lot more sinister than that. I think it was Eric Hoffa, whom you mentioned earlier, said that every great cause begins as a movement, then becomes a business, then devolves into a racket. And I think that that's what's happened with the civil rights movement. Essentially, it began as a movement with very virtuous causes behind it. But what happened is it gradually became a business, and then from a business, it's now a racket. And that's what we're seeing now. And it's become, I think the basis of this mind virus that you were alluding to earlier.
It's a belief that essentially that the world can be divided into oppressors and oppressed. It's a very simple view of life. So, in reality, it's not that simple. You can't split humanity into oppressors and oppressed. Some oppressors are also oppressed themselves. And some people who are oppressed, they're also oppressors in their own way. It's a very messy world in the real world, but it's much easier on the mind to believe that you can divide the world into different groups of people. Some of them oppressors, some of them are oppressed. And I think that's one of the reasons why this worldview has become so popular, because it's easy and it applies very basic, easy to understand concepts, to complex problems and makes them seem much more simpler than they actually are.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So much to unpack there. I think on your last point, I think that that might be because we so long clung to Aristotle's either or, yes, no, zero, 100, black, white dichotomies are much easier for the average person to understand. But when you label me, you negate me. And label thinking is a big part of what you're talking about. I can't remember who said it, but most people think that they're thinking when they're simply rearranging their prejudices. And so, basically, a lot of people are cognitively lazy. And so, the idea of victimization.
So, if I were evil and I had unlimited resources, what I would do is not too dissimilar to what's been happening over the last 10 years, particularly in the West. I would do my very best to baffle people with bullshit. I would throw tons of conspiracy theories out there. I would get them to believe that they were victims, that they had no agency. Brave New World. Brave New World is probably a better predictive book than 1984. It's like, what do you mean we're going to burn or Fahrenheit 451? But we don't need to burn books. All we got to do is get people not want to read them and keep the masses infinitely amused.
But this is a big part of what the Romans used to do, bread and circuses. And when things were getting shittier and shittier, what did they do? Bigger and bigger extravaganzas. They had naval battles in the Colosseum, for example, because it wouldn't do anymore to just let the lions eat the Christians. And so, you see this arms race for bigger and bigger spectacles. Bigger and bigger diversions. Bigger and bigger events that make people feel like they don't have agency. That would be the other thing that I would do. I would do everything I could if I were evil and trying to destroy a society, I would say, you have zero agency. Nothing you do will matter. And it will never matter. Right?
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So, the flip... go.
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Sorry, sorry. Yeah, I was just going to say, so there are two ways to negate agency. There are two ways to make a population zombified. One of them is to convince them that they can't do anything. And the other is to actually make them do the wrong thing. And I think that both of these things are at play now. So, I think for instance, a good example of the latter would be going back to the campus protests. What we saw was we saw a lot of people starting to essentially engage in a role play a lot, live-action role play, where they were talking about liberating campus buildings. And they were talking about they needed humanitarian aid and they were getting their friends to give them sandwiches through the fence. And they were like, "We're being oppressed here by the university deans and all this kind of stuff."
And they were using the language, the revolutionary language that say even Hamas is using, but on a completely trivial level. And they were essentially fictionalizing the struggle and they were engaging in a fictional struggle. And all of their energy was essentially in this LARP. And obviously as long as they were in this LARP, they were not doing any harm in the real world essentially. I mean, yes, okay, they were blocking a few roads here and there, and they were obviously making life hard for the university administrators. But their protests were essentially just contained because they were completely fictional.
And I think that that's a good metaphor I think for today's activism generally, where you have a lot of people who are just completely engaging in wrong... they're just engaging in this recreational activism. Essentially, they're engaging with fictional villains and fictional heroes, and they're putting all of their energy into these struggles. And that is essentially the same as having no agency at all because all they're doing is they're playing a game. They're not actually making any real difference in the real world. And so, I think that that's just as dangerous as convincing people that they don't have agency. It's convincing people that they do have agency, but then getting them to do completely the wrong thing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
My friend, Robert Henderson, dubbed it Luxury Beliefs. And what's interesting about that is the thing that I think a lot of people miss is because we so venerated accreditation again, that if you go down the status loop, you see why we did, like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, et cetera, those are the tippy top universities. A piece of paper from there gives you accreditation and gives you, in many people's eyes, the right to say, "My opinion is superior to yours because I have this little piece of paper here." But the thing that's interesting about universities is they're followers, in my opinion, they're not leaders. I mean, as an example, back in the '20s, guess what? All of the elite, most prestigious universities were rushing and falling all over themselves to put entire departments together around eugenetics. And then suddenly, it even led to some catastrophic US Supreme Court decisions that allowed people to neuter people that they viewed as somehow ill-formed, let's avoid all of the horrible names that they used.
But then of course along came this fellow with the little funny mustache and he wrecked it for them. They quietly shut down all of their eugenetics departments and everything. Now, is that saying that genes don't have an influence on human behavior? Well, maybe, but all of the evidence we have, at least that I've been able to review, shows that a lot of things are genetic in nature. There have been reproduced studies on identical twins separated at birth. The similarities between them are astounding. And yet, the idea of fascism is what always springs to my mind. So, back in the '20s, eugenetics was fashionable. And so, all the university departments did it. Then we get different fashions. DEI is the current fashion. And they seem to fail their own tests in my opinion. In other words, these universities, what they are doing is they are indoctrinating. They are not teaching anyone how to think in my opinion.
And I've always believed that the truth should be predictive. And so, I really tried to train myself to convince myself, "Jim, you're probably wrong. What you believe is probably wrong." And one of the most helpful ways that I did that was if you look back, let's call it 500 years, if we could collect, let's do a thought experiment. We get into a time machine and we go back 500 years and we manage to assemble the upper 1% of the world's population by their genius and by what they think, how many of the beliefs of 500 years ago do you think would sustain inquiry today? Very, very few. So, the idea that they're culturally transmitted and that the importance of memes, the importance of that type of transference, I find fascinating. But again, there are solutions. And you write about these solutions. So, let's shift gears and talk a little bit about how do we solve this problem of the dumbing the idiocracy and politicization of the Tower of Babel? And how do we make it the human colossus where the interconnectedness actually is a positive sum game?
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Okay. So, I don't think there's an easy answer to this. So, I don't think there's a way to do it at scale because I think obviously there are two options here. There is a top down approach and there's a bottom up approach. And each of these approaches has significant problems that I think are insurmountable when you're trying to do it at scale. Obviously, with the regulatory approach, who's going to decide what regulations and how they're going to work? So, that's obviously got problems.
And then the bottom up approach is a bit of a problem also because there's no way to coordinate. There's obviously a coordination problem here. So, I think ultimately, this is something that can only be done in small communities, small groups. I've tried to find a way that this could be done at scale. I don't think it can. So, I think it's really a case of small groups of high agency, high integrity people who are willing to step away from the morass of all this infectious viral ideas, and to try to go back to first principles, and to try to essentially find ways of looking at the world that are, as you say, predictive of the future. Because I think being predictive is the ultimate measure of whether you are aligned with the truth or not.
The degree to which you can predict the future is the best gauge I know of, of the accuracy of your model of reality. And so, I think there are several ways in which people could do this, and one of them is by forming small networks of people. And I think this is happening already. We have communities of people who are coming together. We have a wonderful community on Substack, for instance, of people who are moving away from the kinds of cultural mores that you find in the mainstream media with alternative media. It's not gone batshit. Because a lot of alternative media tends to go batshit crazy and tends to just go way into the crazy conspiracy theories. But that hasn't happened with Substack generally.
Substack is a place where you get a lot of people who don't think in orthodox ways, who have got a heterodox view of the world. A lot of communication is occurring now between these people. They're forming connections, they're forming partnerships. And I think this is probably happening with your podcast and with your other vertical media that you have. And there are other people who are pioneering these new ways of doing things.
Elon, for example. Elon is a very controversial figure. I don't agree with him on a lot of things. I think he's quite crazy in some ways, but I think his genius can't really be denied. And although I think that he's not done a great job with Twitter, I think not as good as he's done with SpaceX or with Tesla, he's definitely changed the conversation, I think. Because by buying Twitter and essentially opening up the Overton window, he's allowed conversations to be happening now on Twitter that couldn't happen three years ago. So, I think it really comes down to individual actions by people who are willing to put their money where their mouth is or essentially have some skin in the game.
I think skin in the game is probably the most important thing. I think when people really have skin in the game, that's when people have to follow what's true rather than what's fashionable or what's popular. I think one of the problems, one of the reasons why we got into this mess in the first place was because people didn't have skin in the game. So, if you look at academia, for instance, in social sciences, what you were mentioning earlier about genetics, it's fashionable to believe that there are no differences between populations, for instance, on average. That's the fashionable thing to believe. It's fashionable to believe that everybody's born a blank slate and that culture is the only thing that affects a person's life.
But if you go to a hospital where there is actually skin in the game, where if you have to believe things that are actually true in hospital, you'll realize that for instance, if you go into hospital as a patient, one of the first things they're going to want to know about you is your ethnicity. Because when they know your ethnicity, then they can know whether you are predisposed to certain genetic issues, whether you might respond well to certain medications. All of these things, and obviously with male and female, they need to know your biological sex as well. That's because in hospital, there's skin in the game. It's life or death. You can't just pretend to have these kind of beliefs in hospital, you have to believe what's true in hospital because if you don't, people are going to die. That's not the case in academia. In academia, you can believe whatever you like and people aren't going to die. And so, at least not in the short term, maybe in the long term.
But it leads to I think having a lack of skin in the game, people will automatically believe whatever is most fashionable to believe, whatever increases their status rather than what's true. So, I think if we can find people who have skin in the game, and if we can create systems that incentivize people putting skin in the game, then we can create small networks of people that are really interested in truth. And then when people are interested in truth, I think that lays a good foundation for essentially sanity. We can begin to restore sanity. Because I think as long as people are interested in truth, they will always want to make the best decisions. They will always want to believe the right things, believe the correct things, rather than what's going to make them look good. So, really it comes down to that.
And I think it's happening, but it's happening very slowly. It's happening in small patches on the web. Small communities are forming where people are genuinely interested in what's true. I think what's going to happen is, I think AI is probably going to play a part in this as well, because there is at the moment, I think on our last conversation, we did touch on this where you don't really know what's real now because we have deep fakes that are as good as real video. We have LLMs that can create essays that are almost as good as a human. And being able to discern what's true and what's not is becoming much more important now than it was maybe five years ago because of the amount of bullshit that's just being produced. There was a lot of bullshit before being produced by humans and troll farms. But now it's just accelerating.
And so, it's becoming an essential skill now to actually be able to discern what's true and what's not in a way that it wasn't before, because it's just so easy to believe false things now. And I think there's going to be maybe a division in human between people who are actually interested in mastering technology and people who are just going to allow themselves to be mastered by it, because I don't think there's much middle ground here. I think that if we don't learn to master the technology, if we don't learn to discern truth, if we don't learn how to see through deep fakes, then we are going to become manipulated by them and we'll become enslaved by the technology.
So, I think there's two paths ahead where we either become enslaved or we take agency and we actually become the masters. I think it'll probably split humanity in two, where we'll have some people who will be able to discern what's happening. And I think probably the majority of the population, there may be some kind of Pareto distribution here where the majority of the population will probably just take the path of least resistance, which will mean just acquiescing to malignant culture and to the garbage that's being fed to us by AIs. And look, these AIs are propagating this mind virus that we were talking about earlier. You saw it with the Google fiasco where it was all the history figures were like Black. Hitler was Black and all this. It was just churning out this stuff because the programmers had basically told it to respect DEI. And this is going to continue to happen. I think AIs will become a tool by which this creed, this DEI narrative will be propagated. And you see it. If you go on any of the major LLMs now. If you go on ChatGPT, or Claude, or any of the others and you type in things about say history, it will give you a distorted view of history, one that portrays white people as evil, Black people as victims, and only as victims. And I think that if acquiesce, if you're passive, then you will be manipulated by these machines because they already are, they already are everywhere. And probably in the future, they will be responsible for the majority of information production, I think. They'll be producing information at a far greater rate than humans are, and there'll be everywhere on the web.
This is already happening now. This is not a prophecy. This is an observation of how things already are. And I think it's only going to get worse. And so, it really comes down to, I think we need to... we're at a phase in history now where we need to finally put skin in the game and develop agency, and to actually go back to first principles, and to actually try to make logical induction and deductions as the basis of our belief forming, rather than what we read. Just casually imbibing culture is no longer safe. I don't think it ever was completely safe, but I think now it's actually dangerous to just be passive and to passively absorb information from the web, and just develop your beliefs based on that, because of the amount of misinformation that is already being propagated.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Again, you just give me so much to unpack. I'm reminded of Jed McKenna's quote where he says, "If you're having a little tea party with Lord Lion and Lady Gazelle, and somebody who comes along and doesn't quite believe your fantasy narrative, it's not that they're mean, it's that your fantasy narrative is a bit fragile." And I mean the event of the moment right now is the debate between Biden and Trump. I'm not a fan of either of those people. Let me let my listeners be very, very clear on that. My only political creed really is, I am fiercely anti-authoritarian. I don't care what flavor it comes in. And yet, it's a great example of the fake narratives and bullshit collapsing before the very eyes of the population. I think that you're going to see that type of thing happen more and more. And only the truly committed or those employed and well compensated for trying to persist with a narrative. The World Economic Forum is another one. I watch their ads and their speeches for laughs. I think that they are so ham-handed and so I mean Eddie Bernays, who was the father of PR, right? He would be facepalming at the idiocy that they have devolved into. It's so obvious what they're trying to do. It is the future. You own nothing. You will eat the bugs. And I do think that your average person is going to be confronted with enough of these disconnects where, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The man behind the curtain is the curtain's been drawn back. And I think this coincides with your view that these deep fakes, for example, are in a sense inoculating us against deep fakes. In other words, when we see so many things that are deep fakes, our reticular activating system gets engaged and we're like, "Huh, I guess I can't trust anything that I watch or see online. So I'm going to try to fact check myself, so to speak."
And I see this evidence kind of everywhere coalescing right now where people we're shocked, shocked that the World Economic Forum really wants to control everything and make you a serf or that our president in the United States has some cognitive malfunction. And I think that I'm watching with great interest how people are reacting and it's the whole common knowledge versus private knowledge. And there's a reason Ben Hunt who runs Epsilon Theory, and I've had on the podcast, he had a piece on it today where he says, "The reason that they crown kings or queens in public or hang people in public is not so much because of the king or the badman being hung, it's so that everyone sees it." And then of course you have, Hans Christian Anderson who wrote The Emperor's New Clothes. And there is also a methodology that worked quite well where you can call out the thing that everyone knows, but no one dares speak, right? And you see it with preference falsification, especially among younger people.
A lot of the young people that I sort of mentor, I've asked a simple question, "How often do you falsify your preferences?" And literally every single person I've asked that the answer is, "Often." And so it's kind of like, Solzhenitsyn had a great thing. They lied to us and they knew they were lying to us and we knew that they were lying to us and they knew that we knew that they were lying to us, but they kept lying to us nevertheless. And then there's this idea of the, Ceausescu moment, right? Ceausescu for people who don't know was the last dictator of Romania. And he ruled through fear. And there was a moment when even the people who were meant to be guarding him we're like, "Sorry, dude. Sorry. We're going to give you to these guys and they're going to put you up against a wall and shoot you," which is exactly what they did. How do we avoid those kind of violent spasms as we go into this period where people's, where the blinkers are falling from not everyone, but from more people's eyes than say they have 10 years ago?
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:58:04]
Gurwinder Bhogal:
So with regards to all of this sort of information or the misinformation that's coming out of AI, my biggest fear is not actually that people will believe what the LLMs are telling them, it's that they will stop believing everything because as you said, we will just develop this kind of persistent doubt that anything we see is real. And what will happen is that in such a case, people will default to believe in what they want to believe. So they will choose to just essentially ignore anything that they don't like as AI misinformation. And then they will just focus on the things that they want to believe. And those things will be, they won't be AI misinformation. Those will be real facts. And so what would happen in such a situation is that there will be further atomization because the cultures that bind people together will gradually fragment.
And as that happens, people are going to fall deeper and deeper into subcultures that are completely divorced from the outside world. So there's going to be essentially a million enclaves within every country in which people just choose to believe the same myths. It will be almost like how life was at the very beginning of civilization where you had everybody living in this kind of close proximity and sharing these local myths, which they might have gotten from the constellations or whatever. But it will be, people will have joined the dots in certain ways and they will form these small common narratives about it. And I think we're already seeing this happen where you have a lot of subcultures now, online subcultures who all believe different things about the world. And essentially there are a lot of people who don't believe anything now that comes out of the mainstream media, for instance, that comes out of anything that they see through mainstream sources.
So the violence that you're talking about, I think is going to be very fragmented. If it does happen, it'll be, it'll be extremely hard to predict. It'll be true. Stochastic terrorism, there's a very popular word floating around nowadays, stochastic terrorism. This will be stochastic in the sense that it could happen at any time from any group, and it'll be very hard to predict because it's not going to be like the old forms of terrorism and the old forms of terrorism, you have these big monolithic ideologies like Jihadism or neo-Nazism. So if somebody followed these creeds, you would know that there were a liability, that they could essentially be dangerous. But when you have a million different ideologies, it's going to be very hard to predict which ones are going to be dangerous. Because the amount of information that you can get from each of these is going to be limited, given how many there's going to be.
And so it's going to be harder to predict terrorist attacks. I think in the future, it's going to be harder to predict violence in the future because it's not going to be as many links between people as there were. If you're dealing with ISIS for instance, you've got these big monolithic cultures, it's not going to be the same. It's going to be very fragmented, I think. And this is hard to overcome because again, people need to have some kind of skin in the game in order to have an incentive to follow the truth. And I think that a lot of people are not going to have any skin in the game, because they're just going to be online. They're going to be online, whatever they believe is not going to impact the world in any real meaningful way.
They'll be going to their jobs as usual, they'll be bringing home the bacon, they'll be doing all the things that they need to do in life, but they'll just go online maybe in the evenings, and they'll start believing crazy stuff because they'll piece together a few things that they want to believe based on all the stuff. And then they'll ignore all the rest as conspiracy theory or whatever. And it's not going to impact their life. It's not going to change their life in any real meaningful way unless they obviously go out and commit violence, in which case they probably will end up going to jail or something like that. But the majority of these narratives are going to spread through just ordinary people just going about their daily lives in the daytime and then at nighttime going online, going to these forums or on social media, these small social networks, and they'll just get crazy beliefs about the world, whatever they want to believe.
And it's going to be very hard to predict what beliefs are going to emerge, what the kinds of things people believing them are going to do. So this is something that's I think is a big problem in the future when everybody is jaded, when everybody has seen enough AI misinformation that they no longer trust what they see. And so they default to believe in what they want to believe. And that I think is something that is something that I don't think many people are really considering this, I don't think it's something that is on people's radar. People just assume that, "Oh, what's going to happen is there's going to be a few centralized systems that are going to feed people misinformation, and then everybody's going to follow these protocols, these narratives." So for instance, there will be the kind of the WEF one, for instance. The WEF, obviously, as you said, they're really bad at their jobs. They're crap. They're crap at propaganda.
And so I don't think they're actually going to succeed at anything. They've already turned most of the world against them. I mean, everybody is suspicious of the WEF pretty much. And so they've made a pig’s ear of it already. Their narratives are not going to be the ones that control people. It's going to be, they're just another tool by which people are disabused of any notion that what they're seeing is real. So the WEF are actually providing a service in a way. They're providing a good service to people because they're making people realize that they can't trust these organizations. They can't trust what they see online, and they can't trust what the governments are telling them. Because look at WEF, look at what they're saying. They're saying stuff that's completely batshit. And so the real issue is what happens when people stop believing in anything they see. And I personally, I find it very hard to really, I think this is why I don't really have much faith in humanity as a whole, as a whole.
I have faith in individual humans, and I have faith in individual communities. I think that communities can do some amazing things, but as a whole, I don't have much faith in humanity because I think most people just don't have enough interest. And the principle of least effort is a big problem for humans. They will always take the easiest route, the quickest route, the simplest route to whatever they want. And you see it all the time. We'd see it with Google search, for instance. People get all their information from the first couple of search results, those first few search results determine pretty much, I would say probably about 80%. So again, Pareto distribution, probably about 80% of what people discuss online and just where they get their beliefs from. Same with Wikipedia. People get, I think a large portion of what they believe about the world from what they read on Wikipedia. If they want to know about some concept, the first thing they'll do is just type it into Google.
And then usually Wikipedia is the first result. They'll press on Wikipedia link, they'll maybe read a few paragraphs of it, and then they'll go, "Oh, okay, that's what it is." So I think we have to, I don't think we could put much faith in human race as a whole, because most people statistically are going to take the easiest, simplest path forward. And we can't stop them from doing that because they've got busy lives. They obviously probably have families, they have jobs to do. They don't have the time to really focus on believing the right things. They have this satisficing strategy where they just believe what is good enough. So they believe things that are just true enough. They believe that if they drive off a cliff, they're going to die, and that's enough. That's the amount of truth that they need.
They know that if they eat chicken without cooking it, there's a chance they might get a disease, they might get salmonella. That's a belief that they need to have. But beyond that kind of basic truth, they don't really have any real need to believe correct things about say what the WEF are telling them or because these are things that they're never going to use. They're never going to use this information in their lives. So for that reason, we can't trust humanity as a whole. I think to solve this issue. It's an issue. I think that it's going to be solved by people who actually have the time and the will to actually believe what's true, and to actually try to get to the bottom of what's going on and have the agency as well and the integrity to actually act on it. And I think that's a very small percentage of humans.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So I would counter that with the idea that it's always been a small percentage of humans throughout any society through history, right? The Pareto distribution, the power law, these things are seen in every society we analyze. So one of the things that I would swing back to on gamification is we can push all the same buttons, we can use all the same levers. If the truth is predictive and you're playing a game and you're winning that game and you're consistently winning that game, then all of a sudden you might have a tipping point where the people who normally wouldn't look into or put skin in a particular type of belief or whatnot, start saying, "These guys over here, they're doing really, really well."
And if it's a capitalist society, maybe they got rich with a startup. If it's a more communal society, maybe their part of the community is doing better farming or doing higher productivity in whatever they're engaging in. And so isn't it a bit of human OS is human OS, right? So the human operating system, I think is mostly emotionally driven. And so we make decisions emotionally and then we rationalize them after the fact. And so these are all hooks, in my opinion, that you can use if you're trying to get people to play along the lines of, you know what? I wonder what would happen if I thought I had a higher agency? I wonder if I just for a day or just for a week decided that, no, I'm not a victim. I'm quite the opposite of a victim. And there are role models for these things.
There's even terms for them, scenius, right? If you can create a scenius in which that serves as kind of a beacon and a magnet to attract the type of people who are like, "Huh, these guys over here, man, they're killing it. And what do they have in common?" They all act with high agency. They don't look at themselves as victims, et cetera, et cetera. At some point. Don't you think that that reaches a tipping point? And maybe it never goes beyond a Pareto distribution, right? Maybe we're stuck with 80% are NPCs and 20% are our actual active agents, but you can aspire to be part of that 20%. No?
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Absolutely. I agree with you. I think in my piece on gamification, that's my conclusion is that essentially you can be part of that 20%, but you've got to have the agency. The agency is where it comes from. And I think most people don't have that agency unfortunately. But it's something that if you are interested in actually bettering your understanding of the world from, if you actually care about what's true and if you actually want to improve your life in that sense, then there are plenty of ways you can do that through gamification. We live in a world where you can essentially create your own games, you can make anything you want, fun. Literally anything you want fun. So you can make all kinds of work fun. And I think that that's a great opportunity for people. I use gamification in my life. I use it for fitness, I use it to learn about the world.
And I think all you've got to do is pretty much like people who always say, there's an app for that. Well, now there's a game for that. There's a game for pretty much anything you want to achieve in life. And you can, if you have the will, you can accomplish that. My only issue is I think most people don't have the will for that, I think, and most people unfortunately just playing the games that are given to them by corporations, and corporations obviously have their own agendas. They want to make money. And so what they're going to do is they're going to make the most addictive gains that they can. And those pretty much, they don't really have much of a concern about whether it benefits you because they just want you to play their game. And we're seeing that a lot with, for instance, dating apps.
We're seeing it with the Temu, which is like the Chinese rival to Amazon, where they try to just get you to buy as much as you possibly can through games by making it into a game. We see it even with sleeping apps, fitness apps. There's a lot of bad fitness apps around which just basically try to, they use fake metrics to try to motivate you to just keep doing whatever you're doing. But there are a lot of good fitness apps as well. It's just a case of being wary of how they work. But basically the ones, the games that are made by big corporations tend to just be games that are only interested in getting you addicted to some activity. And the activity isn't usually good for you. It's usually just a sink on your time. You might enjoy it. I mean, obviously you'll enjoy it if it's addictive, but in the long term it's not going to improve your life.
But with that said, there are good games out there as well. They're a minority of games, but they do exist. So for instance, there's one game that I really like called, Zombies Run. This is a very simple game. It's a game that you download on your phone and it basically takes the form of a radio broadcast during a zombie apocalypse. So basically, the world has been overrun by zombies, and basically the game just tells you which way the zombies are coming from, whether they're coming from the north, from the south, which road you have to run down in order to avoid the zombies. So it's basically a fitness app. You just run in the directions away from the zombies basically. And there might be some surprises and they say, "Oh, you've got to quickly change course because the zombies are coming from a head. Oh no, now they're coming from behind you."
So it keeps you on your feet and it's a good way to stay fit. So that's for fitness, but there are also games that you can play for truth as well. And one of the games that I like for truth is prediction markets. So prediction markets are essentially, you could sort of say that they're kind of gambling, but you don't have to gamble with real money. You could just gamble with virtual resources if you wish. And what happens is whenever there's some event in the future that may or may not happen, people will wager on it. They'll try to reason, they'll try to find some kind of way of determining whether it's going to happen. And you see, it's interesting because unlike the gambling community, it's actually formed of people who are genuinely interested in rationality because these prediction markets really came out of the rationality space, Less Wrong space.
A big figure in there is Robin Hansen who's got a theory called, Futarchy or Futarchy, which is his way of creating a government by its ability to predict the future, essentially. A government through prediction markets, which I think is a really interesting idea, which could, once humanity is more enlightened, maybe that could be the form of government that we have where we have a government based on who is best at predicting the future. But yeah, these prediction markets I think are a very interesting game because they incentivize you to try to predict the future. And obviously there's only one way you can predict the future, and that is by having an accurate model of reality. You can't predict the future consistently in any way. You can predict it by chance, you can get it right by chance, but you can't consistently predict it without having an accurate model of reality.
So it's a game that incentivizes you to not believe what's fashionable or what's going to get you money or whatever in the short term. It's about believing what is actually the case, what is actually going to happen. And so this is a game you can play to get your mind more in tuned with reality, with rationality. So there is, gamification is an excellent tool as long as not to be sort of essentially puppeteered by it. Because if you just follow fun, if you just do whatever's fun, you're probably find games that are bad for you because the bad games tend to be the most fun in the short term anyway. You have to be very selective about the kinds of games you want to play. That's the key. You have to understand. And I think there are certain criteria that you can use to determine whether you're playing a good game or a bad game. So for instance, one would be what is the long-term effect of playing this game? What is it going to do to you in the long term? So if you ask yourself, if you were playing a game today, if you were to play that game just as you played it today for every day of your life for the next 10 years, where will you be in 10 years? And that way you can determine, because there are some games that put you on a downward trajectory. For instance, a lot of video games, gambling machines, for instance, if you gamble, if you go to Las Vegas and you spend all your day on slot machines in 10 years, you're going to be broke. If you play video games and you do nothing else, you're going to probably be quite unhealthy because you won't leave the house, you'll be sitting on your couch all day.
You'll probably put on a lot of weight, you'll probably have high blood pressure, probably you're not going to meet many people. So it's probably not a good idea to play that in the long term. But there are games that you can play in that will benefit you in the long term. So for instance, if you play prediction markets and assuming you don't gamble, you don't have to gamble to play prediction markets because you can play with virtual currencies. If you play those kinds of games, you'll get better and better at truth. And obviously, this is not to say that you should spend your whole life playing prediction market games, but it's a good side hustle. It's something that you could do on the side. Also, fitness apps are great. If you use games to motivate you to be active physically, then within 10 years you'll be much healthier than you would've been if you hadn't played that game.
So that's one. And then there are other things like for instance, play positive sum games rather than zero-sum or negative sum games. In the past, in the distant past, we had to generally play negative sum games because resources were very scarce, and life was generally about survival. If you lived in the desert, for instance, you couldn't really share water with the neighboring tribe because if you did, then neither of you would survive. So you had to take it all. But in the modern society that we live in, especially in societies of abundance, like we live in the West, resources are plentiful enough that you can work together to share rewards with people. And I think that those kinds of games are much healthier mentally than playing zero-sum or negative sum, I mean, negative. Some games are dangerous because they harm everybody. And the problem is a lot of negative sum games that really exist, particularly on social media.
On social media, you have the beauty pageant on Instagram where a lot of young women are trying to look as beautiful as they can be, and they're trying to out beautify their rivals. And what this does is this leads to women getting plastic surgery. It leads to them pumping lip fillers. It leads to them using digital filters. And what happens in the longterm is that all the women involved in this game feel uglier as a result because they realize that they have to wear all this artificial stuff to make themselves look good. And when they look at their faces in the mirror without any makeup, without any digital filters, they look ugly to themselves. And so it makes them feel depressed. And I think it might be a contributor to the rise in anxiety and depression amongst young girls and young women that we're seeing currently.
There are also games like the culture wars, which there are people arguing about politics all day on Twitter. They may have good causes, they may be arguing for good causes, but the problem is that nobody gets their mind changed through an argument online. And so all that happens is that everybody just gets angry. And I call it a state of mutually assured distraction where people are just arguing because their opponents are arguing, but nobody's mind's being changed. So these games are very dangerous, and these are negative sum games, these are games in which nobody wins and everybody loses. And we have to avoid those kinds of games because they're not good for anybody. Zero-sum games are not good either because they're games in which you can win something, but at the expense of somebody else. And the reason that these are generally not good games is that they create a mentality of dog-eat-dog.
And what happens is that this is bad psychologically. You make enemies with people, you become, you cease to see the people around you as human beings, you just see them as competitors, and you become hyper-competitive. You have to win because if you don't, you're going to lose. And so that can exert a stressful toll on people's minds. It can just hurt people mentally. So I think that's not a very good type of game to play. Positive, some games are very good, positive. Some games like wealth creation, for instance, if you start a business with somebody and you create wealth, everybody benefits and nobody loses out. Another game would be educational games. There are plenty of educational games you can play with people now where you answer questions like a quiz, for instance. And the good thing about these games is that even if you lose, you still learn.
So you learn things from other people. So in that sense, it's positive sum. So there are games that you can play in which you don't have to lose anything, and you can win even if you lose, essentially. I think those are very good games to play. And there are plenty of other criteria that you can use to determine whether you want to play. You should play hard games rather than easy games because if you play easy games, easy games are usually a trap, because they exist usually only to addict you and for no other reason. They don't develop you in any way. Hard games, they have a point to them. They actually exist to refine your abilities. Because they're challenges, you have to develop your character in order to win at them.
And so I would say play hard games rather than easy games. Easy games, you're not going to benefit from them. They'll be fun to play in the short term, but they're going to harm you in the long term because if they're easy, you don't need to use your mind, you don't need to use your muscles as much. And so they will atrophy. If you have to put in a lot of effort to win a game, then you have to improve your abilities. You have to train, you have to essentially be on the ball as it is. So that's the key I think, in this game. Well, it is a game, but this world that we're living in now, there is an incentive now to turn everything into games. Corporations have found that they can control human behavior by gamifying it, and so we're seeing it happen. We're seeing status bars, progress bars, rather we're seeing point systems, scores. We're seeing all kinds of mechanics of games, we're seeing them being applied to non-game activities. And so, now the dating apps, for instance, have got XP levels where the more you use the app, the higher you score and you can use that score as a resource to buy things. You can buy emojis to send to prospective dates and all this kind of stuff.
So I think personally, based on what I spent six months researching this article on gamification, that the world is going to become more and more gamified. Now that corporations have realized that the best way to control people is by turning desired behaviors into games, we're going to see a lot more of it. We're already seeing it. We're seeing more and more things being turned into games. And so, it becomes essential to be able to determine what is a good game and what is a bad game. If you can answer that one question, I think you can thrive in the future, in the near future, just being able to discern between bad games and good games. That is one of the most important questions people should be asking themselves if they want agency and if they want to be able to restore sanity to themselves in this world that's just constantly trying to make them crazy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It's something that I thought about deeply when coming up with my various investment strategies, because what you learn when you study people's results in investing is that there's a term called hyperbolic discounting. And hyperbolic discounting is where you only really care about what your payoff is going to be next week or next month, and you fall into this trap quite easily because it's highly emotionally based. You get emotionally involved. You see it with the meme stocks like GameStop and AMC, et cetera. But when you hyperbolic discount, you essentially are trading your long-term future for some perceived payoff in the short-term. And the problem with that is that most people don't understand that most short-term gyrations in markets are pure noise.
And so, what they're trying to do is they are trying to insert a pattern where none exists. Right? We're pattern recognizing creatures. So it's an easy thing to fall into. And I, like you, believe passionately that long-term games that are positive sums. For example, every vertical in O'Shaughnessy Ventures was set up with the north star of only playing positive sum games, only playing games where everybody wins. Right? So when you use that as your filter, you design things differently. We were talking before we started the podcast about Infinite Books. We're taking a completely different mindset and rule structure there where we can still make a lot of money, even though many of our deals are 70% to the author, 30% to Infinite Books. Wait a minute, how does that happen? Well, it happens because we pay attention to the technologies that are available to us, that the traditional publishers are kind of like, again, "Don't look at the man behind the curtain or these tools. You don't want to use these tools. They're bad and they're new and oh goodness."
Well, what they're really trying to do is protect their massive advantage and moat where it's easy to destroy it. So I do think that you're going to see more and more groups, individuals, et cetera, set up companies like O'Shaughnessy Ventures. Look, I'm a capitalist, but it doesn't mean that by being a believer in free markets, that I believe in zero-sum games. I think markets are the ultimate example. If you use them right, of positive-sum games. There's a reason why where all of the isms of the world, all the religions, all of the ideologies from communism to socialism to Catholicism and Protestantism, et cetera, they all make a promise. We are going to bring you to the promised land. Here's the promised land. What is the only ism that has actually delivered on its promises? Capitalism.
Now, does that mean I love capitalism and it's perfect and it can't be changed? Absolutely not. There's a lot wrong with capitalism. And we should endeavor to come up with better explanations, which lead to better methodologies and improvements in error correction. But open systems, in my opinion, dominate usually, not always, but dominate closed systems for the most part, because closed systems tend to be top-down. They tend to not understand that complex adaptive systems. Emergence comes from below, not from above. And that's why all of the planned economies failed so horribly and so miserably. Not only because they had a fucked up version of what human beings are, but also because they thought that this was the singular truth that everyone had to comply with. And gosh, the truth was wrong. And it kind of brings us back to your comments about skin in the game. Again, back to the guy I admired, Jed McKenna, who himself is a fictional character.
I love that. It's so meta. He is a fictional character telling you that you are a fictional character. I love it. But one of the things that he brings up endlessly is this idea that if you surrender your agency, if you surrender your internal locus of control, you are essentially what the ancient Greeks would've called a natural slave. Right? A slave mentality. You are letting yourself have a slave mentality, which if I think if your average human knew that they wouldn't, like, "I am, what? No, I'm not that." And they would at least sort of take steps to try to correct that. And then the idea of meta games, right? Change the rules. I don't know if you're a Star Trek fan, but the Kobayashi Maru.
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Maru. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right? The Kobayashi Maru, and how did Kirk, how was he the only one to beat it? He reprogrammed the simulation. I love that because that's the way I like to approach life. It's like, "No, I'm not going to play by those rules. I'm going to make up new rules and play by those." And that's kind of guiding our entire series that we're kind of doing in a halting fashion, but that we call the Great Reshuffle. It's like all of these old rule books are collapsing, and you've got a lot of people going, "What the fuck? This worked all of this time and it no longer works." Well, because we're going into this new world. And if you understand that, and one of the things I admire about you with your razors and the maxims is those are excellent, they're compressed knowledge.
Why do we have maxims? Because they've made it through generations, and they're compressed, compressed, compressed until you get down to very, very useful-
Gurwinder Bhogal:
The essence.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. The essence of why people should do things a certain way. And so, I think that the idea of gamification, you made the point where when you've got skin in the game, you take it a lot more seriously. My friend Annie Duke says, if you really want to nail somebody down, if they make some statement, just look at them and say, "How much would you bet on that? Because take the other side." If you ask them that way, and that's why I like organizations like longbets.org. Put your money where your mouth is.
And who are kind of the three groups that, again, a Jed McKenna or a Robert Pirsig would say had the highest chances of becoming enlightened or truth-realized? They're people who are surgeons, i.e. emergency room doctors, because all of the decisions they're making literally are life and death. Special forces, again, every decision that they make is literally a life or death situation. And then one that I didn't think about too much, my friend Dan Jeffries highlighted this, traders, people who trade for big financial houses. It's kind of a psychic death if you lose a billion dollars for the institution that you are trading for.
And so, I'm fascinated by, one of the things we're doing is I'm doing a meta study of what do those characters have in common with one another? What do emergency room doctors, special forces operators, traders, and there's others too that we are including in. And guess what, when you do kind of a summation of the way they look, super high agency, skin in the game, internal locust of control, perpetual learners, fuzzy logic, probabilistic reasoning as opposed to deterministic reasoning. These are things that you can learn to be better at. Right?
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it really comes down to, I think, willpower. That's the key because people have to want to actually improve their thinking. They have to want to improve their rationality and to develop agency. Unfortunately, that is the bottleneck, is willpower. I think, like I said, and this is why I think it's something that it's going to remain a sort of Pareto distribution. Because for the majority of people, they just don't have the will for it. They don't actually care about being rational. They don't care about truth as in truth with a capital T. They're just interested in satisfying. So they just want to know what's the bare minimum that they need to know in order to be able to function in their lives, in order to be able to do whatever they want to do in life. And so, it really does come down to how much do people want it?
And I think if somebody wants it enough, then there are plenty of tools that people can use in this age that we're living in now, where they can essentially achieve pretty much anything they want as long as they have the willpower, because there are so many tools now available. AI has just opened up the game now, but it's not just AI, just the internet itself is an amazing resource. You can use it to find out anything. You can form connections with people on the other side of the world. There's amazing ways. As long as you are intent on it, as long as you have the willpower, then nothing else is really an obstacle because heuristics, for instance, if you don't have a particularly good memory, for instance, you can just rely on heuristics. Heuristics are very simple and they're very easy to remember.
I use heuristics all the time because I don't actually have a particularly great memory. I'm not great at reading large tracts of text, and I like to just do things quickly. So for me, I just rely on heuristics and I can get them very easily online, and I can also just get them from thinking. And there are so many tools available to people that there is no excuse really. If you want to be more rational, if you want to develop your agency, and if you want to, essentially whatever you want to do, you can do it. It's just a case of having the willpower. So I think if we could find a way to improve willpower, that would be something.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So I think willpower is the starting point, but willpower is very difficult to rely on consistently over long periods of time because willpower is like a tank of gas and it gets depleted pretty quickly. That's why so many people fail on diets, fail on fitness programs, fail on all of those things. I would suggest to you that there is a better way to do that, and that is to use a little willpower in the initial phases so that you habituate the behavior. If something becomes habituated, as opposed to a matter of will, it becomes a lot easier to consistently follow that. I've written a lot about that actually. And I think it's sometimes when people hear willpower, they're like, "Ugh." Like, "Ah." But developing habits,
If you can use your willpower initially, use it all you got, to cement those habits, and then you habituate eating better, reading better, exercising better, et cetera, then I think that that becomes a lot easier. Another thing that I would say is that in this new environment, there will be all sorts of competing entities like, I'm competing. I'm in the arena here. You are in the arena here. And to me, that's a good thing because what happens is what happens if we start curating things better? What happens if people are like, "God, I read him because he's always right about this shit."
That's a social scoring system right there too. So people playing for different reasons, playing a long, long-term game could not even intentionally get the people who might otherwise be satisfied with just, eh, they might actually gain their attention. On AIs, There's going to be deep competition. There is a very good reason why O'Shaughnessy Ventures is using on-prem models. Why? Because we don't want the lobotomized models that the commercial powers that be are hoisting on. Now, I use ChatGPT all the time. Is it lobotomized? Not entirely, but it's certainly what they would call de-biased. In other words-
Gurwinder Bhogal:
It's biased…
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
In other words, it is biased toward their biases. Right?
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so, if people realize, I just think ultimately we're back to the truth ought to be predictive. And if all of a sudden our unbiased, non-lobotomized AI models that we're building in-house start running circles around the other models that are biased, people are going to start to notice and they're going to be like, huh, I wonder. Hey, could you tell us a little bit more about that unbiased model that you're using and why are people afraid of it? Well, they're afraid of for obvious reasons. Most of the things that is coming out of the mouths of all of our politicians, all of the so-called influencers, all of that is pure bullshit. It's just bullshit. And it doesn't lead you anywhere that is going to be predicatively good for your future. And people do not want their sacred cows turned into burgers. And yet, that's what's going to happen.
In my opinion, that's why you see this meltdown in the traditional press, in the traditional political circles. They can't believe that people are looking at them and saying, "Man, you are just incredibly full of shit." And that's where what I call the global colossus, right? The interconnectedness amplifies. If I said that it was just me and you talking and it wasn't a podcast, and like, "What's the effect?" There's no network effect. There are network effects that are huge and amplify. And there does come points of tipping points where people are like, I think that politician, and fill in the blank, red, blue, purple. To me, they're all the same.
I personally believe that, at least in the United States, this is the worst political class on both sides of the aisle. So let's be fair here. CNN and Fox are just different versions doing the same thing, spewing propaganda. It's just different talking points, really. And so, one thing I say to people, "Do yourself a favor. Stop passively consuming information through a TV." I stopped watching TV news almost 15 years ago, and honestly, I cannot tell you when I see clips, they horrify me. It's like, I can't believe that people sit and watch this. And again, back to different generations. My dear mother-in-law is nearly 98 years old, and she sit and listens to news. I'm doing air quotes here for our people just listening, news all day long, and she's filled with despair. Because it's just doom, doom, doom.
You can counter-program these days, and that's one of the things I sort of believe if you can make a difference, you've got to try to make a difference. I don't try to engage myself in non-computable problems. Roger Penrose calls a lot of things that people spend endless times arguing about non-computable. Right? Robert Pirsig would say the answer's mu, M-U, which is, there is no answer to that particular question. And yet one of the things that you see people online endlessly arguing and screaming at each other about for hours and hours and hours, non-computable problems.
And so, if you learn to just say, "Yeah, I'm not going to bother with that one because that's non-computable." Like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Like, okay. Medieval scholars spent entire careers going back and forth in their little oystered environment as to what that can do. I think that you could turn the network effect on its head and say, "Guess what? You want social proof. Well, the social proof is that film had made a ton of money and people loved it, and maybe its message was one of inspiration and empowerment and all of those things."
So I think that while we naturally get more clicks, as it were, by trying to scare the shit out of people, I think that you can also get quite a bit and do quite well with things that inspire people with things that get people to think, "You know what? Maybe I can develop that habit. Maybe I can become better." Is it going to always be a Pareto distribution? Probably. Those things have remained incredibly stable over long periods of time in a variety of civilizations. But I also think that there is a thing that I first learned about in the book, The Weirdest People in the World, cumulative cultural evolution.
If we went back in time and I'm holding up an iPhone here and showed this to somebody from 1900, it would be magic. What is this magical thing that you have in your pocket there? And then there's also finally you can adjust your attitude, which is by that I mean there is no such thing as perfection. What we are trying to do is continually come up with better explanations so that we have better problems to solve. We're always going to have problems. Anyone who's just like, "These are all of the problems." And it's really easy to be against things. It doesn't take any cognitive, your neural expenditure of caloric intake, it's going to be really low. If it's just like, "I'm against that, I'm against that, I'm against that." It takes a lot more to be in favor of something. So I'm always looking for things to root for. I root for you, man. I root for people-
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Likewise.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... I root for people like you who are doing really great work and doing it in such a manner. You're such a good writer, and that's important because Mark Twain had a great quote. “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and lightning bug.” And you are lightning, my friend.
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Thank you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I could talk to you literally for the rest of the day, but my producers are giving me the hook here. So you might remember from your last visit with us that we are going to give you an opportunity to hypnotize and mesmerize and incept the world. We're going to make you the emperor of the world for one day. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a re-education camp. But what you can do is we're going to give you a magical microphone, and you're going to say two things into it that every human being on the planet, even the 80% that we worry about are going to say, "You know what? I've just had the two greatest ideas. And unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually take action on these two ideas and I'm going to try to really make them part of my life." What two things are you going to be incepting in the world's population?
Gurwinder Bhogal:
So in the theme of this conversation, it would be gamification and skin in the game.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Skin in the game. I love that one. If we made everyone have skin in the game, the world would be a very, very different place. By the way, that's what it used to be in the old days. There's a reason I put my name on all the companies I found, except for one. Guess what happened to the one that I didn't put my name on? It failed.
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Wow.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
The ones that I put my name on was great advice from my wife. When I was trying to name my first company that I created in 1987 when I was 27 years old, she's like, call it O'Shaughnessy Capital Management. She goes, you yourself lecture me all the time about in the old days, people put their name on those banks, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith. Why did they do that? Because they were all in.
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Skin in the name.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It was their name. Yeah. Skin in the name. Soul in the game, blood in the game, and they were partnerships. Why were they partnerships? Because guess who had to pony up when you made a bad bet? The partners. You didn't get a chance to socialize your losses back then. So I try to keep it as is. So I love both of those, inceptions and let's hope we get more people with skin in the game. Thank you so much. There's always so much fun talking with you. And I'm going to already have Ena schedule version three because I didn't even get to 70% of the stuff I wanted to pick your brain on.
Gurwinder Bhogal:
Yeah, it's been a pleasure, Jim. I'd love to do it again. Thanks.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
All right, thanks so much.