Attention and curiosity

Revise your relationship with the unknown and change your life.

This is the final episode of season 1. Thanks for joining me on this journey. In this episode, we discuss a hypothesis about internet trolling and misinformation. I provide two pieces of evidence along with one personal anecdote supporting this hypothesis. These are given in the episode and are not provided here in the synopsis. Hopefully they are convincing for you. Time will tell if my hypothesis is ultimately correct. The hypothesis is that these phenomena (trolling and misinformation) are symptoms of the early internet that will improve over time. The idea is that every new power is abused in its early years as people adjust to it, but in time people learn to use it properly. Internet access represents a brand new type of power that we’ve never had before, and every day, more and more people are getting access for the first time. They are immediately sucked into fake news websites that proliferate everywhere, and participate in and are affected by internet trolls. As the decades go by and internet access becomes the rule rather than the exception, more people will be born with the internet as something that just exists. As this population of people born into the internet grows, the phenomena of trolling and belief in fake news will likely subside. More people will learn internet etiquette, having been taught about it from an early age, and the trolly, bullshitty corner of the internet will begin to shrink in relevance. As that happens, the best version of the internet will begin to grow in importance: the aspect of the internet that facilitates valuable contributions and learning: Wikipedia and GitHub come to mind.

 

One of the things I am learning as I go through life is that you can’t binge on good behavior and expect a good life. What I mean by that is if your behavioral norms are corrupted, you can’t do the occasional good or even the occasional VERY good deed and expect your life to improve significantly and sustainably. Good begets good, and daily habits do the begetting, not occasional acts that are out of character. This is true no matter how large the magnitude of your temporary good deed. A good deed will make you feel good for awhile, but eventually you will fall back to the baseline feeling that is the result of your standard behavior. Boring, small, daily habits are what matter, not gigantic heroic acts.

Are nihilists correct? Is there a point to anything? Are there any effective counterarguments to the nihilistic assertion that life is meaningless? There is little to be found in terms of solid logical counterarguments when it comes to arguing against a nihilist. It always requires a leap of faith, because the nihilist has the intellectual upper hand. The leap of faith involves building your own meaning and hoping that that’s enough; chasing your own dreams tenaciously and hoping for the best. After a few decades, when your dreams unfold, the nihilist may still have the intellectual upper hand, but you’ll have the better life after having shown that even though life may seem (or be) meaningless, it is still worthwhile to pursue something that you consider meaningful, as it leads to a better life, however temporary and fleeting, and that is really the most we can hope for when it comes to countering nihilists. Having the logical upper hand is not the holy grail of winning, necessarily. In the middle of the podcast, I provide a way to turn the nihilist perspective against them: the nihilist case for striving to pursue your own meaning.

In this episode, we discuss two different career types. In my view, all careers fall somewhere in this dualistic spectrum: knowledge-centric careers (minority) and task centric careers (majority). We discuss the dynamics between people on different ends of the spectrum, and how these can bring about a change in the times – ushering in a dark age or an enlightenment age, depending on how the dynamics play out.

The path to right wing extremism involves the extraction of men from society who don’t feel useful or like their life has a point. Every man has the desire for meaning, and the chance to contribute and improve their world. The views and beliefs are extreme, but I would argue that the men themselves are not extreme at their core. It’s a shame that our society has not harnessed this male desire to make meaningful contributions. Instead, we leave them behind to the detriment of society. ANY man can be radicalized if found in the right point in his life and if the conditions are right. Anybody. People are always surprised when they find out that that average Joe or that quiet kid they went to school with is a white supremacist. They can’t imagine someone like that being radicalized. They imagine that only crazy people can be radicalized. But no, anyone can go down this path if they get sucked in by some predatory recruiters who make big promises. Some people are like leaves in the wind, and that leaf can land in the sweet spot if the wind is right. If they get caught in a rightward gust, however, they can end up being radicalized. Society should be more structured, and blocking these strong winds to ensure that these leaves end up in more desirable locations.

No summary today. You’ll have to listen to the podcast.

Nothing is more oppressive than nature. We as humans spend a lot of time trying to correct the wrongs of others. We want to see justice and ensure fairness, so we have laws and things like that. This is a noble pursuit, BUT we spend far less time trying to decouple ourselves from the oppression of nature. We try really hard to correct human oppression, trying to keep people from doing horrible things to others to the best of our ability, but we spend a lot less time than we should trying to solve problems imposed upon us by nature. Nature just is, and sometimes the way nature is, is very very damaging for us. I would argue that nothing is more oppressive than nature, and the problems that nature imposes upon us are far more difficult to solve than human problems, but far more worthy of solving. The reason we don’t spend as much time as we should on this, is because it doesn’t have the emotional weight of a human problem. When a person is doing bad things, it incites anger in many people, and they rally to solve that problem. Natural events, on the other hand, just “happen”. There’s no one to be angry with, so there isn’t the emotional motivation to solve the problem. We need to overcome this dismissal of nature, and solve some of natures most pressing problems, like asteroids and cancer. The good thing about solving natural problems, is that there is no real enemy, and all of humanity can therefore come together to solve the problem together. In a sense, the problems of nature can be unifying for us in our attempts to solve them. As an example, we humans have the ability to prevent an asteroid the size of that which killed the dinosaurs from ever hitting the planet. If we detected it early enough, we could develop a technological solution which would steer it off course and prevented the collision entirely. These sorts of problems that don’t have any emotional weight, but do have seriously grave consequences are the most worthwhile problems to solve. An asteroid has no evil intent. An asteroid can’t trigger us emotionally. But an asteroid can easily destroy all human life.