#1073 - Gurwinder Bhogal - 19 Uncomfortable Truths About Human Nature

It's been too long man. You write these awesome things on the internet. This is the eighth time we've done this now For the people that haven't seen you before you come up with some of my favorite aphorisms and insights and stuff and we just do that we're kind of like the Bonnie blue of Interesting insights about the internet. We're just taking whatever we get it's high velocity stuff The first one that I want to get into the oxytocin paradox. This is one of yours oxytocin The love hormone can also make people spiteful cruelty is not simply the opposite of compassion It's often adjacent to it for instance The platform most dominated by social justice activists blue sky is also the one with the highest support for assassinations Beware of those quick to show empathy for they are often just as quick to show barbarity Yeah, so This is a finding that I sort of came across quite recently, but it confirms something I've long known Which is that people who outwardly express a lot of empathy tend to also be equally capable of cruelty to that same extent and I first learned about this from a book called against empathy by by Paul Bloom who's a psychologist and in this book, I think you've had him on the show in In this in this book. He basically talks about how people tend to Assume that empathy is a just a good thing overall, you know that it's not that we need more empathy that that empathy is like in short supply But really Empathy is in group loyalty. That's what it is. It's you know, because we're tribal animals and what empathy is is when you empathize with someone The way he describes it is you don't empathize with everybody at the same time You empathize with select people and the way he describes it is that it's empathy is like a spotlight So you shine it on people, you know a small group of people at a time or just an individual at a time But while you have empathy shined on that person everybody else is in darkness, which basically is Basically means that you don't have any real feelings for that person. That's outside of that spotlight so what this can mean is that if You empathize so let's take a real-world example. Let's say You're somebody who empathizes with the plight of the Palestinians So you'll you'll have a lot of love for those for those people and you'll be very very concerned about them But there's a there's a kind of yin yang effect where because you have so much concern for them You have negative concern for Israelis So it's not like, you know You just have love for one group of people and then everybody else you're sort of neutral to It can actually have a sort of almost like a zero-sum effect the more empathy you have for one group of people the less empathy You have for other people and this is I think a major driver of sort of cruelty and spite in the world When you consider like the people that go out there and commit political violence What you often see is that these people empathize very strongly with one group of people So again, you know, if we go go with the Palestinian analogy a group like Hamas for instance You know Hamas have a lot of empathy for Palestinians at least they do claim to But then that equates also to hostility corresponding on hostility proportionate to Israelis You see it also with again with the example that I gave in that in that piece which is about blue sky So blue sky obviously is where all the social justice people hang out, you know, it's basically all refugees from musk ex So, you know, these are all people that you would think would be extremely compassionate extremely sort of empathic And they are they are but only to a small group of people For example, you know the left when they call for empathy, they don't call for empathy for right-wingers They call for empathy towards immigrants or towards trans people, you know so their empathy is very selective and This is why when when you look at recent research you find that the Amount of support for Assassinations is strongest amongst the people that you would expect to be the most compassionate basically Well, you saw that with Luigi Mangione, right that he had a manifesto He was very empathetic toward people who'd been screwed over by health care services people who'd had their health care denied and their claims That had been rebuked to do, you know squirrely Manipulation behind the scenes and that resulted in him shooting a guy in the head Yeah Yeah, so I mean Yes, I sort of met Luigi In 2024 and he seemed like a really nice guy, you know, I can't say a single bad thing about him from our conversation He really did seem like a genuinely nice person. You spoke to him for a couple hours, right? Yeah, yeah, I did two hour conversation with him Because he was you know, he was a big fan of my writing and so it became a founding member and then we ended up having a two hour video call and Yeah, he seemed like he genuinely seemed like a really nice guy and I just you know Did not have any idea that he was planning this. I don't even I don't know if he was planning this at the time that I spoke to him But yeah, but I wasn't I mean although I was shocked obviously because when somebody you know is in the news for something like that It's of course, it's gonna be shocking But at the same time it didn't surprise me from an intellectual point of view It didn't surprise me because I've I've interacted with some extremely dangerous people You know early in my sort of writing career, right? I hung around with Al Mahjaroon just try and find out who they are Al-Mahjaroon is the the UK's deadliest. She had this organization. They've been responsible for quite a lot of terrorist attacks on UK soil and I was sort of hanging out with these people for a while just to find out how they Minds work and they were really really friendly people. They were because they thought I was Muslim Because I speak the same language as them and so I was able to pretend I was one of them and they were really really nice to me you know, they would You know, they would like if they were going to the shop They would ask me if I wanted anything they were just kind of like really always concerned, you know, like and stuff and they barely knew me and So, you know, I was kind of like this is a bit strange, but then I'd later learn that one of them Went to Syria to become a bomb maker for ISIS. He blew his arm off He another thing he did was actually before he did that he he stabbed a guy in the eye for apparently insulting the Prophet Muhammad And then when he was on bail, he was able to skip But he was able to skip bail he fled he went to Syria became a bomb maker blew his arm off and then he got killed in a strike So, you know, this guy's name was Abu Raheem Aziz He also used to go by the name Abu al-Britani and I think he was actually allowed to leave by MI6 so that they could track him and blow him up But that's a whole other story. But basically he was he was somebody who was really nice Guy that would say hey, do you want a grenade bar? I'm going to the I'm going to the corner shop Would you yeah, do you want some crisps or some chocolate or something? Yeah, I mean, they were just you know, they were always looking out for each other And they had a lot of empathy for each other, you know and for their fellow Muslims They had a lot of empathy for them But then they had no empathy for for example Jewish people I witnessed a lot of anti-Semitism when I was in in Burry Park in Luton Which is a just a Muslim sort of enclave They were very, you know, they were very anti-Semitic they did they dehumanized Jews and especially Israelis, but they had all the empathy in the world for Muslims And you know, you see this on the other side as well You know, you see Israelis who have all the empathy in the world for Jews, but don't have any for the Palestinians So it's you know, this is not like just one side. This is a common human trait You see this everywhere you see it amongst the left you see it amongst the right you even see it amongst centrists So, you know, when people say oh, we need more empathy I think do we you know, I think maybe the problem is is that we have sort of selective empathy and we maybe need to sort of Understand that everybody's a human being not just the people that we empathize with Yeah, less tribalism not more empathy Exactly interesting next one Rumpelstiltskin effect to name a problem is to tame it Diagnosing one's suffering makes it feel more meaningful and thus manageable even if the diagnosis is wrong Major depressive disorder is easier to live with than anonymous sadness This is one reason for the recent surge in diagnoses of disorders like depression autism and ADHD and I pulled some data Anxiety is now the most common mental health condition in the world. So global burden of disease study 359 million people that's 4.4 percent have an anxiety disorder 332 million that's 4% have depressive disorders 37 million bipolar 23 million schizophrenia 16 million have eating disorders. So that's I guess bringing the Rumpelstiltskin effect into real life Yeah, so so the Rumpelstiltskin effect takes its name from the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin Which most people should be familiar with from their childhood. I vaguely remember it but what I remember is that basically Rumpelstiltskin is an imp who steals a woman's baby and In order to get it back She has to find find out his name and then one day she hears him dancing around a fire Singing about how she you know, nobody knows his name because his name is Robert Rumpelstiltskin So he's not very bright, but you know after she finds out she has power over him So it's the idea of when you name something you have power over it And there's a lot of kind of evidence of this because I've actually written about this in detail actually when you look at for example the ways in which People come to understand themselves how they come to sort of understand their own identity is often through their ailments and this can kind of bring them a kind of a sense that they're Not in control of well at least it gives them more of a sense of of control over their problems um, so you know, for example if you are If you are shy, right then you might consider that your shyness is a personality defect And this can be quite hard on people right so it can it can compound The anxiety that you already feel from your shyness By by making you believe that you're worthless or that you're you know that you're defected in some way Because it's a personality trait that you can't really you can't really grasp you don't know why you're shy You know, you don't know why and so you're just kind of you're stuck with it But if somebody says to you, oh, no, no, no, you're not shy. You have social anxiety disorder Then suddenly you have something that you can direct all of your sort of your frustrations towards You know, you have something concrete now You're like, oh, okay So now you can come to understand a little bit more about yourself by learning more about social anxiety disorder So it helps you to sort of come to terms with your problems There are many incentives why you would want to label yourself in such a way I mean one one of the other incentives is that it kind of takes responsibility from yourself To something that you can't really do much about so something like, you know, your neurochemistry Or, you know, your genetics or something like that. So you're like, oh, okay Well, I can't do anything about it because this is social anxiety disorder, you know, but then At the same time this can also prevent you from Getting that thing treated, you know, because then you can kind of become quite resigned in a sense I think, you know with with kind of labels like this. I think that they can be useful, right? But I think Naming only helps if it leads to a tractable next step, you know, a real tangible next step because If the label replaces action, then it's just an excuse, right? And I think that's the problem that a lot of people are facing at the moment where they're using the label as an excuse Rather than as a motivation for more action Because if you have let's go back to the example of social anxiety disorder But there's two ways to cope with labeling your problem as social anxiety disorder You can either resign yourself and say, well, you know, this is a Something biological or psychological that I can't really do anything about so let's just not bother trying to fix it That's one path The other path is say, okay, so what are the causes of social anxiety disorder? What are the treatments for social anxiety disorder and what's going to work best for me? Obviously the latter is a much more healthy attitude But I think that too many people what they're doing is they're using the label as an excuse To to prevent action. So it actually has the opposite effect and never they never fix it, you know So while i'm not against labeling one's problems in such a way I think that it should always serve to further action You should actually it should be a step towards further action if it's if it's a step towards inaction, then it's just an excuse basically I saw a clip of Someone on some women's show talking about maybe it was opera talking about how obesity is a disease and Osempic is the medicine to the disease and you wouldn't tell somebody That has diabetes that they shouldn't take their insulin because they have a disease and this is medicine for the disease and It it reminds me a little bit of concept creep that idea that you talked me about probably four years ago where Over time as racism goes down numbers of racism objective numbers of racism Which I know that you've done tons of research into this in your previous life Uh objective racism goes down but subjective racism goes up because the demand for racism outstrips its supply And the only way that you can keep the volume of racism going so that people who comment on it have got something to talk about and campaign against Is to broaden the definition of racism Until it becomes so large that basically anything could be racism or anything could be transphobia or anything could be xenophobia or anything could be And the same thing goes for diseases right if you're diagnosing some issue uh what you had a passage from a book Maybe he was a clinical psychologist or something and he was saying how many patients he'd ever seen in his entire career Who'd come in and labeled themselves as just being sad with sadness? And it was three three patients across thousands had ever come in and said sadness everybody else was depression or anxiety or schizophrenia or imposter syndrome or whatever even even imposter syndrome right the the fear that other people expect a standard of you Which you can no longer meet that I mean there are a million different terms for it It could be uncertainty Uh it could be humility And humbleness it could be low confidence. It could be low self-esteem. It could be low self-belief um, but Imposter syndrome to put the word syndrome after something and it's a cool term And I think it's a useful term to name something but the danger is of pathologization and yeah, you're right if you being able to put a name to imposter syndrome And because of that you go i'm gonna learn a little bit about what the research says to do with imposter So oh well actually if I do some positive self appraisal and I journal a little bit and I have a gratitude practice It seems that I can overcome my imposter syndrome how wonderful But if it is oh, um, let's say we're in a different world that didn't have ozempic I have obesity. It's a disease. I can't lose weight. You have outsourced all of your agency now. So yeah, you have used the naming of it as a roadblock to action as opposed to a GPS that can help you find how you should act Exactly. Yeah, and um, yeah, so the passage that you're talking about is from theodore dal rimple um, who's sort of like clinician Come sort of writer and yeah, he's sort of talked about this quite a bit Um, but I mean medicalization is a real problem. It's it's been a major problem since the 1970s um, uh, I think it's kind of like it's something that's sweeping across pretty much all sort of fields And the reason is because it's kind of like the alignment of perverse incentives. So you have patients, right? Patients who want easy answers to their problems. So they they are incentivized to pathologize Then you have the medical industry, which is both financially and ideologically Uh incentivized to sort of treat more and more things as medical problems For obvious reasons, uh, you know, firstly They they make money if they are treating more things So they have a sort of incentive to sort of just creep Crete their definitions Outwards and then they have ideological, um issues as well. And uh, this is because obviously They are not looking for signs of uh health they're looking for signs of disease That's essentially what physicians do, right? They don't look for signs of health They look for signs of disease and because of that there's a certain sense of confirmation bias where they're if you're looking for something You will tend to find it And so it's very easy if you have that kind of mindset the mindset of a clinician or a doctor Where you're looking for disease to see it even if it's not there And this is again, this has been shown throughout Throughout history, uh in the sort of you know, in the 1980s. There was the whole thing about Um multiple personality disorder. It's now known as dissociative identity disorder And this was basically from like, you know, you can actually trace the development of this What it is essentially like a kind of moral panic I don't believe that uh multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder are real things. I think that they're actually fictions Um because I've actually looked at the history and it really began in sort of like the late 1970s where I think there was one Case of somebody claiming to have multiple personalities And this case went kind of viral as things might go viral in those days, which was through newspapers And after this suddenly loads of people started coming forward saying that they also had this issue and what's interesting is that the number of um Alternate identities that people claim to have increased over time So I think like initially people averaged one alternative personality and then apparently by like the 1990s There was an average of about 17. It was absolutely ridiculous Like just more people just more and more they're having more and more alternate identities You know and and there's no real sort of like Neurology behind it. It's just complete sort of nonsense Um, so, you know, this this to me is is a very good example of this whole pathology pathologization Sort of pandemic as I call it, uh, where even it's not just that definitions increase, but whole diseases can be invented out of nothing Simply because people want to put a name on their discomfort Trust really is everything when it comes to supplements a lot of brands may say that they are top quality But very few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with momentous They make the highest quality supplements on the planet and their whey protein is literally the cleanest on the market It's fast absorbing isolate sourced from grass-fed european cows, which means no hormones No antibiotics, no gmos plus its nsf certified meaning that even olympians can use it and unlike most proteins It's designed for gut health. No fillers. 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Best of all, there's a 30 day money back guarantee So you can buy it completely risk-free plus their ship internationally right now You can get 35 percent off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below Or heading to live momentous.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a check out that's live Emo m e nto us.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a check out Malingering between 20 and 40 percent of undergraduates at many elite american universities are now registered as disabled In the uk one quarter of the entire population now identifies as disabled the rewards for claiming a disability Now outweigh the stigma and those hurt most by all the pretenders are ultimately those with genuine disabilities Yeah So we're kind of living in a world now where I don't really see much stigma Um towards disabled people at least not institutional stigma Um, I see a lot more benefits being given to people who claim to have disabilities. So in the example that I give Um, you know, if you look at universities like elite universities such as stanford harvard. Yale They have like really high percentages of disabled students or at least students who claim to be disabled And when you look at why this is you see it's pretty obvious Um, if you if you are registered as disabled with one of these universities, then you get extra time on exams That's just one of the benefits you get but you also get other benefits as well But that's the main benefit, uh, but probably the most lucrative benefit. And so, um You get a lot of rich kids. It's weird because when you look at the people who are Primarily claiming disability it tends to be the rich kids Uh, which is quite a quite an odd sort of correlation, right? And um, you know And it seems to be because they are the ones who can pay doctors to essentially fabricate their disabilities Oh You know, so, um, yeah So basically these kids now are getting extra time in exams because they're basically saying oh, I have a dhd I'm on the spectrum. You know, I have um Some problem like I have constant pain in my in my left leg. It could be anything, right? They'll just basically say something, you know, I'm dyslexic or whatever And so what happens is is that these kids basically get the extra time in exams and why this is bad? I mean, it's obviously bad for being dishonest, but it's extra bad because It essentially makes it harder for people with genuine disabilities To be believed like when they have a disability because it is true that there are some people who have disabilities That are not obvious that require a physician to actually do a check on them To find out, you know, I have an aunt for example who has um osteoporosis And it's not it's not obvious watching her even walk that she has osteoporosis, but she jet but she actually does have it because it's all um, you know She from x-rays you can see that her bones are basically crumbling and so um You know, it's it's it's it's actually quite common where somebody can have a disability But it's not obvious and so if you have like between 20 and 40 percent of everybody Claiming to have a disability then the people who actually have a disability get less Attention they get they're not believed as much the treaty with skepticism So not only do we are we creating a victimhood culture? But we're also creating a cynical culture where the people who genuinely need help where we believed So yeah, it's a pretty bad way yeah Sloppy gander more online articles are now written by ai than by humans and research is increasingly finding the Ai is better at persuading people than people are Who wins in a world of unlimited propaganda? Not those with the best arguments, but those with the most slop This is similar to mollocks bargain when llms compete for votes or social media likes They push lies and rage bait to win even when explicitly instructed to stay grounded and and honest if chatbots conclude that getting our attention Requires lying to us is the ai misaligned or a we? Yeah, so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about The kind of ai driven disinformation age where basically nothing will be nobody will be able to Know what's true and everybody's going to believe lies and all this kind of stuff and I mean, yeah, that that's probably Part of it. I don't think it's like as as serious as people are claiming I don't think the actual the serious part of this is that people are going to believe lies Because people have always believed lies, you know If you go back, you know, throughout any any point in history There were a lot of sort of consensus beliefs that were ultimately proved to be wrong Um, so I don't actually think that people believing falsehoods is is necessarily a bad thing I think most of what people believe as opposed to what they know is is false anyway, right? I think that the bigger problem is not The dissolution of truth, but the dissolution of trust. I think that's far more important because A society can survive without truth Um pretty much most of the time, you know, as long as you have very basic truths Like knowing that gravity is a thing for example, you know, as long as you have basic truths Society can survive you don't need complex truths for a society to survive and history shows us that it's demonstrated that beyond beyond reasonable doubt But trust is a whole different ball game uh, a society can't survive without trust because pretty much everything depends on um being able to Trust other people in society if you can't you know, if you can't trust other people then you don't have a society It's like literally the glue that binds a society together And what what I think is a problem is not that people will believe falsehoods I think the problem is is that the cost of determining what's actually true is going to become so high It's going to require so much effort That people are essentially going to give up really valuing truth as a principle This is this is one of my favorites from you reality apathy when the sheer volume of conflicting information makes the effort of finding the truth Costlier than the value of knowing it people give up trying to be accurate and instead choose whatever bullshit stinks least Slop doesn't just threaten the truth, but the very worth of truth and it's this um This sort of overwhelm the the the goal of propaganda isn't to make you believe any one narrative sometimes It's simply to make you more pliable at not wanting to believe anything So, uh, I I just I I'm earlier on today in one of the old group chats from the guys that used to work for me in Newcastle one of the guys said, um Is anybody else's algorithm getting peppered with all of this hepsin stuff at the moment these are blue collar dudes from the northeast of the uk Maybe they're working in london or something this is not hepsin is not supposed to sort of cross their their threshold And it's obviously hit a limit at a volume where they think holy shit like this is so much hepsin stuff um I've just seen I'm now convinced that he's playing fortnite in fucking israel. I don't know what to believe anymore And that's that's literally reality apathy and it was so funny to see that message come in and think that This is the overwhelm of information and conflicting points of view going in opposite directions Literally happening in front of my eyes Yeah, and I think one of the challenges going forward Is going to be trying to convince people that it's actually worth pursuing the truth I think more than actually convincing them of anything any particular truth Just convincing them of the value of truth is going to be extremely important Because we're essentially entering a world of virtual reality You know, you can essentially create your own reality now You can do it both figuratively through social media echo chambers, but you can also do it literally by essentially just sequestering yourself in your bedroom and living your entire life um Through your you know your headset or your your your laptop screen or whatever And just using ai to just generate whatever you want, uh, whatever, you know, reality you want This is not far away. I mean, you know, there's recently been um, I think it's cdance this new Chinese Sort of video generation tool which is just insane cdance. Yeah, I think it's okay cdance. Yeah Is that like it's a it's chose chinese saura Much much much better than saura. It's like a whole generation Ahead of saura ahead of vo3 ahead of all the best uh frontier models in the west This is something completely wild I think china has got an edge in video generation Because they don't have copyright laws or at least they don't really care about copyright very much Whereas the west has an advantage in text based Generative ai because they don't have censorship laws So, um, you know, there's this trade off whichever market whichever market has the poorest protections will get the most progress Yeah, basically. Yeah, because that seems to me to be the bottleneck. Oh funny. Yeah, so you can you can make oh, is that who made I saw a pretty famous Uh, uh dragon ball z recreation. Yeah, three d. Have you seen this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay I know exactly what you mean and I saw it last night. I don't remember thinking Fucking hell that's really good and they're still trying to use Um cell shading to make it it's not supposed to look like people It's supposed to look like cartoon people, but it's in 3d and it's I mean significantly better than dragon ball z from a design standpoint, so yeah, I wondered what that was Is that saura that seems really good for is that fucking nano banana 5? What the fuck is going on? But it was this new thing that you're talking about. Yeah, I think it's from bite dance which is the company that created tiktok and um Capcom. Yeah, basic cap cut and all the rest of that stuff. Yeah, um, but it's wild so we're basically entering this kind of virtual reality age where People can essentially create their own reality, you know, whatever they want to believe they can make it at least seem true enough Um by curating, you know curating information online. So yeah, we need to teach people to actually value truth As a species if if we want to actually progress What was that line around? Dead internet theory people being worried that all of the content on the internet is just going to be made by robots We're worried about the fact that unthinking Replicative automatons are going to be producing most of the information that we see online The future that we fear will come to pass has already come to pass Because most people blindly just repost what they see in any case Like we're worried about the fact that these disembodied fucking ayes are posting stuff. Meanwhile Someone that doesn't read an article or watch a video outside of the first 15 seconds Decides to spew their half baked opinion, which isn't theirs You know, they're being marionetted by the few original thinkers that came before them and are now just saying the nearest close What was it? um uh The new hill to die on that they've just decided they plant this flag and like this five minute old opinion is that this The new thing that they're going to wrap their entire identity around uh You're already doing the dead internet theory has been here since social media was here People were unthinking in the way that they reposted and commented on stuff They weren't being subtle and nuanced and now all that you're worried about it's this it's the exact same as People being worried about self-driving cars that are significantly safer than humans are But they've got a combination of naturalistic fallacy and some weird preference that they'd rather die by a human driver than be saved by a robot And it's kind of the same. Well, you know, I'd rather be lied to by an unthinking human idiot than convinced by an unthinking robot super genius Yeah, I mean few people are willing to admit the similarities between humans and chatbots You know, like there's a lot of people saying, oh, you know, well, uh, you know, these chatbots aren't intelligent They're just predicting the next token, but then you consider, you know, what are humans doing? You know A lot of the time they're just predicting the next token too Uh, they're just you know, they're just regurgitating, you know, what they've heard and Kind of just developing explanations about the world based on that, you know going by vibes is probably how people would describe it today Uh, so, you know, I think yeah one of the good things about sort of The whole aii age is it's really allowed us to understand that a lot of what we thought were Unique to humans are actually just basic algorithms, you know, just ways that we organize information the way that we generate beliefs Um, a lot of it is, you know, people don't really understand what they're saying they're just kind of regurgitating what they heard and That is essentially what a chatbot does in a sense. And so it helps us to really understand how automated so much of our Believe formation is. It's why we need to you know, have more agency and actually If we want to be indistinguishable if we want to be distinguishable from from chatbots Then we need to actually sort of we need to strengthen the one thing that we have that that chatbots can't replace and that's agency To the ability to actually act independently and to actually Think about what you're doing rather than simply reacting to your circumstances One percent rule in online communities around one percent of users produce almost all of the content as such What you see online is not representative of humanity, but merely allowed obsessive and often narcissistic psychopathic and low IQ Minority social media is literally a freak show and consuming only content that reinforces your views is intellectual incest producing beliefs that are increasingly frail and deformed yeah so You know when I go online on social media, I often Can sometimes well I sometimes feel disheartened, you know, it can I think we've discussed this before Uh where you know you go on social media and you just see just loads of just crap on your timeline And just the the most ill-informed opinions and you know people getting outraged over just nonsense And it kind of can like destroy your faith in in the human race You know, I think um sam harris. I think the reason why he left twitter I think he did describe it that way. He said that you know when he was on social media and made him hate humanity You know, and I I could say yeah, you referred to it as the most pathological type of telepathy you can imagine Where all he could hear were the worst of everybody else's thoughts Yeah And you know and sometimes, you know, it can sort of just really disheartening you I have a few friends who you know on social media and they They sometimes have long breaks because they just completely just just really demoralizes them when they think oh This is what humanity is, you know, all this noise like all this completely irrational noise just being thrown out everywhere um But I think it's always helpful to remember that what you're seeing online is not actually representative of humanity It's representative of the loudest and often the most obnoxious Humans on the planet and there's a lot of research to support this, you know, there's a pretty consistent findings Which find that people who are high in um in certain dark tetrad traits particularly in narcissism and psychopathy Uh tend to use social media more, but also they tend to engage in online political participation A lot more as well. They tend to engage in in sort of online debates and things like that a lot more um, and then you also have um people who are Essentially close to be you know people who are really dramatic again. Narcissism comes up here Um, also histrionic personality disorder Naturally, you know the people that are histrionic personality disorder So histrionic is basically when you're a drama queen Basically, it's when you um, you know, you just want to to draw attention to yourself by playing the victim Or by you know, just catastrophizing Uh, just making out like everything's worse than it actually is just to throughout theatrical behavior basically and um, so you naturally this is a good fit for social media this kind of behavior You know because obviously if you want an audience and if you want to play theatrics Where else would you want to go then a place where? Everybody else is freaking out and everybody's looking to be freaked out You know so obviously social media attracts the absolute worst of the human race It attracts the most impulsive the most theatrical the most Narcissistic the most psychopathic the most low IQ You know these are the you know often the worst people not saying that there aren't good people on social media Of course there are but when you look at it from a statistical point of view you have Overrepresentation of the worst elements of humankind I also imagine even if you have somebody who is compassionate and well-meaning and delicate and and and thoughtful and high IQ They're operating in an environment where they regress to the mean and the mean is mean Oddly enough I had one so uh for the people that haven't heard us do this before most of the stuff is me Shamelessly shilling Gwenda stuff and then he says it back to me But sometimes I bring stuff from home and I've got I've got some that I brought from home So this one's kind of related recursive red pill learning Most people get their information from the internet the stories online Which garner the most attention are the most extreme meaning that influences Unrepresentative insights are being trained on other influences unrepresentative insights Leading to self-reinforcing antagonism between the sexes and this came out of a quote that I saw online Which is having a boyfriend is embarrassing now Which was that variety article that came out about six months ago has the same energy as the Kardashians made skinny go out of style in that neither is true if you just go outside so this um The the loudest stories the biggest stories the ones with the most upvotes on reddit By definition are the ones that are the most attention grabbing which means that they're the most extreme or unrepresentative And that means if you spend most of your time learning about the world through the internet What you see is the least representative presentation of what reality is like Over and over again, and it just retrains you to expect that as normality Yeah, and I've seen this play out in real time because I've been on on social media since uh around 2014 And in that time, you know, I've stuck with pretty much the same group of sort of mutuals mostly And I've actually witnessed an interesting pattern, which is that the people who spend the most time online Have become more unhinged and more extreme in their beliefs. This is something I've personally witnessed I know that this is n n n equals one, but it's it's more compelling to me than studies because it's something I've literally witnessed happen in real time. Um, and I think this is it's probably I mean, this is also supported by research as well some of these You know, I wrote this article called drama get in about people talking about a civil war Um, and this talk has been going on since around 2021 like really serious talk People like elan musk have like, you know, sort of promoted this idea that there's going to be a civil war between the left and the right in the us and Some people have said, you know, it will probably happen in the europe as well But it's mainly it seems to be much more in the us because the us is a lot more politically polarized than than europe is um in general and Basically this idea is is that You know, a lot of these people think there's going to be a civil war for precisely the reasons that you gave which is that What we see is that what goes most viral are the so-called scissor statements, you know What scott alexander called scissor statements, which are statements that are deliberately designed to Create debates create arguments basically Like and this is you know, this is this is one of the reasons why The the media now what they seek to do is they don't seek to just tell you things that are true They seek to actually create statements or news reports that will divide people Because when they do that the two sides will argue over that issue and in so doing they will help that thing go viral So for example, if you are, you know, if you're the new york times and you want to go viral How do you go viral? You're not going to go viral by telling the truth if you just state facts like, you know about some sort of reporting You're not really going to go viral most of the time But what you what will go viral is if you make a divisive claim something that's going to split the internet into two So something like Oh, you know white people are privileged are too privileged You know, if you say something like that that's going to divide the internet in half You'll have half of people be like, yeah, you know, oh, you know white people are too privileged You know, we need to do something about it and then you have the other half people say no no no This is all nonsense, you know, this is based on, you know, false studies bad studies all this stuff, you know And so then they'll argue over it and in arguing over it They're going to make it go viral because then it's going to appear on everybody's timeline and then people are going to be writing Substance about it. They're going to be making videos about it, you know And so this all helps the the original claim to go viral And so this is the sort of tragic system in which we're in in which just stating true things does not go viral But but dividing people saying things that are going to divide people does And this is why I think so many people still believe that there's going to be a civil war In the u.s. Even though there's just when you look at reality, there's just no inkling of this whatsoever You know the polarization does exist but the polarization exists amongst the top like one percent of people on social media Who are most engaged in politics? It doesn't it doesn't really exist very much in the wider world, you know, so yeah in other news Shopify powers 10 percent of all e-commerce companies in the united states They are the driving force behind gymsharks, skims, aloe and mutonic Which is why I partnered with them because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers They are best in class their checkout is 36 percent better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms And with shop pay you can boost conversions by up to 50 percent They've got award-winning support there to help you every step of the way Look, you are not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do back-end inventory management Shopify takes care of all of that and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do Which is designing and selling an awesome product Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with new tonic On Shopify right now you can sign up for a one dollar per month trial period by going to the link in the description below Are heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom or lowercase that shopify.com slash modern wisdom To upgrade your selling today You stress people have more comforts and conveniences than ever yet reports of unhappiness or at an all-time high One reason is that discomfort isn't an obstacle to happiness It's the path to it for it's only by enduring struggles that we develop the resilience necessary for lasting contentment And you had a fucking slammer that i've been thinking about so much Automate only the skills you're willing to lose that those two feel like they're pretty related Yeah, so I mean You know, we've been told again, this is another sort of um error that the sort of social sciences have for a long time Propagated which is that you know, if somebody's exposed to stress then it's bad for their health You know, it can cause trauma or whatever, you know that that horrible word um But I mean when you actually look at the not just the data, but when you just look at pretty much All of human history, right? It's clear that stress can be very beneficial not all stress Right, it there's a certain kind of stress and that's called you stress And so, you know, you stress is basically the stress that challenges you that basically forces you to adjust that forces you to improve basically um, it's not like the stress of um You know being online and being constantly exposed to just, you know, horrific News from around the world that's bad stress because you can't really do anything about that, right? if you're you know, if you're if you're stressed because your feed is filled with horrific You know, um news stories from around the world. That's just bad stress. It's just going to stress you out You can't do anything about it. So you it's pointless. It's pointless stress. It's pointless suffering Good stress is when you can do something about it. So it's the it's stuff like you know, if you've got um If you've got a date for example, right? If you have a date with a girl That's stressful because now you've got to be your best You've got to be the best version of you, you know, you've got to you've got to impress that girl So you're under a lot of stress, right? But that forces you to become better. It's a challenge and you have to meet it and what happens is that In so trying to meet that that challenge you become a better person It helps to it helps you both at a psychological level, but also at a physiological level It's hormetic stress. You know, so hormetic stress is stress that sort of Makes you adapt basically it makes your body adapt to it and constant stress Of that kind is really really good for you And this the research is is is very clear on this but also Ordinary human experience is clear on this as well Anybody who's lived on this earth knows that you need a little bit of stress now and again just to sort of You know push you forward and get things going And so this whole thing that we've been told by a lot of people which is that you know, we need to minimize stress Because then we'll live longer or whatever that's actually it's not really true. It's half true You know bad stress is bad for you. It will reduce your lifespan probably, you know But we need to constantly expose ourselves to discomfort if we want to be able to be happy because happiness is dependent On having a resilient mind You cannot be happy unless you have a strong mind because you have to be able to weather All the slings and arrows of vicissitudes and the vicissitudes of life Like they will be constantly throwing things out your life will constantly be you know, knocking you astray From your course. It will constantly be throwing, you know, just a lot of unexpected things are going to be happening If you're only happy When things are going your way, you're not going to be happy most of the time And so you have to cultivate this strength and that's essentially comes from exposing yourself to stress the more stress of that Not not stress, but you stress the most you stress you you expose yourself to The more resilient your mind becomes and the more you are able to stay happy no matter what life throws at you What about automate only the skills you're willing to lose? Yeah, so this is basically the same principle. So Stress is also a form of learning It's it's how you learn, right? You know, I always say that, you know, um, You know, you you can you can rent wisdom But you can only purchase it with pain right, so What I mean by that is, you know, you could tell me something you could give me some modern wisdom, right? And I will be like, oh, okay. Yeah, that's a really cool way of living You know, maybe I should do that and I'll try it a couple of days and then I'll forget it exists And I'll just carry on with my life as it was But if I learn that same lesson through hardship if I suffer if I if I'm exposed to stress And I have to adopt that out of necessity Then it becomes integrated into me And then it becomes a habit. It's something that will always remember I'll always remember because it, you know Sort of the pain engraved the lesson into my brain And so stress can also be a form of learning And one of the things with automating things is it completely reduces the friction. It reduces the stress You no longer need to engage in any kind of discomfort because you just get things done automatically for you And so you don't learn as a result of that because the pain the stress is a necessary component of the learning You're not going to remember the lesson unless you really suffer or Expose yourself to some kind of stress that forces your body to internalize the lesson Have you looked at that research? Maybe harvard, maybe mit about students that use LLMs to help them with learning and writing and the differential in terms of how much they can recall afterward Yeah, yeah, I I recall this study. Yeah, I think so This is basically has found that essentially LLMs can cause brain rot basically I think I think that was like the one of the sort of clickbait titles that was given to the study Um that l lm's caused brain rot. So yeah, I mean, it's the same principle basically like when you are You know outsourcing your abilities to an l lm There's no incentive for your your body or your brain to learn the lessons, right? You know, you're just kind of Because it's like what playtoe said, um you know In fedras where he was talking about his one of his sort of concerns was he was writing at a time when When sort of paper and pen and or parchment and pen were becoming common So this was the ai of his age and he lamented that um paper was gonna all parchment was going to destroy people's memory Because if they could write things down then they would have no incentive to remember it And uh, I mean, I don't know how true that is, but I think that there is a certain sort of Analog with what we're seeing today, which is you know, there's a thing called the google effect Now this is it's not a robust finding, but I think that it It's I think the finding does exist. I think the finding is true But it's probably smaller than it. It's probably overstated But the the google effect is this idea that you know, if you can just kind of google anything then there's no need for you to Uh, remember facts basically because you can your your mind has essentially been extended to your screen So that's now functioning as your memory your laptop screen your phone screen is your is basically your memory now So your your actual memory doesn't really feel the need as it were to kind of Remember anything so I mean, you know, again the research on this is a bit shaky I don't want to say that this is a genuinely a thing because it's contradicted by some of the studies um, but some studies have found that this is this is the case so um, I don't know with this chat gpt thing if it really does cause brain right in the same sense because it's only one study and I'm very very Sort of wary of single studies now because of of course we've got a replication crisis A lot of studies are not replicated now. So um, but what I will say is one thing that we know for sure Is if you don't use it you lose it. This is a this is a fact that's beyond dispute. It's true of Uh, your body. It's true of your brain, right? If you you know, there's there's recent research, um, which early came out I think yesterday which found that uh people who are whose brains are active in in late life So from the ages of 50 to 80 They have a much, um, they're much less likely to develop Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia um, so if you know if you basically engage in things like video games um board games like chess Uh, if you write and read a lot if you if you keep your brain active in your sort of 50s Then then your chances of developing like dementia are much lower apparently And this is apparently like a pretty robust uh longitudinal study. So, um And again, this fits this is not just an isolated study This fits with all the other research that has been done on this topic Like the more you the more actively you use your brain The stronger your brain becomes this, you know, although it's not technically a muscle It functions like a muscle in that respect and so I mean one of one of my big fears about AI is not that um the machine is going to go conscious. It's going to become conscious It's that it's actually going to steal our consciousness away from us by essentially just Causing us to outsource all of our Agency our intelligence, you know to it and causing our own brains to actraffy So I think I had a conversation with Cal Newport Deep Workman Last week about a lot of this obviously his whole thing for 15 years now since he wrote so good. They can't ignore you was How can you stand out In a field of relative equals But I think his perspective certainly my perspective now is that The the field is getting worse and worse The the the bar that you need to get over is becoming ever lower um, you know in order for you to Get a partner at the moment simply approaching somebody in person in the real world is a one in a thousand Chance as opposed to 50 years ago. That would be something that everybody was doing And the same thing goes for what's the quality of your writing? Well, what AI is enabling is velocity and Quantity, but it's regressing to the mean with regards to quality and creativity and taste especially so If you can cultivate creativity quality work writing and good sense of taste You are going to stand out even more And you don't even need to cultivate it. You simply need to stop it from atrophying if you can hold your level if you can hold 2016 levels of Focus and ability to write and overcome stuff I mean if there's somebody out there who's got sort of 2008 levels of non-distraction before slack and before smartphones But you didn't you don't need to be better. You just need to not be worse and that ability to kind of hold is the entropy this sort of technological entropy of the system is trying to fucking compress you into dust Uh, that to me it kind of is hopeful. It's a hope in spite as a Civilization gets fatter not great for the civilization. I think that it should be good that everyone's in health But it does make For a pretty uncompetitive environment if you are someone that is able to avoid getting fatter That's good for you in as much as Civilization and the people around you are kind of a bit of a competition, which they are uh Probably the same thing goes for being able to read now. How long is it going to be before If we neuralink In we don't actually need to have the written word anymore. We don't need to have the spoken word anymore And that all of these skills that Latrophy Eventually you may get into a world where that's so redundant that you don't actually want it that there's better ways But at the moment we're at a transition period Where you still need to be able to have the skills from the old world in order to have a competitive advantage in the new one So, yeah, I I'm increasingly thinking now about What are the things that are non fungible? What are the things that are only human? What are the things and that's really where most of my attention should be focused on writing without using ai to help me with my research on coming up with ideas on developing taste on trying to be creative on Giving myself space because there's all of the market moves in the direction of why can just publish more if I publish more slop because I've been enabled by the magnifier that is llms That is where The entirety of the market will move because it's the path of least resistance. Okay. Well, what's the opposite of that? What's the more difficult choice? Yeah, the secret I think to surviving the future is going to be agency Because as I said before that is the one truly non fungible thing You know, I think everything else is downstream of agency. I think what's going to happen in the sort of ai age is that Essentially humanity is going to split in two and I think I've made a reference to this before I think in we've had a conversation in 2021 in which I spoke about this But basically the analog I use is a novel called the time machine which was written I think at the start of the 20th century and it was basically this story of in the far future humanity has sort of Evolved into two subspecies. So you've got the moorlocks and the eloi and the moorlocks basically they do all the work They've maintained like all their faculties because they have lived lives of drudgery and they've passed this on down to their generation Or from generation to generation And they're in charge of all of the machinery basically and they you know They're constantly working and constantly improving themselves mentally and physically and then you have the eloi who were basically they were the former Aristocrats they were the ones who had everything done for them And as a result of this they have all of their faculties of atrophied So that their bodies are like really thin and frail their minds. They've become very naive They're like they're basically like children. They've regressed into children And they're completely dependent on the moorlocks who do everything for them And in the end basically it turns out that the moorlocks have been farming the eloi in order to eat them Basically, you know, and while they're doing this, they're just distracting the eloi with all this like entertainment or you know, basically just to keep them Placid and I think that essentially we're going to have something probably not as horrific as that but something similar in the sense that We'll have a class system a new class system Well, we'll have high agency people whose agency is going to be increased even more by AI And then we'll have passive people whose passivity will be increased even more by AI because AI the way I look at it I don't look at it as artificial intelligence. I look at it as amplified intelligence But as I say, you know, it can also amplify stupidity It amplifies essentially it's an amplifier of everything So if you're lazy, it will amplify your laziness If you are highly agentic and conscientious, it will amplify those fact those Attributes as well. So what's going to happen is the people who already have agency. They're going to use AI to increase their options They're going to use it, you know, they're going to basically use it to do more So they're going to become even more agentic and the people who lack agency They're going to use it to do things for them. They're going to use AI to think think for them to basically outsource everything to them So they're going to get even less agency So what we're going to see is the compounding of both agency and its opposite Which is why I think there's going to be this purification of you know People who are high agency and low agency we have extremely high agency people and extremely low agency people who will probably be the majority of humans in the future quite a scary prospect This episode is brought to you by gym shock. 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That's good It's okay to suck compared to your standards as you grow So will your standards it doesn't mean that you actually suck This is similar to the matthew principle of self-improvement There's two types of people those who don't know how to improve their lives and those who don't know when to stop but that personal tockville paradox thing of um I have standards those standards continue to rise as my capacity rises and now The standard always outstrip where I think my capacity is at Well, if you didn't you would never get any better and it's kind of like hedonic adaptation But for your skill set like a habituation to what your performance level is and um The tockville paradox which I learned from you as living standards in a society rise people's expectations of those standards Grow more quickly than the standards can deliver them to it. So this is why given that, you know Louis the 14th we have technology and equality of life that he could not believe And yet we feel like Quality of life is the worst that it could be despite all of the material comforts and safety and medicine and Access to the internet and air conditioning and fresh water and stuff that we've got And I think the same thing happens with regards to personal growth as well You just continue to outstrip your own standards over and over again with where you want to be Yeah, absolutely. I I always think of um regret as a sign of progress You know, a lot of people think regret is a bad thing. I don't I actually think regrets a good thing Because what it shows is that you've grown basically Because if you're looking back and you're seeing an idiot in the past Then that's a sign that you have grown as a person, you know You basically you have you have new standards of behavior that you had when you did when you committed whatever act you are regretting And so I think you know, it's all I think so many of these kinds of problems are really just base rate fantasies you need to understand that Your own standards have risen and that's why When you look back and you think oh, okay, you know, this this person wasn't the person that I wanted to be That's because you you are now a new person you wouldn't be able to do that if you were the same person in a sense and again, you know, like Yeah, our sort of expectations for what is Is good do always increase as we improve and we have to we have to manage that we have to always account for that because if we don't We're essentially living in some sort of Weird kind of on on some treadmill basically, you know, we're basically on a hedonic treadmill The way that I like to look at things is to try to look at objective metrics rather than You know, whether I'm you know using subjective metrics because subjective metrics are always moving around. They're always, you know they're always they're very malleable and and on a bad day you might have Certain expectations that and then on a good day you have different ones So I think looking at objective metrics are always much much better So for example, if you want to look at, um, you know, they could be really shallow ones like, um If you know as a writer if you're a writer like me, it would be like how many likes do I get on my sub snap post, you know um, or it could be something a bit more sort of in depth like, um, you know, uh, looking at like, uh Where you know who who likes the the the piece, you know Is it is it just like sick of fans who like your your article or is it actually other people Do people that you normally disagree with politically? Are they liking that you're writing because if they do then that's that's a sign that you've really written something good You know, so there's many metrics you can use Um, and again, you know, if you're if you're using subjective metrics It's like trying to navigate by the light of a shooting star, you know It's just you're gonna be all over the place. So you have to have fixed points. You have to fix things that you you are aiming for Um, and that's way that way you can objectively measure Where you're going, you know, then your own standards are not really going to matter too much because you've got objective metrics fix in place Rothbard's law if a talent comes naturally to someone They assume it's nothing special and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them as a result people often specializing things that they're bad at We've spoken about this one before this was on on the last on the last episode we did It just relates to it just relates to these two so much. I think yes, so it's so good I have a friend. I think I told this story last time Ryan Long Wonderful at doing comedy sketches and just so fantastic But because that comes easily to him he's decided that other art forms are more elevated Because we're sort of blinded to the there is this natural assumption that if something is worthwhile, it's going to be difficult and that I wrote this essay a couple of months ago about the difference between inputs outputs and outcomes so inputs is Sort of time spent outputs is work done and outcomes is real world results And people love to focus on the first two not the third one because you never have to ask the question of effectiveness but this the Rothbard's law thing actually plays a role in this too because The outcome focused assessment of your own work gets It forces you to look at your assumptions and maybe go oh actually I have a natural talent at something and this sort of strange pattern whereby I assumed that I'm not supposed to achieve things without sweat and pain and discomfort and agony Maybe that's wrong. Maybe that maybe that isn't something that I should try and build my entire worldview around Hmm. Yeah, absolutely. But I think one of the problems and that's sort of highlighted by Rothbard's law Is that often really the issue is is that we just never try in the first place to do something that we're good at because we assume By default that we're you know, it's just basically a pretty easy thing that anybody can do right so What I would say is to overcome that Is to just do what you love right? I know it sounds a bit corny right? But ultimately I found that that is the best Horistic for you when you want to try and work out what you're what you want to do Do what you love and the reason for that is because you even if you're not good at it The fact that you enjoy doing it Shows that you will be motivated to do it. You'll be motivated to get better at it You know and obviously because our brains are neuro plastic If you keep doing something you will get better at it, you know And so I think you know even like I would rather do something that I'm bad at but which I enjoy Than do something that I'm good at but which I don't enjoy Because you've got to bear in mind you're going to do this for the rest of your life, right? This is going to be your life Like this is going to be the the thing that essentially you get out of bed for each morning So if you're if you're getting out of bed, you're like, oh, I've got to do this, you know That's not a life because you're going to be that most of your life is going to be that But if you're getting out of bed, you're like, oh, right. Okay. I've got a hard challenge, you know This is a really hard challenge. I don't know how I'm going to do it But I'm loving the fact that I get to tackle it. That's how you want to live because then your fun is going to be the motivation And that is going to ensure that you will get better at that thing Um, and so I think that's really the way around Rothbard's law just to do what you enjoy Forget what you're good at it doesn't matter if you're young enough or if you're you know If you're young enough in spirit even you don't even have to be physically young enough Uh, you know, you keep doing something and if you're determined if you really enjoy it You will get better at it there's a an interesting challenge. I think that people face with Believing that their accomplishments are as big as they are, you know, there's there's certainly some people out there who are Bpd narcissists full of ego or whatever Uh, I think So many people especially in the modern world are just chronically uncertain. Am I okay? Is what I'm doing good How much more do I need to be until I can rest? I always think about that scene from Avengers endgame where Thanos has done the snap and he's got this cabin on a planet that overlooks a lake And he comes and he puts his helmet down and then he sits in this seat He sits down in the sort of rocking chair and he makes this noise and it's kind of like Satisfaction, but it's much more like exhaustion and I often think about um, this assumption that at some point there will come a time the provisional life Uh, or the deferred happiness syndrome or the arrival fallacy This sense that at some point, but there's a personal growth version of this too There's a personal growth version of at some point I can I will have done the growing and the learning and I will be able to rest Well, I don't think that you're ever going to stop learning and growing and I think that you would Probably not enjoy your life if you were to do that But also what that means is you need To enjoy some of whatever it is that you want to do Now because it will just be this it is just going to be this Convey about up until the end of time Yeah, so um Naval Ravikant has a brilliant quote about this which is um If you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht Basically And it's just a really great sort of quote because it sums up pretty much everything you've been describing Which is you know, people are always looking for this moment where everything is going to be perfect You know, they're always chasing this this idealized version of reality Where they will have attained all the skills that they want to they will have gotten all the things that they want to and then they will Finally be happy but ultimately As you know, as we spoke of before Real happiness ultimately comes from the resilience of your mind If you can find happiness in just something as simple as a coffee Then that is enough right then that means you will you will be happy later on when you have Even more right then there needs to be this kind of baseline That you're willing to be Um happy at right so you need to be happy even if you have nothing because If you're if you're tying your happiness to something Everything is is transient. Everything can be broken. Everything can be destroyed in this world And if you tie your happiness to that thing and that thing gets destroyed You're going to lose the very your whole purpose of existence So the only thing the only thing that is going to survive all of the the slings and arrows of life Is to tie your happiness to just the basic fact of existence just the fact that you are alive And you get to live what is essentially such an improbable life, you know, there's a there's a crazy sort of Statistic, which is that if you look at genetically the number of people that could have been born You know the chances of you being born um, I like One in n where n is greater than the number of atoms in the universe right So it's extraordinarily like Improbable for us to even be here right now talking and you know, this is assuming Um that we were essentially selected randomly Um from from the sort of genetic lottery But like, you know, we're it's so improbable that we're even here So I try to find happiness in the most basic things Like because then if you can do that then everything else that you get is just going to be a bonus Right, but if you tie your happiness to something that you haven't yet achieved Then your entire life's journey up until that point is going to be miserable And then you can't even be sure that when you attain that thing It's going to be it's actually going to be as good as you thought it was because often we inflate our hopes and dreams beyond reality So what we think is going to make us happy when we finally get it It doesn't actually make us happy and this has happened to pretty much everybody, you know, so everybody will recognize this Um, so you've got to I think if you want to be happy you've got to be happy no matter what the external world is like You know, you have to cultivate internal happiness. You have to have that happiness with a coffee and then you'll be happy with a yacht Original position fallacy far leftists favor planned economies because they imagine themselves as the planners Not the planned far rightists favor a return to feudalism because they imagine themselves as the lords not the peasants Many delusional worldviews stem from main character syndrome and I had this from Three or four years ago one of our first episodes the alpha history fantasy Modern men who are angry at a world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe that they would have done better in medieval times They're somehow adamant that the chance of them being genghis khan is greater than the chance of them being canon fodder peasant number 1373 whose favela was sacked and destroyed yeah yeah, so um So yeah, so the original position fallacy Is really has its origins in the work of john ralls John Rawls was like a liberal philosopher basically a political philosopher and uh, so his his argument was um That basically people when they when they think of like future states They tend to assume that they're going to be amongst the elites basically So, you know, and this is true whether you're on the left or on the right, you know If you're on the left you you think you're going to be one of the planners Uh, if you if you're on the right you think you're going to be one of the nobles, right? Um history again history has shown this to be completely false So for example, if you look at all the communist revolutions that occurred in the 20th century, you know, whether you're looking at um starlin mal Um pol pot chow chescu, you know all of these people One of the first things that they did was to either imprison or murder the intellectuals right So the elites basically is that is that because they were the ones who could have come up with ideas to reverse Their proposed direction for those civilization Basically, yeah, so if we take one of these examples, so if we look at pol pot so pol pot wanted to um basically reset history to year zero And he wanted nobody to remember anything from below before year zero like for him that was literally the beginning of time So he wanted to completely wipe out all traces of of the past beyond year zero And one thing he knew about intellectuals was that they read books and that they wrote And obviously writing and reading are essentially the society's memory So if you can eliminate all the intellectuals, then you eliminate society's memory. Basically you wipe Society's memory and you can start fresh. You can create a new fresh without any bourgeoisie without any of the capitalism The ideas of capitalism to pollute the modern world would die along with the intellectuals Exactly. And there's an irony because there were a lot of intellectuals that were supporting pol pot They were like they were some of his fears You know defenders like, you know They were the guys that were advocating like writing the propaganda for him. They were the ones who were like, you know And this this is not just with pol pot. This is with all the communist revolutions Even, you know, western intellectuals many of them. There was one guy. I've forgotten his name, but he was a western intellectual He went to pol pot. He was like a he was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Khmer Rouge and he went to Basically have a meeting with pol pot and he ended up getting assassinated, you know, nobody knows who killed him But I mean, it was probably on pol pot's orders, but I mean A lot of you know, so the left wing intellectuals believed that if they were to create a socialist Sort of society that they would be at the top of society They would be planning things they would be You know, everything would go according to their vision of society and that's why it's such an intoxicating vision That's why, you know academics and other elites will tend to you know, tend towards kind of these kinds of uh these Sort of views of of a society and they want either a socialist Uh republic if they're you know, they're on the left or if they're on the right They'll probably advocate for something it could be like neo monarchy, you know with the the menschia small bugs Curtis Yavin's whatever the world who believes that they would be, you know I'm sure Curtis Yavin believes that if there was a right wing revolution that he would be at the right hand side of You know the monarch he would be the advisor. He would be the savannah li um, but I mean again, you know, uh Usually it's the it's the the revolutionaries who ended up getting murdered themselves, you know This is true of the french revolution true too as well You know the the biggest advocates of the french revolution ended up being the first people to get guillotines, you know Or at least they did eventually get guillotines. So You know all of this stuff, you know, so again, so this is probably going off in tangent anyway But basically the going back to the original idea. So it was originally john ral's idea, right I kind of adapted it to extended it to the left and right But his idea was just generally that people tend to benefit they will tend to adopt Whatever state that they think is going to benefit them they will tend to advocate for whatever state is going to benefit them and the solution that he proposed was um What he called the veil of ignorance and I think we might have covered this before but basically The veil of ignorance is is his belief That the best way to create a society um, is to imagine is to begin by imagining That you are going to be assigned at random a position in the in the world that you advocate for Mm-hmm So if you advocate for a socialist or a communist country You can't you can't do that with the assumption that you are going to be Uh, the planner you you are going to be you know the chairman of the party or anything like that It's got to be the assumption that you will be assigned a place within that state at random Because then this will motivate you to then hedge And ensure that every person in that state is well looked after Basically, so this this is obviously coming from his left liberal perspective to optimize to optimize for the sort of highest average Life quality as opposed to your selected Fortunate quality Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so, you know, this was his way of advocating for liberalism because that's essentially what liberalism does Liberalism is based on the idea that you know, you want to ensure that everybody in society redistribution Yeah, redistribution but to an extent it's obviously it's not the same as a socialist Country which is a socialist country would be complete redistribution Or or or near total whereas liberalism is a Is a sort of middle ground between socialism and sort of Free market capitalism like completely like laissez-faire capitalism. So it's basically the idea that Liberal liberals want to maximize freedom, but they consider Freedom to also be freedom from For example poverty or from oppression by by higher classes of of people so So they're they're they're similar to libertarians from the basic point in that they value liberty more than anything It's just that liberals tend to have a slightly different definition of what Liberty means like for libertarians liberty is literal. It's literally just freedom freedom to do what you want Um, whereas liberals, you know, depending on the specific brand of liberalism It might be the john's john stewart mill or the john lock, you know, kind of liberalism Where your liberalism where your liberty ends? At the point at which it does harm to somebody else where it basically encroaches on their liberty sort of thing. So what about um What about the coyotes law thing? Don't give the government a power you wouldn't want your political political enemies to wield Because one day they may well be in charge of it Yeah, yeah, so this is the sort of a kind of pre a preventative to the original fallacy position This is what I advocate for personally. I think that the best way to determine what policies to support Uh are the ones that will you are the ones that will be Not harmful If the government were to be taken over by somebody that you despise basically By the worst government that that is possible in your in your country so, um You know, if you're on the left then you should advocate for policies That would not harm your interests or the interests of those you advocate for if the government would suddenly become right-wing and vice versa You know, so I think this is it's a pretty sort of straightforward common-sense rule Because I think one of the problems with people is that they tend to think about the short term at the expense of the long term this is one of the fundamental problems with human beings and Extends to politics as well people tend to only they tend to imagine that whoever they're supporting Is going to be in power forever. And this is why, you know, when I see people like right-wingers for example on twitter um actively suppressing and censoring left-wingers After advocating for free speech for so long I just think well, you're just shooting yourselves in the foot because this is going to be used against you the apparatus you're you're Creating is going to be used against you, you know so for example, if like, you know, if we go with if if trump for instance were to Uh pass new laws which were to make it illegal for people to criticize him. This is obviously a hypothetical situation This is not something he's actually done. But this is a hypothetical You would see people on the right supporting a lot of people on the on the right would support it They'd be like, yes, you know, you know, you know stick it to the left, you know Yeah, you know trigger the libtards and all this stuff. Yeah, and they'll be cheering But then trump's not going to be in power forever And then you're going to have probably a democrat in charge and he's going to have now he's going to have the power To do exactly to the right what trump was doing to the left So, you know, it's basically like the lipids eating your own face kind of thing, you know where A lot of this stuff can backfire if you don't think about it on a long enough time scale In other news this episode is brought to you by rp strength This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now It's designed by dr. 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So for instance BLM rioting and pushing as hard as it did it would surprise me maybe i'm wrong but 2020 into 2021 January 6th was sort of the year of the riot and I get the sense that the tone had already been set by something That seemed to be swept under the rug. It was done by the mostly peaceful and quiet protesters that I think legitimated a degree of retribution Even if it was only sort of in the minds of people that decided that that was the way that the world works that you know one stupid action Deserves another stupid action uh that You see this too with the way that people behave the sort of language that people use online Well, you know if if your president gets shot at then maybe their president can get shot at and if you use A knife then we can bring a knife too and maybe we're bringing a gun and then you bring a gun and then someone brings a bazooka And you just The tit for tat sort of ever it's kind of like um, what's that isn't there a law? Doesn't somebody have an idea? I think elon's talked about this work over time Because laws get instantiated and rarely repealed Eventually everything will be made illegal that there will be a law that stops you from doing everything because You creep this forward one step at a time Well, you shouldn't drive when it's this wet with that car then with a different car then with any car then when it's a bit less Wet then when it's dry then when it's you know, you just end up litigating your way out of civilization and this is kind of the same sort of thing that if You allow this behavior and then the behavior can come back in a little bit more from the other side and then the other side Then the other side it's this game of uh ever escalating tennis Yeah, I mean so there is um, there is a concept which relates to this called um reciprocal radicalization Which is basically where it's it's like a game of brinkmanship where you have one group or advocate for something Which then the the other side now feels entitled to and then they'll they'll escalate it even more and then it'll basically suck a repeating pattern, you know, so it's like The left and the right almost have this symbiotic sort of relationship Where you know the excesses of one group will fuel the excesses of the other group the opposing group and they kind of in they're kind of like uh, they're kind of like what is known as a mishand bean which is a Mirror when you have two mirrors facing each other and they kind of infinitely reflect each other And it's like, you know, they're constantly reinforcing each other in that sense So it's not just with the left and right. You also see this amongst the terrorists and governments as well So what will happen is that you have terrorists who will commit an act of violence And then the government will respond to that by having a crackdown and by tightening laws And then the terrorists will use this as an example of the the government being tyrannical And so that that would justify further action against the government And then the government will use further action to justify their own further action by saying all these terrorists are even more dangerous now So we have to even tighten laws and so it's like an ever tightening sort of situation where The excesses of one group fuel the excesses of the other group and ultimately the only way out of this is long-term thinking again You know, so this is again, it's it's it's short-term thinking. It's when people are engaging in the sort of the satiation of their own Impulses rather than actually engaging in in long-term Thinking about the consequences of their actions, you know, it's this first order first order thinking Only thinking about the immediate consequences. They're not thinking about the consequences of the consequences Let alone the consequences of the consequences of the consequences, which is what you really need to be When you're in the political game, you know, so yeah There's a that's short-term long-term thing There's a similarity with amara's law We tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new tech and underestimate the long-term impact because it hype inflates expectations and thus disappointment and thus skepticism as such it's possible for ai to both be a bubble and the most transformative tech since fire Yeah, so this is an idea that's illustrated by something called the garner hype cycle Um, so if you go on wikipedia, it will tell you that the gardener hype cycle is pseudoscience It's not supported by evidence. This is nonsense the gardener hype cycle cycle is not supposed to be a scientific Um, sort of like, you know study of what actually happens What it's supposed to be is a general rule of thumb and it does fit most major technology major technological Sort of developments one of the problems with wikipedia is it's Often straw man's ideas before discredit or trying to discredit them So I wouldn't pay attention to the wikipedia article of the gardener hype cycle basically what the gardener hype cycle states Is that you have when you have a new technology? You have like massive surge in hype, right? where everybody's incentivized to sort of um, just kind of Get on the hype bandwagon basically because it's a new technology and people are speculating that they're sort of they're They're spitballing they're speculating about where this could go and people get excited about it People write clickbait articles about it. And so this obviously inflates people's expectations And so then the next stage of the hype cycle is where people start to realize hang on a second The hype was was hype, you know They start to sort of realize that the reality of the new technology is not quite What people were saying it was going to be And this causes a kind of backfire effect Where people temper their expectations by over correcting So what they do is they assume that because the Where the technology is actually headed is is is slightly different from where it was where the hype claimed it was headed Therefore they were wrong about the technology completely and therefore the technology is worthless So then you get the you get people now from the opposite side arguing for the opposite thing saying it was all hype You know, this is humans are stupid. Don't listen to humans. This technology is just going to fizz out. It's just crap, you know So people naturally react very strongly by over correcting. That's what humans tend to do So you get a lot of articles arguing for the opposite But then what will happen is everybody will go, oh, okay. Well, yeah, so the hype was just crap So let's just get on with our lives and they'll forget about the technology And then It's when they forget about the technology That's when the technology will start to change the world Because even though the technology is no longer in popular discourse It has been adopted by The sort of people at the frontier of development the industries where it can actually be used and these are usually not exciting industries. They're usually things like you know, um, sort of bank sort of, you know, fight of sort of doing financial financial wizardry Which is not really something that interests most people, right? So it will usually be it will have very limited Um visibility for a long time But then the developments in those industries will gradually compound Until we have something that is really really amazing and ai is a great example of this, right? so, um For you know, so one of the guys one of the main pioneers of um, ai Is a guy called Marvin Minsky. He was a major figure in the development of neural networks I think it was in the 1970s. He said that in around seven to eight years Uh, we will have human level intelligence in neural networks. Basically. He said something like that anyway And obviously this is completely absurd because you know by the 1980s, you know, we had really really basic neural networks And that continued into the 90s and everybody had kind of by then just forgotten about the hype everybody was like, ah You know this this whole neural network stuff's crap. Nothing's gonna happen. You know, it was all just hype Everybody forgot about it apart from a small number of researchers and a small number of people who were using You know convolutional neural networks to like do things like imaging and things like that And it happened is suddenly you have chat gbt boom, you know in like 2022 And this kid is seen to have come out of nowhere, but it didn't actually come out of nowhere um, the technology for it the the transformer architecture was actually developed by google deep mind And this was um a few years before chat gbt, uh, sort of accommodated it and actually like, you know began to develop it themselves Um, but like before that nobody really cared like for for 30 years Nobody really cared in the in the mainstream about about neural networks So this is a good good example of it. But the thing is is that the gartner hype cycle continues. So it's not just You have this one hype cycle and then it's over it often repeats itself. So we're going to see it again with things like world models now, I think where there's a world world models So world models are like a stepping stone towards agi a world model is where you have um things like physics implemented into your llm Um, it's not really an lm anymore because it can do so many other things It's it's more like a video model But it's a video model that actually has real world physics And at the moment google is probably best placed for this because they have um, they have all the data They've got the real-time data through search. They've got video data through youtube and then they've got like they've got spatial data as well through Um, uh google street view and all that kind of stuff. So they'll probably they have actually got the best The world model at the moment called genie genie 3 But basically a world model is basically when an llm or an ai can model the world basically Literally, you know, that's what's called a world model. It can model the world So it can understand things like physics. So it can understand collisions. It can understand gravity. It can understand The way that fluids move like water and things like that And we have we have like a kind of we have a simulacrum of that in video generation But video generations don't understand physics. They're just copying the physics of you know films and you know other stuff like that Whereas a world model gen genuinely understands the physics And so it can that's the first step towards creating a gi because then you can actually activate ai in the in the physical reality And this is probably going to be the next hype cycle. It's already begun There's been a lot of hype around genie 3. What will probably happen is we'll have something called the trough of dis disillusionment Which is the next of the um the gardener hype cycle And then when everybody's forgotten about world models, we'll start to see real world models emerge wow there's a I was looking at I've spoken to a lot of Behavioral genetics guys and girls on the podcast. I've got kathryn page hard and coming back on for her new book next week and um I'd always wondered there's an equivalent basically with over time things changing and the wilson effect feels like a Biological equivalent of what we're talking about with regards to the hype So this is from you heritable traits like IQ and personality become more heritable with age Because as you mature you become more independent and free to be who you really are Many heritability studies find that nurtures influence is stronger only because they never see that nature's influence is longer yeah, so historically The sort of so the social sciences and the field of genetics Has pretty consistently Underestimated the heritability of a lot of traits and just to give a very recent example. I think just a couple of days ago There was a new study published Which I retweeted onto my timeline which basically shows So initially there was the belief that heritability of lifespan Is between 20 and 25 percent And this new study has found that it's actually closer to 50 percent And this is a pretty important, you know, this is obviously a pretty important finding because this is the heritability of your lifespan how long you're going to live Yeah, and so there's been a massive underestimation of lifespan in terms of the heritability of it And I think this is not fully explained by the wilson effect but I think the wilson effect is a contributor to this and It's basically what it is is because studies tend to be quite short term genetic studies tend to be quite short term So they will tend to obviously, you know, it's very hard to track a human being Throughout their entire life. So usually longitudinal studies in genetics will tend to sort of follow people for a few years, you know, so usually three three years five years and that's not enough time to really understand the effects of these genes because A lot of these genes only become apparent later in your life, you know, people tend to sort of There's a kind of what happens is that there's a masking effect. So early in your life The effects of genes are masked by your upbringing by your environment So for example, if you are genetically predisposed to love reading But in your life Your parents never buy you any books and instead they buy your playstation, right? You're going to spend your childhood playing playing playstation instead of reading books Which is what you really love to do It's only when you get older that you start that you're able to follow your own natural inclinations Which are books and so it's only when you're older that you have the power to buy books And therefore it's only when you're older that your genetic predisposition predisposition to books becomes apparent And so this is a very simple example But this is very common I think now in a lot of studies where a lot of there's a lot of reassessment that needs to be done Due to these studies being so so short term, you know, we really we really need to study people at different stages of their life We need to study them when they're children We need to study them when they're adults and we need to study them when they're elderly in order to actually have a good understanding of the influence of genes versus environment I saw uh, there was a line from you An emerson one people do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character And dylan osilevan that I know we're both fucking huge fans of yeah, he's great. Yeah He's so good, dude He says nothing gives you a clearer look into someone than how they misinterpret things Every misinterpretation is a confession and it feels like the emerson and dylan are kind of agreeing with each other here Their opinion of the world is a confession of their character and their misinterpretation of the world is also a confession Yeah, so to give you another quote from neval uh, I think he said something like um it's almost always possible to be both honest and optimistic Right, so what I find is that If you are optimistic is not because you're deluded necessarily It's often just because of your personality because you choose to see the good Rather than choosing to see the bad, you know, it's often just a choice. It is literally just often a choice, you know them It's something that I've really has really sort of become an important force in my life now This understanding that I can actually choose how I perceive things I can choose whether I see things as a good or a bad thing Depending on the facts that I select and the way that I interpret them And I'm aware that yeah, okay This this often requires me to ignore certain things, but we're always ignoring things anyway So it's not like I'm doing anything wrong here You know attention is selective attention is like empathy. It's a spotlight You shine it on some things and by doing so you cast everything else in darkness And so when you are pessimistic, this is not a sign that you see reality more clearly as a lot of pessimists like to believe It's actually a sign that you're choosing to shine your spotlight on shit rather than on diamonds You know to put it simply right, you know, you have a choice where you shine your spotlight, right? And Ultimately, it's a case of what are you looking at? What are you perceiving when you see something? What details are you picking out? And this is why when I when I see miserable people now? I don't see realists. I just see miserable people I see people who are unhappy inside who are essentially Externalizing their unhappiness by choosing to see the absolute worst and everything Right, and this is why you know, I don't have much tolerance now for people who just keep complaining about things because to me It's it that's just a way to dig your hole deeper. Basically, you're just making life worse for yourself by choosing to see the worst But there's no solutions in complaining if you just keep complaining All you're doing is just you just make you're convincing yourself that the world is bad And the world doesn't need to be bad. You don't need to lie to to see the good But surely some in some in some situations things are bad Is it not fair to accurately represent that and reflect it so that maybe people try to change the thing that's bad and shouldn't be bad? No, no, you should always recognize that things can be improved always Yeah, absolutely But this doesn't mean that you should focus on the bad and have the bad as the only thing You know to focus on there's always two sides to the story. So the way I look at it is yes, you should always be Cognizant of problems. I'm not saying that you should not see problems. You should choose not to see problems You should see the problems But instead of focusing on on complaining about them, you should try to focus on solutions instead You know, what can I do rather than make this better? So this actually fits in with another of my ideas so there's a concept called the stockdale paradox and the stockdale paradox is quite an interesting one because it's sort of like It's basically taken from a guy called James Stockdale. He was an admiral right and he survived nearly eight years of torture and isolation in the Hanoi Hilton Basically, which was so called because it was one of the most brutal camps in in north vietnam during the Vietnam War He was basically a POW for quite a long time. He yes for eight years and so basically um So what he observed while he was there was that there were people who were optimists and there were people who were pessimists and they both Both groups ended up suffering hard and and many of them died very early Um, so the optimists would basically believe that they were going to be released from the jail Uh by Christmas and then when Christmas didn't come it would be Easter and then you know, Easter didn't come So they would keep hoping and eventually their hope just ran out and they just kind of gave up on life And they some of them like, you know, they just lost the will to live because they had hoped and their hopes had been destroyed But then on the other hand there were the pessimists who were people who just kind of believed that their station was completely, you know Irredeemable and there was no hope in the first place. So obviously they had no motivation to improve What Stockdale found was what got him through the eight years Was not by being an optimist not by being a pessimist but actually by practicing a kind of Optimistic pessimism And this was essentially so what it was is that basically the key to achieving this kind of paradoxical state of mind Is to accept that bad outcomes are indeed a real possibility But rather than let that possibility crush your hopes You can develop hope in your ability to deal with those problems by preparing for them So by acknowledging and confronting the harshest potential outcomes you make them less of a problem and less of a reason for negativity So so you know, so what i'm saying is basically Healthy optimism arises through a kind of practical pessimism. It's it's not the blind idealism that everything is always going to turn out fine But rather the self-belief that you can deal with things no matter how they turn out And that's essentially what confidence is confidence is not the belief that everything is going to be all right Confidence is the belief that you will be able to handle with things even if they're not okay Right, so you'll be able you'll always be able to deal with the eventualities and the way that you do that is by acknowledging the worst-case scenario But preparing for any scenario essentially, you know, so you don't necessarily have to be pessimistic You don't have to be optimistic if you use the two So this is obviously this is a bit separate from from the idea of seeing the beauty in things But it's this is obviously a very healthy attitude to have With regards to just you know Half glass half full or glass half empty just understand that the glass Is half right that's it. You don't need to it doesn't need to be half full doesn't need to be half empty It's just half, you know what the uh, george's george's line from the agency book is Some people look at the glass and see it as half full some look at the glass and see it as half empty What you should do is realize that you are the tap And that's his line that's his line around agency, which is yeah, that's a good wherever Wherever this is you can actually pour into it. Um, yeah, it's a The the the stock deal thing is interesting because I can see how People preparing for the bad Would quite easily cause them to tumble down the rabbit hole of ruminating about it and worrying about it and woe is me and concept creep And now I've got pathology and I've got multiple personality disorder or you know, that that is the genesis of it, but um ultimately it comes down to it ultimately comes down to How you interpret it right so there is you know, yes You could you could just go down this rabbit hole where you're just constantly thinking of the worst case scenario But that's only going to happen if you haven't found a solution You know if you have a solution if you have developed a solution to the worst case scenario Then it's no longer going to really dwell on your mind You know because you already have the solution and that's ultimately what what I do like if I You know like if I was to say come on this podcast and I would have the worst case scenario where I would say something You know, let's say I said the n word or something like that Like that that if you're somebody who um is really anxious you'd be worrying about something like that so long You know, you'd be like oh my god, you know, what if I say the wrong thing? You know that would just cause you to be a nervous wreck and it would probably just mate for a very bad episode but if you have a solution right if you actually have um trained yourself to not Uh engage in these kinds of intrusive thoughts that might cause you to say those words or you know If you have a way to sort of style it out, you know, then You then it's not going to be a problem. Do you know what I mean? It's it's the same with anything like anxiety is really It's really a result of you not having a solution to the worst case scenario But as long as you have that solution, you're not going to have the I mean you might still have have anxiety if you're a new You know if you're a neurotic person but That the thing is you're not going to have any less if you've got a solution and what's that line about anxiety hates a moving target Action is the antidote to anxiety. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look, gwenda, dude, you're a legend I appreciate you coming on this this always rules. It's one of my favorite episodes Where should people go to check out all of the stuff that you've got going on? Yeah, so main place is uh my blog which is just go winder dot blog Um, and you can also find me on twitter at g underscore s underscore bogel Or just type my name into google and i'm sure it'll come up. Uh, yeah Heck yeah and cheers, you know pleasure. Yeah, thank you It's always a good one. Uh keep writing because we've got more to talk about Oh, yeah, yeah Congratulations. You made it to the end of an episode. 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