Tim Urban

Tim Urban’s "What’s Our Problem?" asks two very important questions: what is fundamentally broken with our society at present, and how can we fix it? As it turns out, Urban has a framework for looking at the world that, albeit devoid of any foundation, works to an extent. He suggests adding a vertical axis (up vs down) to the horizontal axis of politics (left vs right), where your place on the ladder denotes how rational or irrational you're acting. He argues that the world is slipping into low-rung thinking, where confirmation bias leads people to favour one ideology over another, or they become completely closed off to others' viewpoints, creating an echo chamber called a golem. This unchecked golem absorbs high-rung people who can't or won't speak up.
To be honest, that's where the book's good parts end. After some amazing, nuanced discussion, it becomes annoyingly USA-centered – astounding for a book that claims to know our problems, not just the USA’s in particular. The next chapter is a short, emotionally-detached Wikipedia-style summary of how Republicans in the US are forming their own low-rung golem, with little to no detail as to the why.
The meat of the book, however, focuses on wokeism and social justice fundamentalism, which Urban sees as a huge problem disintegrating society. I've encountered this topic online numerous times (mostly discussed by right-wingers and “enlightened” centrists), and I have never found a convincing argument in support of it - and Urban fails to provide one. Believing that inequality is not only structural is one thing, but pretending that it is not structural at all is another. Maybe it’s just me, but I think high-rung thinking should also involve not becoming excessively angry when confronted with topics one dislikes, a fact that Urban conveniently forgot.
After an excruciating discussion on how progressives are responsible for the US's downfall and how (renamed) social justice warriors are bad for everyone, and why even progressives who believe in social justice should stop doing so, the book concludes with a contemplative redemption. It suggests that people should strive to find common ground even when it doesn't exist, treat political opponents as humans, and remember that we're all in this together.
All idealistic and logical and sufficiently high-rung of you, Tim. Wish the rest of the book was like that, though.… (altro)

Tim Urban reckons he's found the answer to the problems facing our societies. It's largely about the way we think and communicate. He's developed a ladder or hierarchy of thinking styles. At the top end of the ladder is rational, scientific thinking....always ready to be challenged and always ready to change who faced by new or conflicting information or facts. At the bottom of the ladder is dogmatic, "golem" thinking that will not consider new evidence and is totally immune to counter arguments of disproofs. "When you’re thinking like a Zealot, you end up in a totally alternative reality, feeling like you’re an omniscient being in total possession of the truth." And "If someone really wants to believe something—that the Earth is flat, that 9/ 11 was orchestrated by Americans, that the CIA is after them—the human brain will find a way to make that belief seem perfectly clear and irrefutable."
Idea labs are places ....more or less like the scientific world where ideas are put forward to be demolished by good counter ideas. If they can't be demolished then they are probably sound ideas. "While Idea Labs are cultures of critical thinking and debate, Echo Chambers are cultures of groupthink and conformity. Because while Idea Labs are devoted to a kind of thinking, Echo Chambers are devoted to a set of beliefs the culture deems to be sacred". "When a group of people exhibits a combination of strict conformity internally and an us vs. them mindset externally—militaries marching in unison, activists chanting a slogan, citizens raising a fist or saluting en masse, or just a group of people being super Echo-Chamber-y—that’s a group of people in golem mode".
If the genie is the product of human collaboration, the golem is the emergent property of human obedience. Golems are what happen when humans act like ants. Ant behavior has two components: strict conformity within the colony and total ruthlessness when dealing with other colonies. And, according to Urban, "because it was the best way to survive in our distant past, Low-rung thinking, low-rung culture, and low-rung giant-building are all ancient survival behavior—behavior that was necessary a long time ago but today seems a lot like moths flying toward streetlights". But it's no longer the best way for us to be thinking.
A large part of the book is devoted to demonstrating that high rung thinking is really under threat in America; teachers are being gagged, alternate views are being stamped out censored or dismissed: "Those who challenge the sacred ideas are seen not just as wrong but as bad people. As such, violators are slapped with the social fines of status reduction or reputation damage".
Up on the high rungs, people know the world is a mess of complexity. They know that people are little microcosms of the messy world—each person an evolving gray smattering of virtues and flaws. Political Disney World is much more fun. Everything is crisp and perfectly digital. Good guys and bad guys, with good ideas and bad ideas. Urban consistently makes the point that there is a spectrum of views and overlaps. It's hard to be a pure "high thinker" or a pure "golem"......"High-rung politics is the Higher Mind’s way of doing politics. It places the highest value on truth. It treats political viewpoints like science experiments to be tinkered with, via criticism and vigorous debate. It is suspicious of fervent conviction and smiles upon humility, incentivizing people to say “I don’t know” when they don’t know and reminding them to stay humble."
Social Justice Fundamentalism (SJF) rejects this [kind of] balanced approach in favour of the more extreme take of standpoint theory: that having a certain skin color or gender or sexual orientation grants one full access to a set of experiences that others have no access to at all—not even a glimpse. I rather like Urban's observation that: "One of the most common pleas from SJF activists is to “listen to people of color,” to “listen to women,” to “listen to LGBTQ people.” But when what these people say doesn’t jibe with the SJF narrative, SJF stops listening"
Throughout human history, clever opportunists have discovered that if you could control what people say, you could write the story people believed. You could dictate the values, the morals, and the customs. You could decide who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. You could create the laws, dole out the rewards, and inflict the penalties. If you could write the narrative, the group became your marionette. And so often, what rule-makers happen to find objectionable is criticism of themselves and their policies. The ability to restrict blasphemy is the ability to censor".
Every time a vocal skeptic like Bret Weinstein was burned for trying to stand up to the cultural hijacking, would-be vocal skeptics at other schools saw the warning in bright lights. Fear has gone viral. Silence has gone viral. Idea supremacy has gone viral. .......Idea supremacy is at odds with the basic ideals of a college campus. And yet, over the past decade, idea supremacists have succeeded again and again at canceling speaker events they don’t approve..........In a campus shutdown, protesters will either physically block attendees from entering the building where the talk is supposed to happen, or they’ll attend the event themselves only to drown the speaker out with shouts, chants, banging on drums, or by pulling the fire alarm once the talk starts. The result is usually a canceled event. .........People aren’t banning speakers from speaking; they can go speak elsewhere. They’re preventing their fellow students from hearing the ideas".
And in regards to academic freedom now in the USA...." applicants must first score high marks on their diversity statements and then describe, in person, their history as a social justice activist and their plans for future activism. This is the process to hire science professors". ........"So you may be a brilliant, accomplished scholar in the life sciences, but if you’ve spent too much time studying biology and not enough on progressive political activism, you’re out". I'm assuming Urban is reasonably accurate in reporting these changing attitudes on the university campuses and that is pretty scary to me, anyway. if Albert Einstein applied for a faculty job at UCLA today, he almost certainly would be ruled out before anyone had a chance to take a look at his research. SJF idea supremacy has permeated American college campuses, rewriting the rules for what’s okay to say, research, and teach. We’ve seen those rules enforced by students, professors, and administrators, on students, professors, and administrators". I like his quote of George Carlin’s line, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”
Urban discusses racial issues in great detail....obviously because they are very significant in the USA but some of his points have much wider application, for example When people lose the ability to speak openly or to criticize falsehoods, it becomes difficult to separate truth from fiction. "Take police killings. Between 2016 and 2022, 326 unarmed white men and 232 unarmed Black men were killed (by any means) by police in the U.S. Media coverage of these incidents has been highly skewed, with the median story about a Black victim receiving nine times the coverage as the median story about a white victim. According to the website Payscale, when controlling for “all compensable variables”—i.e., when comparing apples to apples—the gender wage gap drops dramatically, from 18% to 1%. Women earn 99 cents—not 77 or 80 or 83 cents—for every dollar a man makes, for the same work.
The fact that SJF is succeeding, to the amazing extent that it is, is evidence that something is very wrong. The high-rung immune system that normally keeps movements like SJF in check has gone MIA. And, as an interesting aside "children of America’s large white working class are dramatically underrepresented among college students. 168 For universities so hell-bent on “diversity and inclusion,” this underrepresented group is invisible—because on the Intersectional Stack, they show up in the powerful, privileged category.
So, in a sen se, Urban's book is a narrative about the decline in the quality of thinking in the USA and the freedom to express opinions and the growth if social justice fundamentalism that is applied as an dogmatic, uncriticised and non-criticiseable ideology...stamping out any contrary views by some pretty nasty means. And he pins it back to "golem" thinking rather than high level thinking.
I think he is onto something...but it's always hard to bring about a cultural change even from a very long book like this one. I wish him well in promulgating his refreshing ideas. Five stars from me.… (altro)

Really brilliant analysis of "what our problem" is - it's neither right nor left but "low-rung thinking."

But it takes a long time to get to the point; and then ends up feeling a bit like a screed against "Social Justice Fundamentalism."

At first I was feeling like Urban wanted to be a cross between the guy who writes the Xkcd comic and Yuval Noah Harari, and coming up way short in both departments. Finally though he hit his stride with his depiction of the "genies" of "high-rung thinking" and the "golems" of "low-rung thinking." The former is when we use our rational capacities, when we steelman rather than strawman our opponents, and question our biases. The latter is when we devolve into tribalism.

His drawings sometimes made me laugh out loud; I wish I could copy some here. I tended to like the ones where the stick figures had open-mouthed frowns, such as the depiction of "probably you" when Trump was elected, and the depiction of the defendant in court while his lawyer says "My opponent makes some good points, I guess my client is guilty after all."

After Urban has laid out his definitions of high-rung thinking, and its opposite, the "golems" of low-rung thinking (it's a golem on the book cover), he turns to some examples. He has Republican examples to lead us off. Another laugh-out-loud was the strip explaining what exactly is going on when the R's stage one of their ridiculous stand-offs about the debt celing.

Then he turns to the big golem in the room - he terms it Social Justice Fundamentalism. I appreciate how he avoids the term "woke", and uses "progressive" rather than "liberal" - but to understand what he means by SJF, substitute "woke." I agree wholeheartedly that this is often a golem, and his examples were as sobering and scary as he meant them to be. But they went on too long (despite his insistence that he really didn't want to have so many examples, just felt it was really, really necessary). I got the idea. I wanted him to stop. I didn't want to read a book against wokeness. I wanted to read a book against low-rung thinking. He stayed too long on this bugaboo.… (altro)