← People and their mental models
60 claims Yuval Noah Harari made fit 16 mental models. Most often: The map is not the territory, Collective action problems, Error correction. Everything they said here.
Nobody and nothing is infallible, so judge a person, a text or an institution by whether it can notice its own mistakes and fix them, not by its claim to be right.
Their wordsAnd in good institutions, they are characterized by having strong self-correcting mechanisms.
Their wordsThe Bible, the 10 Commandments for instance, endorses slavery.
Their wordsLiberalism’s great advantage over other ideologies is that it is flexible and undogmatic. It can sustain criticism better than any other social order.
Their wordsThe holy book is supposed to be infallible. The self-correcting mechanism embraces fallibility.
Their wordsScience is a team effort, relying on institutional collaboration rather than on individual scientists or, say, a single infallible book. Of course, institutions too are prone to error. Scientific institutions are nevertheless different from religious institutions, inasmuch as they reward skepticism and innovation rather than conformity.
Their wordsSelf-correcting mechanisms are ubiquitous in nature. Children learn how to walk thanks to them.
Their wordsCrucially, scientific institutions are willing to admit their institutional responsibility for major mistakes and crimes.
Their wordsThese self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them. Silicon Valley thought it was exempt from this historical rule.
Their wordsTo guard against a plethora of unforeseeable problems, our best bet is to create living institutions that can identify and respond to the threats as they arise.
Test an idea in your head first, by imagining the case that would break it.
Mental modelWhen a measure becomes a target
Their wordsIn the very same years, that Nick Bostrom came up with this thought experiment in 2014, the managers of Facebook and YouTube, they told their algorithms, your goal is to increase user engagement. And the algorithms of social media, they conquered the world and turned the whole world into user engagement, which was what they were told to do.
Every model, word or plan is a simplified map of reality; useful when its structure matches, misleading when mistaken for the thing itself.
Their wordsHuman rights, just like God and heaven, are just a story that we've invented. They are not an objective reality; they are not some biological effect about homo sapiens.
Their wordsThe simplest one, the best one that I can say in short, is the test of suffering. If it can suffer, it's real. If it can't suffer, it's not real. A nation cannot suffer.
Their wordsIdentity is always problematic, because identity is always based on fictional stories that sooner or later collide with reality.
Their wordsAnd the other thing is that at least the meditation that I practice, which is with passive meditation, it's all about really knowing the difference between the fictions and stories generated by our mind and the reality.
Their wordsThe key is to remember that we created them to serve us, and not that we are here in order to serve them. The trouble really begins when people lose sight of the simple reality that we are real, they are not.
Their wordsAn imagined reality is not a lie.
Their wordsWe believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.
Their wordsThe soul is a story that some people accept while others reject.
Their wordsTo think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories.
Their wordsHumans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.
Their wordsContrary to the naive view, information isn't the raw material of truth, and human information networks aren't geared only to discover the truth. But contrary to the populist view, information isn't just a weapon, either.
Their wordsBy inventing a new order and imposing it on the world, bureaucracy distorted people's understanding of the world in unique ways.
Their wordsThe witch-hunting bureaucracy did what bureaucracy often does: it invented the intersubjective category of “witches” and imposed it on reality.
What everyone would gain from, nobody provides alone, so shared goods need someone or something to hold people together.
Their wordsWe can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories.
Their wordsHumans control the planet because they are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers.
Their wordsIn essence, what you can say is that we now have global ecology, we have a global economy but we have national politics, and this doesn't work together.
Their wordsBut the most important thing is to join an organisation. Cooperation is what makes humans powerful.
Their wordsthe global order is now like a house that everybody inhabits and nobody repairs it can hold on for a few more years but if we continue like this it will collapse
Where this was said
Watch from 26:52 plays hereTheir wordsif we allow such an arms race to develop in fields like AI and bioengineering it doesn't really matter who wins the arms race the loser will be humanity
Where this was said
Watch from 20:44 plays hereTheir wordsHowever, while short-term quarantine is essential to stop epidemics, long-term isolationism will lead to economic collapse without offering any real protection against infectious diseases. Just the opposite. The real antidote to epidemic is not segregation, but rather cooperation.
Their wordsThe key is institutions. Because you can't build a personal intimate relationship with millions of people.
Their wordsThe difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.
Their wordsEven if by some superhuman effort I succeed in freeing my personal desires from the grip of the imagined order, I am just one person.
Their wordsIn fact, no social animal is ever guided by the interests of the entire species to which it belongs.
Their wordsThe merger of infotech and biotech threatens the core modern values of liberty and equality. Any solution to the technological challenge has to involve global cooperation.
Look at what people are rewarded for; it explains more behaviour than what they say, your own included.
Their wordsNuclear weapons and cyber warfare, by contrast, are high-damage, low-profit technologies. You could use such tools to destroy entire countries, but not to build profitable empires.
Their wordsToday, the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge — and you cannot conquer knowledge through war.
Their wordsAnd on the collective level, I think the solution to this problem would be to change the model of the news market to high-quality news that costs you a lot of money, but don't abuse your attention.
Their wordsThe key issue is who has liability, that it's the company that is liable for what the algorithm is doing and not the human individual liable for what they are saying.
Ask "and then what?": follow a decision past its first effect to the ones that come after.
Their wordsDuring the agricultural revolution, what happened is that immense technological and economic revolution empowered the human collective, but when you look at actual individual lives, the life of a tiny elite became much better, and the lives of the majority of people became considerably worse.
Their wordsPeople thought they were building paradise for humans. Turned out they were building paradise for germs.
Their wordsThe pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time.
Their wordsBut once we come nearer to achieving these goals the resulting upheavals are likely to deflect us towards entirely different destinations.
Every choice gives something up, so name the cost; and check, because some trade-offs everyone assumes are not real.
Their wordsAnd I think that in this case, societies that will choose to progress more slowly and safely, they will actually have an advantage.
Their wordsWhat worries me is that a lot of these things will turn out actually to be downgrades.
Their wordsIn exchange for power, the modern deal expects us to give up meaning.
Their wordsThe biggest advantage of the centralized totalitarian network is that it is extremely orderly, which means it can make decisions quickly and enforce them ruthlessly.
A system moves only as fast as its narrowest point; speed up anything else and nothing changes.
Their wordsMost people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.
Their wordsEven today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number.
Their wordsTechnical difficulties often prevent dictators from becoming totalitarian.
Your mind jumps to conclusions and defends them; look for the evidence against you and use checklists.
Their wordsThis is the basic lesson of evolutionary psychology: a need shaped thousands of generations ago continues to be felt subjectively even if it is no longer necessary for survival and reproduction in the present.
Their wordsSo if you want to instigate genocide, you start by hacking the disgust mechanisms in the human brain.
Their wordsObserving the truth about yourself is just so difficult! Even if you somehow manage to get most humans to try it, many of us will quickly distort the truth we encounter into some story with heroes, villains and enemies, and find really good excuses to go to war.
Reward a number and people, or machines, will find ways to move the number without the thing it measured (Goodhart's law).
Their wordsaccording to this measurement, 1 hour of outrage is better than 10 minutes of joy and certainly better than 1 hour of sleep.
Their wordsNow, the great thing about make money or increase user engagement is that it's very easy to measure it mathematically.
Mental modelThought experiments
Their wordsIn the very same years, that Nick Bostrom came up with this thought experiment in 2014, the managers of Facebook and YouTube, they told their algorithms, your goal is to increase user engagement. And the algorithms of social media, they conquered the world and turned the whole world into user engagement, which was what they were told to do.
Know the edge of what you really understand, and act inside it.
Their wordsI have had personal experience with only one technique - Vipassana – so it is the only one about which I can talk with any authority.
Whole systems do things none of their parts do, and nobody has to design that order for it to appear.
Their wordsLike DNA, stories can create new entities. Indeed, stories can even create an entirely new level of reality.
Carry many models from many fields and use them together; with only one, every problem looks like a nail for your hammer.
Mental modelProbabilistic thinking
Their wordsIf you see just one possibility, you're not looking wide enough. If you see two or three, it's probably also not wide enough. You need a map of, like, four or five different possibilities, minimum.
Think in odds, not certainties, and bet heavily only when the odds are clearly yours.
Mental modelMany models, not one
Their wordsIf you see just one possibility, you're not looking wide enough. If you see two or three, it's probably also not wide enough. You need a map of, like, four or five different possibilities, minimum.
Most growth slows as it matures; the question is whether the curve is flattening or something new is restocking it.
Their wordsWhen things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvements in objective conditions can leave us dissatisfied.
When something becomes cheap and plentiful, the value moves to whatever is still rare next to it.
Their wordsThe biggest misconception about information is that information is truth and information isn't truth. Most information is not truth. The truth is a very rare and costly and expensive type of information.