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Many of us fancy ourselves as good thinkers, we apply reason to the facts of the world
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and we believe that our thinking is clear and our judgement is good.
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And yet, how much do we think about our thinking or what is known as metacognition?
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Our brains evolved in prehistoric times, they are best suited to a world that no longer
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exists, they are illiquid for modern life.
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And most of the time, we ourselves do not really know why we do what we do, so charity
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can be an act of vanity, a show of virtue can be lazy posturing, all our reasoning can
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actually just be rationalisation.
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And even my urging you to think about your thinking could be an act of self-delusion.
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Welcome to the Scene on the Unseen.
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My guest today is Gurvinder Bhogal, a brilliant young thinker I discovered a couple of years
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ago when one of his twitter mega threads went viral.
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Gurvinder is a computer scientist who shifted streams to study psychology because he realised
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that the biggest problem in the world is not the information or education that we get but
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the way our brains are wired.
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This is amplified in modern times by technology and social media and has had bad effects on
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many areas of our lives, most visibly politics where our discourse has become so tribalistic
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Some of Gurvinder's finest work is in metacognition or thinking about thinking, but understanding
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that has also brought him to some incredible insights on the world around us.
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I urge you to visit his Substack newsletter to read some of his work, you'll find links
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Gurvinder unfortunately had just two hours to give me and while I never record for so
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short a time, I made an exception because he's such a fine thinker that I felt I need
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to introduce my listeners to him.
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He's promised another longer episode at some point, please go tell him on twitter that
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For now though, here's an excellent little taster of one of the finest thinkers of our
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A commercial break first though.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it?
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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Since April 2020, I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course, The Art of
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Clear Writing and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase the work of students and vibrant community
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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about the craft and practice of clear writing.
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There are many exercises, much interaction and a lovely and lively community at the end
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Gurvinder, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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One of the reasons I used to be negative about social media, especially a while back,
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and I found more reason to be positive recently, is that I used to think maybe five years ago
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that it's become so incredibly polarized.
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People go online, they find their ideological tribes, they want to belong and there's that
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natural push to the extremes because of the way the incentives are.
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And this left me very despondent because it became impossible to have conversations and
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But what sort of gave me hope was as I got into podcasting and I teach a writing course
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as I started teaching that and people signed up, I realized that the tribalism comes from
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And the silent majority of people are people who know that the world is complex, who don't
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necessarily have the time to fathom all of it themselves.
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But they're open, they're not tribal, they're not extreme, they're open, and many of them
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are like hungry to learn.
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And to me, the way I noticed you on Twitter and I first of course saw your viral threads,
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40 mind expanding concepts and all of those, which I absolutely love, but then I just poured
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through your newsletter and I learned so much and took notes and recommended it to so many
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people and they've gone viral for a reason.
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And that gave me a lot of hope.
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It made me think that, all right, that there is hope, it's not just this mad polarized
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world where our brains are being turned into mush and we are being manipulated by algorithms,
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but people have agency and they want to figure stuff out and they want to have these dialogues.
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What is your sense of this?
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Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with you, actually.
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I think what we see on social media tends to be mediated by selection effects.
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So we always see the loudest or we hear from the loudest people, the most sort of attention
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We don't hear the millions of people who are quietly listening.
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And so we get this distorted sense of the people on social media, because obviously
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the people that are the most in our faces become the people that we see the most.
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But I think, yeah, I completely agree with you.
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I think that there is an appetite, a growing appetite now for people to take a more nuanced
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and more thoughtful approach.
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I think we've kind of over the last decade, we saw a lot of polarization, we saw a lot
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of conspiracy theories and things of that sort of, you know, and that was, I think,
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a kind of a trial run essentially for where we are now.
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I think now a lot of the information has come out and there are a lot of people who are
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realizing the effects of social media on people.
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And we're all becoming wiser because, as you said, we have agency.
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We learn things, you know, people learn from their experiences on social media.
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And I think that there's gradually a sort of growing awareness of the kinds of ways
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that it exploits us, it manipulates us.
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And so it's good to see, you know, I'm not a social media doomist.
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I don't think that, you know, it's going to sort of destroy the social fabric or anything
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I think that it's a new technology, it's only been around for 10 years, and it's something
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that we had to get used to as a species.
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We've never had anything like social media in the history of our species.
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I mean, the closest that we came to it was probably the printing press.
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But even that is a completely different thing.
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You know, this is completely new.
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Instant communication with anybody around the world is unprecedented.
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And so, yeah, I think we had to get used to it.
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We made a few mistakes early on, you know, with this kind of things like allowing sort
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of this partisanship to sort of spiral out of control.
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These were problems that were serious for a while.
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But, yeah, I mean, the studies that have come out recently and over the past couple of years
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have shown what you just said, which is that the vast majority of social media toxicity
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and misinformation spreading, all of this kind of stuff is really just something that
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only a small number of people are responsible for.
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The vast majority of people are interested in just learning or, you know, just having
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normal relations that there's not this sort of weird idea that, you know, everybody on
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social media is going crazy because they're on social media.
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I don't think that's true at all.
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And I think the best thing of all is that social media now actually gives you the tools
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to remedy these problems, because, as you said, there's only a small number of people
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causing the vast majority of all the problems on social media.
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So you have things like the block button, you have the mute button, and you can go.
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People are quite reluctant to use them for some reason.
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But I think that it's actually essential to using social media, you know, because there
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are so many of these very loud, very obnoxious people who are used to engaging in attention-seeking
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There's been studies which have shown that social media attracts narcissists and that
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these narcissists are more likely to go viral because of their attention-seeking behavior.
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So if you can filter them out using things like the block button and the mute button,
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it kind of, you know, social media actually becomes a very useful tool for learning, for
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And so, yeah, I think it's not a problem, you know, if you know how to use it.
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Yeah, I mean, speaking of narcissists, I used to think that social media brings out the
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worst in us, but I have also come to sort of realize, perhaps uncharitably, that it
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also empowers the worst among us.
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And I don't want that tinge of judgment to be there because character is contingent
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and, you know, all of that.
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But that's just kind of how it works.
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And the way I like to think of social media is that if you told me, say, in the mid-90s
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when I just hit 20, that someday I will be able to wake up every morning and listen to
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the best minds in the world thinking aloud, I would have said that that's ludicrous, you
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know, it can never happen.
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So if you curate your feet properly, and if you block a lot like I do, then, you know,
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Now, I want to ask you stuff about your personal journey and really learn a bit about your
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But before I do that, there's a larger question I want to ask, like, one of the themes that
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you focused on in your newsletters and your Twitter and all of that is how we have to
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take human nature into account when we look at human behavior in the sense that our brain
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evolved for a low information world, our brains are configured not to find truth, but to survive
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and reproduce, paranoia is optimal, all of those things, you know.
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And to me, what I find fascinating about what I find unique about our species, and unfortunately
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it leads to hubris, but what I do find unique about our species is that we are the only
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animals that can mitigate our own programming, that, you know, we are wired in different
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contradictory ways, we are wired both for selfishness and altruism and so on, but we
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are wired in some deeply disturbing ways, including a lot of the tribalism that we see.
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And to me, this whole enlightenment project or this whole sort of cultural project of
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us is to understand ourselves and to figure out how do we want to live our lives and to
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mitigate against, you know, to corrupt Steven Pinker's face, to mitigate against the worst
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And this is something that, although you haven't put it in these words, this is a strain that
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runs across everything you've done when you talk of metacognition, understanding how we
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And there are times where I get really pessimistic and I think that it's kind of an uphill battle
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because nature is always with us, but nurture is an evolving beast and it's evolving in
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And like we've seen from social media, it can actually amplify the worst in us as well,
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Just on that larger question of this grand project of, you know, mitigating our nature,
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what are sort of your thoughts?
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Yeah, so I think that sort of one of the foundations of all of my writing is this idea that we've
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created for ourselves a world that we didn't evolve for.
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So you know, 90% of human evolution took place sort of on the savannas of Africa in a hunter-gatherer
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So we are configured for that kind of world.
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That's the world that the majority of our evolution took place in.
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You know, we see signs of it now.
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We see this tribalism, you know, where we form these subcultures online and then we
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sort of start sort of conflicts with other subcultures, rival cultures, and you know,
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we sort of twist the truth sometimes to sort of favour our tribe over the opposing tribe.
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And all of these problems, they are things that originally were heuristics.
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We call them biases now.
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But originally they were actually, they were not liabilities, they were assets.
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They were things that helped us to survive in a low-information world.
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You know, it was obviously in your interests, if you were living in a remote tribe in Africa,
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it was in your interests to believe what the tribe believed, to want to help your tribe
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and want to defeat the enemy tribe as well.
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And that was also important because resources were scarce and, you know, it was essentially
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Unfortunately, we have retained these assets, well, former assets now, and they have essentially
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become liabilities and they've become the things that are now undoing our ability to
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discern truth, our ability to form relationships with strangers and all these kinds of things.
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So I think the chief problem of the digital age is that we're still catching up.
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We're still, we're lagging behind in our evolution because we've really, you know, the digital
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age has only been around for, say, you know, 40 years, 30 years even, which is absolutely
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nothing when you look at the grand scheme of human history, which is what, 200,000,
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So we're in the infancy of the digital age and we are still getting used to it.
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We're still trying to find our way through it.
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And I think, so it's, to be honest, I'm actually surprised that we're not doing as worse than
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You know, I think when you consider how completely different this world is to the one that we
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evolved for, it's a miracle that we're actually still keeping everything together, which shows
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that we are adaptable, you know, we're not static, again, going back to your point of
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us having agency, you know, we learn quickly, we are able to override our biological programming.
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These are very, very important things.
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And to be honest, that's essentially the reason why I got into psychology was because I realized
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that the key was not technology, it was, it was psychology, it was overriding our programming,
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not the programming of the machines, of the, you know, the computers, the networks, all
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that kind of stuff, the algorithms.
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That's just a reflection of our own nature.
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What we really need to change is our nature, the way that we approach the world, the way
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that we look at the world.
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Because I think once we do that, then everything else will fall into place.
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Because if you think about what are the problems right now on social media, and the problems
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are that the algorithms provide perverse incentives.
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They incentivize loud attention seeking behavior, they incentivize partisanship, they incentivize
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easy answers over long complex truths, you know, so that the incentives are the thing
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that is driving a lot of this sort of online irrationality.
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But those incentives are aligned to our nature.
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So the problem is not the algorithms, the problem is our nature.
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That's the thing that we really need to grapple with, I think, this worldview that we've inherited
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from our ancestors, who were living on the plains of Africa.
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This is the thing that we need to overcome.
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And so that's why I'm more interested in psychology.
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I mean, I have a computer background, and we can probably get into this soon.
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But yeah, I mean, I have a computer science background, but I don't work in tech anymore.
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I work in the field of psychology, because I feel that psychology is a more important
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sort of obstacle to rationality now than technology.
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So yeah, it's not the algorithms, it's not the algorithms of the machines, it's the algorithms
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of the mind, I think, that we need to reprogram.
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Yeah, you know, a few years back in India, there were after an elections, there were
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predictably shouts of how, you know, there was rigging and the electoral machines were
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hacked and all of that.
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And one of my friends, Nitin Pai, said that they don't need to hack the machines when
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they can hack the minds, which is really true.
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And which also brings me to thinking about, you know, before we get to your life, just
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another larger question and a question that also is a theme that runs through everything
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And that's a question of human hubris.
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That while our brains are so incredibly complex, while so often we are slaves to desires that
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we don't even acknowledge or recognize, leave alone have actual control over, we behave
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as if we are a fixed thing.
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We are in control of everything, we are in control of ourselves and sometimes even the
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And, and that hubris seems to me like you've of course spoken about the need for epistemic
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humility and all of that in your pieces, but that hubris also seems to me to be hardwired
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because how do you sort of live in a difficult world, in a nasty, brutish world without the
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self-belief that, you know, you can outpace a tiger or whatever the case might be.
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What is your sense of how deep a problem this is, like even, even today, and we'll discuss
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what you've written about AI as well, but you know, when, when I listen to the chatter
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on AI around me, what really strikes me is that when people are sort of dissing it or
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even worrying about it, they are vastly overplaying on the one hand, human intelligence, and on
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the other hand, the significance of human life in the whole scheme of things, like,
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you know, you and I are being able to have this conversation because we've been trained
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on LLMs that are much smaller than what AI is getting trained on.
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And our processing capacity of that is way, way less, as you know, much better than me
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from your study of psychology.
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So how big a problem is hubris in all of this?
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Because I realized that, you know, when I read something by you, for example, or by,
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you know, similar writers, I can for a moment congratulate myself that, hey, I'm so self-aware
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and I'm so this, but that's also hubris, right?
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And you've also self-referentially referred to it in a couple of your pieces.
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So what is your sense of that as something that needs to be overcome?
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And were you, were you hubristic once?
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I think hubris is human nature.
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It's very, very hard to be humble all the time.
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But as I've said, I think we can't strive to be humble all the time.
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But what we can do is we can strive to strive to be humble all the time.
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We can, we can try, you know, and I think that if you can just try to be humble, there
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is not much difference from trying to be humble and actually being humble because you realize
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and you recognize the limits of your own knowledge and you realize that you, you always need
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to learn more because the world is far more complex now than it ever was in the past.
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But I think one of the problems with having so much information available at our fingertips
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is that it allows one to cherry pick facts to fit their narrative, no matter what they
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And so they can always find confirmation of their beliefs.
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And one of the strongest sort of biases is confirmation bias.
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You know, this idea that we tend to ignore information that doesn't fit our narrative.
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And then we just sort of put all of our focus on the information that does.
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And what's happened is we now have a massive information space now where you can find pretty
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much any narrative that you want and you can find evidence of any narrative that you want.
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And what I've observed is that people tend to engage in confirmation bias far more now
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than they ever have been able to in the past, because all they have to do is type it into
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Google evidence for their beliefs and they will immediately find it.
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Even if it's wrong, they will still find it.
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And this leads to a lot of hubris because now people are sheltered, they're cocooned
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And this is also this sort of goes hand in hand with another problem, which is that people
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don't really pay consequences for having wrong beliefs online.
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This is something that Nicholas Nassim Taleb has written about where he's basically said
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people don't have skin in the game.
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It's very easy to have beliefs and opinions online because you don't need to test them
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against the real world.
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They don't collide with the real world.
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They remain in this weird, fuzzy domain online where they're just constantly shielded away
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And so if you have these two things, you have this fact that you have all this information
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and you can cherry pick the narrative that you want.
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And then you have this other idea where it doesn't ever have to face reality because
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you can just spend all your time online and pretending that you're right.
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You never have to confront him.
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This is a pretty dangerous combination and it can lead to a lot of hubris.
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I think I've actually experienced it myself and I've seen it in others where everything
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you know, there's another factor here, which is that we form echo chambers.
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So if you combine these three things, that's a recipe for disaster.
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You've got everything that you want to believe confirmed back at you.
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The internet is like a mirror where whatever you project gets reflected back at you.
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And so this leads to a lot of hubris.
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And I think really the only solution that I know of, the thing that's kind of helped
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me to recognise my own hubris, is to test your beliefs in the real world and to become
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aware of your biases, because I think once you test your beliefs in the real world, that's
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when you realise, hang on a second, just because I'm sure about something, it doesn't make
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I think that's a lesson that a lot of people have to have.
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Unfortunately, because we're living our lives online more and more, we don't test our beliefs
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in the real world as much.
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You know, if you think about it like, if you have like these famous psychics who purport
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to be able to read your mind, if you give them a stage, you know, in a packed theatre
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with a big audience, and you give them a few days to prepare, they will always be able
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to guess what's in a box, you know, what's in a closed box, they'll always be able to
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But you'll notice that psychics never are able to win the lottery, they're never able
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to solve murders, you know, in the real world.
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So this is really the same principle that we are facing when we're online.
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Online, you can always have your beliefs confirmed, always, because you just have to look in the
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But in the real world, you can't do that, you can't use a Google search when you're
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just out in the streets, you know, not unless you've got your phone, but like you can't
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just, you know, use that on the on the landscape, as it were, you're sort of stuck in this world
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You know, a building is always going to be a building, it's not going to change into
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a tree just because you want it to.
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Whereas online, you can just sort of search for a picture of a tree rather than a building.
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So you can't cherry pick reality, but you can cherry pick the internet.
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And so I think once you try to make predictions in the real world, that's when you realize
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That's when people realize that, hang on a second, everything that I believed online
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is just the domain of sort of a dream, essentially, you know, it's a sort of selected reality.
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It's not actual reality.
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But once you go out into the real world and you try to match your beliefs, you try to
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match your beliefs to reality, try to predict things in the real world, that's when you
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realize how wrong you are.
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And so I always say that the measure of truth, like people sometimes ask me, what is truth?
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And I say that truth is that which helps you make better predictions about the future,
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because that's the only thing, the only truth can do that.
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Nothing else is able to improve your ability to predict the future.
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And so that's the measure, that's the ultimate measure of whether you know you're deluded
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or not, is how well can you predict the future?
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If you can't predict the future, then this is a sign that you have incomplete information
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or you have the wrong information.
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Usually it's a combination of both.
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And so this is something that people need to realize is that if you can't predict the
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future, even within a small domain, you know, if you have certain beliefs, like if you have
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financial beliefs, if you believe the economy runs a certain way, well, then why can't you
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predict the stock market?
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Why can't you predict what's going to happen to the country's GDP next year?
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You know, these, when you when you ask people to make these predictions, that's the foundation
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of humility, because that's when people realize, oh, I don't know enough.
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And so I think when you try to make predictions and you realize how wrong you are, that's
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the foundation. That's what I try to do.
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When I can't make predictions, that's when I realize I don't know enough.
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I need to rein in my my sort of hubris, as it were.
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So, yeah, that's that's what I say.
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Philip Dettlok has this great book called Super Forecasting, where he talks about the
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importance of probabilistic thinking, but also how experts get it wrong so often.
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And my good friend, Alex Tabarrok, I think once wrote a post in Marginal Revolution about
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how any expert who predicts anything should be forced to bet on it.
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You know, name the odds bet on it.
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So let's let's see the rigor of your thinking, because that's where the incentives kind of
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But, you know, a slight nuance I'd add to what you said, and I agree with all of it.
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But a slight nuance I'd add is that in some domains in the real world, it is so messy
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that you can't even verify something from reality.
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Like my friend, the economist, Ruthi Rajgopalan, gave me a great example of this, where she
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said that, let us say that you want to test the theory that if you have a coin, would
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putting it in a beaker of water, displace some water right now in a laboratory.
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It's really easy to test.
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You take a beaker, everything is controlled.
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You measure it. You put in the coin.
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And then you can kind of figure that out.
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But if you do it in a crowded swimming pool with 40 kids jumping up and down and it's
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raining overhead and you put the coin in, you know, then it's really up to whatever
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your prior beliefs are or what tribe you're part of.
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And, you know, and we find so much of this in economics, for example, you know, all the
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age old debates about the minimum wage or whatever.
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So testing your belief in such a complex environment also then becomes a case of, OK,
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you know, going back to heuristics that, OK, these are the people I trust or this is
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my tribe and this is what I can say to remain, to not get cancelled or to remain relevant
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or whatever. And I think that's a complexity that comes in.
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So I totally agree with the principle that you have to not take anything at face value
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and try to kind of test everything.
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But there is just the scarcity of bandwidth and time.
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And also the world is so complex that, you know, everybody is not going to figure out
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how to, you know, what's the methodology of different studies and which one should I
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It's just mind boggling. Let's sort of or do you want to add something to that?
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Or should we? Well, I'll just say that that's all the more reason to be humble.
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You know, it's another reason.
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Basically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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Fabulous. Let's let's talk about your childhood.
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So, you know, tell me, where were you born?
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Where did you grow up? What was that like?
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Yeah. So I was born in a town called Lamington Spa, which is sort of in the middle
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It was a pretty sort of uneventful childhood.
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Just basically when I was young,
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I was a bit of a science fiction geek and, you know, I sort of
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watched a lot of Star Trek and a lot of science fiction movies and things like that.
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And I think they instilled in me this
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this view of a very sort of utopian future.
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I mean, if you I don't know if you've seen Star Trek, but it's quite utopian,
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particularly the sort of newer Star Trek episodes.
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And as a result that I kind of
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I got swept up in the hype of the Internet.
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And I kind of believed that, you know, when the Internet was sort of first
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sort of when it first began to sort of spread through households
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in the United Kingdom, there was this sort of hype around it,
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which basically a lot of people, a lot of tech visionaries
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were saying that it was going to change everything.
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It was going to it was going to destroy ignorance.
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It was going to allow everybody to connect, you know,
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and it was going to just make everybody into essentially a god.
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You know, there was all this really lofty talk about it.
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And one of the things that really struck me was
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this idea of it destroying ignorance.
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I really, you know, that when I was growing up and I thought of this idea,
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I thought, wow, you know, because I had always believed that
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the problems in the world were caused by ignorance.
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And this was largely a result of me
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when I was growing up, watching a lot of science fiction, utopian science fiction.
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And there's a very common thread through a lot of the science fiction,
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which is the idea that humans essentially are ignorant
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and that if you give people the right information,
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then they will be more rational and, you know, then everything would work out
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and we'll all sort of hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
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And essentially, when the Internet came along,
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I believe that that's what it was going to do.
#
I believed that the Internet would just destroy ignorance.
#
It would allow everybody to have instant access to information,
#
and that would allow people to become more enlightened.
#
And that would eventually end to the end of wars
#
because people would realize how pointless they were.
#
And, you know, it would result in the sort of end of crime
#
because everybody would be able to learn.
#
Everybody would be able to receive education online.
#
So everybody would have, you know, good jobs.
#
There would no longer be any poverty, no crime.
#
I had a very naive view of the Internet when I was young.
#
And this sort of view is what motivated me to study computer science
#
because I believed that I would be able to help make a difference
#
to people by essentially
#
creating this new information landscape that would allow people to
#
learn anything that they wanted.
#
So I worked after I graduated from the university.
#
I basically sought out a few jobs in tech.
#
I worked as a web designer and all these kinds of things.
#
And basically, probably the most high profile job I did,
#
which was around 2009, was for Microsoft Bing.
#
And that was basically working on making the sort of final touches
#
And I worked on I wanted to work on search engines because for me,
#
search engines were the sort of doorway to the Internet.
#
They were the sort of thing that dictated the path that people would take
#
through this infinite library of knowledge.
#
And so if we had good search engines, we would allow people to get
#
exactly the information that they needed, which would, you know,
#
allow them to learn whatever they wanted and allow human flourishing.
#
Essentially, this was this was my view at the time.
#
And so, you know, I started work on the search engines.
#
I was a very junior employee.
#
I wasn't, you know, I didn't have a senior job or anything like that
#
at that time. But I was working on as part of a team,
#
primarily on the kind of testing of the search engine to ensure
#
that it was giving people the right it was giving people
#
the right results to their queries.
#
And something struck me which completely changed my worldview.
#
And that was that people don't actually seek out the best information.
#
Few, even if you offer it to them, they will not necessarily take it
#
because human information seeking behavior is not based on trying
#
to determine what's true, at least not always.
#
Sometimes it may be, but not always.
#
Much of the time, it's actually a function of people's curiosity.
#
And people's curiosity is simply often just the result of how much
#
they want to be distracted and what they want to be distracted by.
#
And so this was a big blow to my worldview, because I thought,
#
hang on a second, this whole view that I had, that information
#
was going to enlighten everybody and, you know, lead to human flourishing
#
might not necessarily be true because you can give people the best information.
#
We were giving people the best information on the search engine.
#
You know, we were giving them the peer reviewed academic studies.
#
We were giving them the Pulitzer Prize winning journalism.
#
We were giving people the best information that we had available.
#
And they were not choosing it.
#
They were, they were skipping that for the click bait, for the gossip,
#
for the hyper partisan hackery and all this other stuff, you know?
#
So I realized, oh, you know, this is a bit of a tricky obstacle here
#
because you can give people the best information and they're not going to take it.
#
So then what? What then?
#
You know, and that was something that completely changed my worldview
#
because I realized, hang on a second, this doesn't, this, this is not going to
#
lead to human flourishing.
#
If people are just seeking out the wrong information that pleases them in the moment
#
rather than the information that's actually true, then giving people
#
all the information in the world is not going to change anything.
#
It's just going to make people dig even deeper into their desired delusions.
#
And so this caused me a lot of difficulty.
#
And I had to really rethink my sort of place in the world
#
and what I was really trying to achieve.
#
You know, I thought if I, if I'm here and I'm giving people this information
#
and they're not even accepting it and they're choosing this other stuff instead,
#
So that led to me having a long rethink about my career trajectory.
#
And I eventually came to the conclusion that the limiting factor, the bottleneck
#
was not the technology.
#
It wasn't the search engines.
#
It wasn't the algorithms.
#
It wasn't any of that stuff.
#
It was human desires because it was the human desires
#
that were essentially the foundation of everything.
#
They were the foundation of humans behaviors,
#
but they were also the foundation of our algorithms.
#
Our algorithms were based on what humans desired
#
because obviously if you have a search engine,
#
you have to give people what they want.
#
You can't give people what's true
#
because then people are not going to use your search engine, you know.
#
And obviously Microsoft being a business, they had to make money.
#
And so they had to tailor their algorithms to human desires,
#
regardless of how irrational those desires were.
#
And so I decided I couldn't really work here.
#
I couldn't do this thing because it was just against
#
what I was trying to achieve in the world.
#
I thought to myself, if this is what, you know,
#
if essentially working in search engines is essentially just
#
following people's desires and giving people what they desire,
#
then all that's going to do is just,
#
it's going to encourage people's more animal behaviors,
#
their primal behaviors like sort of partisanship
#
and all that kind of stuff.
#
And so I decided that what I needed to do
#
was not debug the tech algorithms,
#
but to debug the biological algorithms,
#
the algorithms of the mind.
#
And that was when I decided to leave the tech industry
#
and to sort of pursue a career in psychology instead of technology.
#
But unfortunately for me, life was quite difficult
#
because I didn't have any real background in psychology.
#
I was educated in tech.
#
I was a computer science grad.
#
I had an A level in psychology.
#
A level is the qualification in the UK that you take
#
between school and university.
#
So it's after GCSEs, but before university.
#
And I had an A level in psychology,
#
but that was the highest sort of qualification I had.
#
It wasn't enough to forge a career in psychology.
#
I did want to at one point,
#
I did consider pursuing a degree in psychology,
#
but I came to the conclusion
#
that that probably wouldn't be worth my time
#
because I have a lot of respect for the topic of psychology,
#
for the subject of psychology,
#
but not for the field of psychology
#
because I feel that even at that time,
#
I was kind of aware that a lot of it was just sort of gobbledygook,
#
a lot of the stuff coming out of the academic institutions.
#
It didn't have scientific rigor.
#
And so I was not very interested in actually doing a degree in psychology,
#
but I was very interested in the subject of psychology.
#
And so I decided instead of doing a degree,
#
I decided to get some real world experience.
#
And that led me to do something quite unusual.
#
So at the time, this was around sort of 2010.
#
And the UK media was filled with this guy called Tommy Robinson.
#
There was a lot of conversation about this guy.
#
And basically, I don't know if you know him,
#
but he was basically a guy who had reacted
#
to this kind of perceived increased Islamification of the United Kingdom
#
and sort of this perceived increase in terrorist attacks from jihadists in the UK.
#
And he sort of represented this movement,
#
growing movement of people who were very angry at sort of Muslim population
#
for sort of aiding and abetting this as they perceived it.
#
And so in the town of Luton, which was about 20, 30 miles north of London,
#
he had basically created this movement called the EDL,
#
which was designed to sort of fight back against this perceived Islamification
#
of the United Kingdom, because the town of Luton is a very
#
sort of strongly ethnic Bangladeshi, ethnic Pakistani demographic.
#
So it's a very big Muslim population there.
#
Most of the people who live in particularly in the Burry Park area are Muslim
#
and they're quite conservative Muslims as well.
#
And so he was from this area.
#
He was sort of live nearby.
#
And he sort of created this coalition of people to protest against this,
#
what he perceived as this community protecting jihadists,
#
protecting Islamic hate preachers and groomers and all this kind of stuff,
#
groomers of young non-Muslim girls.
#
And so this led to a lot of conflict in the town of Luton because
#
the Luton was not just home to Tommy Robinson and his movement,
#
the English Defence League or the EDL.
#
It was also home to, or at least it was a stronghold of the deadliest
#
jihadist group in the UK, Al-Mahajeroon.
#
This was a group that was responsible for a lot of attempted terrorist attacks,
#
large scale ones, and also was linked to the 7-7 bombings.
#
And later it was also linked to the Paris attacks.
#
But yeah, I mean, at this time, Al-Mahajeroon was also in the papers
#
because a lot of its members were engaging in pretty sort of radical behaviour
#
where they would publicly burn poppies on Remembrance Day.
#
They would abuse soldiers who were engaging in parades.
#
They would march through the streets.
#
There was this one thing that they did where they would go through the streets.
#
And you know, the big billboards which had female models on them,
#
they would use spray cans of black paint to spray paint burkas over them.
#
So they were quite sort of sensationalist in their behaviours
#
and they were trying to attract attention and they got the attention.
#
So there was this conflict between the EDL and the Al-Mahajeroon.
#
They were engaging in street fights.
#
They were setting each other's buildings sometimes on fire.
#
A couple of mosques got burned down.
#
There was people getting beaten up in the streets.
#
So there was a lot of violence and a lot of this was being blamed on the algorithms,
#
Tommy Robinson, he had a big Facebook following.
#
Al-Mahajeroon, they were quite prevalent on Facebook also.
#
And so a lot of this was being blamed on the internet, a lot of the violence in Luton.
#
It was being blamed on what was being perceived as sort of misinformation and all this kind of stuff.
#
And I found it very interesting because I knew that this was not just a problem of
#
misinformation and a problem of people just being ignorant,
#
because I had literally just believed that before I'd worked at Bing.
#
So I decided to go down to that town.
#
I decided to move to Luton, right into the neighbourhood of Burry Park,
#
where all the violence was going on.
#
And I decided to monitor the situation myself to see
#
if I could actually determine what was going on.
#
Because I found this to be a great way to sort of build up my own portfolio of work.
#
I thought if I can go there, I could take some pictures of the violence.
#
I can sort of interview people, you know, try to build up a picture of
#
how this town set it into chaos.
#
And I had my beliefs confirmed.
#
Most, I mean, not every belief confirmed, but I did.
#
My general sort of view of things, my new view of things was confirmed,
#
because I realised that the people who were jihadists, particularly,
#
they were not people who were ignorant as they were portrayed,
#
particularly in the left-wing newspapers of the UK,
#
the left-wing newspapers like The Guardian and The Independent.
#
They would portray jihadists as people who had been left behind by society,
#
people who had not received due care from society,
#
people who had not received proper education,
#
people who were lower on the socioeconomic scale.
#
That was the sort of general narrative.
#
That was something that I realised was not true,
#
because a lot of the jihadists and particularly the jihadist leaders,
#
people like Anjum Jowdhury and Saiful Islam,
#
these people were highly educated people.
#
Saiful Islam was an architect, an architecture graduate.
#
Anjum Jowdhury, he was a lawyer.
#
There were medical doctors amongst them, engineers.
#
These were highly educated people.
#
They also came from middle-class backgrounds.
#
They were not impoverished.
#
Essentially, they had a better life than many of the native white people,
#
and they still had rejected the UK's values.
#
They had rejected the idea of democracy,
#
and they would embrace this violent totalitarian ideology,
#
irrespective of their background.
#
It was clear to me that this was not just about them having a bad upbringing.
#
They had been given all the opportunities in the world.
#
They'd been given all the right information.
#
They'd been given a good education, and they'd rejected it,
#
just as I'd seen when I was working at Bing,
#
how you give people the right information
#
and they will reject it for the easy answers.
#
It became clear to me even more now
#
that this was not a problem of algorithms.
#
This was not people not receiving the right information.
#
This was people being given the right information,
#
I wrote a long 30,000-word article about the animating forces.
#
I delved into the government's experiments with jihadists in the 1990s as well,
#
but that's something for a whole new conversation.
#
That's another rabbit hole.
#
I think a lot of my understanding of human beings
#
really came from those couple of years
#
that I spent in Luton studying jihadists
#
and those anti-Islamic far-right nativists,
#
because I realized that this was not a problem of the algorithms.
#
It was a problem of human desires.
#
The human desires were the thing that was causing a lot of this.
#
So the next stage in my life was to try to work out,
#
how do we find a solution to this?
#
How do we make people aware of these biases in their desires,
#
biases in their information processing and information-seeking behaviors?
#
That was when I became interested in social media,
#
because at this time, social media was beginning to really pick up.
#
It was becoming even more of a problem,
#
but now it wasn't Facebook.
#
It was even shorter form,
#
and this was leading to a whole new host of problems.
#
I planned to write a book about the things going on in Luton,
#
about the jihadists and about the EDL.
#
But interestingly, what happened was that the people that I was studying by 2016,
#
they had all either been captured or killed, the jihadists anyway.
#
Tommy Robinson was essentially a wanted man
#
and pretty much everybody was going after him.
#
So it was no longer possible to study these people,
#
because they were either dead or in jail,
#
and they were not willing to talk to me.
#
The people in jail were not willing to talk to me.
#
I decided, okay, so what I'm going to do now?
#
This had been my life for a couple of years,
#
but now all of these people had essentially been locked away.
#
After the Paris attacks, there was a big crackdown on jihadists in the UK.
#
Alma Hadroon was essentially disbanded.
#
There was a massive crackdown that essentially not even jihadists could overcome.
#
So I was trying to look for a new way to apply my knowledge
#
and to try and learn about human behavior.
#
And I found it in the culture wars, which began in 2016,
#
just as the jihadist threat began to dwindle in the UK.
#
There was a new conflict.
#
This time it wasn't between Islamists and anti-Islamists.
#
This time it was between the left and the right.
#
The populists, well, the sort of elitist left and the populist right.
#
So you had the kind of left composed of the New York Times writers and academics
#
and a lot of these kind of more elite people.
#
And then you had the right wing, which is more populist.
#
And this was supercharged by the election of Donald Trump
#
or his kind of campaign at that time.
#
And this was essentially the same thing over and over again.
#
It was the same thing as the conflict in Luton.
#
It was people having access to the right information.
#
Again, these were academics.
#
These were people who were well-educated.
#
They were not low on the socioeconomic scale.
#
They had more than enough money.
#
This was a problem of them having the wrong desires
#
because they were not desiring the truth.
#
They were desiring to fit their tribe.
#
They wanted to do a sense of belonging from their tribe.
#
They wanted information that sort of confirmed the beliefs of their tribe.
#
They wanted information by which they could denigrate the opposing tribe.
#
So these behaviors, I saw them again online.
#
It was essentially the same thing.
#
It was happening on the left and on the right.
#
The people on the right, again, people like Donald Trump,
#
They're very, very rich.
#
This was not a problem of socioeconomics,
#
but they were essentially choosing the bad information
#
over the good information.
#
They were choosing to reject all the education they'd received.
#
They were choosing to reject the kind of the civility
#
that they'd been offered by democracy.
#
They were just engaging in this essentially, I'll call it,
#
authoritarian behavior on both sides.
#
This became my new project, something I became very interested in.
#
I realized that what I needed to do was to try to use social media
#
to try to create memes that would essentially act as a kind of antibody
#
to the virus, the mind viruses that I was witnessing online.
#
Because all these behaviors were essentially like viruses.
#
They were like mind viruses.
#
You had people who would have a narrative in their head.
#
They would spread that narrative to other people online
#
using the network to sort of create an exponential growth, just like a pandemic.
#
Eventually, you'd have huge populations completely enthralled to this virus,
#
So I had this weird idea of using the same transmission pathways,
#
the same networks to try to kind of spread antibodies to these mind viruses.
#
This is where I got the idea for my megathreads.
#
So my megathreads were short, easy to understand concepts,
#
which helped to sort of reveal our biases, reveal our perverse incentives,
#
to reveal the ways in which our information-seeking behaviors are not rational.
#
The way that I did it was because I realized that it's the small,
#
simple, easy answers that people want.
#
I made my explanations small, easy to understand.
#
Each one was just fit within a tweet.
#
You know, each one fit within 280 characters.
#
And so I thought I'd use the same tactics as the irrational sort of demagogues,
#
the jihadists or the culture warriors, the same tactics as them.
#
Because I'd witnessed them because I'd watched them.
#
I actually interacted with jihadists in Luton,
#
and I'd seen the way that they approached the indoctrination.
#
And they used simple, easy to understand narratives.
#
You could eat bite-size.
#
So you can know the entire story that they want to tell you within a couple of sentences.
#
Very, very clever, because it means that even if you reject their message,
#
you still hear that message.
#
Because before you can even make up your mind that you don't want to hear that message,
#
By the time you decide you don't want to hear it, you've already heard it.
#
So I did the same thing.
#
I thought if I make the biases, my knowledge of heuristics and biases and all that,
#
if I make that fit within a single tweet, all people have to do is they just have to glimpse it,
#
and then they will get that information.
#
And I did not expect it to go as viral as it did, but it really blew up.
#
Because this was the first mega thread I did.
#
I was writing about biases and stuff since about 2017.
#
But my first mega thread was in 2020, right at the beginning of 2020.
#
It got like, I think, about 50,000 likes on Twitter.
#
Going back to the initial point that we made, you and I made,
#
which is that there is hope, because there is an appetite for this.
#
There are people who want to learn about biases.
#
There are people who want to learn about heuristics and about information-seeking
#
behaviors and fallacies and all this other stuff.
#
And so that was very encouraging for me.
#
I realized, hang on, yeah, there are people who do want to know about this.
#
So I'm not wasting my time.
#
And that really encouraged me to pursue this full-time,
#
to pursue this kind of thing full-time.
#
And so I began to write a lot more about this, began to use the same tactics I'd been using.
#
I used these kind of same tactics of the jihadists, of the culture warriors and the EDL
#
to send out these antibodies to these mind viruses.
#
And I found it was actually very, very encouraging.
#
I found that there's so many people who want to do this because
#
the next one I did also went viral.
#
And most of the ones that I've done since then have gone viral.
#
And so that's kind of where I became established as a kind of essentially as a
#
sort of a writer where I gained the majority of my audience was from this.
#
Then from then, I decided essentially that I could actually do this for a living.
#
I wrote for a few magazines.
#
I wrote for Quillette and for The Humanist and for The Express and a few other places.
#
And then eventually, I had enough of a following that I decided to go out on my own
#
and start my Substack, which brings us to last year, which was when I started my Substack.
#
And since then, that's essentially what I've been doing.
#
I've been doing longer form stuff now because I now have that audience.
#
I've managed to indoctrinate people, as it were, into this worldview.
#
So now I can write longer pieces.
#
I've got their attention.
#
I write longer pieces now.
#
I still do my megathreads occasionally, but most of my focus now is on really exploring
#
things from a really in-deep sort of depth, through depth rather than through breadth.
#
And so that brings us to essentially where I am now, working on this idea.
#
I've got a few other projects, but they're quite early, so I probably shouldn't talk
#
But yeah, that brings us to where we are now.
#
So yeah, that was quite long.
#
No, no, you haven't heard my episodes.
#
There's no way in here as long as it can be.
#
I have to say I love your Twitter.
#
What most impressed me about your Twitter threads and your newsletter is that they're
#
two fundamentally different formats.
#
And yet you've kind of nailed the craft on both of them.
#
And I'll come back to that craft and the clarity a little later.
#
I'll also double click on the culture wars at some point.
#
First, you know, the central insight that you spoke about in your wonderful, I think
#
it was your first newsletter piece on Luton.
#
You know, I'll just quote a couple of lines because it is so true and so well written
#
where you wrote, quote, what I learned was this information doesn't enter the mind intact
#
like a puzzle piece slotted into a jigsaw.
#
Instead, it becomes distorted to fit the shape of its container, like water poured into a
#
And I just love that quote and that kind of explains so much.
#
And it's like a fundamental truth.
#
I want to step back for a moment and I'll come back and I'll double click on a lot of
#
this, but I want to step back for a moment on your personal journey and ask a sort of
#
a dual question about the shaping of identity.
#
Like when you were speaking, two things struck me about yourself.
#
One was, and this comes through your newsletters also, that when you did the things that you
#
wanted to do, like computer science or later psychology, they felt like a sense of higher
#
purpose to it, almost like sci-fi, utopianism, that this will make the world a better place.
#
And I find that kind of unusual.
#
A lot of people rationalize themselves into thinking there is higher purpose, but they
#
don't actually act on it because typically people do the things they do based on, you
#
know, an intersection of what they love doing, what they're good at, what they'll get paid
#
for, or they just, you know, follow a path that is set out and they're given to inertia
#
And yet it seems that there is almost this, this idealism that these are the things that
#
you are doing for a reason.
#
And, and I'm really interested in how that shaping of yourself, how you viewed yourself
#
And equally, the sort of the mirror to this also is, I'm also interested in how this was
#
impacted by the friction of the validation that one naturally craves, right?
#
So like you have this moving story about how I think when you were 12 years old and a bunch
#
of school kids, you were singing ringa ringa roses and you tried to hold the hand of a
#
And she said, I don't want any ground on me.
#
And then the next day you put powder and you tried to make yourself white.
#
And that's a very moving story.
#
And you see the same theme later, maybe, you know, after your Luton experience, you write
#
a bunch of articles, you identify at that point as a leftist, but all the leftist magazines
#
reject you because it doesn't go with their prevailing theme and their prevailing thinking
#
on Islamism, that it is necessarily always, you know, victimhood and so on, those, those
#
kinds of simple narratives.
#
And then you decide to sort of strike away from that.
#
And you've criticized wokeness, but you've also criticized what you call base thinking.
#
You've criticized all the sites in a sense.
#
And that's a damn difficult thing to do.
#
Like people claim to be independent.
#
People claim to be like that.
#
I came to be like that.
#
But it's actually a damn difficult thing to do because then you're all alone.
#
You know, and you know, you've spoken about the looking glass self, you know, a danger
#
that people are always looking for a reflection of themselves in the eyes of others.
#
And they let that shape them, you know, in more ways.
#
So you spoke about that guy who started this YouTube channel where he's eating all the
#
And eventually he became incredibly obese, character change, personality change, because
#
once those videos became popular, he had no option.
#
He just got to keep eating all the time.
#
And you get sort of trapped into that.
#
And, you know, I keep reminding myself not to get trapped into that because at a book
#
launch recently, you know, someone who listens to the show came up to me after the thing
#
and she'd heard all my episodes.
#
And at one point she said, have you ever shouted at someone?
#
And it was a funny moment.
#
But I said, oh, fuck, you know, you know, this is not me.
#
People think that is me.
#
And now it's a danger I have to avoid to get trapped into some hyper rational sort of,
#
you know, model that people have of me.
#
So again, to kind of sum up dual question, one is how was your shaping of yourself in
#
the sense of what did you see yourself as and how did that evolve over time?
#
And the second is that what does one do about validation, the looking glass self?
#
Because in a sense, all of us are sort of looking glass cells in a way.
#
We can't completely be immune from that.
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know, the shaping of you through this period of time.
#
So yeah, I'm assuming you're asking me about my sort of ideological approach to the world.
#
Not just that, just in terms of what motivates you, because you've done that thing of taking
#
a step outside yourself and doing the self-reflection, which most people never do in their lives.
#
And even those of us who do it do too little of it.
#
Now you've taken that step.
#
So what do you see when you look at a journey?
#
Yeah, so I would consider sort of, I do consider myself to be ideological.
#
I consider everybody to be ideological.
#
So my motivation is ideological.
#
I think my original view of things was, as I said before, you know, I was a kind of utopian.
#
I've always wanted to do good for humanity because I believe that, you know, there's
#
one of the things that I don't like to see is I don't like to see people suffer.
#
And this is something that I've always felt, you know, since I was a child.
#
And I kind of want to find ways to improve human life for the people.
#
It's just sort of just a natural tendency that I sort of have.
#
And this is what attracted me originally to leftism was this idea, you know, when I was
#
young that, you know, leftism was all about helping other people.
#
It was all about raising up the impoverished and the downtrodden and essentially sort of
#
You know, those were very, very powerful ideas for me when I was young.
#
And so, you know, I kind of became a leftist sort of when I was probably around 16 or 17
#
years old, so I was very young.
#
And basically that guided my kind of approach to a lot of politics.
#
I mean, I wouldn't say that I was very political at that time.
#
I was, you know, it was I did have leftist views, but I wasn't like, you know, politics
#
didn't take up too much of my day when I was very young.
#
It was more when I sort of began to use social media.
#
I think that was when I became more political and think that was because I was around other
#
You know, this was early sort of around sort of 2010 and 2011, right when social media
#
was still quite a new thing.
#
And immediately, you know, I formed an echo chamber with other leftists and I had this
#
view of sort of helping human beings.
#
I kind of, I mean, I was a leftist, but I was also a humanist, you know, I've never
#
believed in God, or at least the only times when I did believe in God was probably like
#
a week after my mother died when I was a child and a week after my father died as well, which
#
was a little bit later on.
#
But, you know, those were just natural processes, grieving processes.
#
But aside from that, I haven't really believed in God very much.
#
I've always sort of as far back as I can remember, I've been an atheist.
#
And so that's informed a lot of my worldview as well, because I had this view that God's
#
not going to help us, you know, we can't rely on God to save the world.
#
We have to do it ourselves.
#
And so that combined with my kind of natural belief in helping people, I think, created
#
this kind of leftist, humanist worldview, which is very common, very prevalent amongst
#
I don't know if that's prevalent in India, but it's prevalent in the sort of West.
#
And this was sort of the kind of culture that I sort of became part of, you know, online.
#
It was the community that I formed, part of that became part of online.
#
And so that because this is a very popular worldview, you know, leftist, atheism, humanism,
#
very, very popular, almost cookie cutter, you know, for an intellectual, I'd say that
#
probably the majority of intellectuals fall into that kind of worldview, especially in
#
the sort of literary world.
#
And so, you know, I had my beliefs constantly sort of reflected back at me in everywhere.
#
Like, you know, I was fond of science fiction in the science fiction world.
#
All the writers are leftists.
#
They're all pretty much atheists.
#
So everything, my entire culture was reinforcing my views at that time.
#
And so I didn't really question leftism or even atheism.
#
I didn't question these until it was around sort of 2016 that I began to question it.
#
And then 2017, where I really became disillusioned with both of them.
#
I mean, this is not to say that I started believing in God.
#
I still don't believe in God.
#
I'm still an atheist, but I now have a different view of religion.
#
And a lot of that is due to the things that I've learned from stepping out of my bubble,
#
stepping out of my ideological bubble.
#
So I'll basically talk about leftism first, and then I'll talk about atheism.
#
So leftism, what really sort of changed my views about leftism?
#
It really did begin with sort of, with the whole Islam, Islamic extremism,
#
and the left's approach to Islamic extremism.
#
So I, one of the people who really influenced my childhood and my, well, my adolescence,
#
actually my adolescence, my sort of teenage years and my early adulthood was Christopher Hitchens
#
and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, you know, but particularly Christopher Hitchens.
#
You know, there was a whole new atheism movement and this sort of, actually, you know, that was,
#
sorry, that was, that's my atheist sort of thing.
#
I was going to talk about leftism first, wasn't I?
#
Yeah, so actually, yeah, I guess I could combine the both.
#
So yeah, so it was Christopher Hitchens, right?
#
So Christopher Hitchens had this great book called God Is Not Great,
#
and he was very popular on YouTube.
#
You know, there's a lot of videos of him, because he's such a good talker, a good speaker,
#
and there were a lot of videos of him on YouTube, and I binge watched them,
#
and I sort of became very influenced by, I mean, he kind of, he didn't say anything that I thought
#
was sort of new to me, but he just put it in words that really articulated how I felt,
#
which was that basically the left were engaging in the soft bigotry of low expectations.
#
They were not giving Arabs or Pakistani people the due agency that they were afforded.
#
You know, they were not treating them as actually having an agency of their own.
#
They were just saying, oh, you know, if a person, if an Arab becomes an extremist,
#
then it's not because of anything they've done, it's because the West is bombing them,
#
because colonialism, you know, it's because of racism, it's because of, you know,
#
it was always the fault of white people or Westerners, and it was never the fault of the
#
people themselves who were actually committing the crimes, and it never made any sense to me,
#
even from the beginning, you know, it was, I just thought to myself, how does having, okay, fair
#
enough, I could understand if somebody has their house bombed and has their children killed by a
#
Western bomb, I can understand being extremely angry about that. But then how does that
#
lead to you wanting to stone women to death? You know, how does that, you know,
#
that didn't make any sense to me. So I thought that this is not the whole, this can't be the whole
#
explanation. It might be a small part of the explanation, but it's not explained the whole
#
thing. And so I thought this can't be right. So because I was not, you know, because I thought
#
there was something wrong with this, I began to speak out about it. And I've always been somebody
#
who just sort of said what they thought, you know, I've never really kept my feelings behind
#
closed doors. And so I was quite vocal about this to my fellow leftists on social media. And
#
the thing that struck me was the sheer vitriol with which I was met. It was almost as though,
#
you know, I was one of the, I killed, you know, I'd stoned women to death myself, you know,
#
the way that I was treated, because they were like, you know, oh, how could you say this, you
#
know, you dumb bastard, or, you know, you're far right, all this, whatever, you know, people would
#
essentially accuse me of being right wing because I was questioning the narrative. And I've never
#
been one to sort of just conform. And so this was the beginning of my suspicions about the left. I
#
thought, okay, so, you know, the left is supposed to be about helping people. But if we're, if we're
#
lying to ourselves about the causes behind the problems, then how are we going to help people?
#
We can't stop jihadism if we're lying about its causes, because it just made no sense to me.
#
There's no way that jihadism, which has been going on in some form or another since the
#
Prophet Muhammad, you know, in sort of the seventh century, you know, there's been wars of conquest,
#
there's been violence against women, all throughout, not just Islamic history, but throughout
#
sort of history generally. So this is, this is a human problem. It's not,
#
it's not something that's just restricted to being bombed by Western colonial powers, you know.
#
And it was really jarring to see that the left were not willing to consider the, all of the
#
violence that occurs against not just the West, but also in India as well. There's Islamic violence
#
in India, there's Islamic violence in Southeast Asia, you know, there's Islamic violence against
#
Africans, there were the Janjaweed in Africa, you know, there's, you know, it's not just that
#
they're fighting against the white people. No, that wasn't, that was a very narrow view, and it
#
was a very Western centric view. And that was when I realized that, hang on, these, these leftists,
#
my fellow leftists, haven't actually, they don't have much of an interest in the world outside of
#
the West. Because for them, it was just a case of the West is bombing the Arabs. And so the
#
Arabs are retaliating. That was their worldview. It was a dualistic worldview. It wasn't, they
#
didn't account for all of the violence that was going on outside of the West. And then they had
#
the sort of temerity, as it were, to accuse others of being sort of, you know, Western centric. And,
#
and so I thought, no, this was, this is very strange. And that was really the first
#
inkling I had that something was not all correct. But I still remained leftist, you know, I still
#
remained leftist even after that. And I continued to sort of support leftist causes. But then,
#
by the time sort of 2015, 2016 came around, then there was a new problem that needed attention,
#
which was the Me Too movement, which was basically when a lot of women came out and, you know, said,
#
look, we've been experiencing sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and we've been forced to be quiet
#
about it all this time, but we're not going to be quiet anymore. We're, you know, we're going to
#
kick up a fuss. And there's a big global movement. And this led to new sort of debate about the sort
#
of behavior of men against women. And around this time, there was a strange narrative that
#
men and women, basically male toxic behavior was a result of culture. And that it was, it was purely,
#
it was toxic masculinity. It was, it was this kind of culture that men had, and that there was no,
#
there was no biological differences between men and women, at least, at least in their brains.
#
There was a strange, strange view that began to sort of take the left and that what the reason
#
that men were acting the way that they were was because they were toxically, you know,
#
they were engaged in a toxic culture. And that if you just change the culture, then men would
#
suddenly be, you know, act perfectly civil, and everything would be all right. This also struck me
#
as bullshit. Because, again, this was not a problem that was limited to the here and now. This was a
#
problem that was essentially one that was universal in all cultures. There was some kind of problem
#
of men committing rape against women. And there was a really, really bizarre paper that I read
#
around this time, which basically said that non-white people did not know what rape was,
#
until white people introduced it to them. And this was, this was, yeah, this was crazy paper.
#
It was written by an academic in the UK, I think it was in the UK. Yeah. And basically, it was this
#
idea that this lady, she made the case that the Native Americans had no conception of rape,
#
until the settlers, until the white settlers came and began to rape Native American women. And then
#
the Native American men saw this, this behavior, and they sort of internalized this toxic masculinity,
#
and they became toxic towards women. And so there was this conflation of sort of rape culture with
#
patriarchy, with patriarchy, with white supremacy. And all of these things just made no sense to me,
#
because on the one hand, you had the leftists defending the behavior of brown people to be
#
misogynistic by excusing sort of this Islamic fundamentalism, and also excusing the kind of
#
very misogynistic rap lyrics in hip hop. Because it was, I got this impression that the left was
#
okay with misogyny if it came from brown people, but if it came from white people, then it was a
#
problem. And this was unfortunately confirmed by a lot of the people that I began to sort of hang
#
out with, and, you know, sort of the circles that I was moving in, where people would never
#
criticize Islam, they would never criticize Islamic misogyny. It was always white people's
#
misogyny that they would criticize. And this, again, was the soft bigotry of low expectations.
#
These people didn't seem to think that brown people had agency. They seemed to only believe that,
#
if white people did bad things, it was the fault of white people. If brown people did bad things,
#
it was the fault of white people. So it was always the fault of white people. And again,
#
this just did not make sense to me, because I was interested in solutions. I wanted to find solutions
#
to problems. I didn't just want to sort of engage my ego by sort of ranting about them online and
#
just sort of pretending that I was going to fix the problem just by complaining about it. I actually
#
wanted to find solutions. And I realized, this is not going to lead to solutions. Just blaming
#
everything on white people is not going to lead to solutions. And again, around this time, 2015,
#
you had a big surge of support for people like Donald Trump, big support for Brexit in the UK.
#
And a lot of this was fueled by this new anti-white sentiment that was just becoming a pandemic
#
through the West. Driven largely by the sort of primarily leftist media that Hollywood,
#
if you, you know, most of the sort of information traffic, the cultural traffic in the West was
#
governed by left leaning institutions. So Hollywood was left leaning, even Silicon Valley at that
#
time, it still is left leaning. You know, the kind of academia is left leaning, publishing
#
industry is left leaning, broadcasting industry is primarily left leaning. So a lot of culture was
#
being fed to the people and they were getting sick of it. You know, a lot of people were reacting
#
angrily to this, everything being blamed on men, everything being blamed on white people.
#
And I began to really think, hang on, yeah, this is not working. This is leading to more problems
#
than it's solving. It's not solving any problems, it's just leading problems.
#
And so I realized, hang on, maybe the left's approach is not actually the right one,
#
because they seem to be more interested in demonizing certain groups of people
#
and sort of exonerating other groups of people, you know. And again, I saw this
#
in the sort of 2017. In 2017, there was this problem with James D'Amour, which was another
#
thing that really was a major influence in my thinking, where a guy called James D'Amour,
#
who's an engineer at Google, he was forced, well, he was basically told by his employers to
#
write about diversity, because this was a sort of group exercise that everybody in his sort of
#
group had to do. And so, you know, basically the employers said, you know,
#
write about diversity and your thoughts on diversity. And so James D'Amour, who's got
#
Asperger's syndrome, like I do, at least I suspect I do, he was basically quite forthright about his
#
opinions and he used academic studies to basically show that women and men engage in different
#
behaviors and that this is probably a result of them having evolved differently, having different
#
brain sort of patterns as a result of sort of divergent evolution, sexual dimorphism.
#
And, you know, he basically said that women tend to engage in sort of more empathic and neurotic
#
behavior and men tend to engage in sort of more rationalizing, not necessarily rational, but
#
rationalizing behavior and that, you know, women are more social, men are a bit more solitary,
#
and all these differences in that he kind of, these were all, you know, from academic studies,
#
the idea that women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things. And this
#
is stuff that's been shown in experiments on humans and experiments on chimpanzees.
#
And it's a very, very powerful, very robust finding that you find in all cultures, that
#
men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people. So when women are,
#
when you have young girls, young girls tend to play with dolls, young boys tend to play with
#
cars or with tools or with other kinds of things. And so, you know, this is a very robust finding.
#
And James Moore mentioned it in his view that he basically used this idea that men and women have
#
different behaviors to justify the idea that we don't, we shouldn't be striving for 50-50%
#
representation of men and women in tech, because tech is inherently something that appeals more
#
to men than it does to women. And at the time, this was considered blasphemy to say this,
#
because this was, you know, in the wake of the Me Too movement, where there was a big champion of
#
women's rights. And it was seen as misogyny to basically say that women just on average
#
are generally not as interested in going into tech as men are. And so, you know, there was a big
#
outcry about this, particularly fueled by social media. A lot of people called for James Moore to
#
be fired. And obviously, you know, Google wanting to preserve their image, they fired James Moore.
#
And so he lost his job as a result of this. He lost his job as a result of citing
#
academic studies and not just academic studies, but highly peer reviewed and robust and well
#
replicated studies. You know, so, you know, what can you do? You know, you can't get any more sort
#
of robust than that. And yet, that got him fired. And that really was the that was the final straw
#
for me. I realized, okay, this culture that the left has created has essentially privileged
#
the feelings of a small number of people online over the truth itself and over not just over the
#
truth, but over the actual what the needs of the many and the needs of the underprivileged.
#
Because I realized that if you if you lie about the problems that are faced by the underprivileged
#
and by the downtrodden, you're only going to make their problems worse, because you're going to get
#
everybody concentrating on the wrong things. And again, I saw this reflected again in the problem
#
of police shootings of black people. You know, this was something that I was, I was quite I was
#
indoctrinated, I was indoctrinated by the New York Times, and by the sort of mainstream media,
#
the Washington Post and Guardian into believing that there was kind of like this massive epidemic
#
of violence against black men by police. But when I actually looked at the statistics,
#
I realized that this was grossly exaggerated. And this is not to say that this is not a problem,
#
obviously, we don't want black people being killed by police in any number. But the actual
#
extent of the problem was nowhere near as large as it was being made out by the mainstream media.
#
And this was actually interesting. But there's a recent study that I saw, which asked the average
#
person on I think it was on Twitter or something. How, how many people they believe are killed by,
#
how many black people they believe are killed by police each year, and everybody pretty much
#
overestimated the number, even even conservatives, not just liberals, but conservatives as well,
#
which just goes to show how, you know, prevalent this view is, because the survey answer, I think
#
the median survey answer was about 100. And the actual number is fewer than 10. So, you know,
#
this, like I said, this is still a problem, we don't want any of any of these people to die, but
#
it's not this kind of epidemic, like it's being pronounced, you know, it's this is usually,
#
and even when you look at the reasons why these people were shot, it's usually because they
#
resisted arrest, they tried to run away, they put up some kind of resistance.
#
And the narrative, and this is the prevailing narrative even now, is that what's happening is
#
that white police officers and black police officers, because black police officers shoot
#
black men dead at the same rate as white police officers. So now there's this idea that what's
#
happened is that the police officers, the police force itself has become internalized in its white
#
supremacy. So now you have black people who are cops, who are also white supremacists,
#
which is just a bit of a strange idea. I mean, I suppose it's possible, but it's a bit of a reach.
#
But yeah, this is the narrative that was going around, it's been going around even now, but at
#
the time, in sort of 2016, 2017, this was something that was blowing up on social media. And I looked
#
at the statistics, I looked at various things, and there was obviously there was a big elephant
#
in the room, which was crime statistics, which was that basically the crime in Western countries
#
is not homogeneously distributed. It's not distributed equally throughout all neighborhoods.
#
It tends to be extremely concentrated in impoverished neighborhoods, but particularly
#
in black impoverished neighborhoods. And as a result of this, if you accept this as true,
#
then it becomes clear why black men are shot at slightly higher rates than white men. And the
#
reason for that is obviously because if the crime is concentrated in majority black neighborhoods,
#
then police are going to be in black majority neighborhoods policing crime more often than
#
they're going to be in white majority neighborhoods. And so they're going to come into contact with
#
criminals more often in black neighborhoods, and they're going to use lethal force more often in
#
black majority neighborhoods. This is, again, this is something that was disputed by the left. The
#
left basically disputed the idea that black people are committing more crimes. They said that basically
#
the reason why we believe that black people are committing more crimes is because of systemic
#
racism, because they're more likely to be tried by a racist justice system for crimes. Unfortunately,
#
this does not jive with the actual data itself, because the data is not just taken from
#
the police reports. It's also taken from the National Crime Victimization Survey,
#
which is a survey of the victims of the crimes themselves. And even that matches the actual
#
official Department of Justice statistics. And it's also important to note that the majority of the
#
victims of these crimes are black people themselves. So this also can't be blamed on
#
the victims being racist, because the victims of the crimes are majority black, and they are
#
essentially saying that they were victimized by black people. And so this is not something that
#
can be explained away by just racism. And yet, this is still the dominant narrative amongst the
#
western left that the reason why these statistics are the way they are is because of racism, and it's
#
just not true. And so I realized this is just the left is not interested in what's true.
#
They're interested in essentially demonizing certain groups of people, i.e. men and white people,
#
and they're interested in exonerating certain groups and essentially playing up the victimhood
#
of certain groups, i.e. black people, women to a certain extent, and I guess trans people would
#
probably fit into that as well. And so that to me was toxic to what I was trying to achieve,
#
because my whole thing was about trying to make the world a better place. And I realized, hang on,
#
this is not working. If you allow the left to just get away with lying about all of this stuff,
#
it's not going to make the world a better place. And you can see it. Black people are not any better
#
for these false beliefs. Shootings of black people have not ceased as a result of these beliefs.
#
Sexual assault has not decreased as a result of these beliefs. All of these things, all of
#
these problems, I realized were not going to be solved by leftists, by policy. What I believed
#
was that essentially technology would be the thing that would fix these things, because
#
it's only really, if you look at historically at what's happened in terms of women's rights,
#
black rights, all of these things have largely improved as a function of technology.
#
And the reason for this is because technology allows people to spread awareness of injustices,
#
it allows people to mobilize, it allows people to form solutions, to have debates.
#
You know, it's essentially the technology that is driving most of people's social justice,
#
actual social justice, not perceived social justice. Whereas a lot of this kind of hyper
#
ideological stuff is just making things worse. It's just leading to the election of people like
#
Donald Trump, it's leading to Brexit, which ultimately harm the rights of these minorities
#
more than helping them. So this was really where I began to deviate away from the left. I realized
#
that the left are not interested in answers, they're interested in playing this game online,
#
The Culture War, which is essentially just a video game where people assume these identities
#
and then they basically just sort of pretend like they're fighting for history to be remembered
#
on the right side of history kind of thing. Whereas actual solutions are messy, they're murky,
#
they don't result in praise a lot of the time. They tend to just be sort of things that people
#
forget but which people need. And so I realized that if the left is not willing to embrace the
#
truth, they're not going to solve any problems. And I was tempted to go to your other point about
#
how do I avoid audience capture? I was tempted to... I found myself being very angry in 2017
#
because I felt like I'd been betrayed essentially by the left. Because I think if you once loved
#
something, then when you fall out of love with it, you hate it with so much more intensity
#
than if you'd never loved it at all. And that's how I felt with the left. I once believed in the
#
left and I once felt like the left was my calling. I felt at home in the left. And so
#
when I realized what the left really was, it really hit me hard and I became extremely angry
#
at the left. And as a result of that, I lashed out quite often on social media. In 2017 on social
#
media, I was pretty partisan myself because I was so outraged at what I've perceived as a betrayal
#
of my values by the left that I kind of lashed out. And I gained pretty large right-wing audience
#
as a result of that because people saw me criticizing the left with such venom and such animosity
#
that they assumed I was right-wing. Because that's the kind of binary that we have on social
#
media where if you criticize the left, people assume you're right-wing. If you criticize the
#
right, people assume you're left-wing. It's like you have to be either or. There's no way you could
#
be critical of both of these groups. And so I did find myself feeling the pull of audience capture
#
where I was being validated in my hatred of the left by all these new right-wing followers that
#
I got. And not just right-wing followers, but also dissident leftists, people who had abandoned the
#
left as a result in a similar vein to me. So all of these people were egging me on. They were
#
basically saying, yeah, this is brilliant what you're saying. Please say it louder, say it louder.
#
And so I was saying it louder and I was saying it louder and I was getting myself angry because I
#
was seeing all this crazy stuff, this woke stuff blowing up online. This was really hitting its
#
stride now. Woke takeover of leftist institutions had really hit in its stride about 2018. This
#
was when it was peaking. And so I was outraged by all the stuff I was seeing on social media,
#
like that stuff about how rape was an invention of white men. It's bizarre. And it was really
#
angering me. And I just gave into my anger. I succumbed to my anger to a certain extent.
#
Fortunately, I was well aware of what was happening to myself because I'd studied this
#
happening in other people for years now. And so I realized that, hang on, this is not good for me
#
what I'm doing. I'm becoming a partisan. Almost I was becoming a conservative partisan, so I was
#
swinging the other way. And so I started making a conscious decision that every time I criticize
#
the left, I will also criticize the right for something. I decided to do this as an exercise
#
for myself to keep myself on the straight and narrow so that the needle was never going too
#
much to the left, never going too much to the right. And I was keeping my independence.
#
And this was something that I did. I made a habit of. So whenever I found something to
#
criticize the left about, I would find something to criticize the right about.
#
And I did this constantly until it became a habit. And it allowed me to keep this even handedness,
#
even though I was probably more biased against the left than I was against the right,
#
because I'd never been on the right. I'd always seen the right as irrational, but I'd once seen
#
the left as the hope, as the promise for humanity. And so my hatred of the left was stronger,
#
because I think betrayal, it hurts somebody more than just outright enmity. And so, yeah, even
#
though I had more hatred for the left, I kept my criticisms even. And so that became the kind of
#
foundation of my sort of political view, where I don't really consider myself a centrist, even
#
though I probably would generally be called a centrist by other people. The way I look at it is
#
that I'm a political spectrum non-binary. So I don't really regard myself as being on the political
#
spectrum anymore. I think that the political spectrum is a relic of 18th century France,
#
right? And it's something that, you know, it was good at the time that it came around,
#
where you had this standard binary of like a radical versus reactionary. But I think the
#
world is far more complex now than it was back then. It's not a simple case of radical versus
#
reactionary. It's not a case of regulation versus free market. There's so many new things like
#
universal basic income and blockchain, and you've got this kind of gig economy and all these new
#
ways of looking at the world. And I think that this, to view life as a binary on a political
#
spectrum is a very narrow way of looking at things. And it's a very obsolete and outdated
#
political view. So I would consider myself to not really occupy a position, not a single position
#
on the political spectrum. And that's how I like to be, because I feel that if you define yourself
#
as anything, then you bias yourself, because you begin to believe what you think you're supposed
#
to believe rather than what you actually believe. So if you're a leftist, then you begin to believe
#
what you think you're supposed to believe about, say, abortion. And you begin to believe what you
#
think you're supposed to believe about the economy or about gun rights or about race, about all of
#
these different things. So I felt like I was just hamstringing myself by identifying with a certain
#
point on a political spectrum. And so I abandoned the political spectrum completely. So now I'm
#
willing to talk to right wingers. I'm willing to talk to left wingers. As long as they're open to
#
my views, I'm open to their views. I think that's the best way to approach it. And that also prevents
#
audience capture. It prevents me from becoming a partisan over time due to the validation of my
#
followers, validation that I receive from my followers rather. And I think with atheism,
#
it's a similar thing. I still believe atheism is true. I still do not believe that there is any
#
good reason to believe that God exists in this universe. I do believe in other universes.
#
I believe in the many words, interpretation of quantum mechanics. So I do believe that,
#
yeah, maybe God exists in other universes, gods exist in other universes, but not in this one.
#
But my view of atheism has become more nuanced. And my view of religion has become more nuanced.
#
And a lot of this is a byproduct of my disillusionment with the left, because I've
#
seen how religion may be epistemically wrong. It may be wrong factually, but it plays, I think,
#
a role in warding off this kind of woke, dare I say, degeneracy, mental degeneracy that has
#
taken hold of a lot of Western institutions. Because now in the West, a lot of the institutions
#
have been completely captioned by woke ideologues, who are now pushing completely
#
false views of reality based on misreadings of statistics. Pretty much anything. I mean,
#
there's been a social contagions of trance, people of gender dysphoria. This is not to say
#
that gender dysphoria doesn't exist. I think there's good evidence that it does exist.
#
But there has been social contagions, because we've seen a spike of the number of people
#
identifying as trance in recent years. And it can't be attributed to just people being more open
#
and being more comfortable talking about mental illness, because this spike is almost,
#
well, it's basically disproportionately affects young white girls who use social media a lot.
#
So there's a very small demographic of people in which gender dysphoria has skyrocketed more
#
than all of the groups. And that group is young white girls who use social media a lot.
#
And so obviously, this is not just people are more welcoming, more open about gender dysphoria.
#
And that's why we've got more people identifying as gender dysphoric. So this kind of social
#
contagions that have been propagated by the left, I feel are essentially something that have only
#
become facilitated because of the sort of death of religion. And you've seen this almost
#
religious belief on the left now in social justice, in their view of social justice,
#
not in social justice, but in their view, their warped view of social justice.
#
So things like gender, sort of sex being a spectrum. These are almost religious views now
#
on the left, where if you believe in biology, if you believe in basic biology,
#
you are regarded as far right fascist almost, because there's this view that you're trying to
#
force people to abide by certain gender norms. But that's not what sexual binary is at all.
#
You can be a female and still have many, many male traits. We used to call them tomboys. Now
#
we medicalise them and say, oh, you've got a problem. Now you actually means you're gender
#
dysphoric and you need to have surgery. So I think a lot of this kind of irrational beliefs
#
have become religious because the original religions are dwindling and are losing sort
#
of favour and people are lacking something, they're lacking meaning and they're lacking
#
purpose in their lives as a result of this kind of hardcore atheism that has taken over
#
the Western civilisation. It's like if you kill God, then you leave a God-shaped hole
#
that needs to be filled with something. And many people are now filling that hole with
#
the religion of social justice or with this kind of extreme populism that you see with demagogues
#
like Trump and Boris Johnson and all these other people. And so I have began to appreciate religion.
#
I still think it's wrong. As I said, I still think it's factually wrong and I still am aware
#
that it does lead to a lot of irrational behaviour. It leads to a lot of violence
#
if you allow it to take control of everything. But I do feel that there is a place for
#
the kind of quiet community religion that is not a kind of theocratic religion, not a religion that
#
engages in politics, but a religion that's more at the local community level where people go to
#
church together and they meet together and they try to connect with something higher than themselves,
#
some kind of spiritual force that has been passed down by their ancestors. I believe that there is
#
great power in that and I believe it can ward off a lot of mental illness and a lot of chaos
#
and it can provide stability and order and structure in people's lives. And I think this
#
is borne out by a lot of studies. I think Robert Sapolsky, a famous endocrinologist,
#
I think he quoted a study where he basically found that people who believe in religion have lower
#
rates of mental illness, lower rates of depression, lower rates of anxiety
#
and they are more likely to say that they feel happy and content with their life and they also
#
have more of an internal locus of control which I think is extremely important and I think one of
#
the reasons why I can no longer abide by this kind of leftist view of life because leftism teaches
#
people to have an external locus of control. So for your listeners, a locus of control
#
is where you blame the things that happen to you and where you believe the power lies in your life.
#
So if you have an internal locus of control, you believe that you are in charge of your destiny,
#
you believe that your destiny is shaped by your decisions and by what you do and
#
that you can make an impact based on what you do. But if you have an external locus of control,
#
then you believe that your destiny is determined by external factors. So this might be your race,
#
it might be your economic status, it might be the country you're living in, it might be your mental
#
health, all of these things. And it's basically this idea that you have no control of your own
#
life. You have no agency. If you are sad, it's not because you're not living right, it's because
#
you have depression. If you didn't get a job, it's not because you didn't work hard enough to get
#
that job, it's because you're black. All of these things are blamed on other things outside of
#
yourself. And I feel that one of the problems and one of the reasons why leftism is not the right
#
ideology for helping people is that it teaches people to have an external locus of control.
#
It teaches people to blame the external world for their own failings. And I feel that this is
#
something that has happened a lot over, I mean, there was a study that was quoted in the
#
Jonathan Heights, The Coddling of the American Mind, where he showed that I think since 1970,
#
there has been an externalization of the locus of control where, originally in the 1970s,
#
people asked in a survey, how much power do you feel you have to shape your life?
#
And most people answered in the infirmity, they feel like I do feel like I have a lot of power.
#
But now there was a more recent survey, and people, the majority of people actually said
#
that I don't feel like I have a lot of power to shape my own life. And so this is, I think,
#
largely a result of the loss of the kind of traditional ways of looking at the world,
#
and the loss of religion particularly, because religion, I think, one of the great things about
#
religion is that it does teach people to have an internal locus of control. It teaches people,
#
you are responsible for your own actions. You have a responsibility to act as well as you can.
#
And if you don't have that responsibility, then you're essentially going to be suffering for it
#
for the rest of your life, and probably in the hereafter. And that's something that seems to be
#
being lost in Western civilization. And again, I don't know if this is true in India,
#
because I don't really keep up with Indian politics, but it seems to me that this,
#
it might be a global phenomenon, but it's, I think, a very important thing that I'd overlooked in my
#
embrace of the new atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.
#
Something that I feel that they overlooked was that religion plays a part in acclimatizing us
#
to society, in allowing us to adapt to the very peculiar perils of living in the kind of society
#
that we live in, where we need to have belief in something in order to be motivated, in order to
#
feel that we can make a difference in life. And so, yeah, I do feel that although I don't
#
want religion to have the power that it used to have, I don't want to go back to the age of
#
theocracy where religion was able to determine who you could have sex with, who you could marry,
#
what you were allowed to say in public. I don't want to go back to a world like that.
#
But I do see the value of religion at community level, where people engage in these kinds of,
#
these nice little sort of church gatherings and where they explore the idea that,
#
hang on, maybe there is something more to this world that is essentially that we can gain power
#
from and that can help us to find meaning and structure and purpose. And most importantly of
#
all, an internal locus of control. Yeah, I mean, there's an extremely stimulating
#
thoughts and I'll react to a few of them. Like first of all, just to take this latest train
#
first. I mean, I'm an atheist and I think it's possible to hold three things in your head at
#
the same time. And one of them is atheism, but defined as an absence of belief. Like many people
#
wrongly believe atheism means you believe there is no God, but of course you can't prove a negative.
#
So I define atheism as an absence of belief. It's no less a belief than not collecting stamps
#
as a hobby, for example. And secondly, people have this mistaken impression that there's a continuum
#
from a believer to agnostic to atheism. And that's actually not true. Agnosticism deals with
#
knowledge. You cannot know something and atheism deals with belief. So it is possible to not believe
#
in God and at the same time believe that the truth, whatever it is, is unknowable by us.
#
It would be hubris to think otherwise. So in that sense, I am both an atheist and an agnostic.
#
And it is also possible, the third sort of thought there is that it is also possible to
#
believe that religion plays a useful function. You know, despite all of this,
#
despite the truth of it, like many of the things that help us in our lives are useful delusions
#
and it comes to choosing your delusion. But in India, frankly, it's played an increasingly toxic
#
role in recent decades. But I'll come back. Yeah, I mean, that's the Hindutva.
#
Yeah, yeah. But anyway, that's for another day. So a bunch of things on ideology and leftism and
#
wokeness that I sort of wanted to share my thoughts on and then we can go further.
#
Like one, you know, there is this like, first of all, I'm an equal opportunity offender,
#
like you hated by the left and the right equally. And the left and the right are almost meaningless
#
terms. You know, I find them to be extremely similar in their embrace of simple narratives
#
to explain the world. And the way I think about it is, you know, there's this old saying about how
#
if you're not a communist at 17, you don't have a heart. And if you are a communist at 30, you
#
don't have a brain. And I think what happens is that people get drawn to leftism because it allows
#
you to project yourself as someone who is virtuous without actually going out there and making an
#
effort to find out the truth. It's a default, lazy position. And you can just adopt those values and
#
you can then pretend to be virtuous. And that's one reason the left actually gets my
#
goat more than the right because of this garb of virtue that they wear. Whereas the right,
#
whatever they are, they bigotry or whatever, it's they wear it on their sleeves. Now that apart,
#
the way I sort of think about wokeism, like I think people who haven't really studied what these
#
are, conflate wokeism with a kind of liberalism, which I object to, I think opposites. I think
#
wokeism begins where liberalism ends in the sense that liberalism is focused on the individual,
#
individual freedom, individual rights. I mean, liberalism is classically defined and wokeism
#
focuses on groups and builds these simple narratives of oppression and victimhood that
#
are sort of necessarily false. And this becomes incredibly toxic. And the issue here is that I
#
consider myself a proud feminist as well. Right. I think a lot of these problems that you and I are
#
talking about are real problems. And we are not disputing these problems. We are disputing the
#
frames that if you look at it with a frame that has a simple narrative and that is wrong,
#
you are not going to solve the problem. And very often you are simply going to, you know,
#
exacerbate the problem in the same way that when you point out the problems of Islam,
#
Islamism, you're called an Islamophobe. But by speaking against radical Islam,
#
you're not speaking against Islam itself. I mean, the biggest victims of terrorism are Muslims,
#
you know, in the same sense that the biggest victims of crime in America are black people.
#
So to instinctively take that simplistic approach that, hey, we're thinking in terms of groups.
#
And if you've criticized, you know, some people from this group, that means you're
#
whatever, transphobic, Islamophobic, whatever the case may be. And, you know, the comparison
#
with religion is especially good when it comes to, for example, Damore's paper, which most people
#
who criticize didn't even read the paper. He wasn't even saying anything prescriptive in it.
#
He was saying something descriptive and pointing to papers and the correct way to engage with it
#
is to argue and say, no, those papers are wrong or the methods aren't rigorous or whatever the
#
hell you feel. But when it comes to Damore or when it comes to J.K. Rowling, for that matter,
#
when it comes to say Charles Murray, you know, there is this sense that you cannot even say
#
that, you know, they're not what you think they are. It's like the blasphemy law in Pakistan.
#
Like Pakistan has a blasphemy law where if you are accused of blasphemy,
#
like, for example, if you, Gurvinder, were accused of blasphemy, I would not be able to say that,
#
no, he's innocent. That would automatically make me guilty of blasphemy. So you can't do it.
#
It's a similar thing. Killed by association. Yeah. And so here, for example,
#
if you say J.K. Rowling is not transphobic, you will automatically by association be transphobic
#
yourself. Right. And so it has that, you know, religious and problematic aspect to it. And the
#
question that I sort of want to come at before we, you know, go on to talking about further
#
aspects of why people are drawn to this, you've got a great piece about why intelligent people
#
are drawn to bad ideas, and we'll discuss that later. But the question is rather about thought
#
that I've had for a long time, that, you know, whereas the right may reject science in certain
#
domains, like evolution or climate change or whatever, the left rejects science in the
#
understanding of human biology, where any description of men and women being inherently
#
different is conflated with a prescription that they be treated differently. It's almost,
#
you know, the naturalistic fallacy where you're deriving an ought from an is. And that's a
#
fundamentally stupid and lazy fallacy to fall for in any case. But what that has done is led to this
#
denial of biology. Like you spoke about the sex binary, Colin Wright had has a few great pieces
#
on it, which I'll link from the show notes. And there are just these really warped world
#
views that are, you know, based on really what is as fictional as religious belief. And in the West,
#
perhaps more dangerous, I can't comment on that. But in India, religion is a slightly greater
#
problem right now. But I think any simplistic narratives, whether they come from the right or
#
the left or religion, any simplistic narratives are, you know, therefore the problem, the
#
fundamental thing to solve. Like I would not fit a God shaped hole with a work shaped hole. I think
#
they're both problems. I think the problem is that they're just simple narratives. And like,
#
what do you do? And I can see you in your little small way playing the long game and trying to,
#
you know, make a contribution there. But, you know, just to talk about that, you know, that
#
basic denial of nature and how the world just seems to have gone mad. What are your sort of
#
your thoughts on that? Yeah, so I think one of the things with leftism is that it's
#
it doesn't really actually hold truth as a high value. It holds equality as the ultimate value
#
and diversity, equity and inclusion, as they as they now say. But I think that it's a feature
#
rather than a bug. I think truth is often just an obstacle to to getting their way, you know,
#
and this has been true for the left throughout history. It's nothing new with left with woke
#
leftism. I mean, if you look at, for instance, Stalin, you know, Stalin and or Mao, you know,
#
Pol Pot, a lot of these dictators, they had no concern for truth. They didn't care for truth at
#
all. And in fact, there was this kind of almost religious way of viewing things. I mean, Stalin
#
was essentially like a god. I mean, if not a god, then at least a prophet to criticize him was
#
blasphemy, you know, and not just that, but they also they did sort of have this kind of weird,
#
I mean, there was like Soviet science, for instance, which was not real science. It was
#
like Soviet science was like this idea that you could create like all the food that people needed
#
to eat just out thin air, essentially, you know, just by just by worshipping, you know, the sort
#
of the ideology, you know, and essentially, it was so bizarre, like you had a lot of these very
#
strange beliefs that was go that was sort of ingrained in communism all throughout history.
#
I mean, even Pol Pot, you know, Pol Pot was afraid of he was afraid of truth, which is why he was the
#
first people he killed with the intellectuals. He killed anybody who had spectacles on, you know,
#
because he believed that they were that was a sign of intelligence. And he wanted to kill
#
anybody who would question him, you know, because he believed that the truth was a
#
danger to his position. And I feel that that's essentially what is going on now, although in a
#
slightly less overly obnoxious form is, I think, wokeism knows and the woke people believe that
#
that truth is just an obstacle. It's not something that people need to aspire to. It's not like a
#
stepping stone to actually helping people like you and I might believe they believe that it's
#
just an obstacle. And I think this is what also is another thing that sort of they have in common
#
with the far right, which is the far right don't really believe in truth either. And I think when
#
you when you when you realize that they don't actually care about truth, then then woke ideology
#
suddenly makes a lot of sense, because then it all becomes about power structures, you know,
#
because woke wokeism is essentially based on postmodernism is based on this postmodern
#
idea espoused by people like Foucault, that there is no that humans can't access objective truth.
#
And so there's no there's no point in even thinking that we're going to find truth. And so
#
if there's no truth, then all that means is that the ideas that get accepted in the world are not
#
the ones that are true, but the ones that have the most power. And so everything becomes about
#
power. It all becomes about expediency. You know, it's all about it doesn't matter if two plus two
#
doesn't equal four, because mathematically, that's what it actually equals. It only equals that
#
because that's what straight white men tell you it believes. That's what that's what it means. And so
#
there's all a case of, you know, it's it's truth is a is essentially a fiction in the leftist
#
worldview. Truth is a fiction. And the eye and anybody who says that they have objective truth
#
is essentially trying to get power over you by trying to make you believe what they believe.
#
And so it becomes all about interests, fighting against each other, different interests. And
#
that's the that's the woke worldview, the woke worldview, there is no place for truth in the
#
woke worldview. It's all about power. And so when they say that, you know, sex is a spectrum,
#
or, you know, that that rape is an invention of white men, or that, as Susan Brown Miller said,
#
that rape is, is a conscious decision by all men to subjugate all women, you know, just openly absurd
#
things like that, you know, they're not they're not actually they don't care about whether it's
#
true or not. They're making these claims in order to sort of essentially gain power and in order to
#
enact their own vision and restructure society according to their own vision. And so this is the
#
way I think to look at it. And this is something that it took me a while to understand, because
#
I've always assumed that people when I was like, as I said, you know, when I was young, I assumed
#
that people were interested in what's true. And that that was what mediated human relations was
#
this belief that, you know, we can arrive at a greater truth by combining narratives and seeing
#
what survives the collision of these narratives. But ultimately, that's not what it is. Ultimately,
#
it's about power relations. And that's what, you know, people are doing. There's also sense
#
of social belonging and bonding and that these tribal forces that are at work when people have
#
discussions and debates. And it all makes sense when you realize that that's what people are
#
actually doing. It's not it's not about truth and truth was never part of the equation. Truth is
#
simply viewed as a fiction. And as a strategy, essentially a strategy to obtain power,
#
the pretense to truth that is because actual truth in the in the work rule view doesn't exist. And so
#
I think that's what essentially is the foundation of work isms, this postmodern view that there is
#
no truth, which is why I'm so I no longer really try to persuade what people are actually because
#
you've got limited time in this world. There's limited time. And you have to if you want to
#
persuade people, you've got to persuade the people who are most likely to be persuaded
#
because you just don't have the time to persuade everybody. And so I don't I don't argue with woke
#
people. As soon as I see somebody with woke beliefs, I just ignore them because I just feel
#
it's not worth my time because they're not interested in truth. They don't even think truth
#
is a thing. And it's going to be too difficult and too laborious to even try to convince them
#
that truth is a real thing. And so I focus more on people who are open minded, people who haven't
#
quite made up their mind, people who are willing to change their beliefs, and people who believe
#
that the possibility of truth is real, that there actually is something called truth in this world,
#
and that we have access to it. Because I think if you don't, if you don't have that basic idea,
#
that truth is a real thing that you can access if you want to, then there's no point there's no
#
point in having a discussion because what exactly are you trying to do, then it's just going to be
#
a case of your word against theirs, and essentially your power against their power, you know, it's
#
a power struggle. And I don't want a debate to be a power struggle. I want it to be a journey
#
to truth. And so, you know, that's why I'm very selective about who I engage with nowadays.
#
There's this great book by Arnold Kling called The Three Languages of Politics,
#
where he talks about how so much of the discourse today is pointless and even toxic because
#
people talk past each other. And his sort of elaboration of this is that if you look at the
#
three dominant tribes in the US, for example, and obviously simplifying for the sake of
#
understanding that progressives will value equality, libertarians will value freedom,
#
conservatives will value tradition. So when any two parties argue with each other, there is no
#
point in that argument because they're not addressing each other's core values. They're
#
addressing, they're keeping their own not star in mind and just going according to that. And
#
that's a problem. And my thinking is that there is a deeper problem with the discourse that this
#
itself is not a problem. Like the way that my journey has come is that I think of myself as
#
someone who is not dogmatic at all when it comes to the facts of the world, because I recognize
#
that the world is deeply complex and I'm always open to learning something that, you know, goes
#
against what I believe. But I am incredibly dogmatic on my values, you know, individual
#
freedom, liberty, all of those things. And I would not mind if people from other ideologies,
#
for example, are dogmatic about their values while being open to the world,
#
because then you can engage, you know, if you care about equality more than anything else,
#
then we can have a discussion where I can tell you that, listen, this specific policy you're
#
talking about will not get you to equality, you know, and this is why, and these are the studies
#
and all of that. But we simply don't have those kind of discussions. So I just wanted to sort of
#
add that point to it that I don't even think that it is those ideological preferences, you know,
#
equality, freedom, tradition are all actually desirable and can coexist in a good way. But it
#
is when we get dogmatic to facts about the world and to these simple narratives and think in terms
#
of groups as both the left and the right do so often that it kind of becomes a problem. So,
#
you know, you're going to sort of have to wrap up this episode soon. And luckily, you've promised
#
a second one. So we'll get to that because there's tons more that I want to talk about.
#
And we should really have kept like seven hours for this. But, you know, rather than go on to all
#
the other stuff that, you know, all your incredible insights on human nature, which we can just talk
#
about for a few hours, and I'll just encourage my listeners to read your articles and follow you on
#
Twitter. And, you know, that'll give them an idea. I want to sort of stick on this subject for a
#
moment, these culture wars and the times that we are going through. And you wrote this awesome
#
piece recently where you spoke about why intelligent people believe stupid things and
#
in fact, why intelligent people are more likely to believe stupid things as well.
#
So tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, so the basic idea is that that
#
unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people. But intelligent people are more
#
easily misled by themselves. And the reason for this is that it requires a lot of intelligence to
#
rationalize one's behaviors and one's beliefs. You know, in order to perform mental gymnastics,
#
as we say, you actually require quite a bit of intelligence. It's not something that a lot of
#
people can do. You need to have the right knowledge, you need to have the right reasoning
#
capabilities. So this is something that really requires a great deal of intelligence. And
#
what this typically looks like is that an intelligent person will form a belief that
#
they want to believe. And once they have formed that belief, they will justify that belief
#
through a very careful argument. But the argument, just because the argument is good,
#
it doesn't mean that the argument is actually true. You know, there's many ways to argue things
#
in a way that sounds very convincing, but which is not actually true. And this is something that
#
is something I've noticed a lot of intelligent people do, where they basically will choose a
#
crazy belief. And like, you know, to use a previous example, the idea that rape was invented by white
#
men, you know, you could begin at that. And then if you're smart enough, if you're intelligent
#
enough, then you can search the internet for pretty much anything that will confirm that view,
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or at least will suggest that view. And then you just put it all together into a very, very long,
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elaborate explanation that will somehow seem true, but which actually isn't true. But what
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you've actually done is you've done something that requires a lot of intelligence, but you've
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done something that does not lead to the truth. And in order to understand how this is possible,
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we need to understand exactly what intelligence actually is. So people seem to think that if
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you're intelligent, then that means you've got greater access to the truth. But that's not
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what intelligence is. Intelligence is purely about the ability of your brain to fulfill
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goals, basically, and to do them the most efficiently as possible. So if you're more
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intelligent, you can fulfill goals more efficiently than somebody who is not as intelligent.
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Now, it's very important to realize that what these goals are, so the goals that intelligence
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pursues are not necessarily intelligent. Just because you are pursuing a goal intelligently,
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it doesn't mean that the goal is intelligent. And in many ways, in many cases, the goal will
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actually be unintelligent. And by that, I mean it will actually be an irrational goal. It will be
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the goal of trying to believe something that's not true. So it's possible to be very intelligent
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at being stupid. This is actually something that people do a lot. You can actually get yourself,
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you could find yourself a very, very stupid belief. And then if you have enough imagination
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and you have enough intelligence, then you can create a narrative in your head that will justify
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that belief. And I feel it's something that is really prevalent now on the left, particularly,
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because the left is more sort of intellectual than the right in terms of, you know, more
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intellectuals tend to lean left and they tend to be more sort of verbally gifted than people on the
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right. And so this is a particular problem on the left. I mean, there are probably intelligent
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people on the right who do this as well, but I think this is particularly a problem on the left
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because you have a lot of people who spend their entire lives in academia who become very,
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very knowledgeable about this very narrow subject, but who don't really get much knowledge outside of
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that domain and who don't experience much of collision of their beliefs with the real world
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because they spend their lives in academia, they gain tenure, so they've got a job for life,
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essentially. And they just spend their lives lecturing to other people rather than actually
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testing their beliefs in the real world. And again, you know, Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks
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about the brilliantly in his book, Skin in the Game, where he says that, you know, a lot of these
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academics are, he calls them IYIs, idiot yet intellectual. He says that because they never
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have their beliefs tested by the real world, that they are able to just sink themselves
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deeper and deeper into these illusion by very, very careful arguments. And, you know, I call them
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master debaters, you know, because essentially they engage in these kind of circle jerks in
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academia where they're just having their own opinions just fed back to them, you know, again
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and again. It's like intellectual masturbation. And this is a particular danger for people who
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live the life of the mind, people who are intellectuals who spend their lives reading books
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and writing papers and lecturing and giving speeches, but never testing their beliefs in
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the real world. Because it's only when you test your beliefs in the real world that you realize
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whether you fooled yourself or not. You can't know that otherwise, because if you are very,
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very intelligent, then you can convince yourself you're right even when you're wrong.
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And this leads to a sort of cycle of self-delusion where you can't know that you've
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deluded yourself because in order to do that, you need to know whether you've deluded yourself.
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So, you know, it's like it's a feedback loop that just feeds into itself and just constantly
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digs one deeper and deeper into illusion, the further one is away from the real world.
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So, my argument is essentially that the only solution to this is to be curious and to be humble.
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There are two factors, because ultimately, rationality is not a matter of intelligence,
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it's a matter of character. It's about how you view, it's about how you approach the seeking of
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truth. It's not about how intelligent, it's not about your IQ, it's not about how much knowledge
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you have, it's not about your SAT scores or anything like that. It's purely a function
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of how you approach the pursuit of truth. And so, I advocate curiosity and humility,
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because I believe that those are the two values that one needs more than intelligence
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in order to ensure that one is not being fooled. You need curiosity because you need to always be
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learning more because you never have enough information. Nobody ever has enough information.
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There's always a missing piece of the puzzle. So, curiosity is essential and humility is important
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because if you are arrogant, then you're going to assume that what you believe is true. You're never
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going to test your beliefs. You're never going to try to change your mind. You're going to be
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constantly ruled by your ego and the belief that you are right. And so, I feel that curiosity and
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humility are essential. And the good thing is that both of these values play very well together
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and they reinforce each other. Because if you're curious, then you learn how much more you need to
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know, which makes you humble. And if you're humble, then you realize that you need to know
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more and so you become more curious. And so, I think if you can be humble and you can be curious,
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then you can somewhat avoid this sort of loop, this intellectual masturbation,
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which I think is the sort of demise of any kind of thoughtful person. And I think another thing
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that you can do to ensure that you're more curious and you're humble is to try to test your beliefs
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in the real world. Put your money where your mouth is rather. So, if you have certain beliefs,
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make predictions, make certain predictions. And if your predictions are correct,
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this is a sign that you're not deluding yourself. If your predictions are wrong,
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this is a sign you are deluding yourself and you must re-evaluate what you believe.
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And the interesting thing is that most of our beliefs... Well, actually, most of our beliefs
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are correct, but only... Sorry, most of our predictions are correct in life, but they're
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so trivial that we just don't notice. For instance, I can predict that if I were to switch this
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computer off, the computer would turn off. That's a prediction. But they're so trivial that we
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just take them for granted. So, we actually are very good at predicting the future. But when we
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try to make non-trivial predictions, we almost always get it wrong. So, if I try to predict
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where the Dow Jones is going to close today or tomorrow, I'm going to probably get it wrong
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because it's a non-trivial prediction. It's one that requires a lot of knowledge. It requires
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more knowledge than probably any human being has got. And so, try to test yourself with
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non-trivial predictions. Try to make non-trivial predictions about the world. And if you can get
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them right, this is the best gauge that you are approaching truth, I think.
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And in fact, to add to that, make a lot of non-trivial predictions because one or two won't
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do simply because all good predictions will always be probabilistic. There's a 40% chance
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of this, a 30% chance of this. So, you can't figure out from any one event if you got it right or
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wrong. You just need a large sample size to figure it out. I love this quote from your
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article where you wrote, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective
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truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well-being, tribal belonging, social status,
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and sex. And this often required the adoption of what I call fashionably irrational beliefs,
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FIBs, which the brain has come to excel at. As you point out, intelligent people are better at both
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reasoning and rationalizing. And in another great piece you wrote, you spoke about what I think
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feeds into this, which is a pressure in modern times to always have an opinion on everything
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because you not only want to appear virtuous, you also want to appear knowledgeable. And I thank
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God the internet did not exist when I was 20 because if it did, I would have said a lot of
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stupid things and I would have had to double down on them because that is what the ego takes you
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towards. And I would have been a different person. So that's also something dangerous to watch out
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for. But all the foibles of human nature and the way the mind works is something we'll examine the
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next time we are together. For now, Gurvinder, thanks a lot for your time. I really enjoyed this
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conversation. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me and I'll be happy to do this again.
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www.sceneunseen.in Thank you for listening.
