 Hi, it is Friday, November 30th, 2018. It is still 2018. Soon we will have to write checks. Wait, what's a check with 2019 on them? And yeah, it's exactly. And this is an inside Jerry's brain call around the topic of how do we draw the line between kooky ideas and absolutely brilliant ideas that may not be provable today, that may not fit within the tolerance boundaries of what science approves of today, but may not be very crazy. So I will explain a little bit more about how we got here. But as background, I'm interested in, I think personally, I feel like I'm trying to digest the universe and the meaning of universe and everything. And it's not 42, as far as I can tell. I've liked the universe and everything, there's the quote. And in doing so, you run across a lot of fringy ideas and some of them you dismiss and some of them you do not. And I think each of us draws that boundary differently. Each of us makes decisions and has a background and has a belief system. And I'm especially interested in the beliefs behind the decisions, the things that would cause us to lean favorably toward agreeing that something is plausible or possible as opposed to impossible and should be, in fact, is potentially dangerous. And I think this line between what's kooky and what's just a little bit outside that is actually brilliant is a super important line for us to draw. And this is a layered process because this is hard individually just by ourselves looking at facts and trying, going to school and reading books and doing whatever, this is a difficult line to draw just by ourselves. But then it's extremely important that we draw this line together. And arguably we've been doing that for a couple of millennia since we've had discussions around the campfire or whatnot, we've been trying to sort out what's real and what's not, including why are we here? Is there a God? Questions like that. But even simpler things about how things work and why people believe things, right? So doing this collectively is harder. It's harder than just the individual inquiry because a lot of these belief systems drive things like government policy. And a lot of these belief systems are co-opted to drive stupid government policy for years and years and years. And we can, each of us point to multiple historic examples in different countries at different times, where at one point Mao creates the four pests campaign. One of the pests is sparrows. Well, there are just too many sparrows flying around China. So over the course of a couple of years, the Chinese citizens managed to kill off almost all of the sparrows. And then there's a decade of famine because all of the insects that the sparrows were eating suddenly thrive and have a great time. They have no predator, et cetera, et cetera. And millions of people starve to death because of a policy decision based on a belief based on nonsense. So these things are actually dangerous knowledge in the wrong hands and applied especially at scale in ways like that. And then to complicate matters just a little bit further, we are now in the era of post-truth. We are now in the era of factual conflict. And I will kind of add that I think, I think personally that we have slipped into what seems to be called a non-linear war. That we are already in World War III and it is non-linear, which means it's about information and it's not about dropping bombs and bullets. It is about illiberal democracy. Have you all heard the term illiberal democracy? Illiberal democracy looks like democracy, smells like democracy, but isn't. There are votes and people go and put ballots in boxes and there are votes, but the votes are mostly sort of rigged because the parties are suppressed. There is a press, there is journalism, but most of them are owned by the people who are being voted on. There is a judiciary except the courts have been basically, thumbs have been put on the scales everywhere, et cetera, et cetera. So it looks like a democratic country, but it ceases to be such over time. But the play-acting of democracy is what the story is told to everybody. So how do we negotiate this line between what's a kooky theory and what's a pre-cog theory, which is just a shorthand I'm using. I'd love better language for this. How do we negotiate that line as we move forward going together and I would love, I would love for Inside Jury's Brain as a little community of practice to develop a method to walk into these issues together with some openness and some judgment and make some decisions on this and I can say that I will reflect in my brain what I agree with and what I disagree with and I would love to see other people's manifestations of saying whether it's in essays or in other mapping tools or in whatever. I think they're a really big piece of why the brain is interesting to me here and I'll just switch to some screen sharing and every time I do some braining on the Inside Jury's Brain I have to explain a little bit for anybody who's new, like how this brain thing works and why it is. I basically, each note is called a thought. I created a thought for this particular call. It's the 1811 means 2018 November Inside Jury's Brain call and in fact what I'm gonna do right now is connect that to, well my brain's acting a little slow because I've got Zoom and a browser and a bunch of too many things going on. So IJB calls, I know I have a thought called Inside Jury's Brain calls, so I'm going to link it, oops I had already linked it to that, nevermind. So this is one of multiple calls that I've started hosting around this notion of Inside Jury's Brain. So if I go back to the current thought, I've linked it to a series of other thoughts somewhere in my brain that I'd like to go through as part of our discussion. But the thing that I wanted to show right now is this thought that I have called my beliefs. And across the bottom of the brain, this is basically a breadcrumb trail. As I click on a thought, you'll see it added to this list and then they scroll off to the left. Across the top is a pin board. So anything, any thought I drag up to the top here stays here. So I've got a thought that's always here in the middle called my beliefs. I also have a thought that's always here with the current year. So in a month I'm gonna change this to 2019. Here's what 2017 looked like. And each year I keep basically the significant, every event that happened during the year that caught the public attention was really interesting. So in 2017, Bitcoin passes 10,000. Bitcoin passes 16,000. Bitcoin passes 19,000. Bitcoin passes 7,000. Catalan independence referendum, a bunch of other things. So if I go back to my beliefs, the reason I'm sort of screen sharing right now, I think that the beliefs behind all these decisions, behind the decisions we make about whether something is real or not are really important. And the more we can externalize them, pop have interesting discussions about whether that's true or not. So I happen to believe that people are born, that people are born good, meaning they're not born evil. So I think I have that over here. This is just an example I use, I think a lot, but it's perfectly legitimate to hold the belief that people are born bad. In fact, entire religious systems like original sin is basically a notion that people are born with an original sin, right? And that we are fundamentally violent is a belief system. But these things lead to very different policy decisions from other belief systems. So let me go back here, stop screen sharing and pause for a second just with that intro and see what you all are thinking as a result. Bill, Skye, Michael, excellent. Anybody who wants to jump in, please jump in. And a couple of you like Bill, I know, and Gene, are lifelong collectors of what you care about. You have been curating your own versions of a digital memory. This goes really deep for you, I happen to know that. So feel free to jump in and just like, has that helped you? Bill, has Sitesweb been good for you? You're muted right now, by the way. Still not, I can hear you. There we go. Yeah, I think while keeping me sane probably is one upside. Having an external brain helps get stuff out of your own brain a little bit and sort of helps untangle ideas that are percolating around and then connect them to other things that you start with an idea and then all of a sudden you remember something from three years or 12 years prior that you were thinking another time in a different way. And so it helps to kind of revisit some of those things and decide how your new ideas relate to your old ideas. All of it I completely agree with, yeah. And then sometimes it's about looking for a hook if you're trying to turn something actionable. Again, you sometimes forget a good idea around that in the past or you realize you've sort of gone down bunny trails too many times and so it sort of forces you to sort of put some boundaries around your thinking and think about like, well, what are you really trying to accomplish and how might you do that? And it gives you like a fresh spin when you sort of see your previous fails to achieve orbital velocity. Exactly, is website stuff fluxent the best address right now? Yeah. So if I click on this link it should launch my browser to your, oops. I just go within slash wiki on there. Like that? Yep. There we go, much better. So what I will do is I will copy that and update the link over here while we're talking just because. Yep. That will help anybody who's browsing my brain find your web, oops. And the very first link on that page coincidentally is a current brain fart that I'm just sort of scratching at and saying I have these ideas that I know are related in my head. Let me sort of write them down and pull some other things in and sort of get them into a scratch pad and try to think about where to go with that. So if you wanted to click into there you'd sort of. Next open infrastructure? Yep. Awesome. This is lovely. And thank you so much for thinking out loud for so long this way. Yeah. It's great. It's great. It really helps to see how other people are puzzling through the same, my theory kind of is that we're all seeing the same flow of stuff because there's few barriers to access. There's a couple of paywalls, et cetera, but basically it's just a ton of info. What you attend to, what you attune to matters a whole bunch and then how you process that is like the crux, right? Where's the chaff, where's the wheat? Can you be distracted by shiny objects? I'm always struck by the like Jay Leno's man on the street interviews where he'll show people pictures of world leaders. They will have no idea who, but you ask them who Kim Kardashian is married to and they know. Right. They know all of it. They know how many babies are in there. They know like the works. And it's not that people are dumb. It's that people are distracted. People have the capacity to remember insane amounts of things and to understand relationships and plot and all that. Yeah. Some of the stuff, yeah, like I know you've read a fair amount of Gatto also and he's got a whole rant about how like we assume that poor people can't make decisions. Like we have to have a public school monoculture because we can't trust poor people to evaluate something as complicated as the education for their children. It's like, well, talk to those people about anything that they have to spend money on or a million other decisions that they make in the course of a day. And they bring all sorts of subtlety of thought and trade-offs and things into that. So it's ridiculous to think that they're not capable of doing that for the other stuff. It's about offering actual alternatives and making those differences more explicit to them so they can then decide how their own values and expectations for the future would drive that decision. There's a book. I'll look right now of Portfolios of the Poor, which was published back. I don't have a date here, but back at least a decade, I think, in which they basically presented, they did a whole bunch of research around the world. And they discovered that most poor people have an average of something like 13 different strategies and instruments through average poor persons. So they might lend money to their cousin. They might keep money under the mattress. They might use payday lending. They might have a loan shark. They might be paying off one credit card in order to defend how poor you may not have a credit card at all, et cetera, et cetera. But the degree of sophistication they were required to have to stay alive was shocking. And of course, the interest rates they faced and the fees they faced at every step on this path were brutal. So it's a complete uphill battle to get out of poverty. So we pursued this in a little ways, but I want to come back to that. And I'm doing this sort of on purpose. I want to see, I love the comparison between ways that you've been curating what you care about and how you investigate these ideas and ways that I do. And I think that's really enlightening to our conversation. So let me go back, turn off share. Kirstie, welcome to the call. Yay. And see what else does this bring up for people? Larry. Larry. Jerry, I would volunteer. Please. Just to kick things off, and because I may be pulled out of this at any given moment, I'd volunteer that I actually retreated away from electronic recording and storage media fairly recently because I realized that writing notes at a computer was really affecting my ability to remember those notes and to sort of pre-process the ideas. So when I would take notes at a computer, the notes would almost bypass any kind of processing here. And they would go literally onto the screen. And I thought that was good because I was a fast typist and I'm able to keep up. But I'm realizing that trying to record my history in this electronic medium, including the brain, just isn't working for me. So oddly here, after 20 or 30 years of computer use, I've gone back to paper. That's super interesting. I'm very curious how other people have addressed that because one thing I noticed, and this only in the last year about my use of the brain in particular, is that curating things and putting them into my brain forces me to go into system 2 thinking about almost everything I run across. And so I have to make a series of conscious decisions. Is this worth remembering? Where does it go? Because I have to put it somewhere in the brain, which means what is it related to? When I put it in, what should I really call it? What else is it connected to? And then if it's really good, if it's a deep article, book, video or whatever, I listen to it and I put my notes in as I'm listening. So what I learn is connected under the node for the video itself and I keep going from there. And that act then makes my memory very visual because the brain has that particular layout. And so now I see and refresh here and then later when I'm browsing, anytime I trip across that particular thing again, it refreshes these neurons. So I'm like, oh, right, right, right. I remember that thing. So it's good because I then run across things later, which I normally wouldn't do with handwritten notes because I wouldn't go back through handwritten notebooks. All of that said, I have great appreciation for what you just shared with us because like sometimes taking copious notes tunes you out of the actual process of synthesizing, right? So I find that my use of the brain forces me to synthesize more, which I love. I think it's great, but I think that's unusual. I think most people's experience of digital notiography isn't necessarily paying off. Anybody else with thoughts? Clark, jump in. It reminds me of the discussions about the importance of reflection and you know what a topic of reflection is for me. So for those of you who don't know me as much, I've spent 30 years building computer systems that we call reflective architectures and now in Europe is called self-awareness. So these are systems that can reason about themselves. But the point that I wanna go back to is that there's a lot of studies on education and that people don't really absorb anything unless they reflect on it or unless you get the student to reflect on what their experience and their understanding is. And Robert, I've had the same experience where things can come out glibly because I'm fast and I'm quick on my feet and I've really learned to slow that process down and not do that. And then I haven't heard it called system two thinking by the way. System two, I'm borrowing from thinking fast and slow Daniel Kahneman or he talks about system one and system two thinking. This is just a for briefing for anybody who's not heard of it. And I can go to it in my brain but I won't because I like where we are here. And system one is your instinctual response. And system one is wrong a lot, really a lot but we humans are kind of lazy about responses and we get overwhelmed easily. We wanna get things out of the way. So we fall back on system one all the time. And also a lot of people's communications, let's just say advertisers and politicians don't really want us switching into system two thinking. Yeah. Right? So they're busy feeling only to system one. They don't want us to bump through that layer where we start engaging the gears of logic or whatever it is. And here I use the word logic very gingerly because I think part of this discussion is everything has to be logical. Sometimes does intuition matter as much as logic? We'll go there as well. Well, so I really wanna go off on your remark about the breaking through. Because one of the things, so I don't know if we already passed this in the conversation just tell me and give me a road sign. I doubt it, go ahead. But I wanted to go into sort of some of the reasons why I didn't respond to that conversation that was in our group last week. It really shut me down. And it didn't shut me down because of my spirituality or something like that. It actually shut me down because of my science. And so I wanted to bring up two thoughts here. One of them was that breaking through that glib level doesn't mean that you throw away emotion. Emotion is not the enemy. It's not like you have to go through this emotional layer to get down to the truth, the core of how we reason and how we think. And I've written articles about how you have emotional reasoning and the role that it might have played in our evolution. I was actually at some early workshops in Vienna with Rosalind Bacard and other people who have done a lot of work in emotional research. And there's a lot of very troubling things about that community, which is why I actually dropped out of it. But the other part was that I felt like one of the things that was going on in that conversation was really bad science. It really violated my notions about science. So one of the things I've tried to teach kids when I would teach at my son's school you know, sometimes I would give these lectures as a scientist, I come in and I talk about science. And I always start out with the sentence that science is not a collection of facts. That is not what science is. That's exactly what it isn't, okay? Now, what makes that hard and goes back to your remark and I don't know where you went, Jerry. But anyway, but one of the things that makes that hard is that it has to do with that breaking down through those layers because as scientists, we can stay on a very glib level. You know, well, these are the facts, but actually part of science is always this process, always this process of reflection where you're constantly second guessing your own assumptions and your own attitude and your own bias and you're trying to understand how that could have interfered with your observations and with your interpretations because science is always a set of stories, always. Anyway, so that wasn't gonna come out in any kind of helpful email in that conversation. And I found myself really stuck because it was poor theology and poor science all together. So this kind of gets at the line. They rise in families and churches and business and studies all over the place. So just identifying when something like that happens and reacting to it is really, really useful. And sorry, Kirstie, I disappeared because I was screen sharing some of the topics you were talking about like Rosbicard and a couple of other things. Which I will do now and then on these inside Jerry's brain calls at the risk of derailing the conversation because sometimes really it pays to just stay with the words. But I'm trying to figure out and I can use anybody's help on this. I'm trying to figure out how context makes can improve the conversation at the danger of distracting it. But can we feed off this shared context and can we feed and improve the shared context? So as we talk when somebody says something I don't know, I'll go look it up and add it to my brain. Sometimes it'll take enough work that I'll do it after the calls. But if I have an open tab in my browser, that means it's worth remembering I'm gonna go find it and put it in my brain at some point. But I want to be collaborating that way as well as we talk. So that's where I was. Or you could just write it down in your notebook. I could just hand write it in my notebook. And I'm an old school square ruled paper guy. Like I haven't touched the pencil in a long time but I'm like a pen and square ruled paper guy on notepads, I still do that. But I confess that I do it less than less. I've been in Evernote which is okay for this, not fabulous but not bad. And so I've been trying to be consistent about keeping notes in Evernote because then I can find them, carry them, they're available on every device. I don't have to scan a piece of paper later and that scanned piece of paper isn't searchable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I wanted to pass the floor to Clark who had a point about sort of note-taking. Well, I jumped in late and I don't wanna derail the conversation but you were talking, Jerry, about the processing value of putting it in your mind map and the conscious reflection you were doing. And I'd known about mind mapping and I hadn't done it. I made a point when I took notes even though I never reread them to actually paraphrase what people said instead of taking them verbatim. And in doing that, even if you never look at the notes again, you're getting value from the extra processing as you think. I had this problem when I was listening to keynotes that they'd say something interesting, my mind will go off and by the time I came back, I'd lost the plot. So I started mind mapping as a way for me to keep enough extra cognitive load to follow what they were saying and yet the mind mapping and trying to extract the underlying structure was really valuable to me. As an interesting side note, I actually started posting them on my blog just because I there, I'd created something let's think out loud, posted my blog they became some of my most popular posts. And the odd thing is I don't think there are value to anybody but those who heard the keynote as well because it's really hard to sort of follow it. It's little bits and pieces. There are some structure that may help it. As an interesting side note, that gets much harder when you have people who tend to sort of throw random bits and jump back and forth instead of a well-structured talk. But I think it gets back to, you know, Kirstie was mentioning that science is a bunch of stories and if there is a good narrative that helps make it, narratives are both dangerous and valuable. They can help lead us to sensible places but they can also be used to misconstrue and miscontextualize things which I think is something that we're seeing a lot today. Absolutely, I think narratives are both, I think the most convincing thing for humans, like we love stories, we love narrative and also in some cases the most dangerous thing because flawed narratives can take a whole bunch of people down the wrong path. Judy, off to you. Well, I wanted to comment on Christie's analysis or her observations about science because I find this, I am a scientist among other many things but a big piece of that is I think the ability to take in data and then sort the data and examine it in light of existing knowledge from a scientific context but from a bigger context as well. And so to go back to the first comments about note-taking, I find that I start out already simplifying the content I'm trying to track by taking notes on the things that are not verbatim everything but are sort of my summary with sort of shorthand notes about where I wanna go with that summary or resources to go back to. And that process of examination is what I consider the road of science in terms of how we collect, sort, prioritize and store for retrieval in our brain, in our head or in other mechanisms. The content that we want and it's kind of not useful to me unless I have an opportunity to re-examine it at some point. And if I don't re-examine it, I probably won't retain it very well. One of the reasons I love squirrel paper and that I kind of miss squirrel paper is that I created my own little format where my notes about what was happening were up on the left going down. My notes about what to ask or what to add to the conversation or what to ask were basically at the bottom coming up. And then my notes about what to contribute to the conversation were down the right margin. And that's just how it ended up happening. I'd keep track of what was up in the middle, but then what that let me do was not have to blurt out and jump in all the time about this thing before I lost it in my head that was so valuable to the conversation, but rather wait until the end and say, hey, if you're interested, we didn't get to these things, but boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I had them listed and I would just write down enough trigger words that would take me down the same conversational thread. Now, one of the things I regret not forming as a habit in my life is checking your notes later. I don't reread my notes that much. I don't go back to my own stuff because Judy, what you just said about just, and also Kirstie, like reflection, reprocessing, going back and seeing what you thought for a second is super helpful. Well, I find that what I don't really review the notes per se, that was a technique I was taught as an undergraduate in terms of long-term storage of memory, that if you took the notes, you had high recall right after you took them, but if you didn't refresh them or re-examine them, within 24 hours, the slope down was steep, and the more you re-examined it, the more likely it would all make it to long-term memory. But I think that the piece that kind of connects with the line between cook and science or this vague difference between reality and non-reality is what I kind of call critical thinking, but it's the examination of each piece of information you confront to your accumulated judgment and your other sources of judgment. And then there are things you take on faith or because there's some intuitional element of it that rings true to you, that hasn't yet been proven, but isn't categorically proven to be impossible from a scientific side. So that would be my definition of that cook line is that if it's been proven to be impossible, that's data that I have to take in. I may still have faith beyond that proven impossibility, but that's a different zone. Yeah, it is a different zone, right? But that's a different zone. Well, it's a little bit like cold fusion or something like that, right? It's like non-replicable experiments, some claim is made, where are we in that territory? I mean, I didn't have too much trouble rejecting. But when we start to talk about things that move into this zone of spiritual or collective consciousness or accumulated wisdom of people or intuition, that's a lot harder line to draw hard boxes around. Kirstie, and then I wanna go to Jean who raised his hand. Go ahead, Kirstie. Well, I'll make it quick because I haven't heard Jean speak before. Okay, so I just wanna say something that another part of this thing about what I try to teach about science when I have had occasions to lecture on it. So you guys know that I'm also a mathematician also. And one of the problems about that, and so here gets into an area and it's really at heart in our scientific education. We clumsily throw out the notions of what we mean by proving something in science. So Judy, you were saying exactly correct things. You take this body of evidence and this goes back to having a good story. There's a helpful, a helpful story. And we retain those helpful stories for as long as they're helpful, okay? And some of them have been 2,000 years of helpfulness like gravity, okay? It just keeps enduringly being helpful even we don't know a lot of things about it. But that's really different from the notions of mathematical proof, okay? And we actually don't prove things in science. I hate to say this, we do not. We prove things in mathematics because we have a well-defined formal space within which we can actually use proof methods. But in science, it's all this a matter of aggregating this useful evidence for this useful story. And that's what it is. And that's different from proof. So when I talk about bad science and bad theology, I really hate some of this discussion that I hear going on by prominent scientists who have become fundamentalists in their own right because they're saying, you're saying things, there is no God, there is no other. There is nothing else in the universe, you know? This kind of logical positivism and that's a misuse of science. It gets a theology for a moment, it's a misuse of science. Let me go to Chen. And I heard you say that you were taking notes in Evernote and I was just curious why you were taking your notes in Evernote rather than in the brain. It's a great question. Partly because I try not to use the brain for evanescent things. So I don't do my calendar in the brain. I don't do what I'm doing next week. I don't do my to-do list. I don't do treat the brain as the long-term permanent archived function. Tell me when you can hear me go. You want to back up a bit, you hung up. Thank you, sorry. My net connection is not that happy right now. So I treat the brain as the long-term archive of the stuff I really want to keep and share with other people because I have two audiences in mind always when I put something in the brain, me, and I know that I publish it so anyone else who happens to stumble across it. So whatever I put in it needs to be clear enough that somebody might be able to infer what I intended by putting something in the brain. But I don't take notes for meetings in the brain. I don't, you know, I sort of, I really don't use it. I try not to use it for transient things. I try to use it for things worth remembering for the long-term. So all my transient notes go into Evernote and that's a problem because Evernote doesn't really generate permalinks I can put into the brain in a nice way so that if I did want to link my notes, you know, I'll keep links to documents. That's fine. I just don't want to pour all the documents into the brain file. I'm very conscious of indexes that are too large. You know, things get bulky, they break down. That's just an old, you know, it's like people who were wondering why we should waste a megapixel of memory, you know, a megabyte of memory on a megapixel of pixels. Nobody's going to need that. Why don't we just keep the command line? Right? There's a vestigial part of me that's probably behaving that way. But that's part of why. Okay. And I wish that the notes field in the brain could in fact be an Evernote note. Like that would make my life really easy. If I could couple the brain to Evernote in a way that notes were just shared, you know, Evernote notes, that would be fabulous. But it's not open. Are you sure? Have you tried it with version 10? I've not tried it. I didn't know it was even on Harlan's list of things that maybe ever try to do. What they did with version 10 is that in the right-hand panel where the notes are, it can actually be a web browser. So that anything, in other words, where you would have links that you would go to, the links actually show up on the right-hand side so that your email and any other websites or anything you go to, you don't go there. It brings it to you in version 10. Oh, right. But I've never wanted to use the browser inside the brain, but I'm thinking about it very differently from what you're saying right now. And do you mean down here? I don't know where you mean. Like if I ask something. I'll show you. Yeah. Why don't you share, let me stop sharing. Can you share with us and show for it? We'll get a tutorial. Let me go change this option, because I turned it off, sometimes it's annoying. It's in bed browser for web links. So what it normally does when I had that on is it goes to every page you land on. It basically goes on searches for whatever you just clicked on. Right, so if you went to my thought in your brain and it was a LinkedIn page, it would launch your browser to LinkedIn. But that's always been there. Yeah, that's always been possible. Oh, yes. Okay. This is a time honored feature that I always turn off because I don't want to be looking at each thing that I browse through, because I browse through a lot of stuff every day in the brain. Okay, I have to admit that I have had a 20 year love-hate relationship with the brain. It is the piece of software that has been installed and uninstalled from my system at least twice a year for 20 years. Oh, wow, that's really interesting. And the current incarnation is only a month old. But at the moment, I'm really hooked. So we'll see how long it lasts this time. That's very interesting. And in 21 years, I've never uninstalled it. I can tell, I'm not talking to this. I've had a couple of periods where the brain was sort of broken and there was a month where I couldn't add anything. So I had to keep notes somewhere else in a tech stock or Evernote. And then I could go back to it, but I've never actually uninstalled it. But I'm also, it's a lot of hate because I'm extremely frustrated that it's not open, that there's no API. There's a bunch of things we could go into that way. I wanted to take something that Clark put in the chat earlier as an opportunity for to talk through an example of the line, right? And the topic is learning styles. And before we dive into it, I just want, would like everybody do, this means I agree, this means I disagree. Can you put your hands in a gesture? This means I'm meh. Can you put your hands in a gesture when I say learning styles, do you agree that they exist and matter? Do they feel strongly that they're a stupid idea or are you like, who's talking about learning styles? So everybody put your hands up where you are. Wait, wait, wait, you have to define learning styles. There's different. No, I'm not, I'm gonna let you all define learning styles any way you want to. So meh, negative, up, up, down, up, mixed, mixed, mixed. Okay, fabulous, thank you. Now we can define learning styles and go into it because I think that part of our disagreement is about our definition of learning styles for starters. And I think we may be seeing it differently. And Clark, would you rather jump in first or would you rather jump in first? If you don't mind, I've been looking at this a long time. Now it's one of those things that feels right. We were talking about that a while ago. And that it, we know learners different. Anybody who's ever taught recognizes there's the differences between learners. And the appeal of learning styles is that we can reliably characterize them. And that if we can, we should use that to their advantage. And this would seem perfectly sensible. However, there's a couple flaws in this. So how Pasha led a blue ribbon panel for the American Psychological Society, Science and the Public Interest, they did a study. And I happen to know how he was a professor of mine. I haven't talked to him in a long time, but I have great faith in him. And at the end of the day, they were looking at, does it make any sense to try and adapt to learners learning styles? And they found the evidence was no. They found some studies that said yes, but more studies that said no, it was a meta analysis. And the interesting, to me, what's, you know, we also have better advice. We have advice that says, don't try and adapt the learning to the learner, adapt the learning to the learning outcome. But you go further back and say, okay, but maybe we still are able to characterize learners. And Caulfield et al led a blue ribbon panel in the UK looking at should learning styles be used in K-12 education. And they looked at all the instruments and they found like 72. And they picked 13 representative ones that included MBTI, by the way. And they did a psychometric validity analysis. And there's a number of things you need to have psychometric validity. It has to measure what you think it measures. Has to be independent variables, has to be reliable testing over time. And only one met all four psychometric validity standards. And it was relatively interesting and it was one dimension. And the rest didn't. And the point is it would seem nice to try and characterize learners, but we can't, they changed, depending on context, what you're learning, phase of the moon, or whatever it is. And so while we know learners different, we haven't been able to reliably characterize it with any instrument. And it may not be a good thing to do anyways. It may be a form of a small age, a small instance of discrimination. Instead of looking at them as learners on their behavior, we're trying to characterizing a lot of it as self-report anyways, which is problematic as well. So that's sort of a thumbnail sketch of learning styles, why it appeals, why it doesn't work. At least, and this is science, as Kirti was pointing out, it hasn't worked yet. We haven't found a reliable instrument, which isn't to say we won't eventually and find a way to do it, but we haven't yet. So I'm showing you the thought critiques of learning styles because I have a lot of thoughts under critiques. Critiques of pretty much everything. So I've been trying to collect up, and you mentioned some research earlier that I'd love to add here later. If you don't mind sending me a couple links, that'd be great. And I think our difference might be, my hunch on our differences is that when I say learning styles, I mean learning, and I'm a big fan of unschooling. I'm a fan of John Taylor Gatto. I hate the compulsory school system. And all the critiques of learning styles to me are basically this is impossible to implement in the school system. A, we can't have teachers modify their curriculum or their teaching methods for every student. That's just impossible because they're overworked and underpaid and already have too many kids. B, we could be tagging a kid for life with a label that could be discrimination. I mean, I can go through a series of ways in which of course it's impossible to implement in the school system because the school system to me is congenitally broken. I'm really interested in, so I had a thought, I think I put it in my brain at some point. If you remember the sorting hat from Harry Potter. So I didn't put it in here. That's very interesting. So one of my long-term, on my long-term wish list, this might have been in one of those little breakdowns where there was a month where I couldn't put anything in the brain but I thought I did. So it's in this version of the brain but not in the actual brain. I'm really interested in and I think this would be useful. Some experience, some test, some thing you could go through that would tell you you're probably better adapted to learn with these kinds of ways and look for those ways but also in this advice, know that there's these ways in which you perceive yourself or you seem to not be very strong. Here's ways in which you could strengthen those if you felt like it, you can balance yourself out, whatever. I don't mean that now I only learn things through musical analogy. I think that's a dumb approach to life, right? But I think that if I learn mathematics best through musical analogy or as some mathematicians reported through visualizing gears in their head or water pouring through a system or whatever, that's a great insight that should lead people to learn better and I wish that all learning resources available openly on the net were tagged up by these learning styles with simple tags like mechanical cogs and gears or something like that so that anybody looking for something to learn with could sort through them and go, oh, I think I'll try these first because they seem to be fitting my learning style. So I think I'm looking at it completely outside the school system because I know that within the school system it's being barfed up, coughed up, tissue rejection, there are white blood cells all over it. I kind of get that. Does that sort out my position at all, Parker? No. I understand your position but I'm questioning the basis of the premise. Do you have evidence that these sorts of approaches even individually would make a difference? I do believe that taking on certain types of behaviors or things like persistence and learning and a belief that you can, it's about your effort, not just about your inability, growth mindset type of stuff and some of this is controversial but I agree but I certainly think we should have a variety of metaphors and find a good entry point and maybe we can correlate certain entry points to certain individual characteristics so if you have a number of different ways to think about math, cogs and gears or water flow, maybe we can find that that's a better entry point but eventually you want people to see all of these because then there's a better chance that when a problem matches to one element of it it'll activate a suite of different ways of thinking about it because they're related and then you have a better chance of finding one that maps to a solution space. So I don't mind different entry points and exploring that and eventually finding it but do you seem to be in proposing that there is a known basis for doing this now and I'm just not aware of one and I welcome hearing of it. And I'm not basing my strong opinions weekly held on learning styles on scientific studies I'm basing it on instinct that I know that my approach to things is really different from other people. They have a completely different mental model that they're using to connect things in into the bigger picture or whatever it is and not that everybody has one consistent mental model anything like that but I've seen and read of people taking completely different approaches and I think that's really useful and the moment learning styles gets demonized and cast out which is what's been happening we lose the ability to use that as a learning lever as a good tool for learning more effectively for whoever. So that's kind of where I go and I'd love to make room for Kirstie and Marie as well who I know probably has a lot to say about this. So go ahead, Kirstie. Just two quick points to add to the discussion Clark I really appreciated your summary that was just excellent and can you send those articles through the usual mail so I don't have to kind of grab them off my screen and I will take the chat and I will send everybody a link to the recording of this call and it will include the chat so Clark if you put anything here I'll add it, et cetera. Go ahead, Kirstie. But I want to go back to two things that I think are really important in this discussion. One was the notion of preferences, okay? So preferences come from the inside out and so you can have preferences Jerry in how you enjoy learning or how you want to look at the material and that's really different from being observed by somebody else and told you're a visual type or you're a whatever, mental ex type or whatever the characterization is. That's one part. I think of it, I can't help but go back to mathematics and other areas I know and love and think about how it is when I'm tutoring somebody there are lots of individual differences and you teach them that they have a repertoire of strategies. So I think one of the important parts of this notion of learning styles would actually be empowering the learners to understand that there could be a tremendous number of ways that they have accessible to them to learn, okay? And that's maybe the power of it. And then the third part was that you guys nobody's using any physical analogies. I found that very interesting, okay? Because now I want you to think about somebody who's coaching some young woman to hit her first ball at baseball, okay? And if you've ever been in that situation which I've been, both receiving and coaching, that's a wonderful example where you use a whole bunch of different strategies. So you might say, look, stand like me, no, here hold your bat a little bit this way, no, try to think of the ball as whatever kind of object. In other words, you give them a whole bunch of strategies and I think that fits in with what Clark was saying. And somehow if we keep those physical analogies in mind, too, we might think more healthily about these mental ones. Marie, you wanna jump in? Yeah, so I think when we say learning styles what we really mean is teaching styles. This is a mechanism that I'm supposed to be using to put something into the child's brain and I think that's backwards and wrong. I think the way we wanna think about it is creating an environment in which different ways that people learn, which may be infinite are all going to be supported and made possible. I have been doing a lot of work recently on student agency and I have come up with a definition that student agents, very narrow definition for K-12 where we say the student agency is when students of their own volition will improve their learning, their learning environment or themselves in some way. But we break that down into the will and skill where will is motivation and that's based on self-determination theory by 20 years of research that talks about how intrinsic motivation is fostered and that it's through autonomy, mastery and relatedness and I'm sure you've all seen Dan Pink's book and all the stuff that has to do with that. But it also talks about metacognition which has two pieces. It's got a piece that is knowledge of cognition which is understanding how people learn and how you yourself learn. And the second one is being able to have actions in cognition. So things like planning and monitoring your performance and reflecting on your performance. And I think that if we look at these fundamental building blocks, all five that I just met or seven that I just mentioned that having an environment that puts those things in place that recognizes the infinite numbers of unique outcomes that can come from those from students and that reinforces all the different ways that people naturally will tend to learn along with what Kirstie said, which is to offer very concrete specific strategies that may work or may form as a basis for them to develop their own strategies that that's an environment in which you can have lots support lots of different ways of learning as opposed to trying to reduce yourself to some finite number of ways of teaching. Mm-hmm. Yeah, as soon as you put the teaching word in here, it really, it lights up, right? It's like, oh, right, we're sort of a, we're a perfect, and if you focus on the learner and make it a learner kind of thing, it might actually work. I think Clark is pointing out how dysfunctionally this topic has been dealt with and implemented in different ways and that it's causing a ton of problems for people in the system. And I agree with all that. And, but I'm trying to figure out how to not let that destroy this very powerful idea of letting people explore how to learn in really different ways. Letting them approach things. And so I've got here a thought types of learning, which is different from types of education. So I've got here sex education, executive education, neuro education, haidea, place-based education, vocational school, et cetera. But just types of learning, blended learning, connective learning, continuous learning, covenantal learning. I don't remember putting that in. That is from a book. It comes out of Talmudic Commentaries, Josh Plaskoff, another state of mind perspective from the wisdom traditions on management and business. That's interesting. Anyway, back to us in the booth here. So I have something to say about the original topic and the chain of email that we went into. It is something that pushed a lot of buttons for me because I am definitely a science firster. Nothing I can do about it. That's how my brain is wired. And it caught me at a time when I have been particularly hot-buttoned about the ideas of people not thinking well. And the way that has been coming out in my not, I'm not so proud of moments is I keep saying, well, no wonder people think it's okay to rip babies away from their mother because 70% of the people in the United States have an imaginary friend called God. And... I can see how that would go. Right? I mean, it's like this is a purely emotional system one kind of a thing that has been coming up and I've been trying to think through, why am I feeling this way? Why am I saying these things? Why is this even who I am right now? And I think what a lot of it has to do with is the frustration that I see in the fake news and the poor media where people will use the trappings of science and logic, but what they're actually doing is putting out fallacies and nonfactual. And in fact, some information that is so bad, you can't even call it nonfactual. It's not wrong. It's not, I mean, it's not right. It's not even wrong. It's just, you can't say that. You absolutely can't say that. And so I've been doing, I actually have been doing a lot of thinking about, I believe there's a lot of value in religion, but I believe that all that value comes from stuff that science does not yet know how to address. And therefore, we don't test religion. We don't test the existence of God. Anything that is not testable is not science. Science is all about testing things that we believe in. And if you can't test it, it's not science. And if you can't prove or disprove it, it's not a fact. And if you think it's okay to rip babies away from their mothers, then you probably have an imaginary friend. And Marie, you've also taken us into the nice deep end of this conversation, kind of right on schedule around what happens when there's people with really bad intent surrounding all of this difficult stuff, planting stories that are completely atrociously false, et cetera, et cetera, where we don't have reliable attribution mechanisms where fact-checking is hard and overwhelmed and actually doesn't help when you present it to these people, et cetera, et cetera. But Kirstie was raising your hand about some of the questions on scientific method. Do you want to jump in? You're muted right now. There. So first of all, I honor the emotion that I heard in your voice and these topics are crazily painful to everybody who cares about science and everybody who cares about different notions of spirituality. And I think that there are malicious people, as Jerry has said, who are purposely playing on that. I guess personally one of my feelings is that as I said, bad theology and bad science. And we could go into a whole discussion about this thing that's being considered the enemy right now of religion. But the other day at Thanksgiving, I was at a thing I was actually singing at a 700-person interdenominational faith event here in Thousand Oaks. Because I don't know if you remember that in addition to the horrific fires we had, we had 14 kids killed, shot down. And the interfaith community here actually includes Muslims and Baha'i and Buddhists and you name it, it was there talking about people sort of clumsily reaching across different denominational lines and places where some of them would think that some of the other belief systems were pretty wacky. But there was an undercurrent of feeling like there's other in the universe and that that concept of other, of love surpassing all could actually unite people. And so from the point of view of the billions of people who actually believe in other on the planet, they look towards religious beliefs as being actually something that can bring people together that could actually heal wounds. And you certainly see a lot of beautiful activity and one of the hard parts is that we're seeing sort of the ugliest of the ugliest. So to sit there and say that this characterizes religious belief in the United States is a little bit like saying Nazism describes all political belief. Just because some crazy wackos have a system of belief that takes and perverts those institutions really does not mean, you know, as you said, you know, it's like, why am I saying these things? And that I think is something that I really actually would love the reflection on the group to realize is to actually go through the heart of the question you said, which is why am I saying this? And to realize how human we are and when we get pushed on enough, we get polarized too. And that's how it happens. Okay, so people of good heart and good intention and good belief if they get pushed on enough, they start to get angry and they start to get emotional and they start to get back, okay? And that plays into exactly what I consider some of the evil forces that are at play right now because they know that like Osama bin Laden really was very successful in his campaign against Saudi Arabia and some of the Middle Eastern countries that he was really targeting, but also against the Western powers, you know? He managed to tie in a whole bunch of people into a whole process of hate. And that's I guess the part where I felt the most discouraged in the conversation a week ago was because I actually considered Jerry's list one of my safe places. And suddenly we were making it really unsafe for people to sit there and say, and now this is a non, this is a spiritual non denominational statement that to me that there are things in the universe that are beyond material values or beyond immediate self-centered gains, you know? And that those things matter to me. And that's what I heard this person reaching out and saying, okay, I'm gonna take some my spiritual beliefs and I'm gonna do something because we have a colleague who's sick, averting right now, okay? I don't know if you saw my responses on that list, but I absolutely agree with that. And I believe in the beauty in religion. And I believe that what happens in most religions for most people most of the time and especially with the mature philosophers is that you are finding that sort of something that brings people together that helps us evolve that makes us more mature spiritually and emotionally. And I use the word metaphor a lot. And the reason I use the word metaphor is because I think that those things are not things that we understand yet through science and logic, but there is a part of us that still has that as an important and real and valid form of knowing. And so most of the time when people talk about God, it's a metaphor for something that's real, but I don't believe it's somebody who sits on a cloud and doles outgifts and punishments, right? And I'm not actually gonna preclude that, but it's probably not on the cloud, but at least not the clouds we're inventing right now. Anyway, the thing about it is that I wanna go back to the other part which I really care about, which is the science. I consider myself a scientist now for all my life. I mean, that's what I've done. And a lot of significant work, 50 years of science actually. I really care about it. And that was actually another part of the conversation that was really bothering me. So I have had deep conversations with certain colleagues and in general, I don't talk about God and science much. Okay, well, it's a while I talked about it with various colleagues, especially in Europe, which is full of interesting philosophical ideas and thinking and things that they will consider. And what I don't wanna see is people not reflecting on their needs to have a sense of perspective and values that reaches beyond certain kind of materials or positivistic views of life. And when they do that, they sometimes turn their science into a religious view. And that leads into very poor theology because they're not thinking it through, they're not reflecting on the fact that they've started to elevate this into a religion. And to me, what I've said very bluntly is that one of the reasons I like being a religious spiritual person is it keeps my science cleaner. It actually helps my science because I'm not loading my science with my religious and spiritual needs. Oh, interesting. For understanding what the meaning of life is and what my perspective is. Does that, do you kind of understand that and by saying that clearly? Absolutely, very much so. Personally, I draw from Buddhism and Buddhism is where I get my philosophical and where I get my metaphors, if you will. Life is suffering, that means a lot of different things and I'm able to use that in a lot of different ways. But I also recognize very clearly that when I think about that, it is not the same thing as when I think about how fast is an object falling and when does, that's right, from no velocity kick in and so forth. And so the place where I get frustrated is when you use scientific language to try to justify religion, right? Oh no, well what if God invented the world 5,000 years ago with fossils, right? Okay, that makes me crazy. Using a 3D printer that we have yet to discover but it's buried under there in one of the layers. Actually, it's gonna be discovered in time travel, yeah. The aliens brought the 3D printers. And handed it to the lizard people. Right, exactly, no, no. All that into the same kind of category of thinking but it also makes me crazy when people use religious language, religious thinking and try to apply it to science. I agree, I agree. So here's, there are a lot of things that are real that I cannot discuss scientifically but that have meaning and value that I need to communicate with people. And I must use religious language to do it because it's the only metaphor available to me, such as grace. I can't talk scientifically about grace. But it's a thing and it's real. So we have 20 minutes left. Fortunately, I'm sitting here with the Dalai Lama. So I have direct access, not as direct as Skye used to have, but still, he was the CTO for the Dalai Lama organization I guess for years, right? And what I'd love to do is make room to the people who haven't had a chance in the conversation yet. So let's go quiet and Skye, Robert, Bo, Rich, Rich is away from his desk, Michael, Douglas, Doug, if you wanna jump in and share what this has brought up for you, I'd love that. And meanwhile, we can just sit with our thoughts for a moment because when the conversation moves quickly it's hard to follow sometimes. Michael just posted a lovely thing to our chat and Doug, the floor is yours. Yeah, I guess where I go to is the word religion coming from Ray Ligiere to retie. Religion is a way of tying things together, but so is science. And what's striking is they're trying to tie together basically different things. And to me, the lesson is that science has been in the service of power, military and empire since the beginning. And as a result, it has a skewed sense of what it's trying to understand. Back to the learning style question, which is implicit in this, is that it's not just the person in relation to the thing to be learned, but it's the environment in which the learning is taking place. So the learning demands on a native living in the Brazilian jungle is really different than a native living in Paris. What they have to learn, how they're going to go about doing it. And it seems to me that including the environment tells us a lot about what the learning needs to be about. And I think my objection is to learning styles within the school with a capital S environment. And that sort of pollutes the idea. And I don't want to revive that conversation because I think it was a really interesting idea for me to turn to meta learning as a different container for what I'm thinking about. Other folks who haven't chimed in very much. Michael, do you want to talk about what you just posted? Sort of, apologies for the cutting it and pasting it and all sorts of messy places. It's, the head gets in the way so easily. I originally trained in physics and engineering, but then became quite entranced with the idea of irrational science. That is laws of form, George Spencer Brown. That's sort of the quantum of fact. Is something what you think it is or isn't it? And how can you leave room for that flexibility? So most of my comfort in the learning world is about see what shows up rather than the specificity of a science. I remember one analogy that said you can't study astronomy in daylight. So if the parameters of your study are, it must be daylight between these hours and stars do not exist. And that's always been my approach to what it is that I don't know. I just don't know what I don't know. Boy, can I get irrational very quickly. I'll leave it at that for the moment. I'm fascinated by this discussion. It's really turning my crank. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you, Michael. And one of the things I wish for, maybe we do this at a different call, maybe it's a bridge too far. I'd love to know what things are on the border for us. Like what things we are completely kooky and what things are we know we believe in that are probably considered kooky by other people. I would love to know that. And we have a pretty good trust of space going here where we could enumerate those perhaps. But let's see how to implement that. If you'd like to do that, let me know. And maybe we do another call where we go a little bit deeper having done that and just work on some of them and just discuss them. Because I found the discussion with Clark about learning styles and other language and framing and all that quite useful. So I'm gonna go back and kind of rearrange stuff on the deck of my little ship. Other folks who'd like to jump in, Skye? Yeah. I was gonna say I have nothing to say, but in response to Michael's quote there, I will point out that during the day you can do radio astronomy. And also you can detect gravitational waves day or night. So changing your perceptual mechanisms can lead to additional information and enlightenment. Yeah, of course. The tool set is what you use to discover what the tools will show you. Yeah, there's a whole nother conversation on that too, right? Yeah. Using the tool set. Yeah, I mean, once the first non-optical telescope shows up, all things go all over the place, right? Like it cracks open whole new, whole new vistas. Yeah. Once it shows up, it's gonna show up first. And I'm also, the story may be apocryphal, but the notion that Galileo first used the telescope to show the papal armies, the armies across in the other valley. And look, you can get a close-up and you can do a better count of how many enemy you're coming towards you. It was basically a military instrument for seeing at a distance that he takes the same goddamn instrument and turns it up and shows them the moons of Saturn or whatever, and they're like, nope, nope, can't be happening. Not real, right? Same instrument used in a different context, possibly at the same spot of ground, don't know. And I don't even know if the whole story is true, but that's the narrative I hold. It's quite interesting how whatever the belief system is that we are defending, whether it's to whatever degree that's conscious or deeply embedded really matters. And if membership in society depends on your holding a belief system, you will squirrel around to any likes you want. There's a thought in my brain on Lysenkoism and basically the Soviet rejection of statistics and a lot of science, and which really screws up Soviet science for a long, long time. And certainly their ability to produce things and improve their production and whatever else. But the Soviets basically dismissed a body of important work because it wasn't suiting the narrative of we're going to make more stuff than those other people. It was proving that they were screwing that up, right? So we fool ourselves all the time, but then sometimes we build these really strong institutions to fool ourselves and we reinforce it with punishment with what have you, right? We have to reinforce a narrative. And those are really dangerous because those can take generations to wash away. Yeah, there was an article in this morning's times about a person, a journalist who went to Cambodia to interview people well after the killing fields and the genocide in Cambodia. And just of noticing how deeply the social trauma is embedded where in most every village, almost every grownup has people who were disappeared or killed or tortured or committed the acts. Everybody's involved and it's all right there. And it's like culturally wide and what do you do? The Chicago School of Economics indeed has driven many, many things that are not so good for us. Other thoughts as we get toward the end of our time together, where in particular, how might we inquire a little further into this topic? What would it be interesting to do a comparison with whoever shows up of what we believe to be true or not true? Certainly I will share out a couple of links into my brain of places. In fact, let me actually do a little sharing because I had set up for this call. 1811Cooks will bring me there. So this is the call when I'm done posting the video to YouTube, I will add it to this particular thought in my brain, I'll pass that link around. But I had added for example, contrarian ideas that I believe in. Right? So I happen to believe that animals are more intelligent than we think. I've collected a whole bunch of articles about this, like a serious bunch of articles about this, all over the place. I believe that many famines are economic. They're not natural disasters. I mean, in many cases people have died because they didn't have food, but almost every famine when you look back through history is economic and therefore also political. These are not just natural disasters where people suddenly can't eat. The Great Bengal famine in India in 1943, there is plenty of rice for Indians to eat. The British will not release the rice and nobody has money to buy the rice. Millions of people starve. So there's a bunch of contrarian, here's one that's a little radical and I just learned this in the last year. I read the book, The American Slave Coast, which is one of my now favorite history books. And one of the ideas in The American Slave Coast is that the actual motive of the American Revolutionary War was preserving slavery. It wasn't no taxation without representation, which was in fact a good cover story, that neither the North nor the South could envision an American economy continuing without slavery. Etna in Connecticut was ensuring slaves. Rhode Island was the seat of shipbuilding for slave ships. New York was busy funding, financing cotton, all of the slave trades. Everything nobody could imagine America without slavery. So that's a contrarian idea, I believe. So none of these are pseudoscience, some of these are history, right? I also happen to believe that schooling kills curiosity, that children are naturally curious, maybe that's not contrarian, that probably shouldn't be there. I'm a big fan of Alice Miller and that leads me down to some controversial childbearing practices like co-sleeping, which somehow became insanely controversial. You could roll over and kill your child. Seriously? How did that become a controversy? So it's interesting to me to curate these and keep them together. And then what I'd like to have is as many conversations as anyone will tolerate to explore these fringe ideas and improve them because I'm happy to change my mind on things, I just need to figure out how and why and where. So here's another one, many early cultures didn't spend much time sourcing food. Another one is when I posted recently, which is that there's a common narrative that we used to live only to like age 30. And now look, we live to like age 80 and that's just how it's always been. Well, it turns out that statistics, infant mortality skews that and a whole bunch of other things skew those stats. It turns out that we used to live to old ripe old ages, just if not that many people survived the ripe old ages, but human longevity has probably been about the same for a long time. We are now messing with that with experiments on telomeres and whatever else, where we might actually artificially goose that. And that's actually really interesting. Yesterday I was watching a video about longevity and life expectancy. I can probably find it. It was... Electric expectancy at birth. No. Shoot, I'll have to find it when I'm not trying to like mind the time and pay attention to Gene who raised his hand. Go ahead, Gene. I just was sort of wondering why this was such an interesting point of focus for you. The line between Cooke's and Peacock's? Yes. Because as I started the call, I feel like I'm trying to digest the universe and figure out how things work. And I think many people are like me in that way or on that kind of quest. Like why do we do things? Why are we in such a screwed up mess right now? How do we do something to fix it? And a big piece of that is what we believe because that dictates what we try to do to fix it or what people do to try to tip it into chaos or why people even like chaos, right? Like investors, big money investors don't like a stable market. They like beta, they like volatility, they don't like stability. So every now and then they will intentionally precipitate us into something like the 2008 global financial crisis. Because if you're on the right side of that bet and everybody moves up and down a lot, you make a ton of money, for example. So this quest between what's crazy and what's not and some of the crazy ideas being weaponized. To me, if we crack some of this code and then if we can sort it out so that people can understand it and distribute it, we might help dampen the crazy non-linear war that we're in. Does that make sense? Or do they, and I'm really, really happy. Curiosity doesn't like that. Do you want to jump in and say why not? I can't hear you, there you go. Okay. I think that there's been these studies now of really fringe beliefs. Things that you guys, I mean, I forget some of the kooky ones. They're so strange that they're even beyond there being aliens and things like that. There's now large groups and so in some ways I feel like you're trying to be too rational about, okay, we'll look at the things that we think are on the fringe and we'll try to understand that and maybe make those arguments better or something. That's the feeling I'm getting from a jury. That's not your intention at all. Whereas what I would think maybe would be a useful conversation first is to try to learn what we can about why people come to believe things and prove pressures and things like, yeah, it's the conspiracy theories. I mean, the crazy stuff. Well, I mean, and there's some that are not that don't require beliefs in paranormal things. There's just things like QAnon, right? Which is a crazy conspiracy theory that everything Trump and his people are doing is completely intentional. They are in total control and they're leading us down a particular path. Yeah, and I have a girlfriend that I've lost that I had since I'm five years old. I've lost her to this contrails and she's actually on TV shows now talking about contrails, you know? And I tried to explain to her the physics of that and she sent me NASA articles that supposedly was the reason why she could believe what she believed. And so I don't know. There's something about that that I think is the necessary conversation before we get into people's sort of individual gray areas. I'm just thinking of people's individual gray areas as a nice forum format arena place to have some of these conversations. That's all. Not as the best path forward to figuring this out. I'm listening with ears wide open to what the best paths might be to make use of this kind of way of thinking or way of going into the conversation. There's something that we've lost in terms of the normalizing effects of the social groups around everybody. I mean, as a U.S. culture, we somehow lost these sort of normalizing things that used to bring back the fringes that made people say, oh, come on. That's really kind of ridiculous, you know? And so the thing that used to be such a wonderful, helpful social glue among us of sort of mutual respect and okay, you can believe that but we're gonna have this mutual respect for each other has now been sort of really harmed by this lack of attention or something to these other mechanisms that used to bring people back together somehow. And I'm saying it very badly and I could really use a sociologist in the group or an anthropologist in the group. And also like, yeah. And also history is really funny on this because in the 50s discourse in the Senate might have been better but black people in America were really screwed. And there was no sense of respect for them. No sense that they're thinking matters. And the pill is 1961 and birth control and all of those kind of like, like it changes the status of women in society in ways that nobody predicted and that like shook things up. And like there's layer after layer of this because there are different periods of time where we've been civil and now like I'm reading a book called Red State, Blue State I think by a super, super analyst and he's writing about how did we get to this divided house and this divided country? How did it come about? And I think the book is gonna help me build more evidence that points to the Gingrich Revolution. That basically when Gingrich comes into the Speaker of the House in 1994 he basically lays down the new law. And this book is really good for early. So I have a thought in my brain, which is one of my beliefs. It's under my beliefs right here that Gingrich created the current political rift in America. Here's the book I'm reading, The Red and the Blue, the 1990s and the birth of political tribalism. It really darkened my memory of Bill Clinton and his rise. Oh my God, I'd forgotten half the crap that Clinton pulled that, he just barely made it to president and he had, you know, Trumpian style stuff in his background anyway. So Gingrich created this current political rift at the same time as we made great advances. Gay marriage was approved in this country that made it through the Supreme Court. A whole bunch of other things happened which brought other groups in, right? And partly we have this backlash when too many things advance here there's a whole bunch of people that get really mad and they swing the pendulum way over to the other side. And at this case, I'm afraid the pendulum is really heavy and really like there's a lot of mass heading the wrong way right now because I have a thought basically where I'm tracking the global shift to the right and it's really frightening. I mean, basically, Gene, partly the reason I wanna do this is that the weaponization of trust and tolerance and facts and the undermining of trust and facts and all those sort of things are very much central to the tactics and strategies of the people who are trying to shift us to authoritarian populism across the globe. And we need to stop that somehow and I don't think anybody has decent countermeasures. I don't think anybody, I don't think that Democrat, I don't think liberals or journalists anywhere in the world have really figured out what the countermeasures are to these tools, to these tactics. So I'm pretty concerned that if we don't figure something out, we're gonna be screwed. Too many of them think that the countermeasures are facts and they're not. The difficulty is that we tend to choose what we believe sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously and then we find things to support those beliefs so that it creates a reinforcing structure that takes us in whatever direction that we were going and the more that we go in that direction, the less likely we are to listen to anything contrary to that belief. What's the name for that fallacy? It's somebody knows the name. Confirmation bias. Thank you very much. Thank you. Motivated reasoning is the other name for it. So here's a bunch of stuff on confirmation bias and as I do, I put, oops, let's put this guy under here. So confirmation bias, a bunch of articles about it, et cetera, et cetera, absolutely agree. And my fear is that I love narratives. I'm collecting all this evidence. I would love to have somebody confront me with the kinds of confirmation bias I'm engaged in. It would be interesting to me, probably depressing, but very interesting to me. So Jerry, I was actually just thinking about that. I was looking at your point and saying, you have lots of things listed that are controversial, but there's nothing there that I would stand up and say, well, I don't believe that. And part of that reason is, is because I don't have enough information on it. And then I thought, well, in order to do that, I would have to go do the full research. And then I went, but wait, Jerry is probably fighting against confirmation bias with every single thing he puts in here. He's probably looking at more counter-examples than I would go look at. And therefore I'm better off trusting this than trying to go and counter-argument. And yes, and I'm trying really hard, but it's just me and the brain is not a great collaborative tool in inside Jerry's brain, in this thing we're sitting in right now, which we should wrap, I'm trying to create a community of practice that does this together so that these things are butt-trust better, explored better. And I'd love to explore them in the gentle sense of friendly inquiry that we've had here on the call. Like a lot. And so any and all hints, suggestions, topic ideas, method ideas, get yourself on the inside Jerry's brain conversational Google group, if you're not already, if you'd like to be part of this, because that's where I wanna have the ongoing conversation with these as our punctuations. If you go to insidejerriesbrain.com, you'll see a little link that says, get in the conversation, but this is the goal. That's kind of why I'm trying to do this exactly. So thank you, Marie. And we can never get enough information to feel completely sure, but we sure as hell can find the best thinking about these things and share it. And there's too much to go through individually. So if we can synthesize the best of what we've found and make those points to each other and then show where the arguments lie so that anybody can go pursue the different parts of it, I think that makes the collective inquiry much more powerful. So I think the next step in my thinking there was the place where that gets interesting is because we have such a high caliber selected group of folks during the discussion, where this group disagrees is where the interesting territory lies. Very likely, although is also likely a couple sigmas off where the public's disagreements are because we're not that representative. So there's a danger in that we become enamored with the places where we differ and focus a lot on that and ignore the places where the bulk of America is just genuinely split and having a really hard time. And I'm interested in doing things as excessively and comprehensively and broadly as possible. I'm interested in making things that are funny, things that are games. If we created a card deck that helps people sit down and have difficult conversations, and I think there is a difficult conversations card deck, certainly there are a couple of card decks for having a really interesting dinner party, like your great questions to put in front of people, but they're not tuned toward today's predicament. But things like that might be super interesting. Any last words before I sign us off the call? Yeah, I was looking at inside Jerry's brain and I'm not quite sure that I figured out how to get on the list. I had the same, I'm on the list to get mailings about calls and things, but whatever the group discussion was that Christie opted out of, I didn't see. No, the one you're on is the right one, because there's a Google group that you're on, which is the updates, which I'm using right now for, hey, here's the next couple of calls. It happens to be a conversational Google group. And so if any of you want to post to it, go for that. You're in the right place. So Gene, when you're on inside Jerry's brain, there we go, sorry. You know what, I buried it. If you go down below our most recent Zoom, just above the Patreon link, it says get notified of upcoming conversations, that link will get you in the conversation. That one, okay. So I need to bring that up higher. Sorry, I buried it. I just redesigned the page a bit and in doing so managed to hide how to join the conversation. Not smart. Any other thoughts? I really want to talk about emotional reasoning with the group. Just put it on the list. Why don't we, so there's a spreadsheet I'm maintaining with topics for future calls. Why don't I put it on that? And if you'd like, we can chat offline briefly about how to frame it or what you mean, and count me in. Yeah, what I mean by it is that, you know, it'd be sort of like, why is there emotion? How does emotion, how does emotional reasoning actually benefit animals, us? You know, and I think it's gonna play into our discussion about belief systems and some of the manipulation here. For sure. For sure. For sure. That was an understatement. And I'm just doing a quick brain share at the end because I have this thought in my brain, which I think you might nod your heads out a bit, but you know, it's under a decision. The other thing is that I think it's really dangerous if we, well, first of all, I don't know how to characterize Trump. I think he's actually crazy, and I actually mean that in a technical sense, okay. But I think it's dangerous for liberals, for progressives to focus too much on Trump. I think we're missing a whole, I mean, yes, you know, he is a terrible influence. You know, all these things about him, yes, yes, yes. But we need to look at the other things that are going on and not just invent a theory of a people or a small coterie causing this shift to the right. Look at some of the darkness in the left that is being very authoritarian too, and who thinks that they know exactly what's good for the population and wants to manipulate them for all the right reasons? You know, those are the voices that scare me on both sides. They're both dictatorships in the making. They both want to discard the experiences and the values of a lot of human beings on earth and prescribe for them. And it offends me in a bunch of ways. Anyone else with a closing thought? I think Kirstie's right. I think there's a lot of discomfort in humanity that's creating momentum and dangerous directions. And we would frame that, but that's a topic worthy of some deep diving. That sounds great. And for everybody, if you want to take something like that and frame it as a topic and a, you know, a pithy question with a paragraph of what you mean, that goes straight into becoming a call and we go around that. So, or just post your ruminations on it. How about this, can we refine it as a group? Happy to do all that. How often do you do these? Right this minute, kind of two a week, maybe three a week. I had a cold for the last week, so I didn't do as many. Next week, there's kind of two or three calls, book that I'm about to send out some announcements for. From conversations with different people about different topics that are of interest, so that's already going into next week. But I'd be happy, you know, I don't know if this, if I had another zero on my Patreon account, I would do this twice a day. Does that make sense? Yeah, I understand. Yeah, because I would love to be like justin.tv and be a live stream, actual live stream of thinking through these things, sorting them out, bringing people in and out of the conversation, posting it, and, you know, lather rinse, repeat. I would love to do that. So right now, it's experimental mode. These are just a couple a week. It can very easily scale up a bunch. So thank you all. This has been really, really fun. I completely love the conversation. Password to anybody who ought to be in our next ones, get them on the Inside Juries Brain List and we'll see you at the next call. And on the list, thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you.