Chris Williamson (4:12)

Well, you saw that with Luigi Mangione, right? That he had a manifesto. He was very empathetic toward people who'd been screwed over by healthcare services, people who'd had their healthcare denied and their claims that had been rebuked due to, you know, squirrely manipulation behind the scenes. And that resulted in him shooting a guy in the head.

Gwinda Bogle (4:34)

Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, yeah, so I sort of met Luigi in 2024 and he seemed like a really nice guy. You know, I can't say a single bad thing about him from our conversation. He really did seem like a genuinely nice person.

Chris Williamson (4:50)

You spoke to him for a couple of hours, right?

Gwinda Bogle (4:52)

Yeah, yeah, I had a two hour conversation with him because he was, you know, he was a big fan of my writing and so he became a founding member and then we ended up having a two hour video call. And yeah, he seemed like, he genuinely seemed like a really Nice guy. And I just, you know, did not have any idea that he was planning this. I don't know. I don't know if he was planning this at the time that I spoke to him, but. But I wasn't. I mean, although I was shocked, obviously, because when somebody, you know, is in the news for something like that, it's, of course it's going to be shocking. But at the same time, it didn't surprise me from an intellectual point of view. It didn't surprise me because I've. I've interacted with some extremely dangerous people. You know, early in my sort of writing career, I. I hung around with Al Mahjaroon, just try and find out who they are. And Alhamdul is the. The UK's deadliest jihadist organization. They've been responsible for quite a lot of terrorist attacks on UK soil. And I was sort of hanging out with these people for a while just to find out how their. Their minds work. And they were really, really friendly people. They were, because they thought I was Muslim because I speak the same language as them, and so I was able to pretend I was one of them. And they were really, really nice to me. You know, they would, you know, they would, like, if they were going to the shop, they would ask me if I wanted anything. They were just kind of like, really always concerned, you know, like, and stuff. And they barely knew me. And so, you know, I was kind of like, oh, this was a bit strange. But then I'd later learn that one of them went to Syria to become a bomb maker for isis. He blew his arm off. Another thing he did was actually before he did that, he. He stabbed a guy in the eye for apparently insulting the Prophet Muhammad. And then when he was on bail, he was able to skip. He was able to skip bail. He fled, he went to Syria, became a bomb maker, blew his arm off, and then he got killed in a strike. So, you know, this guy's name was Abu Raheen Aziz. He also used to go by the name Abu Al Burtani. And I think he was actually allowed to leave by MI6 so that they could track him and then blow him up. But that's a whole other story. But basically he was. He was somebody who was really nice.

Chris Williamson (7:00)

He was the sort of guy that would say, hey, do you want a grenade bar? I'm going to the. I'm going to the corner shop. Would you. Do you.

Gwinda Bogle (7:07)

Yeah.

Chris Williamson (7:08)

Do you want some. Some crisps or some chocolate or something?

Gwinda Bogle (7:11)

Yeah, I mean, they were just, you know, they were always looking out for each other and they had a lot of empathy for each other, you know, and for their fellow Muslims. They had a lot of empathy for them, but then they had no empathy for, for example, Jewish people. I witnessed a lot of anti Semitism when I was in. In Bury park in Luton, which is a just a Muslim sort of enclave. They were very, you know, they were very anti Semitic. They. They did. They dehumanized Jews and especially Israelis. But they had all the empathy in the world for Muslims. And, you know, you see this on the other side as well. You know, you see Israelis who have all the empathy in the world for Jews, but don't have any for the Palestinians. So it's, you know, this is not like just one side. This is a common human trait. You see this everywhere. You see it amongst the left, you see it amongst the right, you even see it among centrists. So, you know, when people say, oh, we need more empathy, I think, do we? You know, I think maybe the problem is, is that we have sort of selective empathy and we maybe need to sort of understand that everybody's a human being, not just the people that we empathize with.

Chris Williamson (8:14)

Yeah, less tribalism, not more empathy.

Gwinda Bogle (8:17)

Exactly.

Chris Williamson (8:18)

Interesting. Next one. Rumpelstiltskin effect. To name a problem is to tame it. Diagnosing one's suffering makes it feel more meaningful and thus manageable. Even if the diagnosis is wrong, major depressive disorder is easier to live with than anonymous sadness. This is one reason for the recent surge in diagnoses of disorders like depression, autism and adhd. And I pulled some data. Anxiety is now the most common mental health condition in the world. So Global Burden of Disease Study, 359 million people, that's 4.4% have an anxiety disorder, 332 million, that's 4% have depressive disorders, 37 million bipolar, 23 million, schizophrenia, and 16 million have eating disorders. So that's, I guess, bringing the Rumpelstiltskin effect into real life.

Gwinda Bogle (9:09)

Yeah. So the Rumpelstiltskin effect takes its name from the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin, which most people should be familiar with from their childhood. I vaguely remember it, but what I remember is that basically Rumpelstiltskin is an imp who steals a woman's baby, and in order to get it back, she has to find out his name. And then one day she hears him dancing around a fire, singing about how, you know, nobody knows his name because his name is Robert Rumpelstiltskin. So he's not very bright. But, you know, after she finds out, she has power over him. So it's the idea of when you name something, you have power over it. And there's a lot of. Kind of evidence of this because I've actually written about this in detail, actually. When you look at, for example, the ways in which people come to understand themselves, how they come to sort of understand their own identities, often through their ailments, and this can kind of bring them a kind of a sense that they're not in control of. Well, at least it gives them more of a sense of control over their problems. So, you know, for example, if you are. If you are shy, right, Then you might consider that your shyness is a personality defect. And this can be quite hard on people, right? So it can. It can compound the anxiety that you already feel from your shyness by. By making you believe that you're worthless or that you're, you know, that you're defected in some way because it's a personality trait that you can't really. You can't really grasp. You don't know why you're shy. You know, you don't know why. And so you're just kind of. You're stuck with it. But if somebody says to you, oh, no, no, no, you're not shy, you have social anxiety disorder, then suddenly you have something that you can direct all of your sort of your frustrations towards. You know, you have something concrete. Now you're like, oh, okay, so now you can come to understand a little bit more about yourself by learning more about social anxiety disorder. So it helps you to sort of come to terms with your problems. And there are many incentives why you would want to label yourself in such a way. I mean, one. One of the other incentives is that it kind of takes responsibility from yourself to something that you can't really do much about. So something like, you know, your neurochemistry or, you know, your genetics or something like that. So you're like, oh, okay, well, I can't do anything about it because this is social anxiety disorder, you know, but then at the same time, this can also prevent you from getting that thing treated, you know, because then you can kind of become quite resigned in a sense, I think, you know, with. With kind of labels like this. I think that they can be useful, right? But I think naming only helps if it leads to a tractable next step, you know, a real tangible next step. Because if the label replaces action, then it's just an excuse, right? And I think that's the problem that a lot of people are facing at the moment where they're using the label as an excuse rather than as a motivation for more action. Because if you have. Let's go back to the example of social anxiety disorder, but there's two ways to cope with labeling your problem as social anxiety disorder. You can either resign yourself and say, well, you know, this is a something biological or psychological that I can't really do anything about, so let's just not bother trying to fix it. That's one path. The other path is to say, oh, okay, so what are the causes of social anxiety disorder? What are the treatments for social anxiety disorder? And what's going to work best for me? Obviously, the latter is a much more healthier attitude. But I think that too many people, what they're doing is they're using the label as an excuse to prevent action. So it actually has the opposite effect. They never fix it. So while I'm not against labeling one's problems in such a way, I think that it should always serve to further action. It should be a step towards further action. If it's a step towards inaction, then it's just an excuse. Basically.

Chris Williamson (13:01)

I saw a clip of someone on some women's show talking about, maybe it was Oprah talking about how obesity is a disease and ozempic is the medicine to the disease. And you wouldn't tell somebody that has diabetes that they shouldn't take their insulin because they have a disease, and this is medicine for the disease. And it reminds me a little bit of concept creep, that idea that you taught me about probably four years ago, where over time, as racism goes down, numbers of racism, objective numbers of racism, which I know that you've done tons of research into this in your previous life. Objective racism goes down, but subjective racism goes up because the demand for racism outstrips its supply. And the only way that you can keep the volume of racism going so that people who comment on it have got something to talk about and campaign against is to broaden the definition of racism until it becomes so large that basically anything could be racism, or anything could be transphobia, or anything could be xenophobia, or anything could be. And the same thing goes for diseases, right? If you're diagnosing some issue, you had a passage from a book, maybe he was a clinical psychologist or something, and he was saying how many patients he'd ever seen in his entire career who'd come in and labeled themselves as just being sad with sadness. And it was three. Three patients across thousands had ever come in and said sadness Everybody else was depression or anxiety or schizophrenia or imposter syndrome or whatever. Even imposter syndrome. Right. The fear that other people expect a standard of you which you can no longer meet, that. I mean, there are a million different terms for. It could be uncertainty, it could be humility and humbleness. It could be low confidence, it could be low self esteem, it could be low self belief. But imposter syndrome, to put the word syndrome after something, and it's a cool term, and I think it's a useful term to name something, but the danger is of pathologization. And yeah, you're right. If you being able to put a name to imposter syndrome. And because of that, you go, I'm gonna learn a little bit about what the research says to do with imposter syndrome. Oh, well, actually, if I do some positive self appraisal and I journal a little bit and I have a gratitude practice, it seems that I can overcome my imposter syndrome. How wonderful. But if it is, oh, let's say we're in a different world that didn't have Ozempic. I have obesity. It's a disease. I can't lose weight. You have outsourced all of your agency now. So, yeah, you have used the naming of it as a roadblock to action as opposed to a GPS that can help you find how you should act.

Gwinda Bogle (16:00)

Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, so the passage that you're talking about is from Theodore Dalrymple, who's sort of like clinician come, sort of writer and. Yeah, he. He's sort of talked about this quite a bit. But I mean, medicalization is a real problem. It's. It's been a major problem since the 1970s. I think it's kind of like it's something that's sweeping across pretty much all sort of fields. And the reason is, is because it's kind of like the alignment of perverse incentives. So you have patients, right? Patients who want easy answers to their problems. So they are incentivized to pathologize. Then you have the medical industry, which is both financially and ideologically incentivized to sort of treat more and more things as medical problems for obvious reasons. You know, firstly they. They make money if they are treating more things, so they have a sort of incentive to sort of just creep. Creep their definitions outwards. And then they have ideological issues as well. And this is because obviously they are not looking for signs of health. They're looking for signs of disease. That's essentially what physicians do. Right. They don't look for signs of health, they look for signs of disease. And because of that there's a certain sense of confirmation bias where if you're looking for something, you will tend to find it. And so it's very easy if you have that kind of mindset, the mindset of a clinician or a doctor where you're looking for disease, to see it even if it's not there. And this is again, this has been shown throughout, throughout history. In the sort of, you know, in the 1980s there was the whole thing about multiple personality disorder. It's now known as dissociative identity disorder. And this was basically from like, you know, you can actually trace the development of this. What it is essentially like a kind of moral panic. I don't believe that multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder are real things. I think that they're actually fictions because I've actually looked at the history and it really began in sort of like the late 1970s where I think there was one case of somebody claiming to have multiple personalities. And this case went kind of viral as things might go viral in those days, which was through newspapers. And after this, suddenly loads of people started coming forward saying that they also had this issue. And what's interesting is that the number of alternate identities that people claim to have increased over time. So I think like Initially people average one alternative personality and then apparently by like the 1990s there was an average of about 17. It was absolutely ridiculous. Like just more people were just more and more, they're having more and more alternate identities, you know, and, and there's no real sort of like neurology behind it. It's just complete sort of nonsense. So you know, this, this to me is, is a very good example of this whole pathology, pathologization, sort of pandemic as I call it, where even. It's not just that definitions increase, but whole diseases can be invented out of nothing simply because people want to put a name on their discomfort.

Chris Williamson (19:12)

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Gwinda Bogle (20:32)

Yeah, so we're kind of living in a world now where I don't really see much stigma towards disabled people, at least not institutional stigma. I see a lot more benefits being given to people who claim to have disabilities. So in the example that I give, you know, if you look at universities, like elite universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale, they have like really high percentages of disabled students, or at least students who claim to be disabled. And when you look at why this is, you see it's pretty obvious. If you are, if you are registered as disabled with one of these universities, then you get extra time on exams. That's just one of the benefits you get. But you also get other benefits as well. But that's the main benefit, probably the most lucrative benefit. And so you get a lot of rich kids. It's weird because when you look at the people who are primarily claiming disability, it tends to be the rich kids, which is quite a, quite an odd sort of correlation, right? And, you know, and it seems to be because they are the ones who can pay doctors to essentially fabricate their disabilities, you know, so, yeah, so basically these kids now are getting extra time in exams because they're basically saying, oh, I have adhd, I'm on the spectrum, you know, you know, I have some problem, like I have constant pain in my, in my left leg. It could be anything, right? They'll just basically say something, you know, I'm dyslexic or whatever. And so what happens is, is that these kids basically get the extra time in the exams. And why this is bad, I mean, it's obviously bad for being dishonest. But it's extra bad because it essentially makes it harder for people with genuine disabilities to be believed, like when they have a disability. Because it is true that there are some people who have disabilities that are not obvious, that require a physician to actually do a check on them to find out. You know, I have an aunt, for example, who has osteoporosis. And it's not, it's not obvious watching her even walk that she has osteoporosis, but she, but she actually does have it because it's all, you know, she, from X rays you can see that her bones are basically crumbling. And so, you know, it's actually quite common where somebody can have a disability but it's not obvious. And so if you have like between 20% and 40% of everybody claiming to have a disability, then the people who actually have a disability get less attention. They're not believed as much, they're treated with skepticism. So not only do we, are we creating a victimhood culture, but we're also creating a cynical culture where the people who genuinely need help where we believed. So it's a pretty bad way. Yeah.

Chris Williamson (23:09)

Slopaganda. More online articles are now written by AI than by humans. And research is increasingly finding that AI is better at persuading people than people are. Who wins in a world of unlimited propaganda? Not those with the best arguments, but those with the most slop. This is similar to moloch's bargain. When LLMs compete for votes or social media likes, they push lies and rage bait to win, even when explicitly instructed to stay grounded and honest. If chatbots conclude that getting our attention requires lying to us, is the AI misaligned or are we?

Gwinda Bogle (23:43)

Yeah, so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about the kind of AI driven disinformation age where basically nothing will be, nobody will be able to know what's true and everybody's going to believe lies and all this kind of stuff. And I mean, yeah, that, that's probably part of it. I don't think it's like as, as serious as people are claiming. I don't think the actual, the serious part of this is that people are going to believe lies because people have always believed lies. You know, if you go back, you know, throughout any, any point in history, there were a lot of sort of consensus beliefs that were ultimately proved to be wrong. So I don't actually think that people believing falsehoods is necessarily a bad thing. I think most of what people believe, as opposed to what they know is is false anyway, right? I think that the bigger problem is not the dissolution of truth, but the dissolution of trust. I think that's far more important because a society can survive without truth pretty much most of the time. You know, as long as you have very basic truths, like knowing that gravity is a thing, for example, you know, as long as you have basic truths, society can survive. You don't need complex truths for society to survive. And history shows us that. It's demonstrated that beyond. Beyond reasonable doubt. But trust is a whole different ball game. A society can't survive without trust because pretty much everything depends on being able to trust other people in society. If you can't, you know, if you can't trust other people, then you don't have a society. It's like literally the glue that binds a society together. And what, what I think is a problem is not that people will believe falsehoods. I think the problem is that the cost of determining what's actually true is going to become so high, it's going to require so much effort, that people are essentially going to give up really valuing truth as a principle.

Chris Williamson (25:34)

This is one of my favorites from you, Reality apathy. When the sheer volume of conflicting information makes the effort of finding the truth costlier than the value of knowing it. People give up trying to be accurate and instead choose whatever bullshit stinks least. Slop doesn't just threaten the truth, but the very worth of truth. And it's this. This sort of overwhelm. The goal of propaganda isn't to make you believe any one narrative. Sometimes it's simply to make you more pliable at not wanting to believe anything. So I just. I'm. Earlier on today, in one of the old group chats from the guys that used to work for me in Newcastle, one of the guys said, is anybody else's algorithm getting peppered with all of this Epstein stuff at the moment? These are blue collar dudes from the northeast of the uk. Maybe they're working in London or something. This is not. Epstein is not supposed to sort of cross their threshold. And it's obviously hit a limit at a volume where they think, holy shit. Like, this is so much Epstein stuff I've just seen. I'm now convinced that he's playing Fortnite in fucking Israel. I don't know what to believe anymore. That's literally reality apathy. And it was so funny to see that message come in and think that this is the overwhelm of information and conflicting points of view going in opposite directions, literally happening in front of my eyes.

Gwinda Bogle (26:55)

Yeah. And I think one of the challenges going forward is going to be trying to convince people that it's actually worth pursuing the truth. I think more than actually convincing them of anything, any particular truth, just convincing them of the value of truth is going to be extremely important because we're essentially entering a world of virtual reality. You know, you can essentially create your own reality now. You can do it both figuratively through social media echo chambers, but you can also do it literally by essentially just sequestering yourself in your bedroom and living your entire life through your, you know, your headset or your laptop screen or whatever, and just using AI to just generate whatever you want, whatever, you know, reality you want. This is not far away. I mean, you know, there's recently been. I think it's Sea Dance, this new Chinese sort of video generation tool, which is just insane. Sea Dance? Yeah, I think it's called Sea Dance. Yeah.

Chris Williamson (27:53)

Is that like Sora?

Gwinda Bogle (27:54)

It's Chinese Sora, Much, much, much better than Sora. It's like a whole generation ahead of sora, ahead of VO3, ahead of all the best frontier models in the West. This is something completely wild. I think China has got an edge in video generation because they don't have copyright laws, or at least they don't really care about copyright very much. Whereas the west has an advantage in text based generative AI because they don't have censorship laws. So, you know, there's this trade off.

Chris Williamson (28:23)

Whichever market, whichever market has the poorest protections will get the most progress.

Gwinda Bogle (28:28)

Yeah, basically. Yeah. Because that seems to me to be the bottleneck.

Chris Williamson (28:31)

Oh, funny. Yeah. So you can make. Oh, is that. Who made. I saw a pretty famous Dragon ball Z recreation 3D. Have you seen this? Is that made from that? Yeah, okay, I know exactly what you mean. And I saw it last night and I remember thinking, fucking hell, that's really good. And they're still trying to use cel shading to make it. It's not supposed to look like people. It's supposed to look like cartoon people, but it's in 3D and it's. I mean, it's significantly better than Dragon Ball Z from a design standpoint. So. Yeah, I wondered what that was. Is that Sora? That seems really good. Is that fucking nano banana 5? What the fuck is going on? But it was this new thing that you're talking about.

Gwinda Bogle (29:13)

Yeah, I think it's from ByteDance, which is the company that created TikTok and Capcut. Yeah, basically Capcut and all the rest of that stuff. Yeah. But it's wild. So we're basically entering this kind of virtual reality age where people can essentially create their own reality, you know, whatever they want to believe, they can make it at least seem true enough by curating, you know, curating information online. So yeah, we need to teach people to actually value truth as a species if we want to actually progress.

Chris Williamson (29:43)

What was that line around Dead Internet theory? People being worried that all of the content on the Internet is just going to be made by robots, were worried about the fact that unthinking replicative automatons are going to be producing most of the information that we see online. The future that we fear will come to pass has already come to pass because most people blindly just repost what they see. In any case, like we're worried about the fact that these disembodied fucking AIs are posting stuff. Meanwhile, someone that doesn't read an article or watch a video outside of the first 15 seconds decides to spew their half baked opinion, which isn't theirs. You know, they're being marionetted by the few original thinkers that came before them and are now just saying the nearest close, what was it the new hill to die on that they've just decided, they plant this flag in like this five minute old opinion. Is that the new thing that they're going to wrap their entire identity around? You're already doing? The Dead Internet theory has been here since social media was here. People were unthinking in the way that they reposted and commented on stuff. They weren't being subtle and nuanced. And now all that you're worried about, it's this. It's the exact same as people being worried about self driving cars that are significantly safer than humans are. But they've got a combination of naturalistic fallacy and some weird preference that they'd rather die by a human driver than be saved by a robot. And it's kind of the same, well, you know, I'd rather be lied to by an unthinking human idiot than convinced by an unthinking robot super genius.

Gwinda Bogle (31:34)

Yeah, I mean, few people are willing to admit the similarities between humans and chatbots. You know, like there's a lot of people saying, oh, you know, well, you know, these chatbots aren't intelligent, they're just predicting the next token. But then you consider, you know, what are humans doing? You know, a lot of the time they're just predicting the next token too. They're just, you know, they're just regurgitating, you know, what they've heard and kind of just developing explanations about the world based on that. You know, going by vibes is probably how people would describe it today. So, you know, I think, yeah, one of the good things about sort of the whole AI age is it's really allowed us to understand that a lot of what we thought were unique to humans are actually just basic algorithms. You know, just ways that we organize information, the way that we generate beliefs. A lot of it is, you know, people don't really understand what they're saying. They're just kind of regurgitating what they heard. And that is essentially what a chatbot does in a sense. And so it helps us to really understand how automated so much of our belief formation is. It's why we need to, you know, have more agency. And actually, if we want to be indistinguishable, if we want to be distinguishable from chatbots, then we need to actually sort of, we need to strengthen the one thing that we have that, that chatbots can't replace, and that's agency to the ability to actually act independently and to actually think about what you're doing rather than simply reacting to your circumstances.

Chris Williamson (33:00)

1% rule in online communities, around 1% of users produce almost all of the content. As such, what you see online is not representative of humanity, but merely a loud, obsessive, and often narcissistic, psychopathic and low IQ minority. Social media is literally a freak show. And consuming only content that reinforces your views is intellectual incest producing beliefs that are increasingly frail and deformed.

Gwinda Bogle (33:26)

Yeah, so, you know, when I go online on social media, I often can sometimes. Well, I sometimes feel disheartened. You know, it can, I think we've, we've discussed this before where, you know, you go on social media and you just see just loads of just crap on your timeline and just the most ill informed opinions and, you know, people getting outraged over just nonsense and it kind of can like destroy your faith in, in the human race. You know, I think Sam Harris, I think the reason why he left Twitter, I think he did describe it that way. He said that, you know, when he was on social media, it made him hate humanity, you know, and I can sympathize with that.

Chris Williamson (34:03)

He referred to it as the most pathological type of telepathy you can imagine, where all he could hear were the worst of everybody else's thoughts.

Gwinda Bogle (34:12)

Yeah. And you know, and sometimes, you know, it can sort of just really dishearten you. I have a few friends who, you know, on social media, and they, they sometimes have long breaks because it just completely just, just really demoralizes them when they think, oh, this is what humanity is. You know, all this noise, like all this completely irrational noise just being thrown out everywhere. But I think it's always helpful to remember that what you're seeing online is not actually representative of humanity. It's representative of the loudest and often the most obnoxious humans on the planet. And there's a lot of research to support this. You know, there's pretty consistent findings which, which find that people who are high in, in certain dark tetrad traits, particularly in narcissism and psychopathy, tend to use social media more. But also they tend to engage in online political participation a lot more as well. They tend to engage in, in sort of online debates and things like that. A lot more. And then you also have people who are essentially cluster B, you know, people who are really dramatic. Again, narcissism comes up here also histrionic personality disorder. Naturally, you know, the people that are.

Chris Williamson (35:20)

Histrionic personality disorder.

Gwinda Bogle (35:23)

So histrionic is basically when you're a drama queen, basically it's when you, you're attract, you know, you just want to draw attention to yourself by playing the victim or by, you know, just catastrophizing, just making out like everything's worse than it actually is. Just a three theatrical behavior basically. And so you naturally, this is a good fit for social media, this kind of behavior, you know, because obviously if you want an audience and if you want to play theatrics, where else would you want to go than a place where everybody else is freaking out and everybody's looking to be freaked out? You know. So obviously social media attracts the absolute worst of the human race. It attracts the most impulsive, the most theatrical, the most narcissistic, the most psychopathic, the most low iq. You know, these are the, you know, often the worst people. Not saying that there aren't good people on social media, of course there are. But when you look at it from a statistical point of view, you have overrepresentation of the worst elements of humankind.

Chris Williamson (36:17)

I also imagine even if you have somebody who is compassionate and well meaning and delicate and, and, and thoughtful and high iq, they're operating in an environment where they regress to the mean. And the mean is mean, oddly enough. I had one. So for the people that haven't heard us do this before, most of the stuff is me shamelessly shilling Gwinda's stuff and then he says it back to me. But Sometimes I bring stuff from home and I've got some that I brought from home. So this one's kind of related, recursive, red pill learning. Most people get their information from the Internet. The stories online which garner the most attention are the most extreme, meaning that influencers unrepresentative insights are being trained on other influencers unrepresentative insights leading to self reinforcing antagonism between the sexes. And this came out of a quote that I saw online, which is having a boyfriend is embarrassing now, which was that Variety article that came out about six months ago has the same energy as the Kardashians, made skinny go out of style in that neither is true if you just go outside. So this the loudest stories, the biggest stories, the ones with the most upvotes on Reddit by definition are the ones that are the most attention grabbing, which means that they're the most extreme or unrepresentative. And that means if you spend most of your time learning about the world through the Internet, what you see is the least representative presentation of what reality is like over and over again. And it just retrains you to expect that as normality.

Gwinda Bogle (37:42)

Yeah, and I've seen this play out in real time because I've been on social media since around 2014 and in that time, you know, I've stuck with pretty much the same group of sort of mutuals mostly. And I've actually witnessed an interesting pattern which is that the people who spend the most time online have become more unhinged and more extreme in their beliefs. This is something I've personally witnessed. I know that this is n equals 1, but it's more compelling to me than studies because it's something I've literally witnessed happen in real time. And I think this is, it's probably, I mean, this is also supported by research as well. Some of these. You know, I wrote this article called Dramageddon about people talking about a civil war. And this talk has been going on since around 2021, like really serious talk. People like Elon Musk have like, you know, sort of promoted this idea that there's going to be a civil war between the left and the right in the US and some people have said, you know, it will probably happen in Europe as well, but it's mainly, it seems to be much more in the US because the US is a lot more politically polarized than Europe is in general. And basically this idea is that a lot of these people think there's going to be a civil war for precisely the reasons that you gave, which is that what we see is that what goes most viral are the so called scissor statements, what Scott Alexander called scissor statements, which are statements that are deliberately designed to create debates, create arguments, basically like, and this is, you know, this is, this is one of the reasons why the media now, what they seek to do is they don't seek to just tell you things that are true, they seek to actually create statements or news reports that will divide people. Because when they do that, the two sides will argue over that issue and in so doing they will help that thing go viral. So for example, if you are, you know, if you're the New York Times and you want to go viral, how do you go viral? You're not going to go viral by telling the truth. If you just state facts like, you know, about some sort of reporting, you're not really going to go viral most of the time. But what will go viral is if you make a divisive claim, something that's going to split the Internet into two. So something like, oh, you know, white people are privileged, are too privileged. You know, if you say something like that, that's going to divide the Internet in half. You'll have half the people be like, yeah, you know, oh, you know, white people are too privileged, you know, we need to do something about it. And then you have the other half people say, no, no, no, no, this is all nonsense. You know, this is based on, you know, false studies, bad studies, all this stuff, you know, and so then they'll argue over it. And in arguing over it, they're going to make it go viral because then it's going to appear on everybody's timeline and then people are going to be writing substack about it, they're going to be making videos about it, you know, and so this all helps the original claim to go viral. And so this is the sort of tragic system in which we're in, in which just stating true things does not go viral. But, but dividing people, saying things that are going to divide people does. And this is why I think so many people still believe that there's going to be a civil war in the US Even though there's just. When you look at reality, there's just no inkling of this whatsoever. You know, the polarization does exist, but the polarization exists amongst the top like 1% of people on social media who are most engaged in politics. It doesn't really exist very much in the wider world, you know, so yeah,

Chris Williamson (41:05)

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Gwinda Bogle (42:30)

Yeah. So I mean, you know, we've been told again, this is another sort of error that the sort of social sciences have for a long time propagated, which is that, you know, if somebody's exposed to stress, then it's bad for their health. You know, it can cause trauma or whatever, you know that horrible word. But I mean when you actually look at the, not just the data, but when you just look at pretty much all of human history, right, it's clear that stress can be very beneficial. Not all stress, right. It that there's a certain kind of stress and that's called eustress. And so, you know, eustress is basically the stress that challenges you, that basically forces you to adjust, that forces you to improve basically. It's not like the stress of, you know, being online and being constantly exposed to just, you know, horrific news from around the world. That's bad stress because you can't really do anything about that, right. If you're you know, if you're, if you're stressed because your feed is filled with horrific, you know, news stories from around the world, that's just bad stress. It's just going to stress you out. You can't do anything about it. So you. It's pointless. It's pointless stress. It's pointless suffering. Good stress is when you can do something about it. So it's the, it's stuff like, you know, if you've got, if you've got a date, for example, right? If you have a date with a girl, that's stressful. Because now you've got to be your best. You've got to be the best version of you, you know, you've got to. You've got to impress that girl. So you're under a lot of stress, right? But that forces you to become better. It's a challenge and you have to meet it. And what happens is that in so trying to meet that challenge, you become a better person. It helps you both at a psychological level but also at a physiological level. It's hormetic stress. So hormetic stress is stress that sort of makes you adapt, basically. It makes your body adapt to it. And constant stress of that kind is really, really good for you. And the research is very clear on this. But also ordinary human experience is clear on this as well. Anybody who's lived on this earth knows that you need a little bit of stress now and again just to sort of, you know, push you forward and get things going. And so this whole thing that we've been told by a lot of people, which is that, you know, we need to minimize stress because then we'll live longer or whatever. That's actually, it's not really true. It's half true. You know, bad stress is bad for you. It will reduce your lifespan probably, you know, but we need to constantly expose ourselves to discomfort if we want to be able to be happy. Because happiness is dependent on having a resilient mind. You cannot be happy unless you have a strong mind because you have to be able to weather all the slings and arrows and the vicissitudes of life. Like they will be constantly throwing things at you. Life will constantly be, you know, knocking you astray from your course. It will constantly be throwing, you know, just a lot of unexpected things are going to be happening. If you're only happy when things are going your way, you're not going to be happy most of the time. And so you have to cultivate the strength. And that's essentially comes from Exposing yourself to stress, the more stress of that. Not, not stress, but you stress. The more you stress you. You expose yourself to, the more resilient your mind becomes and the more you are able to stay happy no matter what life throws at you.

Chris Williamson (45:54)

What about automate? Only the skills you're willing to lose?

Gwinda Bogle (45:57)

Yeah. So this is basically the same principle. So stress is also a form of learning. It's how you learn. Right. You know, I always say that, you know, you know, you can rent wisdom, but you can only purchase it with pain. Right. So what I mean by that is, you know, you could tell me something, you could give me some modern wisdom, right? And I will be like, oh, okay, yeah, that's a really cool way of living. You know, maybe I should do that and I'll try it a couple of days and then I'll forget it exists and I'll just carry on with my life as it was. But if I learn that same lesson through hardship, if I suffer, if I, if I'm exposed to stress and I have to adopt that out of necessity, then it becomes integrated into me and then it becomes a habit. It's something that will always remit, I'll always remember because it, you know, the sort of. The pain engraved the lesson into my brain. And so stress can also be a form of learning. And one of the things with automating things is it completely reduces the friction, it reduces the stress. You no longer need to engage in any kind of discomfort because you just get things done automatically for you. And so you don't learn as a result of that, because the pain, the stress, is a necessary component of the learning. You're not going to remember the lesson unless you really suffer or expose yourself to some kind of stress that forces your body to internalize the lesson.

Chris Williamson (47:22)

Have you looked at that research, Maybe Harvard, maybe MIT, about students that use LLMs to help them with learning and writing and the differential in terms of how much they can recall afterward?

Gwinda Bogle (47:38)

Yeah, yeah, I recall this study. Yeah, I think so. This is basically. Has found that essentially LLMs can cause brain rot. Basically. I think that was like the one of the sort of clickbait titles that was given to the study that LLMs cause brain rot. So, yeah, I mean, it's the same principle, basically. Like, when you are, you know, outsourcing your abilities to an LLM, there's no incentive for your, your body or your brain to learn the lessons. Right. You know, you're just kind of. Because it's like what Plato said, you know, in Phaedrus where he was talking about his. One of his sort of concerns was he was writing at a time when, when sort of paper and pen or parchment and pen were becoming common. So this was the AI of his age. And he lamented that paper was gonna, or parchment was gonna destroy people's memory because if they could write things down, then they would have no incentive to remember it. And I mean, I don't know how true that is, but I think that there is a certain sort of analog with what we're seeing today, which is, you know, there's a thing called the Google effect. Now, this is, it's not a robust finding, but I think that it, it, it's, I think the finding does exist. I think the finding's true, but it's probably smaller than it, it's probably overstated. But the, the Google effect is this idea that, you know, if you can just kind of Google anything, then there's no need for you to remember facts, basically because you can. Your, your mind has essentially been extended to your screen, so that's now functioning as your memory. Your laptop screen, your phone screen is your, is basically your memory now. So your, your actual memory doesn't really feel the need, as it were, to kind of remember anything. So, I mean, you know, again, the research on this is a bit shaky. I don't want to say that this is a genuine new thing because it's contradicted by some of the studies, but some studies have found that this is, this is the case. So I don't know with this ChatGPT thing if it really does cause brain rot in the same sense, because it's only one study. And I'm very, very sort of wary of single studies now because of, of course we've got a replication crisis. A lot of studies are not replicating now. So. But what I will say is one thing that we know for sure is if you don't use it, you lose it. This is a, this is a, a fact that's beyond dispute. It's true of your body, it's true of your brain, right? If you, you know, there's recent research which only came out, I think yesterday, which found that people who are, whose brains are active in, in late life, so from the ages of 50 to 80, they have a much, they're much less likely to develop Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. So if, you know, if you basically engage in things like video games, board games like chess, if you write and read a lot, if you keep your brain active in your sort of 50s then your chances of developing dementia are much lower, apparently. And this is apparently like a pretty robust longitudinal study. And again, this fits. This is not just an isolated study. This fits with all the other research that has been done on this topic. The more actively you use your brain, the stronger your brain becomes. You know, although it's not technically a muscle, it functions like a muscle in that respect. And so I mean, one of, one of my big fears about AI is not that the machine is going to go conscious, it's going to become conscious, it's that it's actually going to steal our consciousness away from us by essentially just causing us to outsource all of our agency, our intelligence, you know, to it and causing our own brains to atrophy.

Chris Williamson (51:18)

So I think I had a conversation with Cal Newport, deep workman last week about a lot of this. Obviously his whole thing for 15 years now since he wrote so Good They Can't Ignore youe was how can you stand out in a field of relative equals. But I think his perspective, certainly my perspective now, is that the, the field is getting worse and worse. The bar that you need to get over is becoming ever lower, you know, in order for you to get a partner. At the moment, simply approaching somebody in person in the real world is a one in a thousand chance, as opposed to 50 years ago. That would be something that everybody was doing. And the same thing goes for what's the quality of your writing? Well, what AI is enabling is velocity and quantity, but it's regressing to the mean with regards to quality and creativity and taste especially. So if you can cultivate creativity, quality work writing and good sense of taste, you are going to stand out even more. And you don't even need to cultivate it, you simply need to stop it from atrophying. If you can hold your level, if you can hold 2016 levels of focus and ability to write and overcome stuff, I mean, if there's somebody out there who's got sort of 2008 levels of non distraction before slack and before smartphones, you didn't. You don't need to be better, you just need to not be worse. And that ability to kind of hold as the entropy, this sort of technological entropy of the system is trying to fucking compress you into dust. That to me kind of is hopeful. It's a hope inspired as a civilization gets fatter. Not great for the civilization. I think that it should be good that everyone's in health, but it does make for a pretty uncompetitive environment if you are someone that is able to avoid getting fatter, that's good for you inasmuch as civilization and the people around you are kind of a bit of a competition, which they are. The same thing goes for being able to read now. How long is it going to be before if we neuralink in we don't actually need to have the written word anymore, we don't need to have the spoken word anymore, and that all of these skills that'll atrophy eventually you may get into a world where that's so redundant that you don't actually want it, that there's better ways. But at the moment we're in a transition period where you still need to be able to have the skills from the old world in order to have a competitive advantage in the new one. So, yeah, I'm increasingly thinking now about what are the things that are non fungible, what are the things that are only human? What are the things? And that's really where most of my attention should be focused on writing without using AI to help me with my research, on coming up with ideas, on developing taste, on trying to be creative, on giving myself space. Because as all of the market moves in the direction of, well, I can just publish more, if I publish more slop, because I've been enabled by the magnifier, that is LLMs, that is where the entirety of the market will move because it's the path of least resistance. Okay, well, what's the opposite of that? What's the more difficult choice?

Gwinda Bogle (54:42)

Yeah, the secret, I think, to surviving the future is going to be agency. Because as I said before, that is the one truly non fungible thing. I think everything else is downstream of agency. I think what's going to happen in the sort of AI age is that essentially humanity is going to split in two. And I think I've made a reference to this before. I think we had a conversation in 2021 in which I spoke about this. But basically the analog I use is a novel called the Time Machine, which was written, I think at the start of the 20th century. And it was basically the story of. In the far future, humanity has sort of evolved, evolved into two subspecies. So you've got the Morlocks and the Eloi and the Morlocks, basically they do all the work. They've maintained like all their faculties because they have lived lives of drudgery and they've passed this on down to their generation, from generation to generation. And they're in charge of all of the machinery, basically. And they, you know, they're constantly working and constantly improving themselves mentally and physically. And then you have the Eloi, who are basically, they were the former aristocrats. They were the ones who had everything done for them. And as a result of this, they have all of their faculties have atrophied so that their bodies are, like, really thin and frail. Their minds. They've become very naive. They're like. They're basically like children. They've regressed into children. And they're completely dependent on the Morlocks who do everything for them. And in the end, basically, it turns out that the Morlocks have been farming the Eloy in order to eat them, basically, you know, and while they're doing this, they're just distracting the Eloi with all this, like, entertainment, all, you know, basically just to keep them placid. And I think that essentially we're going to have something probably not as horrific as that, but something similar in the sense that we'll have a class system, a new class system where we'll have high agency people whose agency is going to be increased even more by AI. And then we'll have passive people whose passivity will be increased even more by AI. Because AI, the way I look at it, I don't look at it as artificial intelligence. I look at it as amplified intelligence. But as I say, you know, it can also amplify stupidity. It amplifies, essentially. It's an amplifier of everything. So if you're lazy, it will amplify your laziness. If you are highly agentic and conscientious, it will amplify those fact. Those attributes as well. So what's going to happen is the people who already have agency, they're going to use AI to increase their options. They're going to use it, you know, they're going to basically use it to do more. So they're going to become even more agentic. And the people who lack agency, they're going to use it to do things for them. They're going to use AI to think for them, to basically outsource everything to them. So they're going to get even less agency. So what we're going to see is the compounding of both agency and its opposite, which is why I think there's going to be this bifurcation of people who are high agency and low agency. We're going to have extremely high agency people and extremely low agency people who will probably be the majority of humans in the future. Quite a scary prospect.

Chris Williamson (57:37)

This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. You Want to look and feel good when you're in the gym. And gymshark makes the best men's and girls gym wear on the planet. Let's face it, the more that you like your gym kit, the more likely you are to train. Their hybrid training shorts for men are the best men's shorts on the planet. Their crest hoodie and light gray marl is what I fly in every single time I'm on a plane. The Geo seamless T shirt is a staple in the gym for me. Basically everything they make. It's unbelievably well fitted, high quality, it's cheap. You get 30 days of free returns, global shipping and a 10% discount site wide. If you go to the link in the description below or head to Jim Sh. ModernWisdom. Use the code ModernWisdom10 at checkout. That's Jim ShModernWisdom and ModernWisdom10 at checkout. All right, next one from me, the personal Tocqueville Paradox. You will always think you suck. That's good. It's okay to suck compared to your standards. As you grow, so will your standards. It doesn't mean that you actually suck. This is similar to the Matthew Principle of self improvement. There's two types of people. Those who don't know how to improve their lives and those who don't know when to stop. But that personal Tocqueville paradox thing of I have standards, those standards continue to rise as my capacity rises. And now the standards always outstrip where I think my capacity is at. Well, if you didn't, you would never get any better. And it's kind of like hedonic adaptation, but for your skill set, like a habituation to what your performance level is. And the Tocqueville Paradox, which I learned from you. As living standards in a society rise, people's expectations of those standards grow more quickly than the standards can deliver them to it. So this is why, given that, you know, Louis xiv, we have technology and a quality of life that he could not believe. And yet we feel like quality of life is the worst that it could be. Despite all of the material comforts and safety and medicine and access to the Internet and air conditioning and fresh water and stuff that we've got. And I think the same thing happens with regards to personal growth as well. You just continue to outstrip your own standards over and over again with where you want to be.

Gwinda Bogle (59:50)

Yeah, absolutely. I. I always think of regret as a sign of progress. You know, a lot of people think regret is a bad thing. I don't. I actually think regret's a good thing because what it shows is that you've grown basically. Because if you're looking back and you're seeing an idiot in the past, then that's a sign that you have grown as a person. You know, you, you basically, you have, you have new standards of behavior that you had when you did, when you committed whatever act you are regretting. And so I think, you know, it's all, I think so many of these kinds of problems are really just base rate fallacies. You need to understand that your own standards have risen. And that's why when you look back and you think, oh, okay, you know, this, this person wasn't the person that I wanted to be. That's because you, you are now a new person. You wouldn't be able to do that if you were the same person in a sense. And again, you know, like, yeah, our sort of expectations for what is, is good do always increase as we improve. And we have to, we have to manage that. We have to always account for that because if we don't, we're essentially living in some sort of weird kind of on, on some treadmill, basically. You know, we're basically on a head. On a treadmill. The way that I like to look at things is to try to look at objective metrics rather than, you know, whether I'm, you know, using subjective metrics. Because subjective metrics are always moving around. They're always, you know, they're always, they're very malleable. And on a bad day, you might have certain expectations, and then on a good day, you have different ones. So I think looking at objective metrics are always much, much better. So, for example, if you want to look at, you know, they could be really shallow ones. Like if, you know, as a writer, if you're a writer like me, it would be like, how many likes do I get on my substack post? You know, or it could be something a bit more sort of in depth. Like, you know, looking at, like, where, you know, who, who likes the, the piece, you know, is it, is it just like sycophants who like your article or is it actually other people do, people that you normally disagree with politically, are they liking your writing? Because if they do, then that's, that's a sign that you've really written something good, you know, so there's many metrics you can use. And again, you know, if you're, if you're using subjective metrics, it's like trying to navigate by the light of a shooting star, you know, it's just you're going to be all over the place. So you have to have fixed points, you have to fix things that you are aiming for and that's way. That way you can objectively measure where you're going. You know, then your own standards are not really going to matter too much because you've got objective metrics fix in place.

Chris Williamson (62:23)

Rothbard's Law. If a talent comes naturally to someone, they assume it's nothing special and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them. As a result, people often specialize in things that they're bad at.

Gwinda Bogle (62:35)

We've spoken about this one before. This was on, on the last, on the last episode we did. I think this was.

Chris Williamson (62:40)

It just relates to these two so much, I think. Yeah, so it's so good. I have a friend, I think I told this story last time, Ryan Long, wonderful at doing comedy sketches and just so fantastic. But because that comes easily to him, he's decided that other art forms are more elevated because we're sort of blinded to the. There is this natural assumption that if something is worthwhile, it's going to be difficult and that. I wrote this essay a couple of months ago about the difference between inputs, outputs and outcomes. So inputs is sort of time spent, outputs is work done and outcomes is real world results. And people love to focus on the first two, not the third one, because you never have to ask the question of effectiveness. But this, the Rothbard's Law thing actually plays a role in this too, because the outcome focused assessment of your own work gets it forces you to look at your assumptions and maybe go, oh, actually I have a natural talent at something. And this sort of strange pattern whereby I assume that I'm not supposed to achieve things without sweat and pain and discomfort and agony, maybe that's wrong. Maybe that isn't something that I should try and build my entire worldview around.

Gwinda Bogle (64:06)

Yeah, absolutely. But I think one of the problems, and that's sort of highlighted by Rothbard's Law is that often really the issue is that we just never try in the first place to do something that we're good at because we assume by default that we're, you know, it's just basically a pretty easy thing that anybody could do. Right? So what I would say is to overcome that is to just do what you love. Right. I know it sounds a bit corny, right? But ultimately I found that that is the best heuristic for you when you want to try and work out what you're what you want to do, do what you love. And the reason for that is because you, Even if you're not good at it, the fact that you enjoy doing it shows that you will be motivated to do it. You'll be motivated to get better at it, you know, and obviously, because our brains are neuroplastic, if you keep doing something, you will get better at it, you know? And so I think, you know, even, like, I would rather do something that I'm bad at, but which I enjoy, than do something that I'm good at, but which I don't enjoy. Because you've got to bear in mind you're going to do this for the rest of your life, right? This is going to be your life. Like, this is going to be the thing that essentially you get out of bed for each morning. So if you're. If you're getting out of bed and you're like, oh, I've got to do this, you know, that's not a life, because you're going to be that. Most of your life is going to be that. But if you're getting out of bed and you're like, all right, okay, I've got a hard challenge. You know, this is a really hard challenge. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm loving the fact that I get to tackle it. That's how you want to live, because then your fun is going to be the motivation, and that is going to ensure that you will get better at that thing. And so I think that's really the way around Rothbard's Law, just to do what you enjoy, forget what you're good at. It doesn't matter if you're young enough or if you're, you know, if you're young enough in spirit even. You don't even have to be physically young enough. You know, you keep doing something, and if you're determined, if you really enjoy it, you will get better at it.

Chris Williamson (65:56)

There's a. An interesting challenge, I think, that people face with believing that their accomplishments are as big as they are. You know, there's certainly some people out there who are bpd, narcissist, full of ego, whatever. I think so many people, especially in the modern world, are just chronically uncertain. Am I okay? Is what I'm doing good? How much more do I need to be until I can rest? I always think about that scene from Endgame where Thanos has done the snap and he's got this cabin on a planet that overlooks a lake and he comes and he puts his helmet down. And then he sits in this seat. He sits down in this sort of rocking chair and he makes this noise. And it's kind of like satisfaction, but it's much more like exhaustion. And I often think about this assumption that at some point there will come a time. The provisional life, or deferred happiness syndrome, or the arrival fallacy, this sense that at some point. But there's a personal growth version of this, too. There's a personal growth version of at some point I will have done the growing and the learning and I will be able to rest. Well, I. I don't think that you're ever going to stop learning and growing. And I think that you would probably not enjoy your life if you were to do that. But also what that means is you need to enjoy some of whatever it is that you want to do now, because it will just be this. It is just going to be this conveyor belt up until the end of time.

Gwinda Bogle (67:24)

Yeah. So Naval Ravikant has a brilliant quote about this, which is, if you can't be happy with a coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht, basically. And it's just a really great sort of quote because it sums up pretty much everything you've been describing, which is, you know, people are always looking for this moment where everything is going to be perfect. You know, they're always chasing this. This idealized version of reality where they will have attained all the skills that they want to, they will have gotten all the things that they want to, and then they will finally be happy. But ultimately, as you know, as we spoke of before, real happiness ultimately comes from the resilience of your mind. If you can find happiness in just something as simple as a coffee, then that is enough, right? Then that means you will be happy later on when you have even more. Right? Then there needs to be this kind of baseline that you are willing to be happy at, right? So you need to be happy even if you have nothing. Because if you're tying your happiness to something, everything is transient, everything can be broken, everything can be destroyed in this world. And if you tie your happiness to that thing and that thing gets destroyed, you're going to lose your whole purpose of existence. So the only thing, the only thing that is going to survive all of the slings and arrows of life is to tie your happiness to just the basic fact of existence, just the fact that you are alive and you get to live what is essentially such an improbable life. You know, there's A crazy sort of statistic which is that if you look at genetically the number of people that could have been born, you know, the chances of you being born are like one in N, where N is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Right? So it's extraordinarily, like, improbable for us to even be here right now talking. And, you know, this is assuming that we were essentially selected randomly from. From the sort of genetic lottery. But, like, you know, it's so improbable that we're even here. So I try to find happiness in the most basic things, like, because then if you can do that, then everything else that you get is just going to be a bonus, right? But if you tie your happiness to something that you haven't yet achieved, then your entire life's journey up until that point is going to be miserable. And then you can't even be sure that when you attain that thing, it's going to be. It's actually going to be as good as you thought it was. Because often we inflate our hopes and dreams beyond reality. So what we think is going to make us happy when we finally get it, it doesn't actually make us happy. And this has happened to pretty much everybody. Everybody will recognize this. So you've got to. I think if you want to be happy, you've got to be happy no matter what the external world is like. You know, you have to cultivate internal happiness. You have to have that happiness with a coffee, and then you'll be happy with a yacht.

Chris Williamson (70:16)

Original position fallacy. Far leftists favor planned economies because they imagine themselves as the planners, not the planned. Far rightists favor a return to feudalism because they imagine themselves as the lords, not the peasants. Many delusional worldviews stem from Main Character Syndrome, and I had this from three or four years ago. One of our first episodes, the Alpha History Fantasy. Modern men who are angry at a world they feel has rejected them mistakenly believe that they would have done better in medieval times. They are somehow adamant that the chance of them being Genghis Khan is greater than the chance of them being cannon fodder peasant number 1373, whose favela was sacked and destroyed.

Gwinda Bogle (70:56)

Yeah, yeah. So. So, yeah. So the original position fallacy really has its origins in the work of John Rawls. John Rawls was like a liberal philosopher, basically a political philosopher. And so his argument was that basically people, when they think of future states, they tend to assume that they're going to be amongst the elites, basically. And this is True. Whether you're on the left or on the right. If you're on the left, you think you're going to be one of the planners. If you're on the right, you think you're going to be one of the nobles. Right. History, again, history has shown this to be completely false. So, for example, if you look at all the communist revolutions that occurred in the 20th century, you know, whether you're looking at Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, you know, all of these people, one of the first things that they did was to either imprison or murder the intellectuals. Right. So the elites, basically, is that because

Chris Williamson (71:56)

they were the ones who could have come up with ideas to reverse their proposed direction for the civilization?

Gwinda Bogle (72:04)

Basically, yeah. So if we take one of these examples. So if we look at Pol Pot. So Pol Pot wanted to basically reset history to year zero. And he wanted nobody to remember anything from below before year zero. Like, for him, that was literally the beginning of time. So he wanted to completely wipe out all traces of the past beyond year zero. And one thing he knew about intellectuals was that they read books and that they wrote. And obviously, writing and reading are essentially society's memory. So if you can eliminate all the intellectuals, then you eliminate society's memory. Basically, you wipe society's memory and you can start fresh. You can create a new fresh, without any bourgeoisie, without any of the capitalism. The ideas of capitalism to pollute the

Chris Williamson (72:51)

modern world would die along with the intellectuals.

Gwinda Bogle (72:54)

Exactly. And there's an irony because there were a lot of intellectuals that were supporting Pol Pot. They were like. They were some of his fiercest, you know, defenders. Like, you know, they were the guys that were advocating, like, writing the propaganda for him. They were the ones who were like, you know, and this. This is not just with Pol Pot. This is with all the communist revolutions. Even, you know, Western intellectuals, many of them. There was one guy, I've forgotten his name, but he was a Western intellectual. He went to popo. He was like a. He was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Khmer Rouge. And he went to basically have a meeting with Pol Pot, and he ended up getting assassinated, you know, and nobody knows who killed him, but, I mean, it was probably on Pol Pot's orders. But, I mean, a lot of, you know, so the left wing intellectuals believe that if they were to create a socialist sort of society, that they would be at the top of society, they would be planning things, they would be, you know, everything would go according to their vision of society. And that's why it's such an intoxicating vision. That's why, you know, academics and other elites will tend to, you know, tend towards kind of these kinds of these sort of views of society. And they want either a socialist republic if they're, you know, they're on the left or if they're on the right, they'll probably advocate for something. It could be like neo monarchy, you know, with the mentious mole bugs, Curtis Yavins, whatever of the world who believe that they would be, you know, I'm sure Kurtz Yavin believes that if there was a right wing revolution that he would be at the right hand side of, you know, the monarch, he would be the advisor, he would be the Svengali. But I mean again, you know, usually it's the, the revolutionaries who end up getting murdered themselves. You know, this is true of the French Revolution too as well. You know, the, the biggest advocates of the French Revolution ended up being the first people to get guillotined, you know, or at least they did eventually get guillotine. So you know, all of this stuff, you know. So again, so this is probably going off on tangent anyway but basically going back to the original idea. So it was originally John Rawls idea, right. I kind of adapted it to extended it to the left and right. But his idea was just generally that people tend to benefit. They will tend to adopt whatever state that they think is going to benefit them. They will tend to advocate for whatever state is going to benefit them. And the solution that he proposed was what he called the veil of ignorance. And I think we might have covered this before but basically the veil of ignorance is, is his belief that the best way to create a society is to imagine, is to begin by imagining that you are going to be assigned at random a position in the, in the world that you advocate for. So if you advocate for a socialist or a communist country, you can't do that with the assumption that you are going to be the planner, you are going to be the chairman of the party or anything like that. It's got to be the assumption that you will be assigned a place within that state at random because then this will motivate you to then hedge and ensure that every person in that state is well looked after basically. So this is obviously coming from his

Chris Williamson (75:56)

left liberal perspective to optimize for the sort of highest average life quality as opposed to your selected fortunate quality.

Gwinda Bogle (76:06)

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So, you know, this was his way of advocating for liberalism because that's essentially what liberalism does. Liberalism is based on the idea that you Know, you want to ensure that everybody in society.

Chris Williamson (76:17)

Redistribution.

Gwinda Bogle (76:18)

Yeah, redistribution. But to an extent it's obviously it's not the same as a socialist country, which is a socialist country would be complete redistribution or near total. Whereas liberalism is a, is a sort of middle ground between socialism and sort of free market capitalism, like completely laissez faire capitalism. So it's basically the idea that liberals want to maximize freedom, but they consider freedom to also be freedom from, for example, poverty or from oppression by higher classes of, of people. So, so they're, they're, they're similar to libertarians from the basic point in that they value liberty more than anything. It's just that liberals tend to have a slightly different definition of what liberty means. Like for libertarians, liberty is literal. It's literally just freedom, freedom to do what you want. Whereas liberals, you know, depending on the specific brand of liberalism, it might be the John Stuart Mill or the John Locke, you know, kind of liberalism where your liberalism, where your liberty ends at the point at which it does harm to somebody else, where it basically encroaches on their liberty sort of thing.

Chris Williamson (77:28)

So what about, what about the coyotes law thing? Don't give the government a power you wouldn't want your political enemies to wield because one day they may well be in charge of it.

Gwinda Bogle (77:40)

Yeah, yeah. So this is the sort of a kind of preventative to the original fallacy position. This is what I advocate for personally. I think that the best way to determine what policies to support are ones that will. You are the ones that will be not harmful if the government were to be taken over by somebody that you despise basically by the worst government that is possible in your country. So, you know, if you're on the left, then you should advocate for policies that would not harm your interests or the interests of those you advocate for if the government was to suddenly become right wing and vice versa, you know, so I think this is, it's a pretty sort of straightforward common sense rule because I think one of the problems with people is that they tend to think about the short term at the expense of the long term. This is one of the fundamental problems with human beings and it extends to politics as well. People tend to only, they tend to imagine that whoever they're supporting is going to be in power forever. And this is why, you know, when I see people like right wingers, for example, on Twitter actively suppressing and censoring left wingers after advocating for free speech for so long, I just think, well, you're just shooting yourselves in the foot, because this is going to be used against you. The apparatus you're creating is going to be used against you. So for example, if we go with, if Trump, for instance, were to pass news laws which were to make it illegal for people to criticize him, this is obviously a hypothetical situation. This is not something he's actually done, but this is a hypothetical. You would see people on the right supporting it. A lot of people on the right would support it. They'd be like, yes, you know, yeah, you know, stick it to the left, you know, yeah, you know, trigger the libtards and all this stuff. Yeah, and they'd be cheering. But then Trump's not going to be in power forever and then you're going to have probably a Democrat in charge and he's going to have now he's going to have the power to do exactly to the right what Trump was doing to the left. So, you know, it's basically like the leopards eating your own face kind of thing, you know, where a lot of this stuff can backfire if you don't think about it on a long enough timescale.

Chris Williamson (79:46)

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Gwinda Bogle (82:49)

Yeah, I mean, so there is. There is a concept which relates to this called reciprocal radicalization, which is basically where it's like a game of brinkmanship where you have one group will advocate for something which then the. The other side now feels entitled to, and then they'll. They'll escalate it even more and then it will basically suck a repeating pattern, you know, so it's like the left and the right almost have this symbiotic sort of relationship where, you know, the excesses of one group will fuel the excesses of the other group, the opposing group. And they're kind of in. They're kind of like. They're kind of like what is known as a Mizan beam, which is a mirror. When you have two mirrors facing each other and they kind of infinitely reflect each other. Okay. It's like, you know, they're constantly reinforcing each other in that sense. So it's not just with the left and right. You also see this amongst terrorists and governments as well. So what will happen is that you have terrorists who will commit an act of violence and then the government will respond to that by having a crackdown and by tightening laws. And then the terrorists will use this as an example of the government being tyrannical. And so that would justify further action against the government. And then the government will use further action to justify their own further action by saying, oh, these terrorists are even more dangerous now, so we have to enact even tighter laws. And so it's like a ever tightening sort of situation where the excesses of one group fuel the excesses of the other group. And ultimately the only way out of this is long term thinking again, you know, so this is, again, it's short term thinking. It's when people are engaging in these sort of the satiation of their own impulses rather than actually engaging in long term thinking about the consequences of their actions. You know, it's first order or first order thinking only thinking about the immediate consequences. They're not thinking about the consequences of the consequences, let alone the consequences of the consequences of the consequences, which is what you really need to be when you're in the political game, you know.

Chris Williamson (84:44)

So yeah, there's a, that's short term, long term thing. There's a similarity with Amara's Law. We tend to overestimate the short term impact of new tech and underestimate the long term impact because hype inflates expectations and thus disappointment and thus skepticism. As such, it's possible for AI to both be a bubble and the most transformative tech since Fire.

Gwinda Bogle (85:09)

Yeah, so this is an idea that's illustrated by something called the Gartner Hype Cycle. So if you go on Wikipedia, it will tell you that the Gartner Hype Cycle is pseudoscience. It's not supported by evidence. This is nonsense. The Gartner Hype cycle is not supposed to be a scientific sort of like, you know, study of what actually happens. What it's supposed to be is a general rule of thumb and it does fit most major technology, major technological sort of developments. One of the problems with Wikipedia is it's it often straw man's ideas before discrediting or trying to discredit them. So I wouldn't pay attention to the Wikipedia article of the Gartner Hype Cycle. Basically what the Gartner Hype cycle states is that you have. When you have a new technology, you have, like, massive surge in hype, right? Where everybody's incentivized to sort of just kind of get on the hype bandwagon, basically, because it's a new technology and people are speculating that. They're sort of. They're. They're spitballing, they're speculating about where this could go, and people get excited about it. People write clickbait articles about it. And so this obviously inflates people's expectations. And so then the next stage of the hype cycle is where people start to realize. Hang on a second. The hype was hype. You know, they start to sort of realize that the reality of the new technology is not quite what people were saying it was going to be. And this causes a kind of backfire effect where people temper their expectations by overcorrecting. So what they do is they assume that because where the technology is actually headed is slightly different from where it was, where the hype claimed it was heading, therefore they were wrong about the technology completely, and therefore the technology is worthless. So then you get people now from the opposite side, arguing for the opposite thing, saying it was all hype. Humans are stupid. Don't listen to humans. This technology is just going to fizz out. It's just crap. So people naturally react very strongly by overcorrecting. That's what humans tend to do. So you get a lot of articles arguing for the opposite. But then what will happen is everybody will go, oh, okay, well, yeah, so the hype was just crap. So let's just get on with our lives. And they'll forget about the technology. And then it's when they forget about the technology, that's when the technology will start to change the world. Because even though the technology is no longer in popular discourse, it has been adopted by the sort of people at the frontier of development, the industries where it can actually be used. And these are usually not exciting industries. They're usually things like, you know, sort of bank sort of, you know, sort of doing financial wizardry, which is not really something that interests most people, Right? So it will usually be. It will have very limited visibility for a long time, but then the developments in those industries will gradually compound until we have something that is really, really amazing. And AI is a great example of this. Right? So for, you know, so one of the guys, one of the main pioneers of AI is a guy called Marvin Minsky. He was a major figure in the development of neural networks. I think it was in the 1970s. He said that in around seven to eight years we will have human level intelligence in neural networks. Basically. He said something like that anyway, and obviously this is completely absurd because, you know, by the 1980s we had really, really basic neural networks. And that continued into the 90s. And everybody had kind of by then just forgotten about the hype. Everybody was like, ah, you know, this, this whole neural network stuff's crap, nothing's going to happen. You know, it was all just hype. Everybody forgot about it. Apart from a small number of researchers and a small number of people who were using, you know, convolutional neural networks to like do things like imaging and things like that. What happened is suddenly you have chatgpt boom, you know, in like 2022. And this seemed to have come out of nowhere, but it didn't actually come out of nowhere. The technology for it, the transformer architecture, was actually developed by Google DeepMind. And this was a few years before ChatGPT sort of accommodated it and actually like, you know, began to develop it themselves. But like before that nobody really cared like for, for 30 years nobody really cared in the mainstream about neural networks. So this is a good example of it. But the thing is that the Gartner hype cycle continues. So it's not just you have this one hype cycle and then it's over. It often repeats itself. So we're going to see it again with things like world models. Now, I think where there's.

Chris Williamson (89:42)

What are world models?

Gwinda Bogle (89:44)

So world models are like a stepping stone towards AGI. A world model is where you have things like physics implemented into your LLM. It's not really an LLM anymore because it can do so many other things. It's more like a video model, but it's a video model that actually has real world physics. And at the moment, Google is probably best placed for this because they have all the data. They've got the real time data through search, they've got video data through YouTube and then they've got spatial data as well through Google Street View and all that kind of stuff. So they'll probably, they have actually got the best, the world model at the moment called Genie, Genie 3. But basically a world model is basically when an LLM or an AI can model the world, basically literally, you know, that's why it's called a world model. It can model the world so it can understand things like physics, so it can understand collisions, it can understand gravity, it can understand the way that fluids move like water and things like that. And we have, we have like a kind of. We have a simulacrum of that in video generation. But video generations don't understand physics. They're just copying the physics of films and other stuff like that. Whereas a world model genuinely understands the physics. And so that's the first step towards creating AGI, because then you can actually activate AI in the physical reality. And this is probably going to be the next hype cycle. It's already begun. There's been a lot of hype around Genie 3. What will probably happen is we'll have something called the Trough of Disillusionment, which is the next of the Gartner hype cycle. And then when everybody's forgotten about world models, we'll start to see real world models emerge.

Chris Williamson (91:19)

Wow, there's a. I was looking at. I've spoken to a lot of behavioral genetics guys and girls on the podcast. I've got Katherine Paige Harden coming back on for her new book next week. And I'd always wondered. There's an equivalent, basically, with over time, things changing, and the Wilson Effect feels like a biological equivalent of what we're talking about with regards to the hype. So this is from you. Heritable traits like IQ and personality become more heritable with age because as you mature, you become more independent and free to be who you really are. Many heritability studies find that nurture's influence is stronger only because they never see that nature's influence is longer.

Gwinda Bogle (92:04)

Yeah, so historically, the sort of the social sciences and the field of genetics has pretty consistently underestimated the heritability of a lot of traits. And just to give a very recent example, I think just a couple of days ago there was a new study published which I retweeted onto my timeline, which basically shows. So initially there was the belief that heritability of lifespan is between 20 and 25%. And this new study has found that it's actually closer to 50%. And this is a pretty important. You know, this is obviously a pretty important finding because this is the heritability of your lifespan, how long you're going to live. And so there's been a massive underestimation of lifespan in terms of the heritability of it. And I think this is not fully explained by the Wilson effect, but I think the Wilson effect is a contributor to this. And it's basically what it is, is because studies tend to be quite short term, genetic studies tend to be quite short term. So they will tend to. Obviously, it's very hard to track a human being throughout their Entire life. So usually longitudinal studies in genetics will tend to sort of follow people for a few years, you know, so usually three, three years, five years. And that's not enough time to really understand the effects of these genes because a lot of these genes only become apparent later in your life. You know, people tend to sort of. There's a kind of. What happens is that there's a masking effect. So early in your life, the effects of genes are masked by your upbringing, by your environment. So, for example, if you are genetically predisposed to love reading, but in your life, your parents never buy you any books and instead they buy you a PlayStation, right? You're going to spend your childhood playing PlayStation instead of reading books, which is what you really love to do. It's only when you get older that you start that you're able to follow your own natural inclinations, which are books. And so it's only when you're older that you have the power to buy books. And therefore it's only when you're older that your genetic predisposition to books becomes apparent. And so this is a very simple example, but this is very common, I think now in a lot of studies where a lot of. There's a lot of reassessment that needs to be done due to these studies being so. So short term. You know, we really. We really need to study people at different stages of their life. We need to study them when they're children, we need to study them when they're adults, and we need to study them when they're elderly in order to actually have a good understanding of the influence of genes versus environment.

Chris Williamson (94:41)

I saw there was a line from you, an Emerson one. People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character. And Dylan o' Sullivan that I know were both huge fans of.

Gwinda Bogle (94:53)

Yeah, he's great.

Chris Williamson (94:54)

Yeah, he's so good, dude. He says nothing gives you a clearer look into someone than how they misinterpret things. Every misinterpretation is a confession. And it feels like the Emerson and Dylan are kind of agreeing with each other here. Their opinion of the world is a confession of their character. And their misinterpretation of the world is also a confession.

Gwinda Bogle (95:16)

Yeah, so to give you another quote from Naval, I think he said something like, it's almost always possible to be both honest and optimistic. Right. So what I find is that if you are optimistic is not because you're deluded necessarily, it's often just because of your personality, because you choose to see the good rather than choosing to see the bad. You know, it's often just a choice. It is literally just often a choice. It's, you know, it's something that I've. I've really. Has really sort of become an important force in my life now, this understanding that I can actually choose how I perceive things. I can choose whether I see things as a good or a bad thing, depending on the facts that I select and the way that I interpret them. And I'm aware that, yeah, okay, this. This often requires me to ignore certain things, but we're always ignoring things anyway, so it's not like I'm doing anything wrong here. You know, attention is selective. Attention is like empathy. It's a spotlight. You shine it on some things, and by doing so, you cast everything else in darkness. And so when you are pessimistic, this is not a sign that you see reality more clearly, as a lot of pessimists like to believe. It's actually a sign that you are choosing to shine your spotlight on shit rather than on diamonds. You know, to put it simply. Right. You know, you have a choice where you shine your spotlight, right? And ultimately it's a case of, what are you looking at? What. What are you perceiving when you see something? What details are you picking out? And this is why, when I. When I see miserable people now, I don't see realists. I just see miserable people. I see people who are unhappy inside who are essentially externalizing their unhappiness by choosing to see the absolute worst in everything. Right? And this is why, you know, I don't have much tolerance now for people who just keep complaining about things, because to me, that's just a way to dig your hole deeper. Basically, you're just making life worse for yourself by choosing to see the worst. There's no solutions in complaining if you just keep complaining. All you're doing is you're convincing yourself that the world is bad and the world doesn't need to be bad. You don't need to lie to see the good.

Chris Williamson (97:23)

But surely in some situations things are bad. Is it not fair to accurately represent that and reflect it so that maybe people try to change the thing that's bad and shouldn't be bad?

Gwinda Bogle (97:34)

No, no, you should always recognize that things can be improved. Always. Yeah, absolutely. But this doesn't mean that you should focus on the bad and have the bad as the only thing, you know, to focus on. There's always two sides to the story. So the way I look at it, Is, yes, you should always be cognizant of problems. I'm not saying that you should not see problems. You should choose not to see problems. You should see the problems. But instead of focusing on complaining about them, you should try to focus on solutions instead of, you know, what can I do rather than make this better? So this actually fits in with another of my ideas. So there's a concept called the Stockdale Paradox. And the Stockdale Paradox is quite an interesting one because it's sort of like. It's basically taken from a guy called James Stockdale. He was an admiral, right? And he survived nearly eight years of torture and isolation in the Hanoi Hilton, basically, which was so called because it was one of the most brutal camps in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He was basically a POW for quite a long time. Yes, for eight years. And so, basically. So what he observed while he was there was that there were people who were optimists and there were people who were pessimists, and both groups ended up suffering hard, and many of them died very early. So the optimists would basically believe that they were going to be released from the jail by Christmas. And then when Christmas didn't come, it would be Easter, and then, you know, east didn't come. So they would keep hoping, and then eventually, their hope just ran out and they just kind of gave up on life. And they. Some of them, you know, they just lost the will to live because they had hoped and their hopes had been destroyed. But then, on the other hand, there were the pessimists, who were people who just kind of believed that their station was completely, you know, irredeemable, and there was no hope in the first place. So obviously, they had no motivation to improve. But what Stockdale found was what got him through the eight years was not by being an optimist, not by being a pessimist, but actually by practicing a kind of optimistic pessimism. And this was essentially. So what it was is that basically the key to achieving this kind of paradoxical state of mind is to accept that bad outcomes are indeed a real possibility. But rather than let that possibility crush your hopes, you can develop hope in your ability to deal with those problems by preparing for them. So by acknowledging and confronting the harshest potential outcomes, you make them less of a problem and less of a reason for negativity. So. So, you know. So what I'm saying is basically, healthy optimism arises through a kind of practical pessimism. It's not the blind idealism that everything is always going to turn out, fine. But rather the self belief that you can deal with things no matter how they turn out. And that's essentially what confidence is. Confidence is not the belief that everything is going to be all right. Confidence is the belief that you will be able to handle with things even if they're not okay. Right. So you'll be able, you'll always be able to deal with the eventualities. And the way that you do that is by acknowledging the worst case scenario, but preparing for any scenario, essentially, you know, so you, you don't necessarily have to be pessimistic, you'd have to be optimistic. You fuse the two. So this is obviously, this is a bit separate from, from the idea of seeing the beauty and things, but it's, this is obviously a very healthy attitude to have with regards to just, you know, half glass, half full or glass half empty. Just understand that the glass is half. Right. That's it. You don't need to, it doesn't need to be half full, doesn't need to be half empty. It's just half, you know.

Chris Williamson (101:06)

Well, the George's. George's line from the agency book is some people look at a glass and see it as half full. Some look at a glass and see it as half empty. What you should do is realize that you are the tap. And that's his line. That's his line around agency, which is wherever this is, you can actually pour into it. Yeah, it's a, the, the Stockdale thing's interesting because I can see how people preparing for the bad would quite easily cause them to tumble down the rabbit hole of ruminating about it and worrying about it and woe is me and concept creep. And now I've got a pathology and I've got multiple personality disorder or, you know, that is the genesis of it.

Gwinda Bogle (101:52)

But ultimately it comes down to. It ultimately comes down to how you interpret it. Right. So there is, you know, yes, you could just go down this rabbit hole where you're just constantly thinking of the worst case scenario. But that's only going to happen if you haven't found a solution. Yeah, if you have a solution, if you have developed a solution to the worst case scenario, then it's no longer going to really dwell on your mind, you know, because you already have the solution. And that's ultimately what I do. Like, if I, you know, like if I was to say, come on this podcast, I would have the worst case scenario where I would say something, you know, let's say I said the N word or something like that, you know, like that if you're somebody who is really anxious, you'd be worrying about something like that so long, you know, you'd be like, oh, my God, you know, what if I say the wrong thing? You know, that would just cause you to be a nervous wreck and it would probably just make for a very bad episode. But if you have a solution, right, if you actually have trained yourself to not engage in these kinds of intrusive thoughts that might cause you to say those words or, you know, if you have a way to sort of style it out, you know, then you don't, then it's not going to be a problem. Do you mean? It's the same with anything. Like, anxiety is really. It's really a result of you not having a solution to the worst case scenario. But as long as you have that solution, you're not going to have the. I mean, you might still have anxiety if you're a new, you know, if you're a neurotic person, but that. The thing is, well, you're not going

Chris Williamson (103:19)

to have any less if you've got a solution. And what's that line about anxiety? Hates a moving target. Action is the antidote to anxiety.

Gwinda Bogle (103:26)

Yeah, that's it.

Chris Williamson (103:27)

Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Look, Gwinda, dude, you're a legend. I appreciate you coming on. This always rules. It's one of my favorite episodes. Where should people go to check out all of the stuff that you've got going on?

Gwinda Bogle (103:38)

Yeah. So main place is my blog, which is just Gowinda Blog and you can also find me on Twitter at gsbogle or just type my name into Google and I'm sure it will come up.

Chris Williamson (103:50)

Yeah, yeah.

Gwinda Bogle (103:52)

And cheers, you know, pleasure. Yeah, thank you.

Chris Williamson (103:54)

It's always a good one. Keep writing because we got more to talk about.

Gwinda Bogle (103:58)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson (104:01)

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