So the Higher Mind’s goal is to get to the truth, while the Primitive Mind’s goal is confirmation of its existing beliefs.

⬥My personal favorite part of the document: The AMA says that “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States” should be swapped out for “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor

People in an Idea Lab don’t usually take arguments personally because Idea Lab culture is built around the core notion that people and ideas are separate things. People are meant to be respected, ideas are meant to be batted around and picked apart.

But in the realm of low-rung politics, there’s also a third option: Change the rules of the game to a different one that you can win. If your ideas can’t win a fair fight in the boxing ring, start taking cheap shots and see if you can get away with it.

Like the moth flying toward a streetlight, the human Primitive Mind thinks it’s a great decision to eat Skittles. In the ancient human world, there was no such thing as processed food, calories were hard to come by, and anything with a texture and taste as delectable as a Skittle was surely a good thing to eat. Mars, Inc., which makes Skittles, kno

Your Higher Mind is aware that humans are often delusional, and it wants you to be not delusional. It sees beliefs as the most recent draft of a work in progress, and as it lives more and learns more, the Higher Mind is always happy to make a revision. Because when beliefs are revised, it’s a signal of progress—of becoming less ignorant, less fooli

Most of us know the term “Echo Chamber,” and we’ll get to that in a minute—but we sorely lack a term for the opposite of an Echo Chamber. When the rules of a group’s intellectual culture mirror the values of high-rung thinking, the group is what I call an Idea Lab. An Idea Lab is an environment of collaborative high-rung thinking. People in an Idea

Throughout American history, free speech has been much more than protection against tyranny. It’s been the country’s brain, its compass, and its conscience.

Thinkers of the Enlightenment believed that the Liberal Games combination of freedom, safety, and equal opportunity would go beyond satisfying core philosophical tenets and generate a brilliant side effect: fantastic productivity. The Liberal Games are driven by human nature, just like the Power Games are. But in the Liberal Games, a key limitation