What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

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

Humans are supposed to mature as they age—but the giant human I live in has been getting more childish each year. Tribalism and political division are on the rise. False narratives and outlandish conspiracy theories are flourishing. Major institutions are floundering. Medieval-style public shaming is suddenly back in fashion. Trust, the critical cu

The four thinking rungs are all distinct, but they fall into two broad categories: high-rung thinking (Scientist and Sports Fan) and low-rung thinking (Attorney and Zealot). High-rung thinking is independent thinking, leaving you free to revise your ideas or even discard them altogether. But when there’s no amount of evidence that will change your

High-rung politics relies on a shared sense of reality—a shared understanding of What Is. In Political Disney World, the beliefs and viewpoints of people in different tribes are premised on entirely different versions of reality.

In a culture where changing your mind is encouraged, new findings spread quickly through the system, and all it takes is one member discovering a falsehood for the whole group to reject it. When disagreement is encouraged, new ideas can be tested as they’re being formed, in real-time, combining the knowledge-building efforts of each person into a s

⬥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.

When we slip down to the Ladder’s low rungs, we’re short-sighted and small-minded, thinking and acting with our pettiest emotions. We’re low on self-awareness and high on hypocrisy. We’re our worst selves.

We like to think of bigotry as something that other people do. But we’re all capable of rank bigotry when our environment pushes the right buttons in our psyche. Political bigotry is as real as any other bigotry. In a 2014 paper on political polarization in the U.S., political scientist Shanto Iyengar and researcher Sean J. Westwood find evidence t