MUST READ New Book: "What's Our Problem? A Self Help Book for Societies" (by Tim Urban)

The author, Tim Urban, starts off with this big question: “What’s our problem? Why, in a time so prosperous, with the stakes so high, would we be going backward in wisdom?”

He is right. That’s exactly what we are doing - going backwards. Provoking wars. Gaining functions on viruses. Eating foods that make us sicker. Ignoring repeatable science in favor of corruptible peer-reviewed papers. Letting the education systems fail us. Dividing humans into classes instead of bringing them together.

Of course, at The Rationalist our first reactive answer to his question (Why are we gong backward?) is this: Because our systems have been corrupted by people who do not have our best intentions in mind.

But our explanation doesn’t account for why so many citizens are going along with those who are doing the corrupting. Tim breaks that down with precision.

He continues, ““As the authors of The Story of Us, we have no mentors, no editors, no one to make sure it all turns out okay. It’s all in our hands. This scares me, but it’s also what gives me hope. If we can all get just a little wiser, together, it may be enough to nudge the story onto a trajectory that points toward an unimaginably good future.”

This is exactly what we at The Rationalist Society of Problem Solvers have been saying since day one. It is on us to fix this; no one is coming to save us.

In parsing this out, Tim does a brilliant job explaining how people think.

Basically, he explains, our minds have two different voices. The first is our primitive mind. This is the lowest on his ladder (image below). This mind has been honed for hundreds of thousands of years to help us survive. It is the mind that gives us tribalism, and also the mind that convinces us to by the fruity-tasting high-calorie Skittles at the checkout despite the fact that our other mind - the second mind known as our higher mind - tells us not to because they are filled with bad stuff.

At the top of the ladder our higher mind controls that primitive mind. At the bottom, the primitive mind runs wild.

Our favorite part of the book was the part about Idea Labs, which Tim explains as this:

"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 Lab see one another as experimenters and their ideas as experiments. Idea Labs value independent thinking and viewpoint diversity. This combination leads to the richest and most interesting conversations and maximizes the scope of group discussions.

Idea Labs place a high regard on humility, and saying “I don’t know” usually wins trust and respect. When someone who often says “I don’t know” does express conviction about a viewpoint, it really means something, and others will take it to heart without too much skepticism needed—which saves the listener time and effort. Likewise, unearned conviction is a major no-no in an Idea Lab. So someone with a reputation for bias or arrogance or dishonesty will be met with a high degree of skepticism, no matter how much conviction they express.

Idea Labs also love arguments. Ideas in an Idea Lab are treated like hypotheses, which means people are always looking for opportunities to test what they’ve been thinking about. Idea Labs are the perfect boxing ring for that testing.

Sometimes high-rung thinkers engage in debate, defending an idea, strenuously arguing for its validity. 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.

Perhaps most importantly, an Idea Lab helps its members stay high up on the Ladder.”

To us, this was music to our ears. We immediately envisioned these Idea Labs working well with the platform we wrote about last year, HERE, called Super Collaborators.

Another amazing part of the book was how Tim broke down what he calls the “Emergence Tower.” If you read how we sign off of almost every post, the premise here might be familiar to you.

Tim says, “Billions of years ago, some single-celled creatures realized that being just one cell left your options pretty limited.  So they figured out a cool trick. By joining together with other single cells, they could form a giant creature that had all kinds of new advantages.

 This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can visualize it using an Emergence Tower.”

Our sign-off here at The Rationalist has always been this: “For over 3 billion years on this planet there were only single-celled organisms. Then one day they somehow learned to work together and make complex multi-celled creatures like you and me. Right now we are like those single-celled organisms. Our next evolution is finding how to work together, better.”

It is refreshing to see this type of thinking and talk spreading. We are currently working with designers on an AI that harnesses “Swarm Intelligence” or “Swarm Imagination” (more on this soon). So we were very excited about this chapter of the book.

The heart of this book focuses on what Tim calls “Social Justice Fundamentalism.” Or what is commonly known today as being “woke.” We have yet to hear anyone explain the phenomenon as well as Tim does here. If you are alarmed by some of the dogmatic and flat out ineffective policies being spread in culture right now, this book is a MUST read. We cannot stress this enough.

We reached out to Tim to discuss making a digital platform version of his “idea lab” so other problem solvers can meet and align there. We look forward to his response and we will keep all of our readers posted!

Until then, we wholeheartedly would like to recommend this book. Especially if you consider yourself a problem solver.

Book is available in digital and audio format HERE. All images and quotes here were taken from the book for review purposes only.

Thanks for reading!

Here is Tim on Lex Fridman’s podcast last week:

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As always the entire purpose of The Rationalist is to connect with other solutions-minded results-driven people like yourself!

For over 3 billion years on this planet there were only single-celled organisms. Then one day they somehow learned to work together and make complex multi-celled creatures . Right now we are like those single-celled organisms. Our next evolution is finding how to work together, better… (like we wrote about here).

#UnifyAgainstCorruption #ResultsMatterMost #DecentralizeEverything #DemandTransparency

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