#1203 - Eric Weinstein

Joe Rogan (0:00)

And we're live. Are you gonna update the people out there?

Jamie (0:04)

No.

Joe Rogan (0:05)

Oh, you're shutting your phone off? Oh, you're a professional.

Try it, sir. Good to see you. I'm doing well. What's going on?

Eric Weinstein (0:11)

Everything, it's all pretty weird out there.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

It is very weird out there. We were just talking about how weird it is out there before the podcast about how it just seems like it's very difficult to keep together during these times and to keep a reasonable position and to handle all of the pressure of all the people that get upset at anything you do, left or right, in the middle, centrist, you're too centrist, you're too left, you're too right, you're unreasonable, you're too reasonable, you're too nice, you're not nice enough.

Eric Weinstein (0:41)

Wow, suddenly I feel like I'm in a marriage.

Joe Rogan (0:45)

Doesn't it seem like that though?

Eric Weinstein (0:46)

Yeah, it does. I think that this is why, this is the era for disagreeability. If you're not easily swayed, because you're somehow insensitive enough that you just want to keep to first principles, whatever it is that you believe, that seems to be the best hedge against getting swept up in the madness of others.

Joe Rogan (1:06)

How so?

Eric Weinstein (1:07)

Well, I guess when I go metacognitive, I look at my yearning for group belonging, and then I also watch my inability to belong to groups that say crazy things.

And so those are two conflicting feelings. I think sometimes when people look at me, they say, wow, you're really contrarian, and you have an easy time standing up to, you know, the conventional wisdom. And I don't think it's that true. I just think when those two things fight inside me, dialectically, the disagreeability is so strong because it's protecting a comprehensive view of the world. And so since everything already kind of fits together fairly well, I would say it's much harder to sway me because the number of things I would have to move cognitively to accommodate a wrong idea is quite large.

Joe Rogan (1:57)

It seems unnecessary, but it also seems like we should be able to disagree on things, and you should be able to point out with reasonable courtesy that there's something wrong with someone's idea and it not become a big personal thing. But oftentimes, that's not the case.

Eric Weinstein (2:15)

Well, so a lot of the things I think that we're exploring are what I would think of as heuristics. They're sort of rules of thumb that work fairly well within some domain of definition.

And we've gotten so many of these conflicting rules. I mean, the rules of thumb themselves conflict. So for example, he who hesitates is lost, conflicts with nothing ventured, nothing gained, or something like that.

Sorry, it's, well, I forget. There's the cautionary aphorism, and then there's the be bold aphorism. And so we don't have a good way of sorting out conflicts that occur at the heuristic level. Then you also have heuristics meant for social cohesion conflicting with ground truths. So this is why biology is always controversial, because biology is a science that tells us many of the things that we wish were true are just not true. I always think about Ben Shapiro's facts don't care about your feelings. Well, biology cares about your feelings. It just laughs at them and stomps on them and makes them, you know, feel very sad.

Joe Rogan (3:22)

Well, it also tries to explain your feelings too.

Eric Weinstein (3:24)

Well, right, exactly. But you know, if you really understand biology, the world is so dark and so interesting and beautiful and crazy that it's very hard to recover simple ideas about how people should be once you really realize that our being apes has deep consequences.

Joe Rogan (3:41)

Yeah, I have a very minimal understanding of biology, but in that understanding, I've come to accept some things just about being a person that I never considered before.

Eric Weinstein (3:52)

Such as?

Joe Rogan (3:52)

Like all the different things that are running your decision-making.

Like just what we're talking about, like the need to be in a group, and all these are probably evolutionary advantages to fostering tribal behavior so you could all work together and feed each other. You know, this is always pulling at you, and you know, when people give people a hard time about virtue signaling, it is kind of gross when someone virtue signals, you know, but we understand what it is. It's gross because we've all done it, right? That's one of the gross things about it. When someone is just like really trying hard to act like, you know, they're disgusted by the way people behave, because they would never behave like that, and they just want to let you know, I'm above this type of behavior. What's most likely, because they weren't above that kind of behavior at some point in their life, or they're not currently really above that type of behavior, but they wish they were.