In this episode, we discuss why everyone should be consuming more “boring” content and doing more “boring” things. Boring has a bad connotation, but boring is actually good, because when nothing is happening, then nothing bad is happening. Unfortunately, “nothing bad happened today” is not a newsworthy story. However, there are people in certain parts of the world that would love to live in a predictable and boring western society. Boredom is actually a luxury.

We go on to talk about how people are getting more addicted to sensationalist media. They want something big going on, and they want to catch some bad guy redhanded and point the finger at him. The reality is though, that most of the pain and discomfort in the world is not due to some huge event or some grand conspiracy, but just a whole bunch of people making small decisions of low integrity over and over and over again, and these little decisions are very insidious, and they add up and accumulate, and things just slowly get worse and worse. So improvement of a society is really just a matter of tipping the scales, and slowly turning the boat in the more positive direction, and day-by-day making better decisions. It is really a boring a process, but it is a process that will get you where you want to go (a better/more positive world).

When I say “consume boring media”, I mean “read textbooks, consume tutorials, learn how to do useful things to pick up skills you need to be valuable in society”. That’s how you change your life, improve your financial situation, and ultimately, improve your little corner of the world. But when you get there, don’t expect it to be some grandiose, heavenly event or accomplishment. It’s going to also be boring. Once you improve your financial situation, you’re still going to be bored, and that’s okay. If that inherent “boringness” of existence bothers you, you can take up meditation, which allows you to see the vibrancy and beauty in even the most mundane aspects of life. You can  have amazing experiences just by focusing on your breathing, and what could be more boring than focusing on your breathing?

Every viable solution to real, systemic problems, involves a boring solution. There are no sexy, explosive, quick fixes to things like that. These problems have to be uprooted slowly, using dull, boring procedures day in and day out that improve things until you get where you want to be. And once you get where you want to be, that’s also not going to be exciting. It’s really about the journey.

Think about the universe. It is mostly empty space. Seems pretty boring, but it’s not. The universe is still awesome even though it’s largely an uneventful place.

There is lot more amazing content packed into this wonderful episode. I highly recommend.

Alphabet has a monopoly on SEARCH (Google) and VIDEO (youtube). This is bad. How much money will it take to bribe them to only show traditional media, or to give it preferential treatment in the search algorithm? Or perhaps a traditional media company bribes the government in their country to ban youtube if they fail to prioritize their stuff. Then youtube can either sellout or leave the country. If there were more viable alternatives, there would be more moving targets and it would be more difficult for video itself to be subject to corporate selling out. But instead, we have a monopoly; one company in charge of video, period. And that is bad, because it just takes one decision for video to go to shit (i.e. not be for the people anymore).

In this episode, we discuss the properties of power. Many people like to assign a value to power – power is bad, they say. Power is good, they say. Power is actually just a neutral property. It is a quantity that different people, places, and things have different amounts of. Power can be used for good or evil, but power itself is neither of those things. Power can be concentrated and intentionally acquired by people, and power structures organize themselves spontaneously.

Sometimes, power structures become corrupted, and need to either be changed or destroyed by the people in them. But even when this is the case, changing it should be done in a cool, calm, and collected way, not in an angry and outraged way. Anger and outrage is useful only in the initial stage of becoming aware of problems and deciding to commit to solving them. But actually solving problems by implementing solutions is technically difficult and requires a clear mind. So power should be viewed objectively, even when it becomes corrupted. And if you need to improve a bad situation, do it calmly.

Most people growing up have at least one non-negotiable thing imposed by their parents, usually in the form of a belief about they way the world is, or about things they have to do if they want to be okay. This almost always leads to either the kids strongly opposing this non-negotiable thing for a large portion of their lives, or the kids falling in line, for fear of the consequences, and doing exactly what their parents want in this regard. In either case, these non-negotiable things are the things that people struggle with the most typically throughout their entire lives, and these things are often the cause of many irrational decisions and bad choices throughout that individual’s life. It is like… the continuation of a generations-long cycle when a child decides to just go along with it, and it is the breaking of a cycle when the child decides not to. In either case, it is a difficult, lifelong battle for the child, because these heavy beliefs about reality imposed upon them by their parents are both hard to carry around and extremely difficult to let go of fully. The truth is, this is generational trauma they are carrying around with them, and releasing it takes time, and many people never release it.

Today we’ll discuss how the same thing from different perspectives might as well be an entirely different thing, and how the possibilities of human experience are infinite, even for a person with a seemingly boring life. Most humans fall into the trap of thinking their experience is too small, or not enough, and this is unsatisfying to them. INTPs, on the other hand, see intricate complexities all around us, and our dissatisfaction comes from the sense of being overwhelmed by it all, and rather than having that sense of boredom or things not being enough, we get overwhelmed by how infinite everything is. We want to understand everything, but we know that is impossible in the span of a human life. The INTP perspective is valuable and unique in that way. We can help others see possibilities where they see nothing, and others can help us narrow our view a little bit so we can actually accomplish something concrete and tangible, rather than being scattered all over the place, jumping around between different technical issues each day that we happen to be interested in.

Which is worse? A dictator or a power vacuum? Both of these things have negatives. In a dictatorship, there is no freedom and everyone has to do what the dictator says or risk being jailed or killed. But, in a dictatorship, everyone knows who is in charge and what to expect. This is a form of stability and certainty, and human beings value stability, even if it takes a dangerous form like a dictator. In a power vacuum, you never know who’s in control, power is constantly changing hands, and you’re not sure who to put your allegiance with because you don’t know if everyone who has allegiance to that group is going to be killed in a week or two. This leads to a lot of uncertainty, violence and chaos.

The comfort of certainty is what leads people to elect strongmen who they feel is going to set things right by force. People would rather live in a dictatorship than a power vacuum, it seems. These are both not ideal scenarios, obviously. Democracy is far more ideal than both. Interestingly enough, ademocracy is essentially just a “controlled” power vacuum. Maybe that’s why they’re so unstable, unfortunately. Power vacuums are always waiting to be filled, by arguably almost always the wrong people.

I go on to discuss the possibility of improving human society through the fusion of artificial intelligence and political systems, and I posit that sometime in the next 100 years, there will be at least one country that lets its government be run entirely, or almost entirely by AI. Likely a small country, like Estonia.

This is a controversial opinion episode and I don’t necessarily stand by all the statements. This is one way to look at the way in which humanity grew, and it may or may not be correct. There are several other alternative perspectives that I touch on briefly at the end of the episode that are equally worth discussing.

People have a low threshold of evidence to belive/accept things other people believe, but they have a high threshold to accept things other people don’t believe. All it takes for someone to change a belief isto meet a good number of people, that they consider kind and reasonable at a time when they are vulnerable, who believe in an alternate thing.

In this episode, we talk about new ideas, how they occasionally spread, and the fact that they hardly ever do.

Everything looks easy and is easy to judge from far away. When people see someone else doing something, especially someone considered a professional, they assume the job is easier than it is, especially if they’ve dabbled in it a bit and are familiar enough to understand a few things, but not familiar enough to understand the emergent difficulty that arises when you scale that activity up to a business. Something might appear straightforward and obvious based on your initial observation, but there is actually A LOT going on behind the scenes to make that simple thing happen, like watching a skater do a kickflip and land it. Looks seamless, and the steps required to do it seem obvious. Just move your feet like this and you’re good. Then when you get on the skateboard and try to do it, it’s far more difficult, and you get injured.

The second example I go into is generating electricity. This seems easy. You just have to turn a turbine. Why can’t we turn more turbines and get the whole world on electric power overnight? But it’s not JUST turning the turbines. Where are you going to turn them? In the air? In the sea? They might kill wildlife. How big will they be? How much do they cost to make? What is their lifetime and how much energy can you get out of them in that time? Are they worth that cost? Now what about storage? It’s impossible to generate energy at exactly the same rate as it is used, so you need storage. Now what about transmission? How are you going to get that energy to the people that need it? It all gets exponentially more complicated when you factor in the human component. Who is going to be opposing you actively? Who is your competition? Who is paying politicians to pass legislation to ensure that you fail? Consider that the majority of the questions I’ve just asked are science questions, each with their own lines of research going on to make turning turbines for people more economically viable. Photovoltaics are even more complicated because you’re not just turning turbines.

That is the essence of why simple seeming things are difficult. You think that you just want to do one thing, but then you realize that to do that you need to address another thing, but to address that new thing you have to address a few other things, and it can explode exponentially into a tree-like structure. Eventually you get to a place where your solution is “good enough” and economically viable, and you release it, but nothing is ever perfect. And then when you do release it, people are going to be criticizing it harshly because it has flaw X or problem Y, and they’ll ask “why don’t they just fix that problem? It’s just one thing. Just make it better. These guys are idiots. Hundreds of scientists and engineers developing this and they couldn’t even prevent problem X? I could make a better project in my garage.” And these little seemingly simple problems that are actually very difficult to solve appearing before the public is what creates people who don’t trust experts.

INTPs are really good at seeing all of this technical nuance, and addressing it carefully, so they often find themselves at the receiving end of this type of harsh criticism. It’s exacerbated by the fact that we like to burrow into our problems without communicating with people, so they think we’re just screwing around, wasting their time, and not actually solving anything. This criticism can actually scare away INTPs from impactful careers in STEM. They might just say “screw that” and spend the rest of their days living in a small apartment, working at a grocery store, and developing their own personal projects at home alone on their computers, never showing the greatness of their work to the world. This is a bit of a loss for the world at large, and can be avoided if people make more of an effort to reach across the isle and understand these technical problems a little bit more, and be less quick to judge a person who is working on it.

Sloppy work is worth avoiding as it puts short term gains ahead of long term growth. In this episode, I discuss the value of doing things properly; crossing one’s t’s and dotting one’s i’s. It may seem like the slower, less efficient way to do something, but in the long term it is actually more efficient because it prevents having to go back and check one’s work, and/or having to scrap a lot of work that was done to begin with.

The negative impact of sloppy work may be imperceptible in the short term, but in the long term it brings progress to a halt. It is like eating fast food. It may give one a temporary energy boost. But over the years, it erodes away the health and causes disease. Doing things slowly and mindfully, on the other hand, is like eating healthy food. It builds one up day by day, slowly but surely, even though it may not be fun in the short term.