You know, for some time now, I've kept silent about this as much as I could. But um here's some water over the edge. I want to use the current situation in Israel as an example to refer back to and further illustrate something that um we've talked about before on this channel. This is a slide that I've
pulled from that presentation. Um His name, I can't remember but uh I think it, yeah, the, the words complex and reality are in the title. So I think it's something about the, the complex nature of reality or something like this. One of the ideas from that presentation is that you can't, you can't do
well in looking at a complex situation with simple eyes. So thinking about the situation in Israel, it's been, it's been rather well, what's the correct word for this? It's been extremely disheartening to see just how many people are demonstrating just how much ignorance in how they are processing the
situation that is completely independent of the actual situation except in the complex nature of it. So this presentation isn't about taking a position on the issue. It's more uh about using the fact that so many people have such strong positions as an example of the dangers of oversimplifying. So I'm
gonna take this picture and I want to rotate it on its side and add a few arrows. Here we go. And so this is a crude representation of how we understand the world to be. And essentially what happens is the world is extremely complex and we could add any number of layers to the left of this diagram, making
things more and more complicated. Basically, with each of these circles, you get another lens or maybe you could think of it as an I on the world, on things as they really are on everything, everything we know or everything that could be known, everything that exists. But the issue is it's extraordinarily
difficult to live with that many inputs and it's perhaps even more difficult to communicate to others or interact with others through so many lenses. And so whether it's just to conserve energy, it's just a matter of survival or a question of practicality or a question of uh efficacy in interacting with
others in the world, which is obviously essential to do anything worth doing. We simplify things, we simplify things. And so the question is how simple is too simple? So can you go too far and what are the effects? And I'm not going to dwell on that too much because this is just a little example. I think
I talked about that more in the other presentation and if not, we'll come back to it sometime. But in this case, I've made the ending point, the, the green dot And the red dot And so what this is, is it's a reduction of the world into binary states. Binaries is, uh, you've got two options. It's like
a light switch. It's up or down, it's true or false. It's good or evil. Now, for whatever reason, whether it's cultural programming or laziness or just a desire to have a simple life, that's clear and less scary. Humans have an enormous tendency to reduce things down to good and evil. And usually you
see this, the more intense the situation, the more overwhelming it would otherwise be, we just go to good and evil. So in crime cases, for example, if the crime is particularly egregious, you'll see all this language employed that um that paints the, the picture as one of moral absolutes of this demon
of a person, did this horrific thing that only a pure evil person would do. And that's not to say that there aren't crimes that certainly seem worthy of this kind of appellation. The issue is that um it's sort of like once we've transformed it into this universal moral language, we stopped thinking about
it. And now all of a sudden, instead of being something that we're, we are actively analyzing and paying attention to, it just becomes this foregone notion that, well, of course, it's a solved issue. It's just, there's a right way and a wrong way and there's nothing in between and it will forever be
this way and nothing could ever change it. Now, what are the dangers of this if you think about your own life, or maybe it's easier to think about the lives of others that seems to be easier for us to criticize than ourselves. Can't you enumerate an unending list of situations where someone was perfectly
sincere but absolutely morally wrong. Haven't you ever been seriously mistaken about something? Have you ever judged someone as not being so great or being wonderful that happens too? And then found out that quite the opposite was, was the reality. So what about just your understanding of something?
Just you, you legitimately feel like you've done due diligence on something and you were totally, completely, absolutely wrong and it wasn't intentionally and you didn't have some ulterior motive that you were dead wrong. That happens to me all the time. I believe it happens with everyone. And if we're
honest, we have to admit that. And so this, this is dangerous because it tends to be a one way street once we've come to our conclusion that something is we've, we've managed to complete the transformation of subtle and complicated reality with many moving parts. That's impossible to fully find out that
changes all the time as far as we can see, at least our perceptions of it. Do we don't see the whole machine, right? Don't know the whole story no matter how hard we try. Once we've succeeded in transforming that into this, fully known, fully decided, very simple situation. It's hardly ever the case
that we go back. In fact, if you look at it, the, the, the most likely circumstances to generate reopening the case, so to speak is some horrific, unexpected outcome. That's so bad. It slaps you so hard that you snap out of it. And you say, wow, well, maybe I was totally wrong about this, but usually
it's, you know, it doesn't sound so great when you say it because it's anything but peaceful. When you, when you have to tear out the foundations that you rested so solidly upon, that's called ego death. It's a horrific thing to go through even once, even to go through that once in life. Ok. So most
people live in the binary space, that's where they live and anything in their lives, that's not that way. They will exert tremendous effort to reduce it down to a binary state. But reality is not like that in a person in this diagram who lives in the blue square will encounter massively better outcomes
and have a massively better time of it. Then the person in the yellow, I don't know if that's yellow or orange, the other square. This is not a good way to be you, you can get into it for convenience sake. But it. Like anything that you do for convenience sake, you have to have sufficient reasons and
you have to be able to go back to the other state. So it's great to assume that your accountant is taking care of your tax situation. That's a binary worldview. And you say, well, I'm paying my accountant to worry about this for me. I don't have to worry about it. But if the IRS picks you up and throws
you in jail and takes your house because they say you're doing something bad with taxes, you can't just say, oh, I thought my accountant was taking care of it, right? You will be put into the complex world and it's not a defense to say, well, I have a simplistic view of the world. I thought it was taken
care of and, and that's just an arbitrary example, but life will throw you back into the deep water. If you assume everything's a puddle you're going to drown. So, um, there needs to be a lot more shift to the complex view of things. So now let's get to this example. I have whiplash because because of
the severity of the back and forth between these, these obviously mutually exclusive positions, you know, society has been whipped year after year. Now, with this idea of men and women are completely interchangeable and fully equivalent in every way. And yet every single time I turn on the news ever
since the flying parachute people invaded Israel. All I see is statement after statement after statement of, look at what's happening to the women and Children and sometimes the elderly are included in that, but mostly women and Children. Now, here's the funny thing about this and by funny, I mean, anything
but it's terrible that these people are being harmed. It's always terrible when any person is harmed. What's also really bad that, you know, you can't, you can't always stop bad people from doing bad things, but everyone should stop themselves from thinking badly. And that is something you could do.
You can't stop other people from doing bad things, but you can stop yourself from thinking badly. And I do not understand for the life of me why anyone is getting away with this idea that one side is worse than the other because of the number of women and Children who have been hurt by them. So first
off, both sides are throwing out this argument. It's almost like there's a leader board somewhere with a count of casualties. And that that's ridiculous. But then on top of that, no one is pushing back saying why are we counting women separate from men? I haven't seen one statistic that says this many
men have been kidnapped. I haven't seen one statistic that says this many men were killed. All of them are making reference to things happening specifically to women and specifically to Children, not things that can only happen to women and Children. But those are the only ones that these folks seem
to care about. Why is that? And where is anyone standing up to say, hey, buddy, pick one, either men and women are fully equivalent or they're not, you can't just pick one based on however you want to manipulate people today. What's the truth? Because if they are equivalent, everyone should be up in
arms about people saying, oh, let's count the number of women who have been kidnapped and ignore the number of men and, and you might think jeez, with these atrocities, that's the thing that you're the most worked up about. No, that's the thing that I think is most avoidable in all of this. That does
the greatest harm actually because you can't stop bad people from doing bad things. You can mitigate it. That's sort of a different argument with this because precisely because it goes back a while folks and it's nasty on both sides. Yeah. So that's the first thing. That's the first thing. So if we look
at this as an example of oversimplification where the goodness or badness of each side's argument is based on how many women and Children and maybe old people, the other side has harmed. Then it literally is a leader board where people just say, well, let's just go into the details of what each side
did to women and Children and the elderly. And then we'll be able to see that, you know, in this, in this column, we have a group who did a few more horrible things to a few more kids or women. Therefore, obviously they're evil and unavoidably, you know, we should not treat them as human beings anymore
in any way because they are the epitome of evil. It's like, well, hold on, even if that's your metric, like doesn't anyone have any issue with the other column? And I'm, I'm dealing with these two columns in interchangeable terms on purpose because there are marks in both columns under this metric. There
are atrocities that have been committed by both sides, not just in this conflict. Again, it goes back quite a while folks and before you get all up in arms about that, please hang on to the end for statement that might, it, it won't make you less upset about that if you get upset about that, but at least
you won't have a reason to be. Not that you do now anyway. But let's deconstruct this a bit to analyze it. You need, if you're moving from right to left here, from a binary state to more complex view of the world, which is more appropriate. If you care at all about accuracy, it's also necessary or value
. The fact is that with sim oversimplified reductions, it's funny because they're known for their brevity. But one other thing they're known for is how much goes with it. That's not explicitly stated that is a key to deprogram yourself from these manipulation tactics and that is what they are. They are
intentionally generated by people who know exactly what they're doing and then endlessly repeated by those who do not. So a lie is always born from a person who knows it's a lie. But the damage it does is magnified by those who do not. So to oversimplify things and say the evil in this situation is measured
by how many women, Children and elderly are harmed. Some of the things that come with this are, for example, the assumption that any good solution to any problem, we never have any cost, which in and of itself seems bad. Now, this is a funky thing to think because any cost by definition is bad, right
? But we enter this make believe world where there's a such thing as is a perfect solution to a problem or a solution to a problem that has no cost whatsoever. But alternatively, if, if, if solutions have costs, then anyone could point to any of those costs at any time and make up some silly oversimplified
rule that says, well, any, any like let's say what we're talking about is fixing a flat tire. You say, well, I mean, but that costs money and anything that costs money just can't be good. We need a solution that fixes a flat without any expense whatsoever. And you say, well, you're oversimplifying lives
and dollars are two different things. Yes, they are. But let me ask you something, if, if you were on a ship and the ship was sinking, the ship was sinking and you had a way, let's say there are 100 people on the ship and you have a way of saving 95 of them. But what is required is for five of them to
die. You're the ship's captain, you have to decide what to do. Do you sentence the five people to death to save the other 95 or not? Now, I've heard situations like this presented as is really difficult problems that are obstacles to the implementation of things like artificial intelligence. I don't
see what the problem is. I've never heard anyone describe to me why this is actually a problem if the lives of the 100 people are equal, which incidentally they're not but supposing they are for the sake of supposing that's never the, the complaint that is raised to make this a problem, the evaluation
of those lives, which also ceases to be a problem if you can't evaluate the comparative value, which in most of these cases, you can't, you have to treat them as interchangeably valuable people. So if they're interchangeably valuable and there are 100 of them, losing five is a lot better than losing
100. In fact, losing five is included in losing 100. So if, if there's were ever a situation where there was no cost comparatively there is no cost because those five people will die no matter what in this scenario. So you get to choose whether the other 95 don't. So someone could look at that and say
what's a terrible solution because five people have to die. And you would be shocked at how many people in society would sit there until all 100 died because they would not be able to even vocally admit that it's a better idea for 95 to live and then far fewer would be able to, to make it happen themselves
if they were the captain to give the order on whatever this contrived scenario is. I'm thinking specifically about a situation in a movie called Master and Commander. In that case, it was one person, one person had to die to save the entire crew and the captain had to make the call. It's a, it's a powerful
moment but, but the situation is extremely valuable and it's general. So it just happens to be the fact that good solutions, they have costs, those costs can include the loss of innocent lives. Now, all of that is before, like I said, addressing the fact that in the contrived situation, those 100 lives
are not equivalent to each other. And in this case, one of the pieces that comes with the overly reduced statements, you know that women, any harm to women, Children and elderly equals bad is this idea that those people are somehow innocent. Now, that's a different story from who gets to decide. Right
. I'm right there with you. That, that is an enormous, enormous problem, fraught with issues and abuse and really scary stuff. I'm right there with you who gets to decide, ok, but to pretend that just because someone is whatever, I, I don't care what the demographic is we could be talking about, you
know, a 25 year old men who are over 7 ft tall. I don't care, whatever it is to just magically assume that this class of people is somehow innocent of any possible um fault in a situation. I don't, I don't understand why that is and why anyone can get away with saying it, every single person around them
should call them on their nonsense. And it's worse than just nonsense. This is extraordinarily harmful thinking. This causes a lot of death and destruction, a lot of unnecessary misery. So anyone who doesn't realize that good solutions have costs, which can include innocent lives and the very few lives
are actually innocent. Anyone who doesn't realize this is not smart enough or honest enough to be part of the public dialogue on any important issue. And very few people are both smart and honest enough to realize this. Here's the thing folks, it's one thing to not have the capacity or willingness to
do or be a certain way. It's another to know you do not have the capacity and to still insist that you call the shots. That is an extraordinarily dangerous person. There is actually very little harm in a person who's unwilling to be as good as they could be. Almost all of the harm comes from their insistence
that everyone treat them as if they were. You should think about that. It's an enormous problem. It almost all goes away. Almost everything wrong with this world would go away if people responded honestly to the evidence that they've seen in their own lives that they are not capable of certain things
or willing to do them. I'm just blending those two together that they are inadequate in certain situations. If they just recognize that and acted correspondingly, instead of insisting to be treated as if they were almost all of the problems in the world would go away instantly. Let's dig a little further
into this women, Children and the elderly idea just to underscore the fact that just because someone's in these groups does not mean that there aren't bad people doing bad things now that in and of itself is a reduction down to binary. So I apologize for that. I'm just trying to make the point through
, through um an extreme case here. So this is not an exhaustive list. This is just off the top of my head. Do grannies ever do bad things? Can you think of any situation where where an old lady did something that was horrifically bad one that just came up recently, I was asking my kid what you learn
in school. He was telling me a story about how during the French revolution, there were grannies up there on the stand where these guys' heads were being chopped off knitting socks and dipping them in the blood of the people being beheaded. And because these socks were gonna go to the young revolutionary
fighters and they wanted them to be infused with the fire of the revolution I think was the phrase my son used, which I was pretty floor to hear him say that because he's very young. But anyway, I guess he's got a vivid vocabulary. Um Yeah, and he said that they were just smiling and laughing, you know
, he wasn't there. But that's what whatever history source he was learning from had to say about it. But regardless you can think of many, many situations where little old ladies did terrible things. It happens all the time. We could go through the list here. Do old men ever do bad things? For sure.
Here's just a random. Who do you think was presiding over the Salem witch trials? You think it was young ladies? No, it was old man. Now you say like, OK, but, but you know men and women who are old or women who are not old, uh they're human. So of course they, they are subject to human nature. What
about Children? This one is going to be contentious? Uh or controversial, at least don't all evil people begin life as Children, you say? Yeah. But Children are innocent. Well, to a point, they are right to a point. They are. But what point? And you say, well, if we take the scale low enough, they're
young enough that they're definitely innocent. I'm not gonna disagree with that. Right. But the question is, are we applying that scale when we say? But the Children are replying that scale. When, when you say you just use the word Children, you don't make any, any call on the age or maturity of the
child or the participation of the child. It's just, oh well, Children equals innocent. And I I say to you, well, didn't the she bear come out and eat the kids that were mocking Elisha. I mean, that's not a pleasant thing to be killed by a bear. That's not uh the firing squad is much more humane, a lot
less painful, a lot faster. And we see that as barbaric. So imagine being mauled by bear till you die or just left there to die. So clearly, there's something going on here that defies our moral system or moral um tendencies in modern society. Because if anyone did anything like that today, folks would
lose their minds and, and feel very secure in writing off the this guy, Elisha is an evil, evil man or God for having it happen. And this does make a lot of modern Christians head spin, they don't know how to explain this one away because it defies their understanding of right and wrong so thoroughly
. And I will say incidentally on this issue, I think Christians are among the chief offenders. They, you know, modern Christians have this sacred cow that, um, well, first off, they're very prone to thinking in binary states that is the religion has been reduced to that. They're not really interested
in getting to know the subtleties of reality. They just want a list of things that are ok and things that are not ok. Mostly the things that a list of things that are not ok. And then they treat that as a blank check to do whatever else they want without any guilt. So obviously, human nature does not
cease among the elderly, the female and the young. And even if brand new newborn babies are absolutely innocent, they're unable to make moral choices, right? That changes at some point. And it was God himself who commanded Moses and the armies that invaded the land of Israel to kill all men, women and
Children in some places. And people who want to understand God have to ask why. And you know, I'm not going to try to explain that in this presentation. That's not the point. I'm just using these things as examples to show that this oversimplified view is clearly broken. It, it clearly defies things
that we ought to be able to see that there are contradictions here that ought to be seen. Now, I mean, conclude with this, I've tried to write this in, in an intentional way because I'm not talking about just one side. So hopefully, it's obvious I tried to use words where you could pick one side and
go through everything I'm about to say. And hopefully it applies equally. OK, criticizing a member or a subset of members of a country, race or ideology. It's that is being regarded in this conversation, this conflict as the same as an expression of absolute hatred, calling for the immediate extermination
of all members of said group. There are people who do mean that who, who, when they criticize a member or a subset of members of a country race or ideology, it just so happens, they do wish every single member of that group were exterminated from the earth. However, that is an obvious minority of these
cases and these two things are not equivalent at all. Even if on some Venn diagram, there's some overlap between them in, in, in a, in some people. I'm saying there's some overlap that you could find people who hold both views. That does not mean that everyone who holds one holds the other. What are
the dangers of not being able to criticize a member or subset of members who happen to live in a certain place or happened to be of a certain race or who happened to share some named ideology. When people are off limits from criticism that has to be a pass for them to do bad things. You can't separate
those two. If you, if you, they tell you in leadership, if you care about something, measure it. In other words, if you're not evaluating something which means criticizing it critiquing, then it's going to go off the rails. Second point, be careful. This says, sorry, there's a type on the slide here
. Be careful when the conversation a about anything uses terms that are ambiguous. One of the best, non confrontational. Although it's seen as confrontational, it's not, it's actually avoidance of it, non confrontational ways to approach. And the disagreement is to just start by having people explain
what they mean. When they say you certain words, please explain what you mean when you say this or could you say what you mean instead of using this word for it? And it clarifies so much that that half the time the argument goes away because you can say, oh, well, then I see where you're coming from
. I actually agree with that. It's just I'd use different words to describe it. This happens a lot or should it could. So when we get into ambiguous terms, going back to this, this uh representation here, the ambiguous terms are the the green and red dots. Folks, if you take it back enough, you'll see
like maybe here's, here's five dots, maybe if you take it to this level, you disagree on one dot And you actually agree on the other four and you don't have to be mortal enemies about something you can say like, well, ok, we disagree on this and we've shared our reasons why and we're not changing, but
we can still be friends or at least not kill each other. Wouldn't that be nice? So, here's some, here's some red flags to look for labels that can simultaneously apply to very different groups of people. So for example, citizens of a certain region and members of a certain religion and people descended
from one or both of those, even if it's been many generations since they had any connection whatsoever to these things. Those are labels that really far from not meaning anything because they're so ambiguous ambiguity tends towards the opposite. It's not a vacuous a condition, it's impregnated with tons
of stuff, tons of baggage that is almost certainly not intended when the label is used. So again, both sides of this current conflict do this and it's really not good. People should be specific and they do it intentionally. By the way, for this very reason, they really want people to side with them and
they know that by doing this, they're going to trip all sorts of wires in people that, where it becomes this. What I the phrase I use in the next bullet is an absolutist holy war where no holds barred the most important. It's an issue of survival. It's, it's when you reduce things down to binary states
, you move towards simplifying reality into two camps. One of which assures your, your survival and um and prosperity and the other assures your destruction and life is not like that. So don't reduce complicated issues and ideas, situations into binary absolutist holy wars, you have to maintain rational
thought. Don't be overcome by emotion. And that's what this is. All this all tends towards the reduction of reality into. Do I feel good or bad? That's what this is at the end of the day. Not only are you oversimplifying very complicated ideas and situations, you're also moving into making everything
a purely emotional and immediate just right now, who cares about the long term consequences, an emotional and an immediate situation. And that is the absolute worst thing you could do if you care about truth value, goodness, utility, beauty, anything that matters. This is the worst possible way you could
deal with life. So that concludes me saying my piece about this at least for the time being and I hope this is useful. And again, this is just an example, the applications of this are manifold and hopefully you see them in your own life. Um This is a ironically a very simple treatment of what could be