0:00:00 - 0:00:21 Talk briefly about the ideal mindset for truth. And I want to give you some notion of just how rare it is. Now, the good news is, it's something we can all aim for. And the other good news is that how we do that is we find people who are already there now to motivate this. I wanna go to an old presentation 0:00:21 - 0:00:45 , you'll find it on the channel and it's called learning to discern. There are all sorts of older presentations that have so much important stuff in them. And so I invite you when you have a free moment to dig into the older stuff, the older materials here, they're rich. They have a lot of good information 0:00:44 - 0:01:10 in them. I know some of you do that, but it's always good to see people going through those. It's, it's good stuff. So I'm not going to rehash that fully. I'm just going to give a quick overview, this diagram hopefully looks familiar and this is, this is a layout of potential perspectives on how we treat 0:01:09 - 0:01:36 new information. And so it's, it's kind of a map of a mindset. So there are various axes here and each of them represents one category of how a person's attitude towards putative new truth could be described. So for instance, on the unconstrained constrained axis, and again, all this is, is, is given 0:01:36 - 0:02:00 in much more detail, probably in a much better, clearer way in the older presentation. But just to give context here, a constrained person, they're going to limit their understanding of reality, understanding that, that they don't get to just make that up. Reality is how things are and you can discover 0:02:00 - 0:02:21 that, but you can't just make it up. And in fact, if you want to change it, you have to learn the rules of the game and you don't get to decide what those rules are. You just get to choose how to play an unconstrained person goes through their life predominantly thinking in terms of what they wish were 0:02:21 - 0:02:43 , was was true. And there are hallmarks of these kinds of people. They, they tend to pretend that they have all kinds of empathy, but they leave a path of wanton destruction because they end up messing things up much more than they were before because they, they just think that the way that they wish 0:02:42 - 0:03:00 reality was is how it actually is. These are the kinds of people who say, oh let's take a bunch of ex cons and set them up in housing in the middle of a residential neighborhood. And then they wonder why crime goes through the roof. And they say Well, I know, but if we just give the ex-cons another chance 0:02:59 - 0:03:18 , they'll be completely reformed. Well, some of them might, but that just flies in the face of human nature. And it's a really stupid idea. So that's unconstrained versus constrained. Then you've got discerning versus naive. I'm gonna try to pick up the pace a little bit and not spend so much time on 0:03:18 - 0:03:40 the, on the review. But a discerning person they think through things they're rational. They investigate, they research, they look at evidence, they're evidence based people, a naive person, a naive person is, is someone who just believes what they're told. They are, they inherit beliefs and then they 0:03:40 - 0:04:01 just stick with them no matter how much counter evidence is presented to them, they just keep going with it. You'll have to go back to the original presentation to see what I meant by sheep and pig on the other. The, the final axis here. The last dimension is dogmatic to open minded. So a dogmatic, a 0:04:01 - 0:04:24 dogmatic person, they believe that one set of moral standards, that's exactly the truth. Truth can be known. Finally, you can know everything you need to know or at least everything. Uh I'm sorry, everything there is to know or at least everything you need to know. And that once you have that you should 0:04:24 - 0:04:48 stick with that no matter what it's, it's done, it's been figured out, an open minded person will, will investigate new ideas. With a limited amount of bias, they'll try to suspend their disbelief and just hear people out and all of these qualities they interplay with one another. And so one interesting 0:04:47 - 0:05:10 thing that I've noticed, for example, is in this dimension, in particular open minded people, they tend to entertain many ideas, but they tend to not go deeply into very many. And that might just be a question of limited resources. But I have found that folks who are more open to looking at my material 0:05:10 - 0:05:28 . For example, if I, if I, if they're public on youtube, so if you have subscribed to my channel and you have your own channel, then I can actually see that you're a subscriber on my channel. And so I could click on your channel and look at some of the other channels that you subscribe to. And what I've 0:05:28 - 0:05:48 found is that there's a common theme in at least some of these subscribers that they tend to be open to ideas that most people would consider kind of far out there. And that, that is by um that, that is very consistent with this idea that if you think you know everything there is to know, you're not 0:05:48 - 0:06:08 gonna wanna see what some random person has to say about relatively deep topics. And if you do, you probably are interested in what, hearing what a lot of people have to say. And there are pros and cons to all of these things right. So in and of it themselves, while one side of each of these dimensions 0:06:07 - 0:06:31 is much better than the other. One dimension in isolation is not going to get you to where you want to be. It takes all three. And so to the extent that one of them is off, you're gonna not be, you're gonna be further away from this star here, which is where you need to be, to be the most receptive to 0:06:31 - 0:06:50 the greatest truth. And, and that's not negotiable. If you're dogmatic, you're gonna be closed off to it for sure. If you're unconstrained, you're gonna be closed off to it for sure. And if you're naive, you're never gonna get there, but just being discerning, well, that's, that's, that would take you 0:06:50 - 0:00:00 over here, right? And, and if you're not open minded and constrained as well, you see how that works. Hopefully, it's clear um here is where you want to be, you want to know how to test things and assign them into. Hey, this is good. Hey, this is evil, right? And hopefully there's a gradation there. 0:00:00 - 0:07:36 You can actually discern the degree to which they are open minded. You, you truly believe that everything you think, you know, is incorrect or incomplete, that's a really rare thing. And this helps distinguish what actually being open minded is versus what a lot of people think it is, right? So, for 0:07:36 - 0:07:58 example, um you, we could argue whether this is more true for being constrained or dogmatic. But one of those, if not both tends to correlate with a conservative life view, specifically a conservative political view. Now it's much more than that. But those two things tend to overlap a lot. You can't 0:07:58 - 0:08:21 say that being on the left overlaps with anything on this screen. Although left leaning people would like to think that they cluster with open mindedness, that's actually not true. Uh Modern, left leaning people are, are, are much more dogmatic and constrained than modern right leaning people. But this 0:08:21 - 0:08:41 is not a political discussion. And I think both of those views have a lot of problems, but just to clear that up a little bit. And then finally, the ideal perspective here is going to be constrained, meaning that you do believe that reality is governed by a set of laws and that these are discoverable 0:08:40 - 0:09:05 that swings you back to discerning. So discerning is, is related to seeking out what those laws are anyway. That's the overview. My question is how common, this is the point of this presentation. How common do you think a red star person is? So I've got a red star on this picture, someone who's discerning 0:09:04 - 0:09:29 open minded and constrained. Have you ever wondered this? Are you this kind of person? Well, let me motivate this a little bit or let's approach this orthogonal and this is a good trick when we're dealing with ideas that are going to run right into our self worth or right into our sacred cows. One mental 0:09:28 - 0:09:47 trick you can use so that you can fully use your rational ability and avoid as, as much automatic bias as you can is to investigate it from a completely or seemingly orthogonal example and then tie it right in. And now I've put my cards on the table and so maybe your fences are up. But let's see if we 0:09:47 - 0:10:10 can do this. I had a hypothesis that if we looked at marathon finishing times, we would see that they were Peredo distributed and that most of the people were really slow and it turns, why would you think that Rob? Because human performance is Pareto distributed. You will see this across the board if 0:10:09 - 0:10:31 it comes down to choice, even if it includes some kind of natural ability. If there's an element of human choice, it will be Pareto distributed. And sure enough, guess what it is now, I need to break this down because it's kind of a wonky graph, but I use it on purpose because uh the data that's assembled 0:10:31 - 0:10:50 here actually provides multiple examples of what I'm trying to say. So these are marathon finishing times and they've separated it by gender. But I wonder why because aren't men and women interchangeable? I mean, jeez these guys need to get with the times. No pun intended. So here are finishing times 0:10:49 - 0:11:18 and as you see men outperform women, moment of silence for rational thought. OK. But amongst the performances in this pattern follows, if we separate out the data from men and women, what you're going to see is that there are these distribution spikes right at the hour or half hour marks, there's some 0:11:17 - 0:11:40 little fractal replications, some echoes of this pattern within that. And this is really weird. So the fast people are super rare, super rare. And then as you get up towards three hours on the elite men's side, you see this explosion and finish times. Why is that? And then it drops down, which is really 0:11:40 - 0:12:01 weird. Do you think this would be continuous? Well, they're stacking multiple data sets here. And in another part of this website, it says that they've combined different demographics, which I think they mean age groups and that's not broken out here. But I suspect that those age groups are have different 0:12:00 - 0:12:19 qualifying times. You know, when you run the Boston marathon, you have to be able to run some other marathon within a specific amount of time. Or else you can't run it. You're not invited to participate and I think it's three hours. So going with that, then it makes total sense why there'd be a drop 0:12:18 - 0:12:38 off here because now you're in a different rule set, different qualifying time. So maybe some other demographic had to finish within 3.5 hours and these people know that they've trained to it. But what you see is that most people just barely get over the minimum. And then from there, there's this stratification 0:12:37 - 0:13:04 . If we were to zoom into this, because this is what a preto distribution does. If we zoom into this, we'd see the same exact pattern again and again and again and again, it wouldn't matter how much we zoomed in. So what's, what's the point here? Elite people are super duper rare. OK. Now, running time 0:13:03 - 0:13:30 is one dimension of performance. It's just one thing, my question for you. And unfortunately, this is a math question. So if you have an upset stomach, you might want to pause this and come back another time if you haven't eaten recently or maybe if you just ate. So here's the question. How do you calculate 0:13:29 - 0:13:58 the probability of several events happening at once? The answer is you multiply the probability of each event happening on its own. And because math tends to be hard. I I broke this down as much as I could if we want to get a handle, an estimation on how rare a person who is discerning open minded and 0:13:57 - 0:14:20 constrained is what we have to do is assign numbers to those and then multiply them together. And a property that, that you might not have fresh on your head. If you don't deal with multiplying numbers for work every day or you're not teaching your kid about this is that when you multiply several numbers 0:14:19 - 0:14:45 , less than one, they get really small, really quick. So if we suppose just plucking this out of thin air that the probability of a random person being discerning or not. So, we're oversimplifying this because we're treating it as true or false. And it's actually, it's on a continuum if that probability 0:14:44 - 0:15:13 were a flip of a coin which is 0.5 and the probability of the other two qualities were the same. So what we're dealing with is flipping a coin three times and getting heads all three times or tail. That probability is 12 out of 100. So something so common that it's 5050 to get it three times in a row 0:15:13 - 0:15:38 is 12 out of 100. So hopefully that, that breaks through what you'd assume it would be, which is if we're dealing with something, it's just, it's a flip of the coin. Yeah, if you do it three times, you're down to 12 out of 100 instead of 50 out of 100 it goes down very quickly. Now, I don't know how 0:15:38 - 0:15:59 you think about this. But with my experience with people, I think each of these three qualities is way more rare than 50% of the population. I would think that out of the three discerning is the rarest I could make an argument for that, but it's outside the scope of this presentation. If I had to just 0:15:59 - 0:16:23 pluck a number out of thin air, let's say two people out of 100 are discerning. What about how often people are open minded? I think maybe 20% of people could qualify for that. What about being constrained? That's the easiest to find out of them. There are a lot of people who are constrained. Um, it 0:16:23 - 0:16:56 , it tends to co occur with having your mind made up about things and just being very sort of, uh, I don't know, strong willed about that. Um, this is misspelled, sorry, that's distracting. Um OK. So if we multiplied these together 0.02 0.2 and 0.4 so two out of 100 20 out of 100 and 40 out of 100 it's 0:16:56 - 0:17:23 a really small number. It's about one out of 1000. Now, the truth is, again, we've oversimplified, this is true or false qualities and they're on a continuum. The truth is going back to here where you are on the slider. It matters and it's just that the math would get a lot more complicated, right? But 0:17:22 - 0:17:41 the point is that this is super duper rare. That's the point, super duper rare. If you were to plop 1000 people down on this, you just, you go into, uh some random place, I was gonna say New York City and, and then you're definitely going to get some bias in your sample. But if you went to a random place 0:17:41 - 0:18:02 and grabbed 1000 people at random and you plotted where they were on this, what would it look like? Well, it would look something like this. These are not 1000 little people, but it would be much more crowded at the edges down at the bottom and it would thin out really quickly. This is actually probably 0:18:02 - 0:18:39 too generous even let's erase some people. Ok. Something like this. That's probably more accurate. Oops, go away. So this is, this is how rare it gets and how quickly it gets rare. Now, does this remind you of anything? Is this ringing any bells? How about this? Now, a whole lot of people have made depictions 0:18:39 - 0:19:02 of the vision of the tree of life and I don't really like any of them surprise. But one thing that this one seems to do better than the other ones that came up in the Google search is to convey that there is a Pareto distribution in the number of people that get to the tree just like you see here with 0:19:02 - 0:19:30 this star. This is no coincidence. By the way, we're looking at the same thing. It's just a different representation. Here's some verses to give a little bit of evidence for what I'm saying. So when Lehigh sees this, he sees a large and spacious field and it's the whole world, he sees numberless concourses 0:19:29 - 0:20:00 of people. Now, out of the set of all people, how many were moving from the starting point? It says many in verse 21 many of whom were pressing forward not all of whom, not most of whom, many of whom. Now how many is many, I don't know, but it's less than 100%. Ok. So out of the, the most intense density 0:20:00 - 0:20:27 at the beginning, some are pressing forward and what happens to them. So they come forth and they come to the path which leads to the tree and many were drowned. Many of the people at the beginning. No, many of the many who had commenced. So now we've got a subset of a subset that are drowned. So then 0:20:26 - 0:20:55 that leaves even fewer that remain. I didn't underline this. Many were lost from his view. Here's another many that peel off and then he says, great was the multitude that entered into the great and spacious building. So who's left? You've got all these, all these exit ramps from the highway who's left 0:20:55 - 0:21:25 ? It's a minority. The number still on the path dwindles as you get closer to the tree, it's a Pareto distribution. The path to God is never the majority path. It's what I call an inverse highway. If you're, if you're on a highway and you're driving cross country or some place that you've never been 0:21:25 - 0:21:43 , you really have to pay attention because you get these forks and highways. Sometimes you don't realize that you're on an on ramp and you're headed in a direction that you don't wanna go. But most of the time when you're on a highway, you can it takes effort to leave it. You have to intentionally take 0:21:43 - 0:22:04 the exit and it's very obvious. Well, the path to God is like the first one, not the second one, you have to pay attention all the time to stay off of the exit ramps. It's an inverse highway. It takes effort to stay on it. And if you go with the flow, you're going to leave. And that's what we see with 0:22:04 - 0:22:31 the vision of the tree of life. And that's what we see in every representation of what it means to move closer to God. Passivity will never get you there. It will always 100% of the time. Take you off the path. You have to be active, you have to be growing, you have to be moving forward. And if you're 0:22:31 - 0:23:03 not, you're out of the path. No, this is the last slide given that this ramp to the ideal mindset for, for finding and evaluating punitive truth. It's invisible. You're not gonna go look out your window and see this picture. There's nowhere you can go to find this picture. Now you can learn what up looks 0:23:03 - 0:23:25 like. And it, it's actually, it's not that hard. It's basically in one word, it's just improvement. Now, we have to dig into that, make it much plainer because it's, it's too easy to, to mess up. It's, there's so many layers of bad ideas that we have to dig through and get rid of. But this ramp is invisible 0:23:24 - 0:23:54 . Now, the good news is, is that the people on it are visible. You can't see the ramp, but you can see the people on it. And it's much easier to see these qualities in people than it is to see the ramp. What do we know about this situation? Most of the people that you encounter are very far from where 0:23:54 - 0:24:18 you want to be. Now, you don't have to be a genius to figure that out. If you look, there's a, there's a comic George Carlin, he used to say, think of your average person and how dumb they are and realize half of people are dumber than that because that's what average is. Right. If you look at the average 0:24:17 - 0:24:37 person, it should be very obvious that you do not want to be average and you have to remember that half of people are worse than that. It doesn't matter what the quality is. Half of people are obese. Well, they're, they're overweight and it's getting bad enough that pretty soon it'll be that half of 0:24:37 - 0:25:03 people are obese, they're depressed, they're downright miserable, they're broke and they're divorced. You don't want to be any of those things, right. So, going to where the crowds are, remember it's Peredo distributed and people are peeling off this path faster than they're staying on it. You're looking 0:25:03 - 0:25:25 for something other than average, you're looking for something that's rare. You know, this, without knowing anything else. About these people who are closer to what you want than you are, you know, that they're rare. So the question is, how much would it matter to find those people? What would you do 0:25:25 - 0:25:58 if you did? And how can you find them? The answer to those questions is in the account of the vision of the Tree of Life. There are two accounts of that. You should reread those passages, those two chapters in the book of Mormon and answer those questions. How could you tell if someone is closer to the 0:25:58 - 0:26:09 tree of life than you are? Why does it matter? How should you respond? It's in the book. So follow the instructions.