#AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022

A host introduces "my good friend Tim Urban from Wait But Why" and jokes that he normally commands a large speaking fee, that the event has no budget, and that his talk is the most-watched in the history of Ted on YouTube. The speaker is then brought on stage. These are the host's own claims and are not checked in the source.

The speaker opens with a joke about a remark made the day before to Nate Silver, then gives his talk a self-deprecating title: that he will discuss politics and other topics that are probably a bad idea in front of this audience. He frames his first question as why he is writing about politics at all.

The speaker says he does not like politics and prefers writing about science, technology, the future and procrastination. Thinking about the future, though, gave him a bad feeling. He had grown up assuming society behaved like a large grown-up organism.

Looking around, he says society more resembles a six-year-old in soiled pants who has dropped an ice cream. He links this to the polarization and mobs that other talks at the event also describe, and says people seem to behave like middle schoolers who cannot communicate. That led him to look for a better way to frame the problem rather than solve all of it.

He argues that conversation is confined to a one-dimensional left-right line, which works like a straitjacket. Calls to "move to the center" confuse a policy position with a way of thinking. In his account, the far left is simply radical and questions everything, while the far right questions whether society made a mistake and wants to return to how things were. Neither end is inherently better or worse.

What people usually mean by wanting a centrist or moderate, he says, is a different axis, which he calls the ladder. Familiar two-dimensional political compasses still describe what people think. The ladder describes how they think. He treats it as a spectrum but focuses on two poles: high-rung and low-rung politics.

High-rung progressives and high-rung conservatives, he says, resemble opposing lawyers in a courtroom. They may dislike each other and disagree sharply, but there is an understanding that both are part of a machine for discovering truth and working out how to move forward.

He says the discussion is complex and spans separate questions: what is true (science and history), what should be (philosophy and ethics), and how to get there (policy strategy, experimentation and testing). Beliefs are formed by moving from "I don't know" toward "I know", so the starting point is an inherent humility.

He compares humility to staying on a tightrope. Confidence jumps when someone first learns something and falls as they discover how much they do not know. Below the line is an insecure zone, where a person knows more than they think and may suffer imposter syndrome. Above the line is an arrogant zone, common in politics, where people believe they know more than they do. He jokes that the distance above the line measures how full of it someone is.

No one is perfect at staying on the rope, he says, but high-rung culture helps because others will disagree with you and because saying "I don't know" or "I haven't thought about that" is seen as smart. Whatever a culture finds cool, people do more of.

In high-rung politics, he says, people do not identify with their ideas. An idea is a machine you built or a hypothesis: you put boxing gloves on it and let friends kick it. He points to the hosts of the show as people who relish telling each other they are wrong, biased or hypocritical, and says nobody takes it personally.

If the idea survives, confidence rises. If it breaks, it feels bad, but the person has become a little less dumb by learning something they were wrong about. He calls this dialectic, and adds that one can play devil's advocate and take the bat to one's own idea, which moves a person up the humility tightrope toward more knowledge.

Another mark of high-rung politics, he says, is consistency, whatever the principle is. He recalls that Elon spoke the day before about free speech and cites the point that defending the speech of people you agree with is easy. He calls that the yellow zone, where principles also support your team.

The test comes when people you dislike say things you dislike, or when your own team tries to shut down others' speech and you know it is wrong. Then a person must choose between the green zone and the orange zone. He says high-rung thinkers stay in the green zone and often go against their own team when a principle requires it.

He stresses that high-rung politics is not withdrawn or unemotional. It can be passionate and heated, with coalitions and marches. What defines it is that people care about truth, stay consistent with principles, do not identify with their ideas and like to argue.

He describes this as a positive-sum game that drives the country, academic knowledge and innovation forward, because people are able to disagree.

He calls low-rung politics "political Disney World", a land of rainbows and unicorns whose inhabitants will not change their minds under any circumstances. It has good guys who are perfectly righteous with good ideas and bad guys who are awful in every way with bad ideas.

Positions come as a checklist. In high-rung politics, knowing someone's view on guns tells you nothing about their view on climate change, abortion or immigration. In low-rung politics, he says, one position plus a person's demeanor lets you guess every other position they hold.

No one thinks they are in low-rung politics, he says; people there believe they value truth. In his account they start from "I know" at a checklist item and then try to prove it correct, which reverses the high-rung order.

An article that disagrees meets a brick wall, with claims that the author is biased or an ad hominem attack. An article that agrees meets none of that skepticism and is suddenly true.