14 Shocking Lessons About Human Nature - Gurwinder Bhogal

A team of researchers analyzed 27 million news articles published between 1970 and 2019, and what they found was that use of words like sexist and racist in the New York Times and in the wider liberal media increased over 400% since 2012. Obviously, sexism and racism have not actually increased 400% since 2012. It's only the media's use of these terms that's increased.

Your writing is so good, dude. People send me that audience capture article all the time. This most recent one that you did about, uh, how Smart People Make Themselves Be Dumb, uh, the TikTok article, it's, it's phenomenal. I, I... You're the only Substack that I pay for, and, uh-

Oh, thanks (laughs) .

... quite rightly, quite rightly so, so-

That's super nice.

... what, what can I say? So, my favorite thing-

Thank you.

... to do with your Twitter is go through some of the mental models, biases, and ideas that you've got, and we're gonna go through as many as we can today. First one is chilling effect. When punishment for what people say becomes widespread, people stop saying what they really think and instead say whatever is needed to thrive in the social environment. Thus, limits on speech become limits on sincerity.

Yeah. So, I mean, so this is, you know, a, a, sort of very timely thing, I think, because there's a lot of talk about sort of suppressing people from social media and stuff, and, um, I think people should really realize that stopping people from airing their true opinions doesn't change their opinions. It just makes them mask their opinions. Um, and when this happens at scale, it can lead to all kinds of absurd situations, uh, like the Abilene paradox. I don't know if we've covered the Abilene paradox.

Run it back.

It's basically a situ- yeah, it's basically a situation where everyone professes a belief that no one actually believes, purely because they think everybody else believes it. And so you can have a situation where literally everybody just is saying stuff that is just not true for the sole reason that they think everybody else thinks it's true. And an example of this, um, would probably be considered sort of, um, the, the issue of what a woman is. Um, you've got pretty much everybody in the mainstream culture now pretending that they don't know what a woman is. Um, but if you were to ask these people in private, they would probably be able to tell you. They'd just probably say, uh, "An adult human female." But because there's this sort of stigma now around knowing what a woman is, people, you know, have basically, sort of, they have to pretend like they don't know (laughs) . And, uh, it's just, it leads to absurd situation after absurd situation, and that's why I think it's, it's... I mean, there's many reasons, there's many arguments against censorship, but this is definitely one of the, the strongest, I think. Um, you're not... By censoring people, you're not changing their behavior, you're not changing their opinions, you're not changing their beliefs. All you're doing is just sort of sweeping them under the carpet, you know? And they're just gonna continue, just, you just won't be, be able to see it anymore, so you can't-