Max Bennett: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Yeah. Well, I I agree with you, and and I don't necessarily want to get too philosophical on that. But, yeah, that that book was, Will Storr's Status Games, where he said that there were 3 meta status games that we played. Yeah. I think he gave, yeah, the virtue game, the dominance game, the success game. So, you know, I might be playing the success game. I want to have the best podcast or or whatever. But, but, no, the the reason I bring this up is the difference between humans and animals is they're just playing 1 game. So it's really interesting that they have this memetic social score, but the the game is the same everywhere. Whereas for us, we go 1 level of abstraction up. So the success game to us can be manifest in in a myriad of different ways. It could be successful at playing computer games. It could be, you know, writing books or or making podcasts or or whatever. So it's almost like we we fractionate our our social ranking into a myriad of different games. And I think that's a little bit of a testament to the difference us humans have in general with our metacognition, which is our ability to kind of like create the memetics, you know, in a novel way. 1 thing that I've that's sort of related to this, at least in early human societies, is 1 way to sort of, I'm taking a little bit from the business world here, where 1 way to reduce sort of status infighting is to make it such that members of a team have distinct roles. And I don't think this lesson only comes from management theory and entrepreneurship. I think this probably derives from either early human or maybe even early primate societies where it's much more stable. And you can introspect that this feels much more comforting being a part of a troop of a 100 humans where pretty much everyone is pulling their weight and everyone matters because they're doing their own distinct thing. And that's a very stable state where we're not infighting as much because we're all sort of doing well matter to some degree. But when now there's infighting for, you know, 5 blacksmiths, or there's 5 podcasts, or there's 5 books about the evolution of the brain. Now all of a sudden, these other types of things start emerging because we're no longer all fulfilling a role that matters. There's only, it feels like there's a ranking and only 1 of these is gonna matter. So I think as an example of ways to reduce this sort of status seeking, I see this in sort of business all the time, which is the more you can create an environment where it's not 0 sum, where everyone's pulling their weight and together we all win, the more sort of the best version of humans emerge. The more 0 sum it becomes and the less divided the sort of roles and what people are doing is, the more of these sort of, I would argue, sort of primitive primate behaviors start emerging. An early stage company, so a company of 30 people, has such different dynamics than my last company where when I was When I left that, we were 400 people. The social dynamics is so different. And I do think 1 could speculatively correlate that to sort of our evolutionary history here, where in a 30 person company, you don't need that much structure. I mean, if you have if you have, like, people that work well together, that are aligned on a mission, that, you know, you get rid of people that are in general mean spirited or have bad intent, you don't need a lot of structure and process to get people to work well together, to support each other, to move in the common direction. I think what that demonstrates when 1 observes that is that what's playing out is an evolutionary program that got groups of 30 humans to work really well together. When you're at 400 people, what very quickly happens and takes a lot of work to fight this is you start getting sort of internal factions emerge. Because what splinters out is these subgroups of 30 to 100 people that then have their own points of view. And then it's very easy to us versus them, other groups. And you start seeing things break down. And that's where 1 mechanism for solving this is very rigid hierarchies. That's what the military does. And then it's very easy to us versus them, other groups. And you start seeing things break down. And that's where 1 mechanism for solving this is very rigid hierarchies. That's what the military does. Another mechanism is embrace the chaos, which is sort of a little bit more Google does. Another mechanism is to have, is to effectively make it a satellite of different startups, which is what Amazon does, where each group is a kind of autonomous and has very clean interfaces to other groups. So it can kind of, there's many different sort of management approaches to this. But the breakdown I do think emerges from humans did not evolve to interact with 100,000 people. We did evolve in an environment where we interacted naturally with about 100 people. And that's why that comes very we don't need as much sort of process to make that work, but we do when we scale it up.…

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