Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Oh, life is getting better. But I don’t know that necessarily that attracts people’s happiness, right? I mean, I would argue that maybe, who knows, I don’t know this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people in hunter-gatherer societies are happier. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re happier than people who have access to modern medicine and email and cellphones. Well, I don’t think there’s a question whether you take hunter-gatherer folks and put them into modern day and give them enough time to adapt, they would be much happier. The question is, in terms of every single problem they’ve had, is now solved. There’s now food, there’s guaranteed survival, and shelter and all this kind of stuff. So, what you’re asking is a deeper sort of biological question, do we want to be… Werner Herzog and the movie Happy People: Life in the Taiga, do we want to be busy 100% of our time hunting, gathering, surviving, worried about the next day? Maybe that constant struggle ultimately creates a more fulfilling life. I don’t know. But I do know this modern society allows us to, when we’re sick, to find medicine, to find cures, when we’re hungry, to get food, much more than we did even a hundred years ago. And there’s many more activities that you could perform, all creative, all these kinds of stuff that enables the flourishing of humans at the individual level. Whether that leads to happiness, I mean, that’s a very deep philosophical question. Maybe struggle, deep struggle is necessary for happiness. Or maybe cultural connection. Maybe it’s about functioning in social groups that are meaningful, and having time. But I do think there’s an interesting memory related thing, which is that if you look at things like reinforcement learning for instance, you’re not learning necessarily every time you get a reward, if it’s the same reward, you’re not learning that much. You mainly learn if it deviates from your expectation of what you’re supposed to get. So, it’s like you get a paycheck every month from MIT or whatever, and you probably don’t even get excited about it when you get the paycheck. But if they cut your salary, you’re going to be pissed. And if they increase your salary, “Oh good, I got a bonus.” And that adaptation and that ability that basically you learn to expect these things, I think, is a major source of… I guess it’s a major way in which we’re kind of more, in my opinion, wired to strive and not be happy, to be in a state of wanting. And so people talk about dopamine, for instance, being this pleasure chemical. And there’s a lot of compelling research to suggest it’s not about pleasure at all. It’s about the discomfort that energizes you to get things, to seek a reward. And so you could give an animal that’s been deprived of dopamine a reward and, “Oh yeah, I enjoy it. It’s pretty good.” But they’re not going to do anything to get it. And just one of the weird things in our research is I got into curiosity from a postdoc in my lab, Matthias Gruber, and one of the things that we found is when we gave people a question, like a trivia question that they wanted the answer to, that question, the more curious people were about the answer, the more activity in these dopamine-related circuits in the brain, we would see. And again, that was not driven by the answer per se, but by the question. So, it was not about getting the information, it was about the drive to seek the information. But it depends on how you take that. If you get this uncomfortable gap between what you know and what you want to know, you could either use that to motivate you and energize you, or you could use it to say, “I don’t want to hear about this. This disagrees with my beliefs. I’m going to go back to my echo chamber.”…

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