Robert Wright: belief

Transcript context

…The President of the United States is maybe the as high as I can go. Well, you know, one thing Trump has done occasionally, and I'm not a Trump supporter by and large, but he has, he has done the cognitive empathy thing. He, he's like, he's done a, a kind of corrective for our natural bias of, of self-righteousness. You know? He- he's like, "What, you think we're so great?" Like, you know, some other country will do something at a time when... I think he's done this a couple times in the course of even the Iran war when he was maybe trying to get a deal done and he didn't want people to focus on duly on some attack that Iran had done in response to some other thing, and it's just kinda like, "What, you think our hands are free of blood?" He's every once in a while done that. I think we need a ton of that because the, the biases, once a nation is deemed an adversary, the biases, the filters, the cognitive biases can be so strong, especially when a nation is very different. I mean, obviously China's system of government is different from ours and, you know, more authoritarian, more autocratic and all that, and there obviously is this fear that if they win the race to super intelligence or something, they will try to impose their system of government on us. Now this isn't the question you asked, but I think that's an assumption that simply has not been evaluated carefully because there really is no evidence that China's that, that, that, that that's the Chinese business model, I think, to, to... I, I don't think it's i- in a weird way very ideologically driven in its conception of how it wants to relate to the world. But that's, that, that's separate. What, what I would say, though, is, like, make at least make people understand how a lot of Chinese view us, and understand that there are filters at work on both sides. Like, we think whatever we're doing, whether it's chip controls or Taiwan or whatever, we, we have these reasons for the, the policies, whether it's defending Taiwan, denying China certain technologies, these, these- Explanations that are fundamentally defensive in nature, right? Like with the chip controls, well, we're afraid of what they'll do to us if they get the chips and the AI. With Taiwan, we're afraid of what they'll do to Taiwan and, and, and so on. I'm not saying none of those are, have any degree of validity, but, but I would point out, like, that's not what the Chinese think our motivation is. That's the first thing to understand. It is widely believed in China that our goal is to keep China down, period. We just wanna be dominant, and we don't like a rising power, and we are gonna try to frustrate them. You may believe that that that's completely confused and all of our rationales are completely right. Fine, but it's, it's still of some strategic value to at least understand the way they're processing the information and how they're gonna react to things you do. So that's job one. And I, I would, by way of illustrating how powerful the filters on information are... rstand the way they're processing the information and how they're gonna react to things you do. So that's job one. And I, I would, by way of illustrating how powerful the filters on information are... Now, have you heard that, and apparently this is true, I haven't, I haven't pinned it down with 99.9% confidence, but apparently this really happened. So China, like 30 years ago or something, they contracted with Boeing to, to design, like, their Air Force One. Okay? They wanted something their premier could fly in. Now, apparently what we did, such is the relationship between our government and Boeing, that we filled it with all this spying stuff. Even the bedroom, even the premier's bedroom, little bedroom on the plane, had listening devices, okay? Now, my main point is... Had you heard about this, Nathan?…

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