Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…“That’s not really evidence.” It sounds like evidence, it’s evidence-sy, but it’s not actually a piece of evidence because that doesn’t in any way demonstrate that they actually were in on the thing. And there’s just a lot of things like that, there’s a lot of things … I even see, because it’s a very popular conspiracy theory online now that Israel did 9/11, and I’m like, “I’m open. What do you got? What’s the evidence?” And they’ll be like, “Well, did you see that Larry Silverstein took out a huge insurance policy on the World Trade Center? How did he know?” And you’re like, “How did he know that the number one terrorist target in the world might need a big insurance policy on it?” You realize that the same guys attempted to knock those towers down in 1993. And so there’s just little things like that where if you’re being sloppy and you already really want this conclusion, I see where you could see these things as evidence, but if you’re just being a little … if you’re critically thinking about them, it’s actually … it’s not as strong a case as you think it is. Again, I’ll speculate every now and again on things, but I like to take on something where I feel like I can prove this case. I really have enough evidence that I think I can prove this. I think I can prove that the neocons didn’t invade Iraq because they were worried about weapons of mass destruction and they actually had this agenda for at least a decade before the war broke out. There’s strong tangible evidence for that. It’s just sometimes the constant conspiracy guys, not always, but sometimes they just get sloppy when it comes to actually analyzing how strong the case is. I mean, there’s several psychological effects. I think there’s a certain drug to the dogmatic certainty that you were mentioning. It really annoys me, there’s something about human psychology, because when I say stuff, I usually show doubt and show the humiliated that I might not have the right answer and I sometimes look at multiple perspectives. And that’s seen as weakness and lack of intelligence often. It just sounds like it. When I even listen back to people that do that kind of thing, that certainty sounds like intelligence to people. If you say something with a lot of certainty, it sounds like, “This is a smart motherfucker.” And I hate that about myself, about human psyche, that that seems to be the case, because then the dumb dogmatists are going to be the ones that are driving agenda. It is true. I’ve noticed that for a long time though. It’s almost like in a weird way, it’s like a prerequisite for leadership in a way. You kind of have to be certain about things. But then there’s a real problem with that, which is that a lot of times you’re just bullshitting or you’re not correct to be this certain about this. It’s at least debatable. And then the thing, I feel like at least for me is, which I try to do, I’m sure I fail at this a ton, but you try to at least go like … You got to work on training your brain and you have to be conscious about it. And so you have to go like, “Hey, if there’s something here that is confirming my bias,” you start getting that little sense of pleasure of like, “Oh, great, here’s another point that proves the thing I want to be true,” then you have to be 10 times as skeptical about this. You have to really examine this one and be like, “Okay, am I sure that this one …” Because sometimes you’ll hear people even throw out things where it’s like, ” Oh, I know you liked that it was helping your case,” but come on, think about this. This doesn’t even make sense. It’s like, okay, I want to make this argument and then everything that would support that just gets sucked in a force of gravity or something, and you’re like, “Yeah, but have half of these are bad data points.”…

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