Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I find it easier to be optimistic than pessimistic because I don’t know either way. So if I get to choose, why not just choose to believe it’s going to pan out? “We suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality,” that’s one of the quotes out of Stoicism. And I also think we have a tendency, a lot of humans have a tendency to be pessimistic in advance for things they don’t know how it’s going to pan out. Climate change, for example, is making a lot of people very anxious and very pessimistic about the future. You know nothing. 40 years ago, we thought the problem was that the planet was going to be too cool. I happen to believe that it’s probably correct that the planet is getting too hot and that CO2 has something to do with it. Whether we have the right measures to fix it in time, if that’s even possible or not, is completely up in the air and we don’t know. If you convince yourself with such certainty that the world is going to turn to shit. It is, right up here in your head, today. Climate change might wipe out this entire species in 200 years. It’s not next year. It’s not 10 years from now. Life might become more unpleasant and there might be more negative effects and so on. Yes, okay, but then deal with that hardship when it arrives. Don’t take that in advance. How are you helping earth by just walking around being depressed? I think our whole conversation today is also an indication, it’s just two humans talking. There’s billions of us and there is something about us that wants to solve problems and build cool stuff and so we’re going to build our way out of whatever shit we get ourselves into. This is what humans do. We create problems for ourselves and figure out how to build rocket ships to get out of those problems. And sometimes, the rocket ships create other problems like nuclear warheads and then we’ll, I hope, figure out ways how to avoid those problems. And then, there’ll be nanobots and then the aliens will come and it’ll be a massive war between the nanobots and the aliens and that will bring all of us humans together. The funny thing, just to pick up one of the points you mentioned, the atom bomb, for example. When that was first invented, a lot of people thought we have essentially ended life on earth or maybe we prevented World War III from happening in the past 80 years because assured, neutral annihilation kept the superpowers from attacking each other at least head-on and kept their fighting to proxy wars. You know what? Proxy wars are not great, but they’re probably better than World War III with nuclear weapons. So it’s quite difficult in the moment to tell what’s actually benefit and what’s not, and I think we should be a bit more humble. I’ve certainly become more humble over time of thinking I know which way it’s going to turn. I think the pandemic was a huge moment for a lot of people where there was so much certainty about whether this intervention worked or that intervention didn’t work and most people were wrong. Certainly a lot of very smart people, very qualified people got that just utterly and catastrophyingly wrong. So just a little intellectual humility, I think back upon that and go like, “You know what? I’m not a PhD in virology,” and I don’t claim that I somehow saw how it always going to play out, but the people who were really experts in it, they’ve got a bunch of it wrong. Nobody knows anything. I keep reminding myself of that every day. No one knows anything. We can’t predict the economy a month out. We can’t predict world affairs a month… The world is just too complicated.…

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