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Imagine I present to you this boxer:
And I tell you
You might ask
If I answered
You’d probably ask
And if I answered
You’d think I was insane.

But people do this with their ideas all the time. They feel sure they’re right about an opinion they’ve never had to defend—an opinion that has never stepped into a ring.
From Story of Us, chapter 7. waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/thinki…
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
Around the early 1800s there were 128 random strangers on Earth, each of whose genes makes up 1/128 of you. Some prob. knew each other and had no idea they'd share a common descendant. There are 127 critical sex moments in this chart. If just 1 doesn't happen you never exist. 1/5
Of course if you keep going, things quickly get hectic. In the mid-1600s, you've got over 4,000 ancestors roaming the Earth. Some of them probably fucking hated each other. Also, now you're relying on 4,095 times people banged—if only 4,094 had happened, you wouldn't exist. 2/5
Keep going with this and you reach a weird contradiction. How is this explained? "Pedigree collapse," a euphemism for a whole lot of incest. Fun fact: 80% of all people who have ever lived have been born to parents who were second cousins or closer. 3/5
Read 5 tweets
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
When a system is flawed, the easy, lazy solution is to destroy the whole system. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater takes no skill, education, or savvy, and it leaves everyone worse off. Productive activism, which is careful to preserve the baby, is much harder. (1/3)
Destructive activists justify their tactics by arguing that what people think of as the baby is actually just more bathwater in disguise. But this simple, extreme view is rarely the case, as the history of productive activism testifies. (2/3)
The hardest part of productive activism is pushing back against destructive activism. The courage to criticize people who seem to be wearing the same uniform as you is the ultimate activist challenge. (3/3)
Read 3 tweets
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Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
2 kinds of intellectual culture:

Idea Lab: a safe space for people, a dangerous space for ideas.

Echo Chamber: a safe space for a sacred set of ideas and people who express them, a dangerous space for opposing ideas and people who express them.
Idea Labs see argumentation as play. Echo Chambers see it as fighting.

Idea labs inflict humility on you. Echo Chambers breed unearned conviction.

Idea Labs are an intellectual gym. Echo Chambers are an intellectual candy store.
On a macro scale, an Idea Lab is a super brain smarter than any of its members.

An Echo Chamber is a giant that’s dumber than an individual person but very good at bullying.
Read 4 tweets

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