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9. The Myth of Universal Agency · Great Houses

• 0:00
  Hello everybody.
• 0:01
  Uh, my name is Gregory Treat and this is the Great Houses Forum.
• 0:06
  So this is episode nine.
• 0:07
  We're gonna be talking about agency or mastery today.
• 0:12
  So I am actually broadcasting from Panama.
• 0:16
  As you can see, I don't have my normal background.
• 0:18
  I'm broadcasting from Panama.
• 0:21
  And, uh, that, that could of course always mean that there would be technical difficulties.
• 0:25
  So if that's, if that's what happens, I open pray that you'll, uh, be patient with us.
• 0:31
  But, uh, here we go.
• 0:39
  So.
• 0:40
  The quest that we're on, the thing that we're doing here is we are leveraging eternal principles to build great houses in the modern context.
• 0:49
  So right now, our society suffers from problems of atomization.
• 0:55
  Atomization is the reality that we used to live in these big, complicated social molecules.
• 1:00
  We used to have, you know, guilds and churches and extended families, clans even, and that got broken down smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller for the past 400 years.
• 1:12
  Basically the, there was, there was this assumption that there was more energy to be gained, more power to be unleashed by, by making what we're doing smaller and smaller.
• 1:23
  Okay.
• 1:25
  And.
• 1:26
  Basically what we've done is we've taken, we've, we've made things so small, we've gone all the way down to the, to the individual themselves, the individual person.
• 1:34
  And now we're probably trying to chop people into pieces.
• 1:36
  Is, is, I, I think that's a fair description of like the transgender stuff.
• 1:39
  We're trying to actually change the unit of the individual himself, which or herself.
• 1:45
  Um.
• 1:47
  Which is counterproductive, wicked bad does, does causes all sorts of problems.
• 1:53
  But this is our, this is our mode.
• 1:55
  When we have a problem, we think, well, the first thing you gotta do to solve this problem is to break it down into smaller and smaller chunks.
• 2:02
  Okay?
• 2:02
  And.
• 2:04
  Historically, um, there's a very, very narrow ban of technologies that allowed for widespread democracies.
• 2:12
  So the modern technologies that produce our food power, military strength are becoming less conducive to democratic systems.
• 2:19
  You think about the fact that over the past, you know, five, 6,000 years of recorded history, there have been two points where democracies were a thing, right?
• 2:28
  Ancient Greece.
• 2:30
  In the modern day when, you know, America kind of stacked the dice or you know, had their thumb on the scales for a whole lot of that.
• 2:40
  And so, you know, I've talked about in, in my introductory series about the i the difference between democratic technologies and aristocratic technologies.
• 2:48
  And so I, I just wanted to take this opportunity where for the next couple of episodes we're gonna go through what does.
• 2:54
  What does it mean?
• 2:55
  What, how do we think about the fact that our democratic technologies have been replaced by other technologies that, that do not seem to be very democratic?
• 3:04
  They don't seem to be very conducive to, um, having voting systems and representative government and, and the idea that all people should be politically equal.
• 3:15
  Um.
• 3:17
  Now we're replacing that with, with new technologies, and that brings vastly different social biases and implications.
• 3:26
  So one of the things that, uh, I think we don't appreciate.
• 3:31
  Is the degree to which the core technologies that we use and, and especially that we used in our youth right.
• 3:36
  In the time that we were coming up shape us.
• 3:38
  And, and everybody knows obviously that, well, you start with, you know, people having a phone, people having a cell phone, people having a screen makes a huge impact on, on people's development, but we don't take that seriously.
• 3:51
  Right?
• 3:51
  Instead, people want to engage in, in perpetual anachronism, right?
• 3:56
  So anachronism, it literally means being against time or out of time.
• 4:03
  And figuratively, it means there's two things it can mean, but the first thing it would be is imposing on an ancient person or an ancient situation.
• 4:11
  A concept or a technology that had not been invented yet.
• 4:15
  Right?
• 4:15
  So the great example of this would be putting a clock or a computer, uh, into ancient Rome, right?
• 4:21
  If you see, if you're allegedly in an ancient Rome period piece, and there's a clock on the wall, or someone's checking their watch, that's an anachronism, right?
• 4:29
  Unless you're doing a story about time travel, then, then that doesn't belong there.
• 4:34
  That's the, that's the author's prejudices.
• 4:36
  That's the author's that is the author, assuming.
• 4:40
  That what is normal for him, which is that everyone has a watch, that that is normal through for all people throughout all time, and that is not in fact the case.
• 4:50
  The other form of anachronism is projecting a thing's current state back into the past before the events that caused it to assume that state and, and that's a what?
• 5:00
  What do I mean by that?
• 5:01
  What would be the, an example of that is the classic version of this is when you see a weak old man or an ugly old woman, and assuming that they were always this weak and ugly.
• 5:11
  Instead of that being a feature of their age.
• 5:13
  Right.
• 5:14
  So if you, if you look at a, a, a, a lady that's passed her prime and you say, oh my gosh, how could anyone have loved her?
• 5:20
  Well, no, she, she's old, right?
• 5:22
  She is the, the, the process of living has changed her.
• 5:27
  If you could have seen her in your younger year, her younger years, that would be a, a very different thing than it is today.
• 5:33
  So.
• 5:34
  And the same for, you know, an an older man, if you match strength with an older man and you're able to beat him and you're like, oh, of course you lost, it's, you know, because you're so weak.
• 5:43
  Well, that's not how it was back in the day.
• 5:45
  That that old man, you know, 50 years ago was very much stronger.
• 5:50
  And, and we do this politically with the French nobility, right?
• 5:55
  The great political anachronism of our time is the French nobility.
• 5:59
  We tend to think of, of, and, and you see this in media over and over again.
• 6:04
  There's just constant representations of systems of nobility or systems of aristocracy that really all they are is, well, this is how the French nobility behaved in the last 10 minutes before the revolution.
• 6:17
  We, which is to say this is how the French nobility behaved when they were no longer relevant, when they were no longer in power.
• 6:25
  When their, when their.
• 6:27
  Their world was exceedingly precarious, right?
• 6:30
  They, they were, they were in a, a, a, they were, they were engaged in, in, in political bubble behavior, right?
• 6:36
  They, they were bidding against each other.
• 6:38
  They didn't, their, their world wasn't touching reality.
• 6:40
  So, uh, but you see this pop up in media.
• 6:42
  So there's a book called The Name of the Wind by, uh, by Patrick RFAs.
• 6:46
  And, uh, which in, in many ways, Patrick is a very gifted writer.
• 6:50
  Uh, but he is, you know, he's got that kind of default left mentality.
• 6:55
  And so, um.
• 6:58
  One of the vi villain characters, misleads the, the, the scene.
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  He, the, the main character is going to a magical academy, and the, uh, the, he wants to go into the, the, the library, this great library.
• 7:09
  And as he walks into the library, the, uh, the main, the, the, the kid that's being the librarian that's guarding the books is, uh, just hands him a, a, a, um, a handle.
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  Instead of like a magical light.
• 7:23
  So he takes an open flame into the library and he's caught.
• 7:28
  And because he used the, he has, he had an open flame in the library.
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  He's banned from the library.
• 7:31
  And he says, well, this guy didn't tell me that I was spo that I wasn't supposed to take an open flame in the library.
• 7:38
  And, and the noble, he, the, the kid lies about it, right?
• 7:42
  And they, and they, it's just, it's this, it's this obvious, you know, great injustice that it's supposed to make you angry at the system because this.
• 7:50
  There's this lucky gifted commoner, right?
• 7:52
  And he's just being oppressed by the system.
• 7:55
  Okay?
• 7:56
  Like in the modern context, friends, that would be equivalent to the, um.
• 8:05
  To a, a, a, a descendant of the rothchilds printing counterfeit bills in their basement.
• 8:12
  Okay?
• 8:12
  That which is to say it's a thing that doesn't happen, right?
• 8:16
  Because it's a thing that has no need to happen, right?
• 8:20
  When you have stable noble systems, the, the, the nobility, if, if, if a noble was, was, was seen to be a liar, if he tricked somebody, if he engaged in that kind of behavior.
• 8:31
  All of his close associates who would more or less know what was going on, right?
• 8:37
  All of his associates would abandon him because the noble's ability to keep faith was the most important social currency he had.
• 8:45
  Okay.
• 8:46
  Um, it was, it was, you know, far more important to him than, than than his credit scores right.
• 8:51
  Now, again, there are times when a society collapses, right?
• 8:55
  It, it, it's kind of the, the end of days.
• 8:57
  Um, and.
• 9:00
  People behave in, in, in weird ways, but that's precisely because they, they, um, some, in some way intuit that their world, that the system of the way of life that they inhabit is, is coming to an end.
• 9:14
  And this is not how stable noble systems behave.
• 9:17
  Okay.
• 9:18
  Um, and we'll come back to that next week.
• 9:21
  Another great form of political anachronism is the way that we use the word agency.
• 9:27
  So agency is typically defined as the belief and demonstrated capacity to positively influence your own life and the world around you, combined with actually acting on that belief.
• 9:41
  Agency is the modern everything word, right?
• 9:44
  The, I think it was Brian Regan once noted, uh, Catholics see Mary everywhere, Protestant, see Satan everywhere.
• 9:50
  And Modern tech bro see agency or, or probably the lack of agency everywhere.
• 9:55
  It's the source of all problems.
• 9:56
  Agency is the source of all, all solutions, and the lack of agency is the source of all problems.
• 10:05
  So.
• 10:07
  When defined, when you say, okay, what is agency like?
• 10:11
  So is this just the power of positive thinking?
• 10:13
  Can you just sort of will your way through things?
• 10:15
  But if you say, well, I've got the power to change things, does that in fact give you the power to change things?
• 10:20
  Um, when, when you press people on what, what does agency mean?
• 10:25
  Agency usually just describes.
• 10:26
  Success conditions of a 21st century software engineer.
• 10:29
  So implied in this definition is an assumption that you have everything you need in your toolkit to succeed, or that, or that those tools are easily accessible to you via the infinite wonders of the internet, which for a trained software engineer is true, right?
• 10:44
  If you're, if you're trained software engineer being asked to do something that other people have done, then the answer is basically just believe you can do it and move forward.
• 10:54
  If you need a library, there's a, you know, infinite number of libraries.
• 10:56
  It's very, very rare that you're gonna be asked to do something that no one has done before.
• 11:01
  And you can probably find an example in an open source, uh, software library and, and be good.
• 11:07
  So recently Rosebud Cain, famous International, non, uh, said the reason why the tech elite produced this, the term agency, is because they want to believe that they would've been just as successful as a Yakuza in 1962, a courtier in Versailles or a general in the Roman Army.
• 11:26
  And this, of course, is patently absurd.
• 11:28
  We had a, uh, a, a, a fascinating discussion as to why they think that and why they're doing that.
• 11:32
  But what I wanna point out to you is this is a massive political anachronism.
• 11:36
  This is projecting the conditions that, that, that do in fact apply to the domain of software development in the 21st century and projecting that back, um, in, in a way that is almost certainly not accurate.
• 11:53
  We see this, right?
• 11:54
  We see this because when these high agency elites, you know, recently, um, uh, Dr. Bennett did a, uh, an entire article on how, uh, our, our high agency elites are, uh, are, are retreating from things.
• 12:07
  So when tech elites enter new different domains, they often find them distasteful and quickly withdraw.
• 12:13
  Um, so the, the recent article was that, that the, that we had all these people leave California, uh.
• 12:21
  The cost.
• 12:21
  There were some costs associated with leaving those costs and those costs were, I, I, I believe he said they were double, roughly speaking the cost of flipping every election in California.
• 12:32
  Okay.
• 12:34
  Which is crazy when you think about it.
• 12:39
  So what's really going on here?
• 12:41
  I think that a, a much more profitable frame than raw agency is the concept of domain mastery.
• 12:49
  So domain mastery is the recognition that you can grow in skill in an area or domain to the point where you reach mastery, which is.
• 12:57
  We, we'll define it for now as the ability to do things in that domain that a regular person could not do, no matter how much time they were given to complete the task.
• 13:06
  So, so when you've mastered a topic, you can accomplish things.
• 13:10
  It's not that you accomplish them faster, it's not that you accomplish them cheaper, it's that you accomplish them at all.
• 13:17
  And normal people could not accomplish that, that outcome, right.
• 13:24
  So mastery allows individuals to optim, is it really, it's the feature that, the fact that humans can optimize their brain architecture to respond to tiny details instantly.
• 13:35
  One of the common features that people talk about in the context of domain mastery is a, is a meditative flow state, as they call it, a flow state, where the ego quiets and their full attention is devoted to a discreet task.
• 13:46
  So when you press practice a task, especially deliberately, everything we can measure about your body and brain optimizes for that task.
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  This is why if you practice at something for 10,000 hours, you can become incredibly good at a particular skill.
• 14:01
  And 10,000 hours is, of course the, the Malcolm Gladwell, um, I think he pop, he popularized that.
• 14:08
  At that 10,000 hours.
• 14:10
  It just basically means practicing for a really long time.
• 14:12
  Like if you practice for a really long time, the more you practice something, when you practice deliberately, when you're trying to learn, when you've decided, Hey, I want to get good at this.
• 14:21
  Um.
• 14:23
  If you practice in that way for extended periods of time, again, in everything we can measure, everything about your brain, everything about your body, and probably many things that we can't yet measure, become very, very optimized and even in some cases specialized for what you're doing.
• 14:40
  So.
• 14:42
  Another, uh, the, there, there's this concept in the, in the cognitive science world called automaticity.
• 14:48
  So automaticity is what allows a skill to be performed rapidly and accurately without conscious effort or attention.
• 14:56
  So we, we've all had this experience of your driving and you get from point A to point B and you, you know, really weren't, um, really weren't paying attention to where you were going and yet you still arrived at where you were.
• 15:08
  Um.
• 15:09
  That's actually automaticity as applied to a route.
• 15:12
  Usually it's the route home.
• 15:13
  Uh, but you, you quickly get, when you're learning to drive, you get to the point where you can just drive along the street and you can carry on a conversation and you don't have to think about the tasks of turning the, the wheel or accelerating or decelerating.
• 15:26
  You don't have to think about breaking when you want to stop.
• 15:28
  Your brain just does these things automatically.
• 15:31
  Okay.
• 15:32
  And what part, A lot of what's going on there, people think is that it's offloading work from limited short-term memory to highly efficient unconscious memory.
• 15:41
  Because one of the fascinating things about about humans is that, at least for now, uh, humans are basically the opposite of LLMs in terms of how our memory works.
• 15:51
  So short-term memory, our short-term memory is painfully limited, but our long-term memory has effectively unlimited storage.
• 15:59
  Once you have encoded the information through the, people call it meaningful practice is this term, right?
• 16:06
  Um, so it's not, you can't, you can't just be quote, going through the motions, right?
• 16:10
  There's some difference between going through the motions and practicing because you're, you're trying, right?
• 16:16
  Actually trying.
• 16:18
  So repeated exposure and rehearsal, strengthen the neural pathways, making the skill fully automatic.
• 16:25
  And what automaticity does is it frees up cognitive resources allowing individuals to engage in complex, layered meta tasks.
• 16:33
  Right?
• 16:33
  So a tangible example of this is in algebra.
• 16:36
  One of the main reasons that kids struggle in algebra is because they have not mastered their timestables.
• 16:40
  This means that they take so long to work through the problem and have to hold so many things in in their head that they either run out of time or, or they actually just can't do it at all.
• 16:51
  Yeah.
• 16:53
  So this ability to abstract out a skill into the meta level is a key part of the concept of mastery in playing piano.
• 17:00
  If you are focused on playing the right keys, it is difficult to read the music.
• 17:05
  If you are focused on reading the music, assuming you've mastered the keys, uh, then it's difficult to pay attention to.
• 17:10
  May maybe we'll call it the feel of the piece or the way that the audience is, is responding to it.
• 17:15
  So.
• 17:16
  A good way to think about mastery is, is you, you've done two levels of the, the, the meta you've, you've automated one level, kinda the basic level, the mechanical, you know, things you do with your fingers, part of the skill.
• 17:29
  Then you've automated one level above that, and then you're actually able to engage at this kind of third level of abstraction.
• 17:35
  That's probably what we mean by mastery.
• 17:41
  So, um.
• 17:44
  One of the things to remember is that humans are curious, flexible things.
• 17:48
  So once you have optimized for a task, you can apply that optimized architecture to other things.
• 17:57
  So.
• 18:00
  There are relationships that help you learn or adapt your skills to other, to other concepts.
• 18:04
  And by relationships I mean like analogies, mental, mental frameworks that say this is like that.
• 18:10
  There's some analogy to between one task and another that that allows you to adapt your skills.
• 18:15
  So the simplest version of this is language, right?
• 18:18
  You have related languages.
• 18:19
  So if you learn Spanish, then you can learn Latin and then you can make, learn basically any of the romance languages, uh, pretty easily.
• 18:31
  So another concept in this is, is the role, right?
• 18:35
  Um, so you've probably heard that if you want get the best out of an LLM, you have to give it a role.
• 18:39
  So you say you want, you want, uh, a health analysis.
• 18:42
  A lot of people are uploading their health data into LLMs right now, and if you give it a role, you say, you say you are a world class health coach.
• 18:50
  You say that in the prompt, you get much better results now.
• 18:54
  One of the fascinating things as I've been looking into this is apparently this works on humans as well.
• 19:00
  So if you, if, if, if a human focuses on a role, um, they, they objectively perform better.
• 19:07
  So if you, if you actually tell yourself.
• 19:09
  You are a world class health coach and you try to answer questions.
• 19:14
  You look at information, you try to answer questions the way a world class, uh, health coach would, you will, you'll get better.
• 19:21
  You, you'll be able to put things together better.
• 19:24
  Um, and even more interesting to me is the fact that at the higher levels of mastery, people sometimes mix metaphors in odd ways, but I'm, I'm a great believer in, in mixing metaphors.
• 19:35
  Dope.
• 19:39
  For instance, one of the ways that people refer to great generals, such as, uh, BEUs, who is the, a noted Christian general, he is a general in, uh, Byzantium in the, in the, uh, fifth century, fifth, uh, excuse me, sixth century, which is the five hundreds.
• 19:53
  Um.
• 19:55
  And a bunch of people that have studied him use this metaphor of a blacksmith forging troops into one solid piece.
• 20:05
  Okay.
• 20:05
  That seemed, and, and, and that, that was a, a, a pretty common Greek metaphor more broadly for, for the, for what you're doing when you're commanding troops.
• 20:14
  Right.
• 20:14
  This, this idea of forging or maybe welding, you know, people together into one.
• 20:19
  Unit.
• 20:20
  Now another, a number of of peak warriors, right?
• 20:23
  Including men like Miyamoto Mai and Yaki.
• 20:26
  Minno.
• 20:26
  Uhm will they, they, they'll compare combat to things that are, are, that sound sort of odd, right?
• 20:33
  So they'll compare combat to music, to, there's a rhythm.
• 20:37
  You have to interrupt your opponent's rhythm.
• 20:39
  You have to kind of know the moves of the dance or calligraphy, right?
• 20:42
  Uh, Minno is he, he's, he's famous for explicitly saying.
• 20:47
  Combat, you know, sword play is like calligraphy.
• 20:49
  And he, he, he, he really rocks, he really owned that metaphor.
• 20:53
  That's very important to him and kind of his philosophy.
• 20:58
  So what's going on?
• 21:00
  Why, why, why do we use these metaphors?
• 21:02
  Why are they, and, and, and why do we even use odd metaphors?
• 21:06
  Like, like, uh, music and calligraphy for, for talking about fighting.
• 21:11
  I believe is so how many people, uh, are familiar with the concept of the elephant and its rider?
• 21:18
  So that's, uh, Ian mcg Gilchrist and then, and then Jonathan Haight, you know, kind of con brought out this idea that there's the talking part of you and then there's a much larger, more powerful part of you.
• 21:30
  I, I think a, a, uh, a metaphor that I'm fond of to use, speak of metaphors is, I think those are the, those are similar.
• 21:38
  To your CPU, right?
• 21:39
  Which you can tell it what to do, you can, you can talk to it and it talks.
• 21:42
  That's what it does.
• 21:43
  And then there's your GPU, which is the image-based part of your brain.
• 21:47
  Um, and, and that image-based part of your brain, that's the elephant.
• 21:50
  That's, there's this powerful part of your brain that can only be accessed through images, and that's because there's a vast amount of information that you take in that is not processed by your conscious mind.
• 22:00
  So, for instance, if you take people on a tour of a low crime part of a city and a high crime part of a city, and you tell them to draw a house, or they have a sketch artist come in and, and, and they, they say visualize a house, and then you sketch out the house that those people are imagining, uh, those sketches.
• 22:17
  They, they can tell, broadly speaking, that's, it is not like you're gonna find a, a number on there, but the people can somehow tell even if they witness no crimes, when you're in a high crime part of the city.
• 22:28
  And when you're not in the high crime part of the city.
• 22:30
  And, and, and you could do this even when the, the, the places look really similar.
• 22:34
  They kind of run down, you know, suburbs, right?
• 22:37
  They, they, they don't look very nice, but people still know somehow, right?
• 22:41
  And, and probably they're processing things like, uh.
• 22:44
  How people are taking care of the property and the fact that the, the grass is being mowed or the trees are being cared for, you know, some something of this.
• 22:51
  So this is not like a, a claim that, that psychic powers are happening here.
• 22:55
  This is, you are, but, but what is not going on is these people are not going, oh, on this street I noted.
• 23:01
  X number of, of, uh, you know, the, the grass had been cut recently and I noted this.
• 23:05
  No, no, no.
• 23:06
  They're on, on some subconscious level.
• 23:08
  Their brain is taking in all that information, and when you ask the GPU in the right way by saying picture, you know, give me this image.
• 23:18
  It will edit the image to correctly align with the reality that, that you're noticing about how the property is being cared for and how the, how, how that space, that part of the city is, is doing.
• 23:29
  And this is a fascinating, I, it's one of my favorite rabbit holes.
• 23:32
  So if you wanna know more about that, go research the house tree person, test the HTP test and Roger Hart and some of those guys.
• 23:38
  And you'll, there's, there is cool and awful, you know, things down that rabbit hole.
• 23:44
  So I'll, I'll leave that to you guys.
• 23:46
  But, uh.
• 23:47
  But that's, this is a really interesting, and it is really interesting to me that that's possible.
• 23:52
  Okay, so the, the image-based part of your brain is very, very important.
• 23:56
  So let's say that you wanted to access the GPU, the visual processing part of your brain as a general of an army.
• 24:04
  Well, in the modern world, you could collect data and do surveys and you know that, that, that might get you something.
• 24:10
  But in the ancient world, you couldn't do that, right?
• 24:11
  You would probably do an inspection, and what you do is you would give your brain permission to tell you if there are flaws in your sword.
• 24:19
  Okay.
• 24:20
  You, you're using the, your, your domain mastery, your, your ability to know if a sword is whole and if it's gonna break, right?
• 24:29
  If you're a warrior, if you're a soldier, you probably have a very, very good working knowledge of, of a sword and, and how to test one and to know whether or not it's gonna break in the next battle.
• 24:37
  So you can use a piece of your brain that's very highly trained, uh, on what is a good sword to, to analyze what is a good army, right?
• 24:47
  Even though.
• 24:49
  The, the manual process of collecting all that data is very difficult.
• 24:52
  And e even to this day, it's very difficult, right?
• 24:54
  The, the surveys do not often get to, uh, effective, the effectiveness in fighting that just did not seem to be what, uh, and maybe that's a problem with the surveys.
• 25:02
  Maybe we could do a better job if we weren't, you know, woke and fake and gay and all those things.
• 25:06
  Um, but I, I, I suspect that if you went in a lot of the, a lot of the, the, you know.
• 25:14
  People like Patton and his intellectual descendants, whether you think that Pete, Pete is one of those people or not.
• 25:19
  Um.
• 25:20
  I think they would say that surveys are not really getting at what they want to get at.
• 25:25
  And, and probably the best way for them to understand the readiness of their troops is for them to eyeball it.
• 25:31
  And I, and, and, and my, my suspicion is that many of them have these useful metaphors that they're, that they're using.
• 25:37
  Now, I am not saying that you can simply walk into a, a new domain and your brain will give you magical information.
• 25:43
  You have to train your instincts carefully.
• 25:46
  Likely through many hours of practice and careful attention, you have to have mastered the skills so that you can analyze errors in other people's practice instinctively, right?
• 25:53
  So if you don't know what a good drill looks like, if you don't know how you're supposed to swing a sword in a Roman drill and you walk by casually, um, you're not gonna necessarily know that, um.
• 26:08
  People that, that, that the, the people drilling are not doing, doing it the right way.
• 26:11
  And so you may not, you may not get right conclusions.
• 26:13
  Okay.
• 26:14
  So you, you have to have a, a familiarity with what you're going on, right?
• 26:18
  This, and, and that's, again, that's what's going on with automaticity.
• 26:21
  That's what's going on with, with your ability to push things into kind of the, the, the subconscious part of your brain where they don't require your conscious attention.
• 26:31
  But you could, and you could do that with information.
• 26:32
  That's the, that's the main point that I'm making.
• 26:33
  So.
• 26:35
  This is how you access the super powerful image processing parts of your brain, and the narrative structure matters.
• 26:42
  The the visual image matters.
• 26:43
  The different metaphors will actually make you better and worse at different aspects of the actual underlying skills.
• 26:48
  So, you know, we've talked about the the calligrapher, right?
• 26:51
  Many other, uh, warriors have thought of themselves as animals.
• 26:55
  Let's say you got a guy that visualizes himself as a panther, right?
• 26:58
  That's how, that's how he thinks of what he's doing.
• 27:00
  He might be better at the kill stroke than a man who visualizes himself as a calligrapher.
• 27:04
  Okay?
• 27:08
  But a man who visualizes himself as a panther may also be more prone to losing himself.
• 27:12
  So one of the things that people do when they're, when they're trying to figure out how to advance, how to, how to be successful is when you hit a block, identifying and changing your metaphor, your role for the task can be a powerful mechanism for unlocking new creativity.
• 27:29
  So, um, while we're on the subject, and this is, this is.
• 27:34
  This is kind of a teaser for stuff we'll talk about in in the coming weeks.
• 27:37
  The, the ability to conceptualize a task as something that a particular role or persona would be good at, and then delegating the task to that role appears to be a really, really important part of using ai.
• 27:50
  It might even be like a core skill, if you will.
• 27:53
  So quantify the, the paper by on that is called Quantifying Human AI Synergy by Christopher Reidel and Ben Weidman.
• 27:59
  It was published in 2025.
• 28:01
  Super interesting paper, super interesting conclusions that people are drawing for from it.
• 28:06
  Um, my, my comment on that is, is that if that skill is at all heritable, then we're then AI is the most aristocratic technology of all time.
• 28:18
  So,
• 28:21
  um, again, one, one of the things that that, that we're talking about here is that mastery translates domain mastery translates.
• 28:30
  Somewhat, and sometimes it, and this is, this is the, this is one of the distinctions that I wanna make.
• 28:35
  So humans can use their highly trained mental architecture.
• 28:38
  You've got something that's optimized for a particular, uh, type of problem to solve other problems in other domains via this analogy process.
• 28:48
  But the transfer of skills is only efficient if the new problem is similar to the original problem that the brain was trying to solve.
• 28:57
  So you, you're also gonna have biases, right?
• 28:59
  When people talk about biases, cognitive biases, one of the ways that you can get cognitive biases is based on, on the mental metaphor that you're using to access that highly optimized part of your brain.
• 29:11
  So, and one of the why, why, why do we do this?
• 29:14
  Well, one of the reasons why we do this is because it's very hard to learn new skills, especially as an adult.
• 29:20
  It's not hard to learn new skills.
• 29:23
  It is not just hard because your brain, you know, becomes less plastic.
• 29:26
  But actually what often happens is you, you become accustomed to existing at a certain high level of status, right?
• 29:34
  And when you try to enter a new domain, um, then.
• 29:39
  You, you sound like an idiot.
• 29:40
  You sound like a beginner.
• 29:41
  You sound like a child, right?
• 29:43
  And that, that means that your status is dropping at least in your own eyes.
• 29:47
  And people get very embarrassed or upset about that.
• 29:49
  So most humans, and especially experts, come back to experts, but especially experts, will do anything to escape this painful loss and status.
• 29:57
  So, um, and you people have talked about that basically like if you only know one language, um, and any, and you are.
• 30:05
  You are in a word based kind of field.
• 30:08
  You never learned a second language and you're, you're kind of what people call hyper fluent.
• 30:12
  So you're, you think about words all the time.
• 30:14
  It's actually more difficult for you to learn a new language because you don't like humbling and stumbling through it.
• 30:22
  Now, if you could just, you know, humble yourself like a child than you'd get through that, um, in a, in a, in a relatively short period of time, especially if you're smart, but people don't.
• 30:30
  Um.
• 30:31
  It's so difficult to do that.
• 30:32
  People, people don't do that.
• 30:34
  So what do we do instead?
• 30:36
  Well, we borrow from an existing domain as much as possible.
• 30:39
  And this is all also important because you, you can only optimize for so many things.
• 30:44
  Uh, so people, um.
• 30:47
  People want to be focused on the things that are the most relevant.
• 30:51
  They, you know, so if you're, if you're a soldier, right?
• 30:53
  Probably the most relevant thing is a sword skill.
• 30:55
  You're not gonna let that go.
• 30:56
  You're not gonna let that skill get, uh, uh, get old, right?
• 31:00
  And then as you learn new skills, as you're having to, to be placed in new context, you layer on a, you kind of link up the things that you were good at using these metaphors.
• 31:11
  Um, and, and, and that's a more effective way of, of learning the new thing.
• 31:15
  Okay.
• 31:17
  But 'cause you're preserving the, the work that you've done.
• 31:22
  But, and this is where the concept of mastery, you know, really this is the dividing line between agency and what I think agency gets wrong and what I'm trying to articulate as as domain mastery, which is that domains can be nearby or closely related, and that means there's a high efficiency of skill transfer.
• 31:39
  Or they can be distant, you know, they can.
• 31:41
  Distantly related, um, there, that that means there's a highly inefficient skill transfer and, and in fact actually in distant domains, in domains that are distinctly different.
• 31:52
  You think about things, you know, the, the, the, the classic one is somebody going from a hard sciences, engineering, software engineering over to politics or law.
• 32:02
  Which are so customary, so, so idiosyncratic.
• 32:06
  So people driven, right?
• 32:08
  This drives the, the, the, the, you know, the left brain engineers crazy, right?
• 32:12
  Because it's like, well, that, that doesn't make any sense.
• 32:14
  You know, there's this joke, uh.
• 32:15
  That, uh, I saw online that, uh, they were asking an AI for legal advice and the AI started hallucinating.
• 32:20
  Clearly it was hallucinating.
• 32:22
  I mean, it was just, it was spouting ridiculous things like the idea that growing wheat on your own farm is somehow participating in interstate commerce.
• 32:30
  Right, right, right.
• 32:31
  Is that, hopefully everybody know in the audience knows that that is actually, that is the legal standard.
• 32:36
  In the 1930s under pressure from FDR, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that yes, growing wheat on your own farm is, um.
• 32:45
  Participation in interstate commerce, even though that sounds kind of crazy, that sounds kind of ridiculous.
• 32:50
  Right.
• 32:50
  And it's certainly not what, what the, the constitutional founders thought they were doing.
• 32:55
  Uh, I I, I, I don't think that anyone would maintain that, but that's the basis of the modern regulatory state.
• 33:01
  It's the basis of all, you know, all of the, the, the wealth of federal regulations, um, that, that we have in the modern world.
• 33:08
  Okay, but that's idiosyncratic.
• 33:10
  Like you, you can't, you couldn't have predicted, you can't look at the Constitution and say, okay, this is what the Supreme Court's going to do.
• 33:19
  Right.
• 33:19
  That that is not what's going on there.
• 33:21
  What's going on there is a very specific, very, uh, you know, very time, very context.
• 33:27
  So for instance, if that was not the law already right then you could not get that past the court today.
• 33:33
  The only reason why the court today.
• 33:35
  Puts up with that sort of nonsense, or at least the, the reason why they don't have to confront it directly is because of, you know, stare decisis.
• 33:41
  And they, they, they want, they want precedent to remain, uh, valid.
• 33:44
  And they also don't want to be the, the, the people that pour down the basis for, you know, 90% of the government jobs in the country.
• 33:49
  Right.
• 33:50
  Um, but.
• 33:51
  In distant domains, when you have a a, a a big difference, then an expert's, highly trained instincts will actually mislead them.
• 33:59
  So they will cause them to jump to the wrong conclusions.
• 34:03
  And, and, and again, I think this is what we've seen in, in the tech bros who attempts to get involved in politics, get burned and then withdraw.
• 34:13
  Right.
• 34:16
  Now I'll also say that new technologies or sometimes new metaphors, new ways of thinking, can suddenly bridge the gap between what were, what appeared to be two distant domains.
• 34:26
  So for example, most people would not find expertise in software helpful in raising children or vice versa.
• 34:32
  But now we have LLMs and training them might not be so different from training children, which is, that's kind of an interesting thing.
• 34:40
  We're, we're, we're not sure what to make about.
• 34:42
  We don't know what, what's, what's going on there.
• 34:44
  So.
• 34:47
  So what does this all mean?
• 34:48
  What, what, what, what am I driving at?
• 34:50
  What am I driving at?
• 34:51
  Um, it means that agency is not universal.
• 34:54
  Okay.
• 34:54
  You can and will optimize for a domain and, and for people, for most people optimizing for a domain, even maybe hyper optimizing for a domain does not lock you into just that domain in the same way that a machine is locked in.
• 35:07
  Right.
• 35:07
  In the same way that a. Like a, like a factory, an assembly line, right?
• 35:11
  They talk about, you know, having to retool assembly lines over in China to get the new widget that you need.
• 35:16
  Um, you are as a human with the, the ability to kind of have these layered, you know, visual metaphors or narrative structures.
• 35:24
  You can adapt your mental architecture by using analogies and those analogies, um, can be more or less efficient.
• 35:30
  Okay.
• 35:34
  Having said that, there's a bunch of people who have decided who, who have, who have gone in with the power positive thinking, and they've just been like, man, I'm just gonna behave like I've got the, the, the power to change things.
• 35:44
  And I would, I would frame that a little bit differently.
• 35:47
  I think there's a, there's a conflation here between skills domains, you know, the, the actual distinct things.
• 35:56
  Where you need expertise, right?
• 35:58
  And need training.
• 35:58
  And you would need, if people hadn't taught you this, you would need to invent stuff.
• 36:02
  Um, and basically just what it means to be human.
• 36:06
  So modern culture suffers from a cult of the expert, which fuels kind of the mythical status of agency.
• 36:11
  So if you're an expert, we worship you, right?
• 36:13
  We worship experts, at least as assiduously, as the ancient pagans worship their priests kings.
• 36:19
  And I believe that that contributes to a lot of the low agency behavior that people exhibit.
• 36:24
  So.
• 36:24
  From the time that you were a child, um, you were, you know, you were taught that you, um, you have to follow the rules, right?
• 36:37
  Public schools have trained westerners to constantly seek permission structures from authorized experts.
• 36:42
  So if you're not a top expert society claims, you have no moral or legal right to, to question the rule.
• 36:47
  So, so you're not allowed, unless you're one of these experts, whoever they are, right?
• 36:52
  You're not allowed to ask if a particular rule set is, you know, good, safe, and sane, right?
• 36:57
  As they say.
• 36:59
  And, and when you talk to people, top expert in this case seems to mean literally one of the top 10 best people in the world on a particular topic.
• 37:08
  Okay?
• 37:09
  And, and what I think is going on is that.
• 37:13
  This, this has replaced our initiation rituals, right?
• 37:15
  So healthy cultures guide men through initiation rituals that provide explicit instructions on what is it that you have to do as a man.
• 37:22
  And, and probably in every ex example that I'm aware of, what.
• 37:27
  What domains must you master to be a man in our society?
• 37:31
  And every culture's got a bias.
• 37:32
  Every culture's got, you know, um, things that, that, things that you must do right?
• 37:36
  Famously, um, you know, said the, the, the Persian way of raising a boy is, uh, to teach him the horse and the bow, and to teach him to despise all lies.
• 37:46
  And that, and that tho those were the things like, if you could, if you could ride a horse, if you could, you know, draw a bow on a horse right?
• 37:52
  And, and hit a target and you were not a liar right then we, then you were gonna be okay as a Persian, like the, the, the Persians were like that, that you should be able to succeed in our culture, the way it's set up.
• 38:05
  Okay.
• 38:07
  And that, and that initiation ritual was, was required for anybody that basically wanted to be part of the, uh, at at least the noble level of society.
• 38:16
  And so I think what we've done is, is we have, we have, we have this kind of apotheosis, right?
• 38:22
  Where if you're in the, if you're in the top 10, if you're one of the experts, the, the few, right, the experts, uh, that's essentially the only initiation, ritual Western civilization has left.
• 38:32
  Okay.
• 38:34
  And this is terrible.
• 38:35
  This is quite bad.
• 38:37
  And the reason it's quite bad, um, I mean, other than just the moral reasons, you're, you're, you.
• 38:42
  Destroying people, um, in school, but centralized experts.
• 38:46
  It, it's the same problem as the, the command economy.
• 38:48
  So centralized experts cannot possibly possess accurate, up-to-date information on what is actually happening on the ground, right?
• 38:55
  And their responses to new information are always heavily mediated by their incentive to reserve.
• 39:01
  Personal power.
• 39:02
  I mean, this is the, uh, this is the ventilators thing, right?
• 39:04
  This is the ventilators thing.
• 39:06
  So, uh, we told everybody, the, the experts, the science trust, the science, uh, the experts told everyone, you know, the CDC issued guidelines about putting people on ventilators.
• 39:15
  And when it became very, very clear that.
• 39:18
  Large numbers of people that were being put on ventilators were dying that didn't otherwise need to die.
• 39:24
  Uh, we, you know, the, the internal conversations, the way they went was, well, if we disclose that we messed up on this, what will that do to the credibility of our organizations?
• 39:36
  Which, another way of saying, what will that do to our personal power, right.
• 39:44
  Um, and some people will say that, that that high agent being high agency just means being a man.
• 39:49
  A man is someone who just gets on it.
• 39:50
  That was, that was one of my grandmother's statements.
• 39:53
  Um, and, and I think that's, there's, there's a, there's a, a lot of truth to that, right?
• 39:58
  But the, one of the problems with the, kind of, the, the dilemma that we're in is that there's, uh, essential human domains, you know, marriage, parenting, faith, et cetera, that require vastly more high agency actors.
• 40:11
  Then, then there are available experts.
• 40:13
  So if, if you're a dad, you're probably not one of the top 10 best dads in the world, right?
• 40:19
  You're probably not one of the top 10 best husbands in the world.
• 40:22
  You're probably not one of the top 10 best Christians in the world.
• 40:25
  But you have to have to have to learn how to, um.
• 40:33
  How to act with agency.
• 40:34
  You have to believe that in the, in these human things that everyone does, that everyone interacts with, that you can and be, can be successful and that you have all the tools to do so.
• 40:44
  Right?
• 40:45
  Um, and if that's not true, then you need to, you need to upskill because really.
• 40:50
  We don't care if you don't have, uh, like as a society, you know, I, I might care, but, but, but broadly, we don't care.
• 40:55
  As a society, if you don't have the skills to be a good dad, to be a good husband, um, to be a good Christian, then, then, then you're, you're gonna struggle.
• 41:05
  Okay.
• 41:07
  Um, and, and, and so what, what I'm, what I'm saying there is that's different in, in my view, like the, the, the way that you have to deal with, uh, these intimate, highly personal things that to me is quite different from the situation of somebody who has expertise in a, in a given profession or, or, or domain, something that's something that requires that 10,000 hours of, uh, practice to master.
• 41:34
  And, and the concept of agency conflates those things in an unhelpful way.
• 41:39
  Okay?
• 41:39
  So yes, in your personal life with your wife, with your children, almost certainly you have agency and you should deal with the things that you have to deal with there.
• 41:49
  But there are a lot of circumstances, like if you try to build a bridge.
• 41:54
  Without understanding how bridge, without actual expertise, then you're gonna get hurt.
• 41:59
  And, and it's not, it's not showing agency to, to go in there and, and just assume, well, I can do this.
• 42:06
  And, and I think some of this is, is, is we, we just struggle in our culture to acknowledge, hey, there are certain people with talents, there are certain people with gifts, there are certain people who are.
• 42:18
  If I can dare to say this better at certain things, inherently there are gifts given by God, and that means that not everyone has equal skills.
• 42:26
  That all, I mean, and that, and that applies to a whole bunch of things.
• 42:28
  It applies to, you know, earning power, right?
• 42:32
  Oh, um, leadership domains.
• 42:35
  As I said, leadership domains like building bridges or flying planes do require specific, largely non-transferable expertise.
• 42:42
  Though they can be adapted through metaphor or learned faster if you've got a a, a closely related domain that you can analogize from when you move.
• 42:50
  Too far from a core domain, your previously successful instincts, the instincts, the assumptions that you made in your other domain that actually led to success, that were a good idea, uh, those may actively mislead you if you get too far, uh, too far away from your core competency.
• 43:07
  And, and then at the same time, so that's true broadly of, of the highly complex technical culture that we live in, and still there are pieces of your life that you must just push forward even without perfect knowledge.
• 43:19
  Yeah.
• 43:20
  And again, what, what I'm criticizing is this, this idea of universal agency.
• 43:26
  So we have enormously successful tech elites, people that clearly have skill that, that have definitely put in the time and effort.
• 43:35
  They have definitely put in 10,000 hours in multiple domains, usually related ones, and they have had enormous success, right?
• 43:42
  And they have struggled deeply to find success in the alien environment of geopolitics.
• 43:47
  Where, where the rules are just different.
• 43:49
  That doesn't mean that the rules are are hard or, or are or unexplainable or unknowable or unlearnable.
• 43:56
  They're just different.
• 43:58
  Okay?
• 43:59
  And you, and, and unless you have mastery in something that's kind of similar, you are going to have to.
• 44:06
  Do the humiliating thing.
• 44:07
  You're gonna have to humble yourself, come in as a junior and work your way out.
• 44:11
  And, and, and if you're smart, you can do that.
• 44:13
  Right?
• 44:14
  So, but unfortunately, people that think of themselves, I think people that think of themselves as high agency, uh, they struggle with this 'cause they get into a new domain and the, the, their high agency behavior, the behaviors that do lead them to success, that are what allow them to, to accomplish their goals in other domains don't work.
• 44:35
  Right.
• 44:35
  Um, and that's so discomforting to them that they would rather, as I said, they would rather lose money than inter domains where their core skills are actively devalued or do not lead to successful outcomes.
• 44:48
  And, uh, you know, we, what's going on there, I think is we want the universe, we want the way we want the universe to work.
• 44:53
  To work, right?
• 44:55
  We want, uh, you know, there's a, there's a friend of mine who lives in Dallas who says, you know.
• 44:59
  I, I, uh, I want to get it right and not be right.
• 45:02
  And most people wanna be right.
• 45:04
  Most people want the thing that they're already doing, that they're already skilled in, that they're already qualified in the thing that makes them happy.
• 45:12
  They want that to be the answer.
• 45:14
  They're, they are a hammer in search of a nail, and it's like, well, hammers are great.
• 45:19
  There's a bunch of areas in which hammers are the thing.
• 45:22
  But not every domain calls for a hammer.
• 45:25
  That is, that is.
• 45:27
  Of life.
• 45:27
  And if you can't acknowledge that, um, then, then you're gonna struggle.
• 45:32
  Uh, and, and, and, and I think we, we, we, we still are suffering from the egalitarian impulse.
• 45:38
  There's a bunch of ways in which, what's going on here is a refusal to admit that there are genuine differences.
• 45:45
  Between humans, right?
• 45:47
  Biodiversity, right.
• 45:48
  The, the diversity that dare not, uh, speak its name.
• 45:51
  And there are, um, and I don't even talking about like racial biodiversity.
• 45:54
  I'm just talking about d biodiversity people are, start with different essential characteristics that mean that they're, they're going to have different outcomes.
• 46:03
  Yeah.
• 46:04
  Um, so, and, and I'm teasing the next episode here again, in a world where mastery of software engineer lead you to wealth and power, those core skills will lead to metaphors that work well for that logical context and other kind of logic driven domains, and it will, may not work.
• 46:21
  So well for other domains.
• 46:22
  By contrast, a world where mastery of horse hawk and hound led to wealth and power that led to a very different set of skills, a very different set of metaphors that, that work well with those skills and, and they have a totally different list.
• 46:37
  Of domains that are easy to master.
• 46:40
  And, and a lot of those domains are what we think of even to this day as leadership domains, right?
• 46:46
  We don't, um, we don't know how to have wizards be our leaders, right?
• 46:50
  We know how to have horsemen be our leaders, and I'll talk about that, you know, in the, in the coming weeks, pretty pre in depth.
• 46:56
  But we, we still have not figured out how to have people whose core skills come from studying and, and calculating and laying out logical progressions for machines.
• 47:07
  We just don't know how to do that.
• 47:09
  Okay.
• 47:10
  Um, and, and, and, you know, with the, a lot of the, the, the background of this, this, uh, this next set of episodes I'm gonna be doing is ai.
• 47:18
  So we don't know what the specific contours of domain mastery of AI will look like, what the core skills will be and what metaphors those core skills will produce.
• 47:27
  I think we'll be better able to analyze that reality, the reality that we will face if we move a away from totalizing concepts like agency and towards domains like mastery.
• 47:38
  Right?
• 47:38
  And as I said earlier, agency is at the end of the day an egalitarian concept.
• 47:42
  It assumes that everyone is the same on the inside, and that we are all equally suited to every task.
• 47:49
  We would only gin up the master virtue of agency.
• 47:52
  I mean, this is, this is course as kinda similar to faith in the, in the Pentecostal context, right?
• 47:57
  The reality is that you can create a mental map of the domains that you have mastered.
• 48:03
  Um, and then you can create a mental map of the domains that other people have mastered in the, in the PDay project.
• 48:08
  Uh, which, if, if you're not, uh, familiar with the PIA project in Exit, then that's a, it's a wonderful thing that we're working on there.
• 48:14
  Um.
• 48:16
  One of the things we talk about is, well, how do you, um.
• 48:21
  Link up the how do you break apart different subjects?
• 48:23
  And there's some really amazing work that people are doing online where they're publishing these, these mind maps, these networks of linked concepts.
• 48:31
  Concepts.
• 48:32
  'cause when you identify even within a domain, the the specific skills and sub skills and how they arrange themselves.
• 48:39
  The, the children can learn those things much, much, much, much, much more effectively as they, as they move through kind of the, the, the totality of the skills.
• 48:48
  And then you could look at their map and say, oh, you're struggling with this problem down here because somewhere higher up in the skill tree, you didn't quite master this.
• 48:56
  And we know that 'cause you haven't spent that much time on it.
• 48:59
  Okay?
• 49:00
  So if you can acknowledge, hey, here's a mental map, a right here's a mental map, B, these mental maps are different.
• 49:06
  Then that might be a basis for a long-term virtuous relationship.
• 49:12
  Okay.
• 49:13
  Now again, maps are very difficult.
• 49:15
  Like there's, there's gonna be hierarchy maps, equal hierarchy.
• 49:19
  To be clear, when we do this sort of mapping, you will notice that certain inherent traits and certain mastered skills are higher ranked in the specific technological context in which we live.
• 49:28
  Certain people are going to have higher earning power and higher earning power is largely correlated with success.
• 49:33
  Okay.
• 49:35
  Now what I wanna know, I wanna finally wanna state and, and, and this will be kind of how we wrap up, um, and transition into the q and a. My main goal in pointing this out is to give us a chance to think clearly about what is coming and give ourselves and our children the best chance of an honorable status, which is not necessarily the same thing as a high status.
• 49:54
  And, and, and I want you to, uh, be able to start appreciating, okay, these are the, these are the master skills.
• 50:01
  How do we push our children through, uh, towards them?
• 50:03
  How do we, how do we allow our kids to, to, to make use of that?
• 50:07
  How do we master some of these things ourselves?
• 50:10
  And, and when you, when you are trying to have that conversation, um, one of the reasons why I'm doing this is because I've had a number of conversations with folks and we, my ability to explain what I thought they should do broke down because they had in their mind this agency thing, right?
• 50:27
  This, this, this universal agency.
• 50:29
  And, and I'm not saying that agency is necessarily a bad concept.
• 50:31
  I think it's helped a lot of people.
• 50:33
  I think there are many contexts in which it is true that what you need to do is just sort of.
• 50:37
  Get on with it, right?
• 50:38
  You're a man.
• 50:39
  Get on with it.
• 50:40
  Um, but it is also true that at, at, at, at a high level, um.
• 50:49
  When you're, especially when you're switching between these domains, the traits, the skills, the instincts, the, the assumptions, the metaphors, the analogies, whatever that do lead to success over here do not necessarily lead to success over here.
• 51:03
  And if we think that that, that.
• 51:05
  By mastering one chunk of the universe that we can then just take that and run with it.
• 51:10
  Ev everywhere we go.
• 51:11
  No, no, no, no.
• 51:12
  Things are different in different places, and you have to be willing to acknowledge that.
• 51:16
  So, but we will discuss that more next week.
• 51:18
  So thank you everybody for, uh, who, who's, uh, the listening to this for free.