What Humans Must Do To Adapt & Avoid the Collapse of Civilization | Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying (Replay)

If you use your intuitive, honed instincts in order to sort through novel problems, you will constantly upend yourself because those instincts aren't built with those problems in mind.

And [Robert Trivers] said, do not accept a job in which you are not exposed to undergraduates because teaching undergraduates means exposing yourself and the thinking that you are presenting to naive minds who will throw curve balls at you. And some of those curve balls are going to be nuisances, and maybe they'll waste your time, but some of them are likely to reveal to you the frailty in your own thinking or in the thinking of the field, and that is the way that progress is made.

Back away from that which is novel & untested and in the direction of that which is time-tested, and it will result in a decrease in anxiety and increase in your control over your own life. And the way you'll tell is that you will feel less confused more of the time.

Well, we are headed for collapse. That's really not even an extraordinary claim. If you just simply extrapolate out from where we are, we are outstripping the planet's capacity to house us, and we don't appear to have a plan for shifting gears. So, it's really a factual statement.

Science is a method for correcting for bias ... It is a slightly cumbersome mechanism for correcting for human bias. And the result is that it produces a set of models and a scope of knowledge that improves over time. And what improves means is it explains more while assuming less.

Wherever perception is the mediator of success, you have deception as an important evolutionary force. Where physics dictates whether you succeeded or failed, you don't have that problem—you can't fool physics.

If you treat your children, more or less, at least cognitively... You just shoot way over their heads. You talk to them like adults from very early on, and they cannot respond in kind, but they get much more than you would think based on what they can say in response.

The very thing that made us so successful, as a species is now setting us up for disaster. That is to say, our evolutionary capacity to solve problems has outstripped our capacity to adapt to the new world that we've created for ourselves. And so, we've become psychologically and socially and physiologically and politically unhealthy, and our civilization isn't any better.

Being courageous about actually acknowledging what you don't know often leads to the best conversations.

Virtually everything that people know is coming through a social channel. So, it is all open to manipulation, augmentation, distortion.

Not only do we need people to be able to see that they've made mistakes and actually course-correct, but we need people to be taking enough risks early on that they are likely to sometimes make errors.

Our brains are antifragile, and our bones are antifragile. And they become stronger with stressors.