Higher and Primitive Minds

Listening to podcast between Tim Urban and Lex Fridman and I wanted to take some notes on Tim’s points on Higher minds versus the Primitive minds and how the latter leads to bad ideas echoing while the former encourages good ideas to generate.

High vs Primitive minds

Higher minds are more rational. These folks put out ideas and are not attached to it. Higher mindedness are also more open to changing their ideas easily, through being accepting on criticism. Tim relates this to an analogy to which higher mindedness allows everybody to take shots at the targets (ideas) the truest ideas rise up among the rest. Most fall but the best rises. This is a good system as overtime, even the most mediocre of peoples with high mindedness can pool together to find better ideas for their problems.

The primitive mind as the name suggests, are closed off to other ideas. it only gets involves to ideas that are sacred or something that ruses the bunch up. This forms an identify for the primitive minds to rally upon and creates an echo chamber where criticism are not allowed and shot down by the group of primitively minded people. Overtime, this collective becomes dumber, and even dumber than the individual as the primitive minds are fanatically attached to the idea.

Conclusion

What i am practising myself is to be mindful of how i am receiving and responding to ideas. Am i approaching it with a higher mindedness or primitive mindedness? Are the groups involved an idea’s lab or an echo chamber?

I also think this applies not only in my application of technology to my work but also in my everyday life with my environment. Collectives with echo chambers often leech the life out of you, hence to live more by your own thought, applying first principles it extremely important as BS detectors.