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Back to #2571 - Jimmy Carr, with Jimmy Carr.

How Does Tim Urban Rank Ways of Thinking?

Jimmy Carr describes Tim Urban's ladder for how people think: a scientist, a sports fan, a lawyer, then a zealot. What's Our Problem, one of his favorite books of the last 10 years, is about how you think, not about left and right. New evidence would change a scientist's opinion. A religious zealot will not change and stays ride or die.

Between the scientist and the zealot, a sports fan likes the team but will not want a win that comes from cheating, because the rules of the game matter more. Election fraud should look like horseshit even to someone on that side. A lawyer will speak for the team no matter what without really believing it, and the zealot above the lawyer really believes everything.

He cares where people sit on the spectrum more than old left and right labels, and he frames the split as freedom versus authoritarian. Thomas Sowell's idea is that politics has no solutions, only trade-offs: you can have safety, but you cannot have safety and freedom together, so the lines between them have to be found. Debate tries to own the other person and win. Deliberation agrees on a problem and talks around it in a broad way.

Grokipedia·Tim Urban·Jimmy Carr

Transcript

#2571 - Jimmy Carr ·

The Joe Rogan Experience

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