@1:02:15
Daniel:
Who you're around affects who you become. As libertarian and self-determining and sovereign as we'd like to be, everybody, I think, knows that if you got put in a maximum security prison, aspects of your personality would have to adapt or you wouldn't survive there. You'd become different. If you grew up and Darfur vs Finland, you'd be different. With your same genetics, just, no real question about that. And even today, if you hang out in a place with ultra-marathoners as your roommates, or all people who are obese as your roommates, the statistical likelihood of what happens to your fitness is really clear, right, the behavioral science of this is pretty clear. The whole saying "we are the average of the 5 people we spend the most time around", I think that the more self-reflective someone is, the more time they spend by themselves in self-reflection, the less this is true, but it's still true.
So one of the best things someone can do to become more self-determined is be self-determined about the environments they want to put themselves in. Because to the degree that there is some self-determination and some determination by the environment - don't be fighting an environment is predisposing you in bad directions. Try to put yourself in an environment that is predisposing the things that you want.
In turn, try to affect the environment in ways that predispose positive things to those around you.
Lex:
Or perhaps also - there's probably interesting ways to play with this. You could probably put yourself - form connections that have this perfect tension in all directions, to where you're actually free to decide whatever the heck you want because the set of wants within your circle of interactions is so conflicting that you're free to choose whichever one. So if there's enough tension as opposed to everyone align like a flock of birds.
Daniel:
Yeah, I mean, you definitely want that all of the dialectics would be balanced. So if you have someone who is extremely oriented to self-empowerment and someone who's extremely oriented to a kind of empathy and compassion, both, the dialectic of those is better than either of them on their own.
If you have both of them inhabiting - being inhabited better than you, by the same person, spending more time around that person will probably do well for you.
I think the thing you just mentioned is super important when it comes to cognitive schools, which is, I think one of the fastest things people can do to improve their learning and their, not just cognitive learning, but their meaningful problem-solving communication in civic capacity - capacity to participate as a citizen with other people, making the world better, is to be seeking dialectical synthesis all the time.
And so, in the Hegelian sense, if you have a thesis, you have an antithesis - so maybe we have libertarianism on one side and Marxist-kind of Communism on the other side, and one is arguing that "the individual is the unit of choice and so we want to increase the freedom and support of individual choice because as they make more agentic choices, it'll produce a better whole for everybody". The other side saying, "well the individuals are conditioned by their environment - who would choose to be born in Darfur over Finland, so we actually need to collectively make environments that are good because the environment conditions individuals. So you have a thesis and an antithesis.
And then Hegel's idea is that you have a synthesis, which is a kind of higher-order truth that understands how those relate in a way that neither of them do. And so it is at a higher order of complexity. So the first part would be, can I steelman each of these - can I argue each one well enough that the proponents are like "totally, you got that". And not just argue it rhetorically, but can I inhabit it, where I can try to see and feel the world the way someone seeing and feeling the world that way would. Because once I do, then I don't want to screw those people, because there's truth there. Right? And I'm not going to go back to war with them, I'm going to finding solutions that could actually work at the higher order. If I don't to a higher order, then there's war.
But then the higher order thing would be, well it seems like the individual does effect the commons and the collective, and other people, but it also seems like the collective conditions individuals at least statistically. And I can cherry-pick out the one guy who got out of the ghetto, and pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but I can also say statistically that most people born into the ghetto show up differently than most people born into the Hamptons. And so, unless you want to argue that - and take your child from the Hamptons and put him in the ghetto, come on, be realistic about this thing. We don't want social systems that make weak, dependent individuals (the welfare argument), but we also don't want no social system that supports individuals to do better.
This perspective-seeking driving perspective-taking, and then seeking synthesis - I think this one cognitive disposition might be the most helpful thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGRNUw559SE&t=410s