Urban: Political Echo Chambers Lack Immune Systems to Filter Bad Ideas
Tim Urban · Tim Urban of Wait But Why · Y Combinator · Jan 3, 2018 · at 32:15
Tim Urban, creator of the blog Wait But Why, discusses how political dogma and insular communities sustain inaccurate information.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In, you know, in an echo chamber environment, there's no kind of like white blood cells to kill the virus, and so it just explains, it just, because dissent isn't okay over there. You know, it's not, not only is it not valued, it's very much frowned upon. So everyone's agreeing, everyone's confirming, and you have these bad stats that live on”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Tim Urban
Urban: Humanity Faces Impending Extinction or a Radical Utopian Paradigm Shift
“It's either going to be the coolest story for humans or it's the end. This is the, That is a, it is a 501 page book. And that's it. Or this is the beginning of like the new paradigm. We have a new BC AD situation. We have a BC, which is like before something t…”
Urban: Convincing Smart People to Solve Big Problems Maximizes Impact
“If I can convince really smart people to turn their attention or their money or their time towards important things I think that that's about as big an impact as I could have as a human, because me going into it myself, that's one person.”
Urban: The Public Unfairly Reduces the Entire Tech Sector to Facebook
“People are pushing tech away, like in big quotes, because they think of tech as like just Facebook. But in reality, it's so, so, so much more.”
Urban: Bostrom's 'Superintelligence' Provides a Sufficient Foundational Base for AI
“One good book, like super intelligence in the case of AI, can give you a really, really great foundation right there, and then you can just kind of tack on information to that foundation or poke holes in that foundation, and then you end up with a solid unders…”