Mark Changizi

speaker

236 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Mark Changizi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi · 28 Nov 2024 podcast

Right. Really, it's all emotional expressions sprinkled with propositional-like content attached to it rather than propositional content sprinkled with emotions. This is the wrong way to think about it. Most of what we're doing, all of these things are amounting to pushing in chips because I've said that I'm so right about something for these reasons or I think you're so wrong for these reasons.

I'm pushing in chips, social capital chips when I tweet. Right. Or I'm saying, I'm not really sure, but maybe it's this. So I push in one tiny little chip.

It's a market. It's a marketplace. And that's what... This is how... That's why free speech is necessary. Free speech is really a marketplace of ideas. Literally, because... One of the interesting things about social capital is a decentralized currency, right? Now, most of us didn't know anything about decentralized currencies until Bitcoin came along.

And now we've got all these cryptocurrencies, which are decentralized currencies. And the... One of the interesting things about decentralized currency is because there's no bank with some boss looking at the ledgers of who sent money to somebody else. That's not going to work because the whole point of a decentralized currency is that it's not in any one person's hand.

Instead, it's spread across many, many- It's an unfalsifiable ledger. That's right. So there's this notion of a blockchain. And a blockchain is just like, OK, today, Doug sent Susie 0.3 Bitcoin. And it's just a list of all the Bitcoin transactions that occurred. And it's in everybody's computers everywhere.

And when there's a new block added to the chain, there's some particular work that has to be done called proof of work or there's proof of stake. There's different kinds of ways of adding it such that once you've built up, let's say, a year's worth of these sort of Bitcoin, let's say, transfers, it's practically impossible to go back and mess with the history of it.

And the reason it has to be like this is because it's decentralized and there's no other way to do it. So, well, reputation is another decentralized currency. How do you get it so that within a community, social community, you can make sure that when I had an argument with you and you won, I don't go around later and say, oh, actually, I won that argument. I totally humiliated Jordan.

I could just start lying about the past, about what happened. It's like me saying, no, actually, you gave me the Bitcoin. I didn't give you the Bitcoin. We call it double spending. I give you Bitcoin, but I still have the Bitcoin because the ledger is not keeping track of the fact that I gave it to you. This would undermine a currency. Nothing would work.

So the same problems that decentralized currencies have that lead to blockchain is why we end up with social narratives. Social narratives are the answer that we already had up and running. Social narratives are the human social group's way of remembering, okay, this week,

uh mark lost social capital to jordan and susie lost it to betty and there's like we keep track and we keep track of these little stories the most stories that we remember are one stories about like the argument that we had mark was being a douchebag but it's also really about the mark lost social capital to jordan because of those things those things are helping me remember how much social capital that i lost so

And there's often people that are good at gossip. These are the people that are good at minors. These are like, or proof of, well, one is proof of stake. They own a lot of, they're already high reputation people in the community. These are like people who own a lot of Bitcoin, say, or some other currencies.

And then they can say, we have a higher vote as to whether a new block comes onto the chain. And they're worthy of listening to because they care about the validity, whether that currency stays good. So gossipers are typically high reputation. ranked reputation people in the community, and they spin stories about what happened, sort of accumulating.

They come up with simpler versions of whatever happened that helps it, remember, it gets added to the chain. And often gossip is really easy to check that it's preserving what actually happened in the community, but it's really hard to come up with good gossip. Good gossip that elegantly explains the happenings of the week

Like a really condensed narrative, easy to verify, hard to come up with. Only certain kinds of individuals are good to come up with. So these are a lot similar to what's called proof of work. Proof of works are things that are really hard to do this work to glue one block to the next, but they're really easy to verify that it's a correct solution.

So you end up with these sort of analogies that we've already been using for hundreds of thousands, well, millions of years, well, at least hundreds of thousands of years, that we ended up with these social narratives that in order to have a reputation currency that is preserved over time and we can't muck with, build these blockchain-like social narratives. And that's great.

But the downside is that once a narrative gets up and running, just like once a blockchain gets up and running, you can't muck with it. And so if it creates something false... you're stuck with it for generations potentially.

So this is one of the things that, that I talk about a bit here and I'm trying to work into a next book, taking seriously some of these kinds of emergent phenomena that you have to deal with when you have decentralized currencies like these blockchain like properties or which are what social narratives are. Um, have these downsides of being almost unalterable. Right, right. Permanent mistakes.

Permanent mistakes that go on and on forever. You know, the Jews deal with this. I think the Jews got added to as being the evil, you know, goblin-type group that's controlling and puppeteering everyone 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, and it just never goes away. It just keeps on – it just keeps getting added to the same kind of narratives, keep moving on.

So there's all these terrible things, but there's also all these great things because you wouldn't have reputation systems that work. None of our social – none of the public square would work. None of the social interactions would work at all without it.

Yeah, I hear that a lot. I've argued against that often. And the reason I don't think that's right is every day you have countless encounters with folks in real life at the coffee place or wherever it is, cars signaling to one another and we emotionally signaling in our cars all the time. And you don't know these folks and you're You know that you don't know these folks.

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