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ishouldreallybeelsewhere · 3 years ago

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okay so that loki video essay thing was going well, and then like a day into writing it i lost the hyperfixation so it's never gonna be finished. i still think it's alright, completely unedited, entirely a train of thought, i hope you like commas and pacific rim, it's only 2.8k

btw if something doesn't make sense, i was writing this while watching some video essays, and also haven't read it

Introduction

Loki is a show, well you know that, but a show that does everything right, until it doesn’t (crazy, I know). If you’re here, I assume you’ll already know a fair bit about it, but if you don’t, here’s a quick refresher. Spoilers for everything MCU.

Loki begins in 2012, technically, just after the Avengers go back through time from Endgame to meet themselves and grab the infinity stones. Unfortunately, the plan goes awri, and Loki ends up in possession of the Tesseract, the mind stone. With this, he teleports to a desert in [a place] and is quickly arrested and apprehended by the Time Keepers for ‘Crimes Against the Sacred Timeline.’ Sounds a bit cult-y if you ask me, and given that you’re stuck here, you will ask me. Essentially, his actions (taking the tesseract) were not supposed to happen. They created a branch, a new timeline, and, according to the TVA, if left unchecked, the timeline could cause a multiversal war that would result in the end of time. This is, to put it simply, a very interesting premise, and the first two episodes do a wonderful job of exploring the TVA and searching for the mysterious Loki variant who causes chaos and mischief, all while evading the time cops.

What is the TVA? Well, it’s the Time Variance Authority, which clears up nothing to those who haven’t seen the show. I would let a clip explaining it play, but I think I’d get a copyright strike, even though I’m fairly sure it’s within fair use. Regardless, the TVA is an organisation supposedly created by the Time Keepers, space lizards who brought together all of time into a singular sacred timeline. Had they not done this, time itself would have ended, how they did this is unexplained, and likely either impossible, or they are greater than gods in their power. Loki is immediately doubtful, but can’t deny that they must hold some power, because not only does his magic not work in the TVA, but infinity stones are useless too. Time is also stranger there too, more an idea as opposed to a set part of their reality. Many theorise that they reside within the quantum realm, which makes sense, as that is how one travels through time, at least in the marvel universe, but we can’t be sure until we get an explanation. Of course, I’m writing this long before I’ll see the finale, so who knows, perhaps I’ll have to rewrite it.

Now I’ve said all that without explaining what the TVA actually does. It’s pretty simple, similar to Stephen Hawking’s (???) ideas of the multiverse, every decision you make has the ability to make another timeline, one that is not part of the sacred way of time, and therefore must be pruned by the TVA before it grows enough to cause another multiversal war, despite multiverses being well-established in the MCU, but I know that’s different. Or perhaps the Time Keepers are lying (spoiler, they are, just not exactly in that way). Anyway, when someone makes a decision or takes an action that creates a new timeline, the TVA arrives. Minutemen arrest the ‘Variant’ responsible, despite their lack of intentional crime, and prune the new timeline, which we are told destroys it. Then Variants must stand trial for their crimes, in which they can either plead guilty or not, but really, that doesn’t make much difference, as they’re unable to make a case, let alone get away as innocent. Before they reach the court, however, Variants are dressed in TVA jumpsuits, have to sign off every word they’ve ever said, and a snapshot of their temporal aura is taken, for some reason. Yeah, it’s not really ever explained why they have to go through all that, like, why don’t they just prune them all, or just send them straight to court. It seems like they’re putting on a big show for nothing. Of course, if you have to go through all that, you probably won’t have time to think about the whys of your situation, which I’m sure the TVA uses to their advantage.

Now, we’re heading into real spoiler-y stuff, just in case anyone here hasn't watched episode three. If you haven’t, why are you here? Go, finish the whole series, and then come back. Alrighty. Now that everyone’s seen it all (apart from me at this point) we can continue.

Everyone working at the TVA is a Variant, and they don’t know it. The Time Keepers are said to have created everything within the TVA, every analyst, Minuteman, and whatever the other roles are. But that’s not true. They’re all variants who’ve been taken from their own timelines and had their memories wiped. This gives an explanation for the courtrooms, and the process to get into them. Robots will be melted from the inside out if they go through the temporal aura machine thingy, and I have a feeling it’s harder to reset a robot’s memories. Living beings are let through, and their actions in the courtroom could give a good overview of their strengths and intelligence, so it can be decided whether they’ll be pruned or ‘reset’ which we are told is killed, but with the information of them all being variants now available, is more likely having all their memories hidden, replaced with the idea that they’ve been at the TVA their whole lives, and that they were created by the timekeepers. Though why would space lizards create workers in the image of humans instead of like their own lizard-y selves. The TVA as a whole, as we are introduced to it, feels very cult-y. Things such as the videos Variants are shown upon being arrested, the whole ‘Sacred Timeline’ thing, the Time Keepers being viewed as almost gods, and that when one of the TVA’s own minutemen is told the truth (C-20) she is, well, removed. The TVA views Variants as criminals of the highest order. How dare they violate the sacred timeline?!!? Only, no variant knew that what they were doing was wrong, or that it even mattered, but if you’re late to work on a day where you weren’t supposed to be, then you’re removed from your timeline and charged. The sentence? Essentially death, or removal of all your memories and being lied to about everything, which might be worse depending on your stance on that kind of thing.

Anyway, the minutemen themselves are another issue that the TVA has. They respond with violence at every available opportunity, like when a young french child from the 1500s walks into a church, the first thing a minuteman does is reach for his weapon. This is also the scene where we’re introduced to my favourite character, Mobius, but more on him later. For now, I need to stay on track and keep in mind this part of the view has to remain consistent. All I can think of are the nerds I split. It seems I have an inability to stay on topic, however, I’m gonna try so you have fun keeping up with that.

Loki stood trial for crimes against the Sacred Timeline and, like any logical person may in that situation, relentlessly questions the validity of his conviction. The answers he’s provided with he just,, kind of,, disagrees with, which is fair. The concept of the TVA and the sacred timeline as a whole is absurd to him, as who would a god serve?

Part one: Glorious Purpose

Loki, in his own words, it ‘Burdened With Glorious Purpose.’ I’m so glad no one but me is gonna read this draft cuz I managed to spell many of those words wrong. His glorious purpose, in his eyes, is becoming the ruler of all, removing free will and choice from those beneath him, in a twisted attempt to make it easy for all living things. He believes in free will, at least, the free will of himself, and also believes that, out of everyone in the universe, he is the one who is right, the one who can make the world better, that is his burden. Now, you may look at that and think, ‘hey, for a god of mischief, that doesn’t seem very mischievous,’ and you’d be right. It isn’t. He’s evil, like, without a doubt, an evil person in his ideals and views of the universe, however, the change from mischief to villainy was rapid, as it’s shown that he was D.B. Cooper, and, when asked, said it was because he was ‘young and lost a bet to Thor’, which, like, okay, but that was the 60s or something. 50 years aren’t a lot in the face of 1,500, but a lot can happen then

Part something: ethics

So, as you’ve probably gathered by now, I’m a pretentious asshole, and with that comes three years of philosophy classes and a superiority complex, though perhaps that comes from the whole leftist thing. Anyway, as per usual, I got sidetracked. I’m watching a really good video atm, so lots of things are happening in my head right now. Back to being pretentious, I’m going to be talking about ethics, fun, and how that relates to the TVA, the sacred timeline, Kang, sorry, he who remains. Regarding the whole Kang thing, I haven’t read a single Marvel comic since I was a member of the comic book club 4(???) years ago. Gods, I’m so old. Yup Percy Jackson took up too much of my childhood. Sidetracked again! I apologise, anyway, everything I know about Kang the Conqueror comes from Tumblr, so I’m not going to spend any time talking about any parts of the character that aren’t shown in the show. I really want to be writing about Doctor Who right now but I have my notes up so I’m gonna do this. Okay, right. Ethics. I hope I don’t go into free will right now because I will never stop going on about that. Anyway, let's look at the TVA, ignoring Kang, not for simplicity, but to see if the ends do in fact justify the means as Mobius said. And by that I mean, if what employees of the TVA think is true, are their actions justified? Finally got to the point, after how many words? Too many, anyway, let’s start from the start (kinda).

In an actual, proper, organised essay, I think that whole last paragraph was supposed to be 1 (one) sentence long, maybe. I have been writing year nine level essays for many years, despite not being in year nine for many, many years, so, be glad you’re reading something I’m interested in. Back to the topic at hand, please. Sorry I just got distracted again. I shouldn’t have Tumblr open atm. Anyway, what are the TVA’s means? So, I’ve already explained what the TVA is, and what it does, but let’s use a fun example to show what they really do. Imagine you’re a kid (or maybe you are a kid, so imagine you’re a younger one) and you just got home from school. You just made an awesome new friend who believes in you and loves your art. This sparks your interest in art, leading to countless pieces, days and days spent drawing and painting and having a great time. Your art begins to take hold on the world, speaking to people, letting them believe in themselves, thousands upon thousands of people inspired to start their own art, to rebel against the system of capitalism and teach people that there’s more to life than a job. This begins the global radicalisation of the working class, and with that, rebellion and the downfall of capitalism. I’m in a good mood rn, feeling optimistic, so don’t worry about what’s happening. Anyway, with the downfall of human exploitation and eradication of poverty comes a branch in the Sacred Timeline, and as the root of it is you as a child making a friend, your 5-year-old self just committed a crime that, according to the TVA, is worthy of what they believe to be actual death, like, being pruned.

Now, this was a very umm, off-the-top-of-my-head example, and entirely makes no sense, but give me two seconds and I’ll remember my original point. Right. The risk of allowing the downfall of capitalism is the end of all time. Always. Maybe? But, in the eyes of the TVA, kidnapping a 5-year-old, putting them through a dehumanising process to be shoved in a courtroom and being accused of crimes against the sacred timeline, and what was the crime? Making a goddamn friend. As a child. Being supported in art. Doing what you enjoy, destroying oppressive systems that will eventually be the downfall of us all and so entwined with all the problems in the world that any chance of saving it revolves around its deconstruction. I’ve been hunched over too long and my back is really starting to hurt, but the essay must go on. And remember, the domino effect of that friendship never actually happened. The timeline was pruned before it could happen, so the crime is literally making a friend. Very extreme example sorry, but shock makes your point go across faster, and also sparks outrage, which I don’t want to happen, but with doing literally anything comes backlash, like stepping on the wrong leaf, or a butterfly. I hope you guys know that this is unplanned and probably unedited. Okay I need to watch Pacific Rim again. Okay imagine now they kill the child. Right. That’s likely what would happen. Children are weak (usually, Sylvie is just on another level of awesome) [author’s note, Crimson Peak is a horror movie and I’m very upset by that cuz now I won’t be able to watch it]. Alright, so, kill a child, or destroy all of time. Always. Maybe. The way we see the TVA in the first two episodes is through Loki’s eyes, as a cult-like lie with a cool retro/futuristic aesthetic (like Doctor Who, but more on that later). I have been sitting here for 4 hours and I can confidently say my cat is an asshole whose sole purpose in life is to want to come in right when I’m in the middle of a point only to not want to come in but allow me to lose exactly what I was about to say, meaning I’ve gotten next to nothing done. Hi, I'm back. I got distracted by My Little Pony and Pacific Rim. And checkers. Issues with pacing? I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Okay, so, I’m going to say something possibly controversial. When the stakes are the endings of the entirety of time, it’s okay to let a child die, and technically they might not die they’d just be sent to be either devoured the void or saved by a ragtag team of loki variants. Which is not great. That might sound like I agree with the TVA, but trust me, I do not. Not in the slightest. I hate the slimy bastards. (I do love every single character though, like all of them are awesome) The prickly pricks will bury us all!!! I don’t agree with them because I think there is a better way to handle the multiversal problem and the issue that arises regarding the particular cause of the multiversal war. That made no sense. You’re really just gonna have to guess at this point, however, for the solution, we must look into the finale and the reasoning behind He Who Remains’ plan. I said I wasn’t going to talk about him, but I lied (rule number one). Basically, from what I understood of his plan (which wasn’t much, I’m pretty stupid) was that there were two options; option number one was to leave him there, looking over all of time, preventing free will, so that the infinite variants of him that would come from timelines wouldn’t once again attempt to conquer all of the timelines (though if there are infinite ones, how would that work? Just kidding, you’re not allowed to question this). He dictates all. There’s no such thing as free will, and if you dare veer off the path, you will be pruned, and your timeline destroyed. His plan is to hand that power over to Loki and Sylvie, because he’s getting old and has lived long enough. The other option (and the one that’s taken in the show) is to allow Sylvie to kill He Who Remains and let the multiverse unfold, allow free will and chaos to reign, with the possibility and established likelihood of the destruction of time itself. Now, just putting this out here, what if there was a third option? My proposition is based of knowing next to nothing and not having seen Loki in a while, and that is,

#loki #loki show #loki series #loki tv show #i don't even know what this is #uhhh i don't think i agree with all the points i made and i also used some very crap example #this is not a good peice of writing and it's from several months ago #if you talk to me about it i won't get back to you.

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ralphmorgan-blog1 · 6 years ago

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Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought

Sam Harris, one of the original members of the group dubbed the “New Atheists” (by Wired!) 12 years ago, says he doesn’t like tribalism. During his recent, much-discussed debate with Vox founder Ezra Klein about race and IQ, Harris declared that tribalism “is a problem we must outgrow.”

But apparently Harris doesn’t think he is part of that “we.” After he accused Klein of fomenting a “really indissoluble kind of tribalism” in the form of identity politics, and Klein replied that Harris exhibits his own form of tribalism, Harris said coolly, “I know I’m not thinking tribally in this respect.”

Robert Wright (@robertwrighter) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED and the author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God, and, most recently, Why Buddhism Is True. A visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, he publishes The Mindful Resistance Newsletter.

Not only is Harris capable of transcending tribalism—so is his tribe! Reflecting on his debate with Klein, Harris said that his own followers care “massively about following the logic of a conversation” and probe his arguments for signs of weakness, whereas Klein’s followers have more primitive concerns: “Are you making political points that are massaging the outraged parts of our brains? Do you have your hands on our amygdala and are you pushing the right buttons?”

Of the various things that critics of the New Atheists find annoying about them—and here I speak from personal experience—this ranks near the top: the air of rationalist superiority they often exude. Whereas the great mass of humankind remains mired in pernicious forms of illogical thought—chief among them, of course, religion—people like Sam Harris beckon from above: All of us, if we will just transcend our raw emotions and rank superstitions, can be like him, even if precious few of us are now.

We all need role models, and I’m not opposed in principle to Harris’s being mine. But I think his view of himself as someone who can transcend tribalism—and can know for sure that he’s transcending it—may reflect a crude conception of what tribalism is. The psychology of tribalism doesn’t consist just of rage and contempt and comparably conspicuous things. If it did, then many of humankind’s messes—including the mess American politics is in right now—would be easier to clean up.

What makes the psychology of tribalism so stubbornly powerful is that it consists mainly of cognitive biases that easily evade our awareness. Indeed, evading our awareness is something cognitive biases are precision-engineered by natural selection to do. They are designed to convince us that we’re seeing clearly, and thinking rationally, when we’re not. And Harris’s work features plenty of examples of his cognitive biases working as designed, warping his thought without his awareness. He is a case study in the difficulty of transcending tribal psychology, the importance of trying to, and the folly of ever feeling sure we’ve succeeded.

To be clear: I’m not saying Harris’s cognition is any more warped by tribalism than, say, mine or Ezra Klein’s. But somebody’s got to serve as an example of how deluded we all are, and who better than someone who thinks he’s not a good example?

There’s another reason Harris makes a good Exhibit A. This month Bari Weiss, in a now famous (and, on the left, infamous) New York Times piece, celebrated a coalescing group of thinkers dubbed the “Intellectual Dark Web”—people like Harris and Jordan Peterson and Christina Hoff Sommers, people for whom, apparently, the ideal of fearless truth telling trumps tribal allegiance. Andrew Sullivan, writing in support of Weiss and in praise of the IDW, says it consists of “nontribal thinkers.” OK, let’s take a look at one of these thinkers and see how nontribal he is.

Examples of Harris’s tribal psychology date back to the book that put him on the map: The End of Faith. The book exuded his conviction that the reason 9/11 happened—and the reason for terrorism committed by Muslims in general—was simple: the religious beliefs of Muslims. As he has put it: “We are not at war with ‘terrorism.’ We are at war with Islam.”

Believing that the root of terrorism is religion requires ruling out other root causes, so Harris set about doing that. In his book he listed such posited causes as “the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza…the collusion of Western powers with corrupt dictatorships…the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world.”

Then he dismissed them. He wrote that “we can ignore all of these things—or treat them only to place them safely on the shelf—because the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism, indeed who would never commit terrorism of the sort that has become so commonplace among Muslims.”

If you’re tempted to find this argument persuasive, I recommend that you first take a look at a different instance of the same logic. Suppose I said, “We can ignore the claim that smoking causes lung cancer because the world is full of people who smoke and don’t get lung cancer.” You’d spot the fallacy right away: Maybe smoking causes lung cancer under some circumstances but not others; maybe there are multiple causal factors—all necessary, but none sufficient—that, when they coincide, exert decisive causal force.

Or, to put Harris’s fallacy in a form that he would definitely recognize: Religion can’t be a cause of terrorism, because the world is full of religious people who aren’t terrorists.

Harris isn’t stupid. So when he commits a logical error this glaring—and when he rests a good chunk of his world view on the error—it’s hard to escape the conclusion that something has biased his cognition.

As for which cognitive bias to blame: A leading candidate would be “attribution error.” Attribution error leads us to resist attempts to explain the bad behavior of people in the enemy tribe by reference to “situational” factors—poverty, enemy occupation, humiliation, peer group pressure, whatever. We’d rather think our enemies and rivals do bad things because that’s the kind of people they are: bad.

With our friends and allies, attribution error works in the other direction. We try to explain their bad behavior in situational terms, rather than attribute it to “disposition,” to the kind of people they are.

You can see why attribution error is an important ingredient of tribalism. It nourishes our conviction that the other tribe is full of deeply bad, and therefore morally culpable, people, whereas members of our tribe deserve little if any blame for the bad things they do.

This asymmetrical attribution of blame was visible in the defense of Israel that Harris famously mounted during Israel’s 2014 conflict with Gaza, in which some 70 Israelis and 2,300 Palestinians died.

Granted, Harris said, Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes, but that’s because they have “been brutalized…that is, made brutal by” all the fighting they’ve had to do. And this brutalization “is largely due to the character of their enemies.”

Get the distinction? When Israelis do bad things, it’s because of the circumstances they face—in this case repeated horrific conflict that is caused by the bitter hatred emanating from Palestinians. But when Palestinians do bad things—like bitterly hate Israelis—this isn’t the result of circumstance (the long Israeli occupation of Gaza, say, or the subsequent, impoverishing, economic blockade); rather, it’s a matter of the “character” of the Palestinians.

This is attribution error working as designed. It sustains your conviction that, though your team may do bad things, it’s only the other team that’s actually bad. Your badness is “situational,” theirs is “dispositional.”

After Harris said this, and the predictable blowback ensued, he published an annotated version of his remarks in which he hastened to add that he wasn’t justifying war crimes and hadn’t meant to discount “the degree to which the occupation, along with collateral damage suffered in war, has fueled Palestinian rage.”

That’s progress. “But,” he immediately added, “Palestinian terrorism (and Muslim anti-Semitism) is what has made peaceful coexistence thus far impossible.” In other words: Even when the bad disposition of the enemy tribe is supplemented by situational factors, the buck still stops with the enemy tribe. Even when Harris struggles mightily against his cognitive biases, a more symmetrical allocation of blame remains elusive.

Another cognitive bias—probably the most famous—is confirmation bias, the tendency to embrace, perhaps uncritically, evidence that supports your side of an argument and to either not notice, reject, or forget evidence that undermines it. This bias can assume various forms, and one was exhibited by Harris in his exchange with Ezra Klein over political scientist Charles Murray’s controversial views on race and IQ.

Harris and Klein were discussing the “Flynn effect”—the fact that average IQ scores have tended to grow over the decades. No one knows why, but such factors as nutrition and better education are possibilities, and many of the other possibilities also fall under the heading of “improved living conditions.”

So the Flynn effect would seem to underscore the power of environment. Accordingly, people who see the black-white IQ gap as having no genetic component have cited it as reason to expect that the gap could move toward zero as average black living conditions approach average white living conditions. The gap has indeed narrowed, but people like Murray, who believe a genetic component is likely, have asked why it hasn’t narrowed more.

This is the line Harris pursued in an email exchange with Klein before their debate. He wrote that, in light of the Flynn effect, “the mean IQs of African American children who are second- and third-generation upper middle class should have converged with those of the children of upper-middle-class whites, but (as far as I understand) they haven’t.”

Harris’s expectation of such a convergence may seem reasonable at first, but on reflection you realize that it assumes a lot.

It assumes that when African Americans enter the upper middle class—when their income reaches some specified level—their learning environments are in all relevant respects like the environments of whites at the same income level: Their public schools are as good, their neighborhoods are as safe, their social milieus reward learning just as much, their parents are as well educated, they have no more exposure to performance-impairing drugs like marijuana and no less access to performance-enhancing (for test-taking purposes, at least) drugs like ritalin. And so on.

Klein alluded to this kink in Harris’s argument in an email to Harris: “We know, for instance, that African American families making $100,000 a year tend to live in neighborhoods with the same income demographics as white families making $30,000 a year.”

Harris was here exhibiting a pretty subtle form of confirmation bias. He had seen a fact that seemed to support his side of the argument—the failure of IQ scores of two groups to fully converge—and had embraced it uncritically; he accepted its superficial support of his position without delving deeper and asking any skeptical questions about the support.

I want to emphasize that Klein may here also be under the influence of confirmation bias. He saw a fact that seemed to threaten his views—the failure of IQ scores to fully converge—and didn’t embrace it, but rather viewed it warily, looking for things that might undermine its significance. And when he found such a thing—the study he cited—he embraced that.

And maybe he embraced it uncritically. For all I know it suffers from flaws that he would have looked for and found had it undermined his views. That’s my point: Cognitive biases are so pervasive and subtle that it’s hubristic to ever claim we’ve escaped them entirely.

In addition to exhibiting one side of confirmation bias—uncritically embracing evidence congenial to your world view—Harris recently exhibited a version of the flip side: straining to reject evidence you find unsettling. He did so in discussing the plight of physicist and popular writer Lawrence Krauss, who was recently suspended by Arizona State University after multiple women accused him of sexual predation.

Krauss is an ally of Harris’s in the sense of being not just an atheist, but a “new” atheist. He considers religion not just confused but pernicious and therefore in urgent need of disrespect and ridicule, which he is good at providing.

After the allegations against Krauss emerged, Harris warned against rushing to judgment. I’m in favor of such warnings, but Harris didn’t stop there. He said the following about the website that had first reported the allegations against Krauss: “Buzzfeed is on the continuum of journalistic integrity and unscrupulousness somewhere toward the unscrupulous side.”

So far as I can tell, this isn’t true in any relevant sense. Yes, Buzzfeed has had the kinds of issues that afflict even the most elite journalistic outlets: a firing over plagiarism, an undue-advertiser-influence incident, a you-didn’t-explicitly-warn-us-that-this-conversation-was-on-the-record complaint. And there was a time when Buzzfeed wasn’t really a journalistic outlet at all, but more of a spawning ground for cheaply viral content—a legacy that lives on as a major part of Buzzfeed’s business model and as a parody site called clickhole.

Still, since 2011, when Buzzfeed got serious about news coverage and hired Ben Smith as editor, the journalistic part of its operation has earned mainstream respect. And its investigative piece about Krauss was as thoroughly sourced as #metoo pieces that have appeared in places like the New York Times and the New Yorker.

But you probably shouldn’t take my word for that. I’ve had my contentious conversations with Krauss, and maybe this tension left me inclined to judge allegations against him too generously. In any event, I suspect that if the Buzzfeed piece were about someone Harris has had tensions with (Ezra Klein, maybe, or me), he might have just read it, found it pretty damning, and left it at that. But it was about Krauss—who is, if Harris will pardon the expression, a member of Harris’s tribe.

Most of these examples of tribal thinking are pretty pedestrian—the kinds of biases we all exhibit, usually with less than catastrophic results. Still, it is these and other such pedestrian distortions of thought and perception that drive America’s political polarization today.

For example: How different is what Harris said about Buzzfeed from Donald Trump talking about “fake news CNN”? It’s certainly different in degree. But is it different in kind? I would submit that it’s not.

When a society is healthy, it is saved from all this by robust communication. Individual people still embrace or reject evidence too hastily, still apportion blame tribally, but civil contact with people of different perspectives can keep the resulting distortions within bounds. There is enough constructive cross-tribal communication—and enough agreement on what the credible sources of information are—to preserve some overlap of, and some fruitful interaction between, world views.

Now, of course, we’re in a technological environment that makes it easy for tribes to not talk to each other and seems to incentivize the ridiculing of one another. Maybe there will be long-term fixes for this. Maybe, for example, we’ll judiciously amend our social media algorithms, or promulgate practices that can help tame cognitive biases.

Meanwhile, the closest thing to a cure may be for all of us to try to remember that natural selection has saddled us with these biases—and also to remember that, however hard we try, we’re probably not entirely escaping them. In this view, the biggest threat to America and to the world may be a simple lack of intellectual humility.

Harris, though, seems to think that the biggest threat to the world is religion. I guess these two views could be reconciled if it turned out that only religious people are lacking in intellectual humility. But there’s reason to believe that’s not the case.