Full transcript
0:00In February 2013, a slide deck began
0:03moving through Google's internal
0:04network. A product manager had built it
0:07at night and shared it with 10
0:08co-workers. Within weeks, more than
0:105,000 employees had read it. It spread
0:12the way secrets spread [music]
0:14because it said, in plain language, what
0:16people inside already suspected, that a
0:18few dozen design decisions made in a
0:21handful of hallways were quietly bending
0:23the minds of a billion people, and that
0:25the bending wasn't a side effect. It was
0:27the business. What Google did in
0:29response to that memo tells you
0:30everything about the decade [music] that
0:32followed. We'll get there. First, you
0:34need to see what the machine has already
0:36done because it left fingerprints,
0:38measurable ones. In one country, they've
0:41been keeping score.
0:43The black box.
0:45Norway [music] drafts its young men, and
0:47for decades, every conscript sat for the
0:50same cognitive [music] test, which means
0:52Norway accidentally built the longest,
0:54cleanest record of human intelligence on
0:56Earth.
0:56>> [music]
0:57>> In 2018, two researchers in Oslo, Ole
0:59Røgeberg and Ola Rogeberg, published
1:02what that record [music] showed. 730,000
1:05men. Through the mid-20th century, the
1:07scores climbed the way they climbed
1:08everywhere, roughly three [music] points
1:10a decade, a rise so steady that test
1:12makers had to keep rebuilding their
1:14tests just to hold [music] the average
1:15at 100. The political scientist James
1:18Flynn spent his career documenting that
1:20climb. It carried his name. Then, with
1:22the men born after 1975, [music] the
1:24line bends, downward, on pace, if the
1:26slope held, to give back roughly seven
1:28points in a single generation. The
1:30skeptics reached for the comfortable
1:32explanations, [music]
1:33immigration, family size, genes thinning
1:35out, which is why the strangest detail
1:37in the data matters most.
1:39>> [music]
1:39>> The decline shows up between brothers.
1:41Younger brothers, raised in the same
1:43house by the same [music] parents,
1:44carrying the same bloodline, scoring
1:46below their older brothers. You cannot
1:48blame a gene pool that produced both
1:50boys. Whatever was eroding these minds
1:52entered the home sometime between the
1:54first son [music] and the second, and it
1:55never left. The genes didn't change. The
1:58environment did. Hold on to that because
2:01it changes what kind of story this is.
2:04Intelligence, [music]
2:05the raw capacity, the hardware, doesn't
2:07collapse in a single generation.
2:09>> [music]
2:10>> What collapses that fast is practice.
2:12Thinking is not a possession. It's an
2:14act. [music]
2:15And acts can be abandoned. A piano in a
2:18house where nobody plays isn't broken.
2:21It's abandoned. Keep that distinction in
2:23your pocket. [music] The people running
2:24the machine you're about to meet don't
2:26need to damage the instrument. They only
2:28need to make sure nobody ever sits down
2:30to play. When an airliner goes down,
2:32investigators [music]
2:33don't look for one cause because there
2:34never is one. They recover the black box
2:37and [music] reconstruct the sequence.
2:38The psychologist James Reason built his
2:40whole model of catastrophe on this.
2:42Every system has layers of defense.
2:45Every layer has holes and [music]
2:46disaster happens on the rare day the
2:48holes line up. What follows is that
2:50reconstruction. Five failures in
2:52sequence filed from the inside of your
2:54skull outward. The last one is the
2:56reason the smartest people you know are
2:58the least protected.
3:00Failure one, [music]
3:01the obedient organ.
3:04In 1916, a young banker in London bought
3:07a typewriter and noticed something
3:09happening to his mind. His long winding
3:11sentences began dying on the page. What
3:14came out instead was short, percussive,
3:16staccato, he told a friend, like modern
3:19French prose. The banker was T.S. Eliot
3:22and he had stumbled onto something
3:23neuroscience would take another [music]
3:2580 years to prove. The tool doesn't just
3:28carry the thought. The tool edits the
3:30thinker. In 2000, Eleanor Maguire at
3:32University College London put taxi
3:34drivers into a brain scanner. To earn a
3:37license, a London cabbie must pass an
3:39exam called The Knowledge. [music]
3:4125,000 streets held entirely in memory.
3:44No map allowed. Maguire found that the
3:47rear portion of their hippocampus,
3:48[music] the region that handles
3:50wayfinding, was physically enlarged. And
3:52the longer a man had driven, [music] the
3:54larger it grew. The brain had
3:56reallocated tissue toward whatever the
3:57life demanded, the way a city reroutes
4:00power toward whichever district keeps
4:02flipping [music] the switches. That
4:03finding gets told as an inspiring story.
4:06It isn't one, because plasticity is
4:08[music] not a gift. It's obedience. The
4:10brain doesn't ask whether the new tenant
4:12deserves the room. It measures
4:14repetition, and it remodels [music]
4:16in both directions. What grows under
4:18demand shrinks under neglect. And it
4:20does so without notifying you, because
4:22the organ doing the shrinking is the
4:24same organ that would have to notice.
4:26Now apply [music] that to reading, not
4:28scrolling. Reading, deep, sequential,
4:31hours-long reading is one of the least
4:32natural [music] things a human brain
4:34does. There is no reading center you're
4:36born with. Every child's [music] brain
4:38has to be hand-built for it, circuit by
4:40borrowed circuit, through years of
4:42effortful practice. It is a custom
4:43renovation performed on Stone Age
4:45hardware, which means [music] it is
4:47exactly the kind of structure that
4:48plasticity will quietly dismantle the
4:50moment the repetition [music] stop. They
4:52have stopped. Gloria Mark at the
4:54University of California, Irvine, has
4:56been putting stopwatches [music]
4:58on human attention for 20 years. In
5:002004, the average adult [music] stayed
5:02on a single screen task for about 2 and
5:041/2 minutes before switching. By 2012,
5:0775 seconds. Her most recent measurement,
5:0947 seconds. And the meter runs on the
5:12back end, too. [music] In an earlier
5:14study, Mark's team tracked office
5:15workers after a single interruption and
5:17clocked the average time it took to
5:20fully return to the abandoned task. 23
5:22minutes and 15 seconds. The modern day
5:24is not fragmented into pieces of work.
5:27It's fragmented into pieces of recovery.
5:29You felt the domestic version, that
5:31paragraph you had to read three times
5:32last week, eyes moving, nothing landing,
5:35the words sliding off a mind that kept
5:37glancing at some internal doorway. That
5:39wasn't fatigue. That was the remodel,
5:41mid-construction. And while the
5:43attention contracted, the memory moved
5:45out.
5:45>> [music]
5:46>> In 2011, Betsy Sparrow at Columbia
5:49published a study in Science with a
5:51finding people laughed [music] at and
5:52then forgot, which proved the point.
5:55When people typed facts into a computer
5:57and believed the computer [music] would
5:58keep them, their brains quietly declined
6:00to store the facts. They remembered
6:02something else instead, where to find
6:04them. Her collaborator, Daniel Wegner,
6:07had spent the '80s studying long-married
6:09couples and found that each partner
6:11offloads whole categories of memory onto
6:13the other. He keeps the birthdays, she
6:15keeps the finances. A shared drive built
6:18from two [music] people.
6:19Wegner called it transactive memory.
6:22Count the phone numbers you knew by
6:23heart 15 years ago. Count the ones you
6:26know now. We married the search bar.
6:28There are early signs the outsourcing
6:30goes deeper. [music]
6:30Researchers at McGill have found that
6:32habitual GPS use tracks with weaker
6:35activity in the very hippocampal systems
6:37Maguire watched swell in cabbies. The
6:39organ obeys. It always obeys, which
6:41raises the only question that matters
6:43about an obedient organ. Obedient to
6:45whom? Someone is issuing the orders.
6:47Someone with a design document and a
6:49quarterly target. Before you meet them,
6:51you need to see what the remodeled
6:53attention actually looks like from the
6:54inside because you've been told it looks
6:56like a skill.
6:58Failure two,
6:59>> [music]
6:59>> the grazing mind.
7:01We brag about it in job interviews. We
7:04put it on resumes. We say it the way a
7:06man announces a promotion. I'm a great
7:08multitasker. The philosopher Byung-Chul
7:11Han, writing from Berlin, delivered the
7:13most disrespectful correction in modern
7:15thought. Multitasking, he argued in The
7:18Burnout Society, is not an advance in
7:20human attention. It is a regression, a
7:22slide back down toward the attention of
7:24an animal in the wild. Watch a deer
7:27feed. It cannot give itself to the
7:28grass. It eats in fragments, head up,
7:31head down, tracking the periphery,
7:33guarding its back, monitoring its young,
7:35never absorbed, never fully anywhere.
7:38That style of awareness, broad, shallow,
7:40restless, [music] interruptible, is not
7:42an achievement. It is the attention of
7:44prey. The other kind, deep,
7:46single-pointed, contemplative attention
7:48>> [music]
7:49>> is a late and fragile invention. Almost
7:51everything you'd call civilization came
7:53out of it. [music] Nobody proved a
7:54theorem in fragments. Nobody wrote a
7:56symphony on high alert. The proof, the
7:59fugue, the 100-year cathedral, each one
8:01is the fossil of a sustained attention,
8:03the visible remains of a mind that was
8:05permitted to stare. And that [music]
8:06kind of attention has a strange
8:08precondition that our entire economy is
8:10built to destroy, boredom. [music]
8:12Hon reaches back to Walter Benjamin, who
8:14called deep boredom the dream bird that
8:16hatches the egg of experience. Boredom
8:19is not the absence of stimulation. It is
8:21the incubator of thought, the empty
8:23stretch in which [music] a mind, given
8:25nothing, finally turns and works on
8:27itself. We exterminated it. Somewhere in
8:30the last 15 years, you had your last
8:32truly bored moment. A waiting room, a
8:34bus stop, a slow Sunday with nothing in
8:37your hand, and it did not occur to you
8:38to mourn it because the device made sure
8:40there would be no funeral. The eggs
8:42don't hatch anymore. The bird has
8:44nowhere to land. You might argue the
8:46trade was worth it, that we swapped
8:47depth for range, and range is its own
8:50power. Stanford tested that in 2009.
8:53Clifford Nass and his colleagues took
8:55people who juggle many media streams at
8:57once, [music]
8:58the self-described masters, expecting to
9:00find their special talent. They found
9:02the opposite. Everywhere [music] they
9:04looked, heavy multitaskers were worse at
9:07filtering out irrelevant information,
9:09>> [music]
9:09>> worse at holding and organizing memory,
9:12and in the study's cruelest line item,
9:14worse at switching [music] between
9:15tasks, the one skill they practiced all
9:18day. Nass summarized his own data with a
9:21phrase that should be engraved above
9:23every open-plan office. They had become
9:26suckers for irrelevancy. The training
9:28didn't build a broader mind. It built a
9:30mind that can no longer tell signal from
9:33noise because [music] it has spent years
9:35being paid to treat everything as
9:37signal. The body knows before the mind
9:39admits it. [music] Linda Stone, a
9:41researcher who worked inside both Apple
9:43and Microsoft, coined the term for our
9:45default state [music] back in 1998,
9:47continuous partial attention. Everything
9:49monitored, nothing engaged. A decade
9:52later, she noticed something [music]
9:53stranger. Watching a couple hundred
9:55people work through their inboxes, she
9:57found that roughly 80% of them were
9:58holding their breath or [music] barely
10:00breathing while they did it. She called
10:02it email apnea. The organism, scanning
10:04[music] its feed, breathes like
10:05something hiding in tall grass. Notice
10:07your own breath right now. [music]
10:09Shallow, isn't it? 20 minutes into a
10:11video about attention, and your body is
10:13still braced for an ambush. And that
10:15detail should bother you more than any
10:17of the others. Because a grazing animal
10:19splits its attention for exactly one
10:21reason. Something might be hunting it.
10:23The deer is not confused. [music] The
10:25deer is correct. So is your nervous
10:27system. Something is hunting you. It has
10:29an address, a payroll, and a schedule.
10:32Failure three, the schedule.
10:36Sometime in the 1930s in a basement lab
10:38at Harvard, a young behaviorist named
10:41B.F. Skinner ran into a supply problem.
10:43His experiments required food pellets,
10:45each one pressed by hand, and he was
10:47running low. So he economized. Instead
10:49of rewarding his rats for every lever
10:51press, he rewarded them for some. What
10:53happened next rearranged the science of
10:55behavior. The rats didn't slack off
10:57under the stingier deal. They pressed
10:58harder. Skinner spent the following
11:00decades [music] mapping the discovery,
11:02and the map has one region that should
11:03be fenced off with warning signs.
11:05[music] It's called the variable ratio
11:07schedule, reward delivered after an
11:09unpredictable number of attempts.
11:11Sometimes the third press pays,
11:12sometimes the 300th. The animal [music]
11:14can never learn when, so it can never
11:16learn to stop. Pigeons on stretched
11:18variable schedules will peck thousands
11:20of times an hour steadily [music]
11:22for one payoff. And when the payoff
11:24cease entirely, the behavior takes
11:26longest [music] of all to die. Certainty
11:28creates satisfaction, uncertainty
11:30creates compulsion. The gambling
11:31industry understood this half a century
11:33before your phone did. The schedule, not
11:36the substance, makes the addict. Then
11:38someone put the schedule behind glass
11:40and the glass in your pocket. Pull down
11:42to refresh. The lever. Maybe a like,
11:45maybe nothing, maybe the message you've
11:47been waiting for. The notification that
11:50might be important, the feed that might,
11:52three more flicks down, contain the
11:54thing worth seeing. None of this drifted
11:56into place. The gesture [music] even has
11:58an inventor. Loren Brichter designed
12:00pull to refresh at his kitchen table in
12:022009 for a small Twitter app and the
12:04industry absorbed it within a year. A
12:06decade later he was telling a reporter
12:08that he regrets [music] the minutes his
12:09own invention takes from him, from his
12:11attention, in the presence of his own
12:13children. When the locksmith can't get
12:14out of the building, pay attention to
12:16the locks, which brings us back to that
12:17slide deck. It's author was a product
12:19manager named Tristan Harris and the
12:22deck [music] argued politely that the
12:23company was strip mining human attention
12:26and had a duty to stop. 5,000 employees
12:29read it. [music] It reached the top of
12:30the org chart and then Google did the
12:32most instructive thing a corporation has
12:34ever done with a conscience. It gave the
12:37conscience a title. Harris became
12:39Google's in-house design [music]
12:40ethicist, a philosopher's chair with no
12:43steering wheel attached. Three years
12:44later he walked out and began saying in
12:47public what the deck had said in
12:48private, that the attention economy is a
12:50race to the bottom of the brain stem, a
12:52competition in which whoever aims
12:54lowest, at reflex, at outrage, [music]
12:57at the twitch below thought, collects
12:59the revenue. He liked to remind
13:01audiences of the asymmetry. On your side
13:03of the screen, one tired human and their
13:05good [music] intentions. On the other
13:07side, a thousand engineers whose
13:09performance reviews depend on defeating
13:11you. The economist Herbert Simon had
13:14seen the shape of it back in 1971.
13:16Information feeds on attention, he
13:18[music] warned, so a world rich in one
13:20would be starved of the other. Simon
13:22thought he was describing a design
13:24challenge. He was was a business plan
13:26[music] now.
13:27one question, and answer it honestly.
13:30Where is your phone right now? There's a
13:32fair chance it's in your hand, that the
13:34glass you're looking at is the machine
13:36[music] in question. In 2017, Adrian
13:38Ward and his colleagues at the
13:40University of Texas took nearly [music]
13:42800 people and split them three ways.
13:45Phone face down on the desk, phone in
13:47the pocket or bag, phone in another
13:49room. Then everyone [music] took the
13:50same tests of working memory and fluid
13:52intelligence, the raw machinery of
13:55reasoning. Every phone was silenced.
13:57Many were powered off entirely. Nobody's
13:59phone made a sound, and almost nobody
14:01reported thinking about it. The desk
14:03group scored worst. The other room
14:04[music] group scored best. The pocket
14:07sat in between, a clean dose-response
14:09curve, as [music] if proximity itself
14:11were the drug. The researchers called it
14:13brain drain. A device trained on a
14:15variable schedule doesn't need to ring
14:17to own you. Some fraction of your
14:18cognition stands [music] permanent guard
14:20at its screen, the way Skinner's pigeons
14:22kept one eye on the food tray, and that
14:24fraction is subtracted [music] from
14:25whatever you are trying to think about,
14:27this sentence for instance. The machine
14:29is elegant. The machine is patented. But
14:31be honest about the machine's one
14:33limitation. It can only harvest an
14:34attention already broken to harness. A
14:37mind that expects three-hour arguments
14:39would spit the hook out. So, the real
14:40question isn't how the schedule works.
14:43It's who spent a century and a half
14:44preparing us to accept it.
14:47Failure.
14:48Four. Three hours in the sun.
14:52August 21st, [music] 1858, Ottawa,
14:55Illinois. A canal town of 7,000 buried
14:58that morning under 12,000 visitors. They
15:01came by wagon, by special train, by
15:03boat, through heat and dust to stand in
15:06an open square with no shade and no
15:08seating. [music] What they came for was
15:10not a spectacle. It was an argument.
15:12Stephen Douglas spoke for 1 hour.
15:13Abraham Lincoln answered for 90 minutes.
15:16Douglas closed with 30 more. Three hours
15:18of constitutional reasoning. Sentence
15:20structures with clauses nested [music]
15:22inside clauses, held together entirely
15:25by ear, with no amplification but lungs,
15:27followed on their feet by farmers,
15:29clerks, and blacksmiths.
15:31>> [music]
15:31>> Four years earlier, at a similar event,
15:33Douglas had spoken for 3 hours, and when
15:36Lincoln's turn came in the late
15:37afternoon, [music]
15:38he made a suggestion everyone should go
15:40home, eat dinner, and come back [music]
15:42refreshed, because his reply would take
15:44just as long. They went home, they ate,
15:47they came back. Nobody in that square
15:49was a professor. [music] These were
15:50ordinary minds, built, and this is the
15:52point, by a particular technology,
15:54print. [music] A print culture is a
15:56training regime. It teaches a brain to
15:58hold a premise steady while the next one
15:59arrives, to track a claim across pages,
16:02to [music] notice when paragraph nine
16:03betrays paragraph four. An argument on
16:05paper sits still long enough to be
16:07interrogated, [music] and that training
16:08regime was not reserved for elites. When
16:11Thomas Paine published Common Sense in
16:131776, dense [music] 40-odd pages of
16:16political argument, it sold on the order
16:18of 100,000 copies within months in a
16:20colonial [music] population under 3
16:22million. Proportionally, that's a work
16:24of political philosophy moving tens of
16:26millions of copies today. Farmhands
16:28heard it read aloud in taverns and
16:30argued back. The ordinary mind of that
16:32era wasn't gifted, [music] it was
16:34conditioned. The critic Neil Postman
16:36spent his career on what happened next,
16:38and his conclusion, published in 1985,
16:40[music] is the piece most analyses still
16:42refuse to swallow. Media are not pipes
16:45that carry ideas. Each medium is an
16:47epistemology, a quiet ruling on what
16:50counts [music] as true, and even on what
16:52counts as thinking at all.
16:54The ruling changed in 1844, [music]
16:56the day Samuel Morse's wire connected
16:59Baltimore to Washington. [music] The
17:00telegraph looked like a way to move
17:02information faster. What it actually did
17:05was sever information from action.
17:07Before the wire, you learned mostly what
17:09you could affect. After [music] it, news
17:11poured in from everywhere about
17:13everything, addressed to no one. And
17:16Postman named the [music] casualty
17:17precisely the information-action ratio.
17:20For the first time in history, humans
17:22faced a daily tide of facts they could
17:24do nothing about. Thoreau saw it
17:26instantly, sniffing that Maine [music]
17:28and Texas might have nothing important
17:30to say to each other, and all those
17:32orphaned facts
17:33>> [music]
17:33>> needed somewhere to live, which Postman
17:35noticed is exactly when the culture
17:37invented places to put them: the
17:39crossword puzzle, the trivia game,
17:41pseudo-contexts, [music]
17:43containers for information whose only
17:45remaining use is knowing it. Television
17:48finished the job with two words. Postman
17:50fixated on the broadcaster's pivot: now,
17:54this. The phrase [music] that connects a
17:56famine to a car commercial. The words
17:58are a confession. Nothing you just saw
18:01connects to anything you're about to
18:02see. Nothing is anyone's fault. Nothing
18:05requires anything [music] of you, and
18:07nothing on the screen will ever be
18:09serious for longer than 45 seconds. You
18:12have watched an anchor make that pivot
18:1410,000 times and never once flinched.
18:16That's how you know the grammar finished
18:18its work. Run that grammar into a
18:20population for a few decades, and you
18:22don't [music] get censorship, you get
18:24something more durable. Postman framed
18:26it as the difference between two
18:28prophets. Orwell feared the men [music]
18:30who would ban books. Huxley feared a
18:32future where no ban was necessary
18:34because no one wanted to read, and
18:36[music] truth didn't need concealing
18:38when it could simply be drowned. Now, go
18:40back to the Norwegian brothers.
18:42Something entered the home after 1975
18:44[music] and pried the sons apart. It was
18:46bolted to the living room wall. The
18:49older brother caught the tail end of the
18:50page. The younger was raised deeper
18:53inside the glow, in the first generation
18:55to do its growing up after the evening
18:57surrendered to the screen. When
18:59researchers list candidate causes for
19:01the reversal, shifts in how children
19:03read, learn, and spend their [music]
19:05hours, they are describing, in the dry
19:07language of a method section, the
19:08migration Postman diagnosed in [music]
19:11real time. The draft board data is his
19:13argument wearing numbers, and that was
19:15only the first wave. The social
19:17psychologist Jonathan Haidt has spent
19:19years [music] documenting the second,
19:20which he dates with unusual precision,
19:222010 to 2015. The front-facing camera
19:26arrives. The like [music] and the
19:27retweet spread. The feed learns to rank.
19:30The phone becomes the place where
19:31childhood happens. Play-based childhood
19:34traded for phone-based [music]
19:35childhood, his terms, and an entire
19:37generation becomes the first in history
19:39to go through puberty carrying [music]
19:41Skinner's schedule in its pocket. The
19:42surveys he compiles put American
19:44teenagers near 8 and 1/2 hours a day on
19:47entertainment screens.
19:48>> [music]
19:48>> In the decade after 2010, depression
19:50among teen girls in the United States
19:52[music] more than doubled, and the
19:54cognitive tail arrived on schedule. By
19:562024, The Atlantic was reporting
19:58professors at elite universities quietly
20:01redesigning courses because [music]
20:02incoming students, the winners, the top
20:05of the funnel, could no longer finish
20:06books. Whole syllabi shaved down to
20:09excerpts. Not unwilling, untrained. The
20:11man standing in the Ottawa dust could do
20:13for 3 hours what a 2026 honors student
20:17finds [music] genuinely aversive for 30
20:18minutes. Not because he was smarter, but
20:21because his environment ran the
20:22repetitions, [music] and the student's
20:23environment bills by the interruption.
20:25Still, everything filed so far fails one
20:28skull at a time, a private dimming.
20:30[music] The signature product of this
20:32century is something else, because an
20:34individual can be wrong alone, but it
20:36takes [music] infrastructure to be wrong
20:38together instantly at scale. That
20:40infrastructure has a birthday.
20:43Failure five, stupidity [music] at
20:45scale.
20:47August 1835, The New York Sun, a
20:50struggling penny paper, begins a series
20:53of dispatches attributed to the great
20:55astronomer Sir John Herschel, then
20:57working at the Cape of Good [music]
20:58Hope. A revolutionary telescope, the
21:00paper reports, has resolved the surface
21:02of the moon. Each installment escalates.
21:05Lunar forests, herds of grazing
21:07quadrupeds, [music]
21:08a species of upright beaver that carries
21:10its young in its arms and lives in huts.
21:12And then the finale, [music] winged
21:14humanoids, man-bats, seen conversing,
21:17gesturing, building. New York devoured
21:19it. Rival papers reprinted it as fact.
21:22Circulation exploded until the Sun was
21:24boasting the largest readership of any
21:26daily on Earth. Herschel, months away by
21:29ship, knew [music] nothing. And when the
21:30thing unraveled, the Sun did not
21:32retract. It mused coyly that the series
21:35might have been satire and kept the
21:37subscribers.
21:38>> [music]
21:39>> That is the founding transaction of the
21:40attention economy on the record in 1835.
21:44A lie is a superior product to a truth
21:46because a lie is built to spec, [music]
21:48novelty on demand, wonder without the
21:50inconvenience of having to occur. For
21:52180 years, you could dismiss that as an
21:55anecdote about a scummy newspaper. In
21:572018, it became a measurement. Soroush
21:59Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral at MIT
22:02assembled the largest study of true and
22:04false news ever conducted, roughly
22:06126,000
22:08verified story cascades spread by 3
22:10million people over 11 years of Twitter.
22:12Every story checked against six
22:13independent fact-checking organizations.
22:16The results, [music] published in
22:17Science, are the black box recording of
22:19the collective mind. Falsehood was 70%
22:21more likely to be retweeted [music] than
22:23truth. Truth took about six times as
22:25long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people.
22:27False political news traveled fastest,
22:29deepest, and widest of all. And then the
22:31finding everyone braced for, the bots,
22:33refused [music] to appear. Remove every
22:35automated account from the data and the
22:37gap barely moves. Bots push true and
22:39false at roughly equal rates. The lies
22:42were carried by [music] hand, by us. The
22:45mechanism wasn't malice, and that's what
22:47makes it a system failure rather than a
22:49crime. False stories were measurably
22:51more novel than true ones, and novelty
22:53[music] is the one commodity a feed
22:55rewards without audit. The replies to
22:57falsehood ran on surprise and disgust,
22:59the two emotions with the cheapest
23:01shipping. The lie is fresher, and the
23:03network pays for fresh. Understand what
23:05that measurement actually says.
23:07Collective stupidity is not a warehouse
23:09of stupid individuals. It is an emergent
23:12property, what you get when a network
23:14optimized for engagement harvest 3
23:16billion [music] people's fastest
23:17reflexes, the startle, the sneer, the
23:20tribal salute, and compounds them at
23:22light speed while every slower faculty
23:24misses the deadline. No node [music] has
23:26to fail for the system to fail. Watch a
23:28murmuration of starlings some evening.
23:3110,000 birds folding through shapes no
23:33bird intends because [music] each one
23:35tracks only its six or seven nearest
23:37neighbors. The flock has no [music]
23:39mind. It has only motion. Beautiful from
23:42a distance, blind from inside, and
23:44steerable by anything that understands
23:46which neighbors [music] each bird is
23:47watching. That is your timeline, a
23:50murmuration of reflexes [music]
23:51wheeling. When a team including MIT's
23:54Alexi Maccarin exploited [music]
23:56Facebook's staggered college rollout as
23:58a natural experiment, they found that
24:00mere access,
24:01>> [music]
24:01>> nothing viral, nothing extreme, just the
24:03feed arriving on campus, measurably
24:05degraded student mental health on the
24:06order of a fifth of the psychological
24:08hit of losing a job. The costs [music]
24:10are not vibes. They are causal, and they
24:12were billed to minds that did nothing
24:14wrong, which leaves you one exit, and
24:16you've been standing near it this whole
24:17time. Other people startle [music] and
24:19sneer and salute. You analyze. You're
24:21informed. You're, say it, smart,
24:24educated, skeptical even. You've been
24:26nodding along for half an hour
24:27>> [music]
24:27>> precisely because you're the kind of
24:29person who sees through things. Dan
24:31Kahan at Yale built a trap [music] for
24:33exactly that sentence. His team gave
24:35about 1,100 Americans a statistics
24:38[music] problem, data from a fictional
24:40skin cream trial, solvable only by
24:42actually computing the ratios, immune to
24:44gut feel. [music] The numerate solved
24:46it. The innumerate guessed. Then, he
24:49handed out the identical numbers [music]
24:50with one change. They now described a
24:53city's gun ban and its effect on crime.
24:55And the best mathematical minds in the
24:57sample began failing, not randomly,
25:00precisely, [music] and in one direction,
25:02whenever the correct answer betrayed
25:04their politics. The most numerate
25:06partisans got it wrong most often on
25:08both sides.
25:09>> [music]
25:09>> More skill produced more polarization
25:11because the skill went to work for the
25:13tribe. The psychologist Keith Stanovich
25:15has a name for the gap this exposes,
25:18dysrationalia. Intelligence and rational
25:20thinking are far more loosely coupled
25:22than the culture assumes. A high IQ
25:25doesn't upgrade the judge. It upgrades
25:27the lawyer. [music] Now, run that back
25:28through everything in this file, the
25:30remodeled circuitry, the grazing
25:32vigilance, the schedule, the flood. None
25:34of it has to make anyone dumb. It only
25:36has to make everyone fast [music] and
25:37keep them fed and let the tribe supply
25:40the direction. The network doesn't need
25:42you stupid. It needs you loyal. Your
25:44intelligence will handle the rest.
25:46The probable cause.
25:49When investigators close a file, the
25:51report [music] ends with a paragraph
25:53that begins probable cause. Ours would
25:55read like this. No single failure
25:58brought the aircraft [music] down. A
26:00perfectly obedient organ, the latent
26:02condition, millions of years old, met
26:04the first economy [music] in history
26:06that bills by the second of human
26:08attention. The holes aligned. Circuitry
26:10remodeled by disuse. Attention demoted
26:13[music] to the vigilance of prey. A
26:15reward schedule engineered to be
26:17unlearnable. A medium allergic to
26:19argument. A network that pays for reflex
26:21and finds deliberation.
26:23>> [music]
26:23>> And one finding the report is obligated
26:25to include because it decides what kind
26:27of tragedy this is. At no point was
26:30thinking banned. Demand died. Nobody
26:32burned [music] the books. Huxley's
26:33flood, not Orwell's fire. And the
26:35passengers assisted, signing every
26:37consent form one terms of service at a
26:39time. The patient, though, [music] is
26:41not dead. That's the strange mercy
26:43buried in failure one. The organ that
26:45obeyed the machine will obey you with
26:47equal indifference. [music]
26:48Maguire's cab drivers grew new tissue in
26:50adulthood on demand because the demand
26:53was real and daily.
26:54>> [music]
26:54>> There is no app for this, no hack, and
26:56no list of 10 tips coming. The treatment
26:58is friction, taken deliberately. One
27:00long book actually [music] finished. One
27:02hour undivided on one hard thing.
27:05Boredom swallowed like the medicine it
27:07is, [music] until the dream bird finds
27:09somewhere to land. Most people who hear
27:10this will nod, feel briefly [music]
27:12sharpened, and change nothing. That
27:14isn't cynicism. It's a forecast. The
27:16schedule is very good at its job. The
27:18decline isn't a fate. It's a default,
27:20and defaults [music] can be refused by
27:22anyone willing to be uncomfortable on
27:24purpose. An hour of undivided attention
27:26is now a genuinely deviant act. It costs
27:29almost nothing, and almost nobody will
27:31pay it, which is exactly what makes it
27:33worth something again. One last
27:35experiment, [music] because it changes
27:36what a single refusal is worth. Paris,
27:391969. Serge Moscovici sat groups of six
27:42in front of slides that were
27:44unmistakably blue, with two planted
27:46dissenters who kept calling them green.
27:49Calmly. Every time.
27:50>> [music]
27:51>> No majority, no authority, no pressure
27:53of numbers, and the group began to bend.
27:56Public answers shifted toward green, and
27:58when the real participants [music] were
28:00retested alone, something stranger
28:02surfaced. Their private threshold had
28:04moved. They now saw green sooner and
28:06didn't know why. When the dissenters
28:07[music] wavered, the effect vanished
28:09entirely. The swarm, it turns out, is
28:12not steered by the many or the loud. It
28:14bends slowly and without admitting it
28:17around whatever refuses to move. In a
28:19system built to harvest reflex, one
28:21deliberate mind is not a casualty. It's
28:24a rudder. [music] And a culture's last
28:25critical thought is usually the same
28:27one, noticing that it has stopped having
28:29them. You just had it. On current
28:31measurements, you have about 47 seconds
28:33to decide what it was worth. One small
28:35[music] thing before the feed takes over
28:37again. Almost everything you watch
28:39tonight will be chosen for you. By the
28:41schedule. By the swarm.
28:43Subscribing to Think Implicit is one
28:45decision the machine doesn't get to make
28:47for [music] you. So, make it the way
28:48nothing else on this screen happens on
28:51purpose. This channel exists [music] for
28:53those 47 seconds and for the people
28:55quietly taking them back.