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High Agency: Difference between revisions
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'' | '''Tim Ferriss:''' ''Have you come to any conclusions or beliefs outside of that essay that related to how autodidacts or Newtons can leave Newton's when they travel on from this world?'' | ||
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'''Eric Weinstein:''' ''I think so. I can't prove it, but I think where I'm headed with this is that most of us who wind up using these sort of strange '''high agency hacks''' to negotiate the world, have some kind of a traumatic birth. We may flatter ourselves that were in touch with reality, but in fact, reality is a second best strategy. If you're lucky, your family works pretty well and you never leave social reality. It's only when something goes wrong that you discover, okay, the world doesn't work in any way the way I was told. Here's the underlying structure. What you then have to realize is, if you want to do this at scale, you've got to stop relying on these traumatic births it's like you're waiting for somebody to get bit by a spider to become spider-man. No you have to do this in a more controlled fashion.'' | |||
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'''Tim Ferriss:''' ''You have to harvest spiders.'' | |||
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'''Eric Weinstein:''' ''That's right, you've got it you've got to regularize it. So I think what we need to do is we need to create a completely secondary parallel educational structure for people who are going to be in the high agency creativity discovery idiom and realize that we know how to impart expertise, but we don't know how to impart creativity in genius.'' | |||
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'''Tim Ferriss:''' ''Could you define high agency? or just explain what you mean by it.'' | |||
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'''Eric Weinstein:''' ''Sure. '''High agency''' is ... well, are you constantly... when you're told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind how to get around whoever it is that's just told you that you can't do something. So, how am I gonna get past this bouncer who told me that I can't come into this nightclub? How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience. You're constantly looking for what is possible in a kind of MacGyver-ish sort of a way, and that's your approach to the world.'' | |||
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'''Tim Ferriss:''' ''Iâm not gonna take us off the rails here - have you seen the Martian?'' | |||
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'''Eric Weinstein:''' ''Yes, the ultimate high agency code!'' | |||
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'''Tim Ferriss:''' ''Did you love it? I just saw it last night, man, it was just like two hours of MacGyver on steroids I loved it.'' | |||
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'''Eric Weinstein:''' ''Yeah, and it I'm glad you brought it up. I think it heralds a return, at least among Americans, to our previous way of being. I think there was some terrible thing that happened starting around 1970 and that is just cracking now. So, really, about 45 years of a low agency super-safe, timid, frightened kind of societal aspiration. If you just stay on track can we keep the American prosperity machine going. I think we now realize that you can't do it without a bunch of really marginal charactersâpeople who have might be described as disruptive and have bad attitudesâthese are my people. They're tough to deal with and I don't always and enjoy them but I do think that without them it's not much of a football team.'' | |||
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'''Tim Ferriss:''' ''What can someone do who's listening to this let's say and they're they live in a community that is clearly low agency and they want to train themselves to be able to look at option C D and F when people say âDo you want a or B?â or if they're given let's say, the know, from the bouncer from the admissions officer from the âfill in the blankâ. They look for a way around it instead of just being stopped in their tracks. Are there any recommendations or tools or resources exercises that they could use to cultivate that higher agency?'' | |||
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'''Eric Weinstein:''' ''Well, there's I don't think there's a community on earth where somebody isn't modifying their car beyond what's street legal. I don't think that there's any community in which nobody is cooking something up in the basement that probably isnât prescribed by law. I don't think that there's a community on earth where somebody isn't trying to break into their own computer in order to see how it works from the inside. There are high agency people everywhere. What there isn't necessarily is critical mass. Sometimes I refer to the Bay Area as the innovation ghettoâ so you have all of the people who are too high agency to behave properly and wait their turn and the rest of the country. So they've been given like the nicest piece of real estate an un-Godly amount of cash and you know the pleasure of each other's company. But they've been told âOkay, you have to stay at the terms of your probation, so you have to stay within the Bay areaâ So what I'd love to see is, I'd love to see more of us violating our parole and going into the rest of the country and trying to bring that irreverent spirit, because I think one of the things that the US still has over, let's say, a competitor like China, is that we tolerate the middle finger. It is perfectly acceptable to be disruptive here in San Francisco, where you and I are conducting this interview, whereas if I'm told that my child is disruptive in Kansas or South Carolina I'm probably being told that he's being sent home for bad behavior. So I think it's really important to start respecting our marginal citizens of greatest ability and looking for the unusual personality types that are irreverent and committed enough to making things happen and to really do things.'' | |||
- '''Eric Weinstein''' on [https://tim.blog/2016/01/13/eric-weinstein/ Tim Ferriss] | - '''Eric Weinstein''' on [https://tim.blog/2016/01/13/eric-weinstein/ Tim Ferriss] | ||