Everyone. Welcome to Non Trivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. In this episode, I talk about snowballs more specifically the runaway process that happens when we take an action that we think is confined to the instance, but ends up becoming so much bigger. We're all familiar with this process, but I want to peel back its nature and expose its underlying mechanisms in order to truly understand how it works in doing this.
I believe we can better appreciate just how prevalent snowballing is in our lives and how we can use such knowledge to make better decisions. I'll be using the much debated topic of freedom of speech as my example and putting forward what I think is the best solution to this problem. Let's get started. OK. So I'm gonna start talking about uh snowball snowballing this uh idea that we all know about where uh we do something and then it kind of takes off on its own.
It's got this runaway effect, this runaway process that happens. Uh You know, the most common example would be, you know, somebody tells a white lie and then it snowballs, right? So somebody tells a fib, it seems relatively harmless and then it starts snowballing, it starts growing, it starts running away on its own and becomes something, uh, very different than whatever could have been predicted. Right.
So, so maybe somebody, you know, lies on their resume or something just to get the job and then they get the job and, uh, and then, you know, obviously the employer expects them to hit the ground with their feet running and they're not able to do so. And so then they have to start making other excuses to try to, you know, not make it obvious that they don't have the skill that they said that they had. And so it starts to snowball and snowball and things get worse and worse.
So I think we're all familiar with that concept of something snowballing because someone tells a lie. But that process, this idea that something just uh takes off on a, on, on a runaway kind of mechanism or process is, uh is, is something that happens in all kinds of different areas of life.
And that's because, well, a number of reasons that we're going to get into, I'm gonna obviously peel back some of the mechanisms like I always do behind how this, how this happens and then explain why I'm talking about the snowballing effect. But the, the main idea behind, you know, snowballing uh is, is that we tend to think that an action or an action we take or a decision that we make in the moment is only relegated to that moment. Right.
It's only, it's only relegated to the context that we're dealing with when we do the thing. So in the lying example, right. It, if someone tells a little fib to, to take the next step and they think that's all it is. Right. And uh, and we do this all the time. Hopefully not with the lying that much. But uh but definitely where we make a decision in life and we think it's only about that moment, we think it's relegated to that one situation.
And then we don't realize how deeply interconnected things are and how it could become something bad or good, right? It could be something bad or it could be good. We might do something in the case of lying. It's obviously a bad thing that snowballs, but there might be other examples where we do a little something and then we didn't realize how good it could have became, right?
So, so kind of like in the, in the last episode when I say, you know, just start, for example, we don't realize how just starting and, and more specifically beyond just starting.
But putting ourselves in the environment and adapting could actually snowball into all kinds of great things because this leads to, this leads to, this leads to this, but it's not that kind of, you know, again, deterministic type linear path, it's something that we don't have access to, it's something that we can't predict, we can't foresee how things snowball. Ok. So, so why am I talking about snowballs? Why am I talking about this mechanism that this kind of runaway process?
Well, what I want to talk about in this episode is how this process plays out uh in our lives and in, in various situations, specifically, obviously non-trivial, right, complex situations and the fact that we can't see where it's going and what some of the consequences of that are. And so I'm gonna use an exact. So the first thing I'm gonna do is after this little snowball conversation, I'm gonna get into the mechanisms.
And uh I think there are two main mechanisms at play about how things do snowball, how they take off. And it's important to understand this property of situations of complex systems because again, it appears so much in life in our decision making. And I think it's really critical that we understand this, uh you know, the mechanisms behind snowballing. OK. And then I'm gonna get into an example where uh this takes place or definitely has the potential to take place.
And I think that's going to ground it more in, in something fairly realistic and not something as, as simple as just like, you know, lying on a resume. I'm gonna talk about freedom of speech and that's obviously a pretty hot topic to get into. Uh But I'm going to show how this snowballing effect um actually plays out on both sides of what you might call, you know, the political opinion, like the left side and the right side.
So we're going to show how um allowing freedom of speech completely could be problematic from a snowball uh perspective, but also squashing down freedom of speech and trying to limit it could be a problematic from a snowballing uh perspective. OK. In other words, these runaway processes that take off, you can use that argument for both, you know, allowing freedom of speech uh completely and also for shutting down freedom of speech.
You know, this is a very real world topic situation that people are talking about all the time. You know, it's, it's heated, it's important, it, it gets into people's, you know, freedoms and the ability to feel safe and, and all this kind of stuff.
And so understanding this snowballing mechanism that takes place in real world situations, uh is important to understand because when we understand the properties, that's when we can step back and start to make, I think smarter decisions about these situations. So I'll be using that freedom of speech as example and notice that I just said, you know, obviously, I just said that it could play out in either way, right?
It could be for allowing all freedom of speech or squashing certain aspects of freedom of speech. Both could be problematic from a snowballing perspective. So in the very end, as I usually do, I'll have a kind of a what to do kind of a resolution uh conversation about what I think is an approach forward given that, that, you know, they, they kind of seem to cancel each other out both ways.
So let's, let's get into the mechanisms behind snowballing and then I'll get into the example and then I'll think I'll have a conversation about what I think is, is a good approach and how that helps us make decisions in very, very real situations, like freedom of speech. Um OK, so let's start talking about the mechanisms. So I think there are, are, you know, how does snowballing happen? I think there are two main ways uh or two main, you know, core properties that are important to understand.
So first is the deep interdependencies of things. OK. So, so in, you know, again, I I make this distinction a lot between simple and the complex. So in simple things, everything kind of adds up nicely, right? It's deterministic. We, we, we think, you know, industrial revolution style machines like steam engines and you know, uh uh you know, pistons and gears and cogs and everything runs into each other.
And you can kind of causally, you can definitely causally see how everything bumps up into one another and blah, blah, blah. So, so we understand that as as simple situations, we know simple situations just to reiterate is, is, you know, from last episode, I was talking about how, you know, when you see a lot of mathematics or a lot of details on the chalkboard. That's because things are simple because when things are simple, the nature condescends to, to give you its mechanisms, right?
It tells you causally how things kind of add up and happen. And so you can say more about it, your chalkboard can be more loaded with details as we get complex, we get more ope uh nature, less and less condescends to give us its internal mechanisms. We don't, we don't have access to it. And so those chalkboards look less detailed, there's less to say they're more conceptual, they're high level, they're more abstract. OK?
So, so, so you know, I talked about that a lot before what I'm talking about in this episode is that kind of ope that opacity, that inability to kind of see how everything adds up. One of the core reasons for that is because of the extreme interaction of so many components, right? We know that about complex systems and situations, as many things interacting and of course, they gain their properties, their most distinctive properties from that interaction, right?
But that means that so many things are connected, right? That means that so many things that go into a system or a situation that we call complex are very, very connected, they're very dependent on each other. OK? So things don't really exist in isolation. And this is this is in quite contrast to the usual kind of scientific narrative that we hear, you know, what you, what you might call reductionism or what you might call even scient maybe.
But, but the, the scientific approach is very much about extraction and isolation, right? If I wanted to find something, if I want to know what, you know, my, my coffee cup is composed of or the coffee inside that cup is composed of, I'm gonna pick it apart. I'm gonna reverse engineer it. I'm gonna do analysis on the chemical compounds and, and I'm gonna start to, you know, dig, dig into the individual components and then I'll say, well, I've defined it right?
Like here's everything that goes into a cup of coffee, right? You know, here's, here's the caffeine molecule, here's, you know, the water content, here's, you know, the tannins that get released from the brewing, whatever, right? And you've kind of picked it apart and you say it's constituents and those constituents become the definition of the thing. And that's very much how a lot of science has happened.
And still today does happen, particularly outside areas of complexity where we take that reductionist approach and we pick everything apart, we reverse engineer it and say, OK, here, here's kind of the ingredient list of the thing, right? Um You know, you know, the the extreme example of this of course, would be the so-called theory of everything in physics, which quite frankly is BS, but I'm not going to get to that in this episode.
And, and the reason, the reason I say it's BS or at least the, you know, kind of the current approach is because it's extremely reductionist, right? It picks apart everything at that low level of detail, you know, the chalkboard of all the detail, right, which is very much physics. And then says this is the theory of everything. Well, it can't be the theory of everything because all you're doing is giving a reduced, picked apart, isolated, extracted ingredient list of reality.
And that isn't reality because the properties that we see in reality isn't the ingredient list. It's the interaction of all those pieces. So that's a topic for another episode, I think to really get into the, you know, my opinions about the theory of everything.
But the point is is that there's an extreme con connectivity between all the pieces or a lot of the pieces that go into a system because they make up the system, they make it live, they make it survive, they make it exist in its environment. OK. So what did they have to do with snowballing?
Well, remember I said that, you know, the way that, that, that this usually plays out is that we take an action, we make a decision in life and we tend to think it's just about that thing, but it's not just about that thing. OK. So again, that scientific kind of mindset or what you might call the traditional scientific mindset based on isolation and, and extraction causes us or, or kind of impels us to, to define things, you know, by, by just using that isolated instance. Right?
But it's not about the isolated instant. Things are deeply interconnected. I'm gonna step back and give another example here because I just want to make sure hopefully that I'm pretty clear about this. Imagine.
Yeah, I, I was, I was going for a drive once and I, I, you know, we came in into this uh kind of, you know, suburbs, small town area, uh off, off of the major city limits and it, it had all these kind of shops, you know, obviously set up and, and everything looked very, you know, some of it was kind of older and you, you, you got the, the brick buildings and you got the awnings and some of them are kind of rusted and some of them even have like, I don't know what it's like a mosque kind of going on, but it looked very real obviously, right?
It looked very kind of grown in and used and uh and, and people were, you know, lively and active within that environment and they're buying things and they're going in and out of shops and I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, you know, th this could never be recreated and I tweeted this recently, right? Where I said, you know, artificial things or rather natural things can be recreated in terms of their look and their feel, but they're unlikely to survive if you artificially created it.
In other words, if, if, if say I looked at this setting of this natural outgrowth, this, this small, let's just say a small town, ok, a small town and with its shops and with the awnings and the rust and the kind of the moss growing and everything kind of interweaving in people and the whole thing, right, that whole ecosystem that's going on right there. I could say, ok, you know what? That's really good and people love that. They like that natural look.
I'm gonna go recreate that because I don't know, I'm a developer and I want to recreate this for people somewhere else and I got billions of dollars and I'm gonna go do it. So I go recreate that kind of small town setting and I think things like this do get done, right? People try to kind of recreate, you know, things very quickly. I mean, you could probably use China as an example for some of that. But anyways, so I go recreate that.
Now, I could make the small town look very much like that small town, right? Set up shops. I could make them look older. Hell, I, I could even use like older materials and I could recreate the whole look and feel and if you first approached it went into it, you'd probably be be, you know, if I put enough money into it, you'd be impressed. You'd be like, yeah, this looks really good. This looks nice and homey and, and everything's great. But I would argue that it's probably not going to survive.
And you could say, well, why is it not going to survive? I mean, it looks just like, you know, this other small town that you had seen in a natural setting. But what we don't realize what we don't understand is that natural small town is, is surviving because of things. We can't see the, the, the way that it has emerged out of its environment has so many dependencies and those dependencies we don't have access to. We could try to explore it, try to understand it again.
You know, we, we could define that small town, the original one, the natural one in terms of kind of isolation and extraction, like there's buildings and there's moss and there's, you know, there, there's trees and there's people and we could, we can come up with that ingredient list and say this is what it is and I could use that ingredient list to recreate the thing and it would look and maybe even kind of feel like the thing, but it probably wouldn't survive because there are dependencies that keep that natural town alive.
Dependencies that we don't know what they are, we don't know what they are. It could be physical things that, that allow the buildings to kind of be situated, situated where they, the way they are. And even though I create that same kind of situation position building over here, I don't know, you know, all the dependencies that made those buildings get arranged like that and something about those dependencies is making that thing successful. It's making that thing survive.
So hopefully that made sense a bit. But, but this is what I'm saying is that things that are around that outgrow naturally and survive are doing so for reasons that we often can't see. And that's because they've got these deep hidden dependencies, we don't know what those dependencies are. They might be physical things, they might be more ephemeral things, they might be kind of human interaction things.
And we just don't realize the confluence of factors that come into play that combine in such a unique way to make that thing good and, and, and to make it survive for a while, to give it its reason to be here. You know, this is why a lot of times when we talk about complexity, you know, I say this a lot, I say that you stop looking for reasons, right?
That that traditional scientific approach for looking for reasons is is very problematic under complexity because under complexity, we don't have access to that kind of causal information, but you know, a little bit maybe but barely any. So this idea that we're going to search for the why behind something that we tend to think is the paradigm of science.
Well, you could say it is the current paradigm of science is is is extremely problematic going into to what I hope will be the new paradigm of science. OK? Because that, that causal, that causal uh information is just not available. So I often say, you know, focus on the properties, not the reasons, right? Properties are more important than the reasons. And of course, that's what I do in this podcast episode. I focus on the properties of these situations.
So anyway, OK, so, so I'm talking about towns, I'm talking about interdependencies. So let's go back to snowballing. So what I'm saying is that one of the core mechanisms behind snowballing and I'll talk about why this is important for real world situations later is because we can't see, right? The, the the main idea behind snowballing is we can't see where it's going to go. We can't see all the things in our lives it's going to affect.
And that's because of, I believe these hidden deep dependencies that we don't have access to. We know there's dependencies there. We understand this about complex systems, right? We understand that, you know, and we see this a lot of times it in whether it's an experimental setting in a lab setting or in the real world where if you remove something all of a sudden nothing collapses, but often we don't know why, right? And sometimes that's enough information.
You know, if I, if I remove all the calcium from my diet and I get really sick, then I can say calcium is probably healthy. Right. That doesn't mean I know why. Right. I talked about this a few episodes before, you know, you might have the prevalence of a compound in the body of a healthy individual. That doesn't mean, you know, the role that it's playing. Right. I might not really know the role of calcium. I'm not saying we don't know the role of calcium plays.
I'm just saying as an example, right? If you remove something and it dies, then you know, it plays a role, but you might not know what role it is. So, so when it comes to snowballing, right, we we can by understanding the the the one of the underlying mechanisms as there's deep core dependencies that are hidden, we can start to be a little bit smarter about how snowballing happens in our lives.
In other words, we might know that, you know, often I've seen previously in my life, let's say that if I make this kind of decision, it tends to lead to bad things and you can try to analyze and pick a part. Well, why does it lead to bad things? It doesn't matter? Or we can say that, you know, the positive version of that, right. I've noticed that when I right, do, do, do you know to take this action and this kind of action tends to leave to good things. I might not know.
I mean, maybe a common example. Well, I've even noticed in my own life that, you know, criticism, it can be a really positive thing. It's really uncomfortable in the moment.
But if I think back, I can look back at the times where maybe I've been criticized about something and, and I thought, and, and if I, if I think about it, you know, that that ended up leading to some really good things because maybe I got a little bit angry in the moment and then maybe I, you know, maybe I just said, I'm just gonna go ahead and build this thing. I'm just gonna go promote this thing.
I'm just gonna go do this thing because I don't care what everyone thinks, you know, whatever it is and then I did it and then all of a sudden a lot of good people took notice and yada, yada yada and led to good things and maybe I've noticed that pattern kind of repeat, you know, whatever. I think we all have examples. If you just stop and, and do a bit of introspection, you'll realize that. Yeah. You know, there was this kind of repeating pattern in my life, right?
Where I did something or I didn't do something and it led to either a good or a bad outcome and you start to see this. Now, I don't know exactly how all that adds up. Right. And I think that's the mistake a lot of people get into is, is it gonna be like, ok, well, why does criticism work? And I'm going to start to analyze and you start to do the kind of the why approach and you might start to tease some of that out.
But I think a big mistake I tweeted this recently too is just that, you know, people will often try to uncover reasons and come up with plans and, and, and approaches and strategies to the life because something will go well and then they're gonna be like, ok, now I'm going to reverse engineer and try to turn it into a recipe and that's when it blows up and it blows up because you don't, you don't have access to all the the the confluence of things that had to come together to make that successful at a high level property level.
You can notice it leads to good thing, right? Like, like calcium leading to good health. But as soon as you start to pick apart the path or what you think is the path as to why that improves the outcome. That's where you get into trouble. That's where you get into this naive interventionism where you start to intervene on a complex situation leading to catastrophe, leading to bad things because you just don't have access to the information.
You don't really have the story of why something added up or didn't add up but became the outcome. But you think you do and it's a false narrative and you start operating under that false narrative and it has disastrous consequences. And I'm actually gonna talk a little bit about that when we get to the freedom of speech stuff later. Ok. So, so I've harped on about that. So, so snowballing an important property happens all the time.
We, we know that certain things in our life we can do and e either in a negative or positive fashion, it can just take off, it can just run away. But we don't know how it's going to run away. We don't, you know, we, we, we can sometimes see that this leads to good outcomes, this leads to bad outcomes. But beyond that, we don't really know like even if you know, it leads to good outcomes, even if the critique that I received back in the day led to good outcomes.
That doesn't mean if I keep taking critique, it's gonna lead to the same good outcomes, you know, and, and maybe there's a threshold there, it could be good, but it doesn't matter. The point is it's just that high level understanding that things do run away and I can try to make decisions and I'll talk more about this later. But decisions within my life about how to, you know, these kinds of things lead to better outcomes, these, these kind of things lead to maybe bad outcomes.
Um but I don't know what those outcomes are going to be. Ok. It's not a path, it's not a big recipe. It's just a high level property that exists. So snowballing as a mechanism is an important property to understand about real world situations. And one of the mechanisms behind that is the hidden interdependencies. Ok? And mechanism, it maybe isn't even the best word there but a but a kind of a core property behind why things would just kind of take off, not to use the word why there.
But you know, is, is because we don't have an understanding or a view of how so many things are deeply connected. And so that's why they can just take off in ways we, we can't even predict. OK, so that's snowballing. Now, now another deep mechanism behind this is um is what we might call renormalization.
And this is where, and, and we see this a lot, we, I mean, everybody's probably has an example of this maybe in their personal life but, but we definitely see it on the political scale and, and different things in society, definitely at the society level where you start to make small concessions, let's say to something, right? And then it starts to grow and grow and grow and grow. It's not the type of snowballing. So I'll give you an example of this.
Um actually, and, and you know, I, I bring him up a lot. I see Taylor is a really good example of this where he talks about. Um, and I'm, I'm paraphrasing here so I'm not gonna do it exactly the way he did it, but it was something about like going to a barbecue or a luncheon and, and maybe you, um, you know, the person putting it on, obviously there's different people, you know, coming to this, to this barbecue, let's say, or let's just say that a potluck, let's say a potluck.
Everyone knows what a Pollock is, right? So everyone brings food and, and most people don't have, you know, restrictive diets, you know, I can eat meat, I can eat vegetables, you know, I don't have any necessarily religious dietary restrictions, but some people do and it's, it's usually a minority, right? Within the group, uh, a smaller portion of the population that would have maybe a religious reason, a reason not to eat certain types of meat. Maybe it needs to be kosher, right? Jewish.
Maybe it, uh, needs to be, or maybe somebody just needs to, to have organic, right? Um, needs or wants to have organic food and, and if you ask everybody else and say, ok, look, it's gotta be all organic or it's got all, you know, it's gotta be non GMO or it's got to be kosher or it's got to be whatever, you know, or we, we, you know, we can't have pork. Most people would be like, ok, that's fine. That's cool. I mean, I don't care, I don't have to eat pork.
I don't have, you know, I'm perfectly fine eating kosher food. I don't have to, if it's organic, if it's non GMO, I mean, that's fine. Tastes just as good. Maybe it tastes even better. I don't really care like, if I'm someone who is in the, generally the majority opinion of things where I kind of just eat whatever, I mean, healthy but whatever, then I don't care if somebody has some restrictions. So I'm, I'm like, OK. Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Let's do that.
And then what happens is, is that's just the beginning and then something else, whether it's another potluck or another event and people start making these kind of individual concessions, right? Which in the moment never seemed too bad. They never seemed too crazy, you know, hey, we're gonna have a, a conference but we're not allowed to or, you know, it's, it's been raised that some people feel uncomfortable if X happens.
And so when we go to this conference, X can't happen, I don't know what it is just an example and, and it might not seem like that big of a deal to a lot of people, but we know that it affects or offends some people. And so we kind of just make that concession and say, yeah, OK. OK. Yeah, sure. That's, I mean, I don't care as long as I can still go to the con you know, the conference and learn what I need to learn. I don't really care. So, so we make a concession.
Well, what can happen sometimes is people kind of incrementally keep making concessions, concessions and keep making concessions until all of a sudden you, you've kind of handed over perhaps a lot of your own interests or likes or freedoms, right? Without realizing it. And the same Talib actually calls this the minority rule, the minority rule.
And this is another example of the snowball effect where you, you kind of keep making these incremental concessions or, or allowances because in the moment, they're not that problematic, they're not that they're not that big of a deal, but over time they've, they've, they've, they've accumulated into what, and, and before you know, it, you know, you turn around and you'd be like, wait a second all of a sudden there's all these things in place where I can't do this and I can't do that and I can, you know, and so we, we see this definitely at the societal level, right?
And of course, we can get into the debate about, well, you know, what's, what's, what's the solution to that? You know? Do we, do we just let it happen? Do we stamp it out somewhere? Do we not make concessions? I mean, what is the answer to that? Right. And of course, that's debatable and, and you can imagine that's gonna come up as we start talking about the freedom of speech example, now I call this the second mechanism renormalization.
Uh it it comes, you know, from a number of areas, you know, condensed matter physics as an example. But basically, you know, back in the day when they're trying to figure out they still do this, they try to figure out how the small scale stuff becomes the large scale stuff, right? You know, we talk about the difference between simple and complex. How does the simple become the complex?
And so renormalization is that kind of approach where you start to take these little averages and you keep coarse, screening it and you, you make bigger averages and bigger averages and bigger averages and you step all your way up until you get to the big system and they say, oh look, maybe this is how the the small becomes the big. Uh I'm not really a fan of that again, I think that's a false narrative because I don't think we have access to that path.
But as a concept, this idea of renormalization uh obviously happens and obviously makes sense. In other words, things become the new normal, right? They get renormalized, right? They become the new normal. In fact, renormalization is probably not a good word.
It'd almost be more like nova normalization, new normalization, whatever you're stepping up to a new normal, how it actually happens again, going back to the hidden dependencies, we don't really know, but, but, but, but, but we can see that as you incrementally keep making concessions to in a given situation that new normals will be established. OK. So those are the two mechanisms I would argue um for snowballing. OK. Right.
One is that there's these deep hidden dependencies that exists and there's this confluence of factors that come together to make a thing, a thing and, and because of that, because we don't have access to those dependencies because they're hidden. This is why it snowballs, right? This is why it not only does it take off, but we can't see where it takes off because that's really the idea behind snowballing.
It's not just that it's a runaway process, it's a runaway process that we don't necessarily know what it becomes, right? And that's because the hid independency. And then the second one is, you know, kind of more mechanistically is just this renormalization process where you keep making these little incremental decisions that don't seem like a big deal in the moment, but they accumulate into something that, that maybe we never could have imagined down the road.
So the world becomes a new world, but we never saw it really becoming a new world. It kind of happened faster than we noticed. And then all of a sudden you're in this situation. 00 my gosh, what's going on, right. And, and you know, it's just these little incremental decisions that were made, but no no one, not one of those decisions seemed like it was a big deal at the time. So it got renormalized. So hopefully, that makes sense.
OK. So those are those kind of two mechanisms I believe behind snowballing. And they're obviously deeply interrelated, uh you know, they, they occur together. So now I want to get into this example of freedom of speech. So let's, let's, let's let's do it, let's, you know, blow it apart. Let's talk about uh you know, this is a, this is a hot topic, sensitive topic. People get very heated and, and typically this gets framed obviously politically, right?
On two sides of the political fence, you got those on the right and those on the left and you know, most of us are kind of obviously for, I mean, it's been like this forever, right? The the right side of the political fence basically wants all freedom of speech, right? They, they want freedom, they want the individual empowerment to be able to say what you want. And yes, you're gonna have to accept a lot of crap with that. But by and large, the idea is that that is for the best, right?
Freedom of speech is for the best. Uh People should be allowed to say what they want. It's the free society that allows creativity and innovation and new ideas and solutions to our most pressing problems and it's not always pretty, but that's the way to do it and that would be the right right opinion. And then typically, traditionally on the left, um freedom of speech is seen in its extreme as somewhat problematic.
Or at least today, we could say that that's, that's how it seems to be framed, right? Is that just this blanket allowance of, of free speech, uh it, it's argued can be problematic because people start saying things that are offensive, right? And, and that uh that discriminate and that maybe start to, to bring things into society. That's, that, that, that almost subconsciously force us to maybe view a certain type of people a certain way or whatever it is. OK.
So you've got, you know, the right side which says all free, you know, freedom of speech, let's let it go and it's not always gonna be pretty, but it's the best and you got the left side which might say, you know, uh this, this kind of needs to be constrained that there's got to be some guard rails on that because I think a complete allowance of all freedom, especially in today's, you know, social media climate uh can be very problematic, you know, the the the the voices that are um that are saying the bad things, you know, are, are unfortunately given really big microphones because of social media.
And so actually, you know, a complete allowance of freedom of speech is problematic. And then of course, you can get into the whole misinformation and stuff we won't get into all that. But OK, so, so you've got those two kind of versions of that.
So let's think back to snowballing as a mechanism because freedom of speech would be an ex you know, a very real world example of something where an understanding of the snowballing property, right, of complex situations could be really, really useful, I think and, and specifically understanding, you know, appreciating the mechanism behind the mechanisms behind it, the fact that it's got hidden dependencies and the fact that there's that, that there's this kind of renormalization process that happens.
So, so, so can we somehow resolve, you know, or work towards a better solution for the freedom of speech issue? Um You know, should it be allowed or should it be constrained? Let's start with um kind of the right political side of things where we say, OK, the argument is we should allow complete freedom of speech. We should just allow people to say what they want. It's a free society, it's a fundamental part of, you know, democracy, the Republic, whatever people should be allowed to say it.
Now, you could use the snowballing mechanism to support this argument, right? Because you could say that, look, if you start uh hampering down or squashing down the ability to speak freely, it might not seem like that big of a deal at any given moment, but it's going to have disastrous consequences in the long run. And that would be correct as an argument. I'm not saying it's fully correct and that, that's the right opinion to take.
But, but as a, as a logical argument, that is a good argument, right? Because we know, right, this is obviously a real world, non-trivial, complex situation. You have a lot of human beings and they're interacting and, and we, we can say as a property of systems, we know that you could have a snowball runaway effect if you start to lock down the ability to speak freely. And so go back to kind of that, that potluck example, right?
Just, just as some people will make hidden uh sorry concessions incrementally. So we might say, ok, well, you can't say this and everyone at first says, yeah, I mean, that makes sense. That's pretty drastic. I don't think anybody needs to be saying that, that, that kind of garbage. So let's shut that down. Everybody's OK with that. And, and it's right. Most people left around. Yeah. Yeah. OK.
I mean, I mean, you know, I believe in freedom of speech, but I, I can understand why nobody would want to hear that. So let's shut that down and then, and then, you know, a little bit time goes by and then somebody else said something and, and then they start to squash that down and squash that down and through and over time. What, what, what ends up happening is pretty soon. A lot of speech starts to get hampered. This would be the argument, right?
A lot of speech starts to get shut down and the problem with this, I, I is what I like to call flexible interpretation. There's gonna be this infinitely flexible interpretation around what let's call it hate speech actually is, right. It starts off in a very obvious fashion. It starts off saying you can't say that we, we know the really bad words, we know the really bad things. So we shut that down.
But all of a sudden somebody somewhere, uh, starts to feel, uh, uncomfortable, unsafe, whatever it is with a certain type of language that most people might say. Oh, really? That, that, that's, I mean, I think that's seems like a bit of a stretch, seems like maybe you're taking it out of context. But then again, I don't have your background, I don't have your experience. I mean, I can't speak for you. Uh, you know, II I can't start imposing my truth on your truth.
And, and so maybe another concession gets made for something that you might not really agree with. But, you know, ok, fine. I guess nobody really needs to be saying that and, and if, if people are speaking up and they're feeling uncomfortable or discriminated against, then maybe it makes sense to shut that down. And so we make that, that next concession, the problem here and, and, and we're taking the right side of the argument currently under this argument.
The problem is that, that, that interpretation of what is bad or hate speech has no end to it because there's always going to be a way to interpret the speech as bad. And we do see this and I'm not arguing where it's good and where it's bad and you know, we can get into the debate. But, but this is a known mechanism. This is something that happens because we do this in all areas of life. It doesn't have to be related to freedom of speech. This always happens, this happens in science.
This happens in our day to day lives where we see something and we decide to interpret it a certain way. We kind of get our confirmation biases kicking in and, well, I, you know, I see this and I think it's this and I think it's that and so much of life comes down to interpretation again, comp you know, complexity. We don't have access to exactly how things come together to produce the outcome. So we have to try to interpret it.
We have to come up with a narrative and we really, really strongly believe in that narrative. But, but everybody has a different version of that narrative. And so, and, and, and, and it's to be clear here, I'm not saying that the people who are defining speech as bad or like doing it for nefarious reasons or, you know, you really know that's not bad, but you're doing it with an agenda, there might be people like that, but that's not what I'm saying here.
The point is as humans, we will do this, we will keep interpreting things uh because we have to write a certain way. And so where this becomes problematic in, in with this argument is that, is that as the there is no end to what hate speech is, right?
There is no end to what the problematic speech is because it can always be hurtful to someone if it, if it gets interpreted a certain way, whether that's out of context or whether that's the way the media portrayed it, you know, at some point, it doesn't even matter. It was said it was heard, it's making someone feel uncomfortable and so it's going to get interpreted. So this will have a runaway process to it, right?
It will, we know this saying this is the full answer, but we do know that these things do happen. So there's a very, instead of saying it will, I should say there's a very good chance that it will because we know runaway snowball, uh you know, processes happen in these kinds of complex situations in ways that we don't know, we don't know how it's all gonna be deeply interconnected.
We don't know how, what the outcome's gonna look like, but we do know it can run away and so we can foresee that not how it's gonna play out, but we could foresee that it could, it could run away to something very problematic where speech just keeps getting hampered, down, hamper down, hampered down. It started with like little concessions, little concessions and then eventually just got out of control and now nobody can say anything. And now we're all walking on eggshells.
And so the kind of the right side of the argument here, not right, correct, but political, right side of the argument here is, is that it makes more sense to allow complete freedom of speech. Because what that does is it nips the runaway process in the bud. In other words, instead of uh you know, trying to figure out where to draw that line.
You know, because we're never really going to be able to do that because that infinitely flexible interpretation is always going to keep, you know, reinterpreting what hate speech is and isn't instead of getting into that process that, that, that or, or that, that, that approach that doesn't really have an end to it and that, that, that is going to lead to problematic outcomes because it will just run away and it'll, you'll have to hamper down all speech, nobody will be able to say anything instead of getting into all that, which can't possibly have a solution.
Seemingly, we should just nip this in the bud and say as a hard rule, allow all freedom of speech. Now that doesn't mean it's going to be pretty because you're gonna have people on the fringe and you're gonna have the idiots and you're going to have, you know, uh, unfortunately a lot of, you know, kind of bad people saying bad things and that's just a part of reality. But the bigger picture, so the argument would go is that it's still for the best.
It's still for the best because, because as long, because then you're not getting into this takeoff snowball scenario where there's no end to the shutting down of freedom of speech. You're instead just kind of making it a black and white decision up front and saying we're allowed to say anything, there's gonna be some crap and, and we have to kind of trust humanity to know that that is crap and to, and to by and large, you know, ignore the crap and, and stick to what's right.
And I believe in, you know, the human spirit and I believe in morality and I think it's more or less universal. So I think that's going to be the best approach, ok? That would be the right hand side or the, the political right argument.
And there's a lot of true things in there because, because it, because it's true, that can be a runaway process and that could lead to bad outcomes and we could see mechanistically that there is that, that, that the infinite flexibility around what is and is in hate speech really has no end to it. So that could definitely snowball. So you might say, ok, that's settled. So, there you go.
I mean, it's not pretty, but I think the best decision is just to allow freedom of speech and you could make that argument and it would be a very good argument and it would be a logical argument. Nothing wrong with that. But let's, let's take the other angle now because it turns out the snowball kind of mechanism or mechanisms can be used for the political left argument as well. So I'm gonna use an example of comedians because comedians are kind of these edgy people, right?
They, they, they really put themselves out there. I mean, yes, they try to make people laugh, but they also typically try to kind of dance right on the edge of controversy, right? Because that gets them known that gets them seen. Uh you know, whether or not it makes anything funnier, it's debatable. But, but, you know, comedians like to be pretty controversial. They like to kind of shock people typically and they, they kind of like to outdo each other.
So imagine there's a comedian and he or she says something uh you know, sensitive, you know, it might be about, it might be about a group of people or just something that, that definitely offends some people and most people would look at that and say, ok, you know, that's a little edgy. I don't know if that really should have been said, but you know what this is comedy, this is art, this is what they do and then it would kind of blow over. Right.
So, so we're, we're just, just to be clear here, we're assuming that we have a world of complete freedom of speech and, and we're kind of ok, let's see how it goes, right? Because we're assuming that's the best decision to make. So that comedian makes that joke and everyone just kind of ok. And then another comedian comes along and has to kind of out edge the other comedian. They gotta be a little bit more controversial. They have to keep pushing the envelope, right?
Because that's what comedians do. They want to be the, the most controversial commercials. So, so they say they're a joke and it's even more edgy and it's even kind of more cringey or whatever you want to call it. And, uh, you know, and, and, and maybe, you know, half the people that hear it like, oh, I don't know, that's a bit much and, you know, maybe that's, you know, but it gets the person well known and then eventually everybody kind of laughs it off.
And now this could be its own snowball effect. This could be its own runaway process. You're allowing complete freedom of speech. And remember, we use the snowball argument to say complete freedom of speech would be a good thing because the, the incremental squashing down of speech could run away into something super problematic, which is true. But the incremental allowing of small jokes that offend a certain group of people could also have a runway process.
You could use the same argument as each I'm just using comedians as an example. It doesn't have to be comedians could be anybody. But as each comedian tries to out edge the other and they try to keep being a little bit more controversial, we start to renormalized, right? A speech that is, is maybe discriminatory or, or offensive or what, you know, hurtful, hateful, whatever it is and it kind of just kind of folds itself into society and becomes normal.
And maybe you could imagine subconsciously, maybe we start to view a certain type of people a certain way because we've heard these jokes all the time, but we don't really think of anything because, you know, it's a joke or I don't, you know, it's almost subconscious, but that could have its own runaway process in ways that we don't know because it keeps getting folded in, right? Keeps getting folded in through this renormalization.
And with all these hidden dependencies that we don't have access to the thing that keeps it alive. We don't really know how it's so super interconnected. So it's not like you can really know where it's good and where it's really bad. And so you, you, you allow, you allow, you allow, you allow and all of a sudden the the these kind of things become what they want to call it socially constructed or whatever they start to become kind of embedded in society.
And, and, and then we look around and say, wait, why is this, you know, why do we talk like this about maybe this type of people, this type of people? So you could envision and, and I'm not saying either one of these is, is true or going on and we can debate that. But I'm saying you could easily envision and make just as strong an argument uh on, on the political left to say this one way process could be problematic for freedom of speech, right?
If you allow the speech, you could start to, you know, I guess the extreme case of that would, would be a type of dehumanization. You'd almost start to normalize, kind of a dehumanizing way of speaking, maybe about a certain type of people. It started as jokes that no, that, that nobody really got offended, maybe a few people. And then it's just started kind of incrementally kept concessions. We didn't see how everything was connected. It snowballed.
You wake up one day you turn around and go wait a second. There's something embedded into society now that is actually not that great. So you can use the snowball argument on both ends of the fence. I would argue, OK. And I would say they're both just as strong because all you're doing is you're just stepping back and saying look, this is a complex situation, this is the world. We got lots of people and we know as a property of these types of situations that snowballing does happen.
And if you're on the political right, you could say the snowballing is a reason to allow complete freedom of speech. And I think that's a good argument. And on the left, you could say snowballing is a reason to not allow complete freedom of speech. And I think that's equally a good argument. OK? I don't think there's any advantage there. So we're at this kind of impasse, right? Remember I said that an appreciation of snowballing uh can help us make real world decisions.
But uh it allowed us to kind of add maybe a little bit of rigor and logic to the arguments behind the right and the left, but they kind of cancel each other out because, you know, you can both make that argument. So, so what do we do? What's the next step? Well, notice something about both cases in both cases. The problem wasn't necessarily the runaway process. We we we have to have an appreciation that this happens, but it's not the runaway process. That's necessarily the problem.
Remember I said at the beginning, runaway processes can, you know, processes can be good and be bad, right? And in the freedom of speech example, we saw something potentially becoming bad, but on, on the squashing down of freedom of speech, right? Whether it's the right or the left, both cases, we saw the runaway process leading potentially to something bad. So it doesn't really help the decision making. So it's not the runaway process. You have to know that this happens, right.
It's important to know that it happens and you have to take that into account, but that alone is not really necessarily the problem. Well, in both cases, if you notice there's kind of something unnatural about both the left and right hand side, OK. On the, on the right hand, political opinion, it was just allow anything to be said, but that's not necessarily completely natural.
It often gets framed as the most natural thing and there is a lot of natural about that, but humans don't just always allow everything to be said, right? That that's actually a type of imposed structure, an imposed structure. You're, you're intervening in a way that's actually kind of unnatural there because people would raise opinions. And if every time someone raised an opinion and said, I don't want you to say that you then shut it down and said, no, there's a blanket argument here.
It's freedom of speech and everything's allowed, you know. So I kind of shut up and sit down and, well, that's not really natural, right? It's more natural to at least listen and then see if, if a certain amount of structure would make sense, right? So, so the complete allowance and opening of the gates is not necessarily a natural thing. And that I'm gonna argue here that, that, that, that, that is a type of imposed structure, right?
You're, you're specifically locking down a system that where the, where the gates are open, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're locking them open, if that makes sense, right? You're keeping them open, you're kind of artificially forcing the gates to always be as wide as possible. And that's a type of intervention that's a type of imposed structure on the system. And, and we know that when you start to impose kind of an artificial structure on systems, they tend to collapse.
OK. So I think the complete opening uh of a freedom of speech has a problematic aspect to it from, from a, you know, an understanding of proper perspective, right? Because you're, you're imposing on a system that isn't quite natural, the more natural thing would be allow would be the allowance of concerns to be raised and the taking into consideration uh of those concerns.
OK. And then on the left side, you obviously also have the imposed structure there too because you're saying every time somebody raises the opinion, we we kind of lock in a new level of what's considered hate speech. OK. And it's kind of this, this runaway bootstrapping effect, right?
Where it, you know, the the the kind of goalpost gets moved, then you lock it and then it gets moved and then you lock it and So we have this problem of, you know, the Overton window as they say, right, the, the uh kind of range of allowable discourse that Overton window starts uh shrinking in the on the left side of things where you keep shutting down the free, shutting down the speed so that the amount of things that we can actually say becomes smaller and some smaller.
And there's something very unnatural about that process. And on the right, you kind of just, you know, keep the opening window open as wide as you possibly can and you never allow it to shrink through natural conversation through natural decision making. You just force it open and you keep it there and there's some kind of unnatural imposed structure on that side of things too.
So this is, this is, I think what the problem is, it's not so much the runaway process, runaway processes that you know, they happen in nature, but they tend to breathe. And by that, I mean, you know, things will grow and then things will shrink, right. Things grow and then they get pruned back and you see this kind of growing and pruning, growing and pruning throughout nature, things breathe, they go in and out.
Whereas on the left and the right side, arguments here, you know, the right side, you're forcing it open, you're not allowing it to shrink back and on the left, you just keep shrinking it down, you're not allowing it to expand out. So there's that, that imposed structure on an otherwise natural breathing system that I think is the problem. It's not the runaway process. We need to appreciate that as a mechanism. But the problem is the imposed structure.
It's that, that, that intervention that's being used on the system, that's locking things in place in ways that don't allow it to breathe, that don't allow it to go in and out, that don't allow it to become uh you know, a a system as it's supposed to. And we know that, you know, successful systems have this kind of growing and shrinking aspect to them, right? So, so a natural process would allow both. So what does that mean in terms of the structure?
Well, something that I've noticed and I'm sure other people have is that there seems to be this kind of sweet spot when it comes to structure, right? You know, like kind of a fundamental truth of all of, you know, nature is that is that you, you have to have uh structure, right? But too much structure is bad. And so we see this in different areas of science, we see this in different religions and different philosophies.
I mean, it comes up again and again, anyone paying attention to how the world works, uh we will see this pattern emerge, right? There seems to be this balance between uh you know, structure and chaos structure and and unstructured. If you will, we need them both uh in ways that I've already explained.
So when we take that if you look at the political sphere or, or the conversations that happen at the societal level, and we see that, that, that conversation is happening in a very polarized fashion, we already know that that's not a great thing, right? If you just say, you know, point blank, we need freedom of speech and let it all happen and, and, and that's for the best we know that's gonna be a problem. That's a type of impo structure that could be a problematic.
And then the same thing on the left, if you keep stamping out speech with a with a infinitely um interpreted version of what hate speech is, that's also going to be problematic. And so that type of imposed structure is not good. So there seems to be this sweet spot that's needed when it comes to structure, right? It seems to be that we need a certain amount of structure, but you know, too much is bad and none is not going to be good. There needs to be a balance.
So, so just that first blush, we can say, we definitely need to get away from this polarized kind of version of the conversation that we keep having. It's not free speech or no free speech, right? That's not helpful. They're both bad, you know, it's it's not the the the typical right and left, you know, versions of this debate because they both have their own snowball processes. As we've explained, they both could lead to very bad outcomes via those mechanisms.
And so that's not the useful conversation. So the first thing that we got to do is get away from the polarized conversation of just, you know, it's one or the other. And we got to start thinking in terms of a balance. And so what we can say is even just the admission that there needs to be a more balanced approach to understanding how much structure is, right?
We're not saying don't impose any structure but the extreme polarized versions of those imposed structures, the locking in the goalpost as wide as possible or the bootstrap kind of, you know, locking in the redefined hate speech every time it occurs, those don't work, but there should be some way of defining it somewhere in the middle or some kind of balanced approach.
And so just the admission of that is, is a step forward, I think because at least that's the kind of conversation we should be having, right? That, that that would be much more helpful. Let's admit that there is a certain kind of sweet spot when it comes to structure, let's try to work towards that. But you could easily step back and say, OK, yeah, that's fine.
I mean, I think just the admission of that is definitely a step in the in the right direction, but there's still so much gray area there, right. There's still so much gray area there because how do we define where to draw that line?
And aren't we just getting caught up in this, you know, flexible interpretation problem again, because we're going to see, you know, everyone's going to interpret where that line should be drawn differently and, and, you know, maybe in some sense, everybody al already kind of intuitively knows there's a balance between, you know, structure and unstructured. But, but again, we just get into these debates about where to draw that line.
So in, in, in, you know, the admission of the balance is good, but in some ways, it, it doesn't really move us forward because we just get caught in these debates again. Well, we do have some guidance on this when we look at the properties of complex systems, this is something that I've noticed and I, and actually uh tweeted about this uh a few days back as well.
I've noticed this with structure in general that if you keep backing off the amount of structure that imposed structure that you, you put on something the better because you're allowing more freedom, you're allowing, you know, the the exploration of that possibilities space, you're allowing more creative innovation to be kind of coaxed out of the entropy coaxed out of the environment. It's a very, very good thing.
But if you, if you back it off all the way, uh it, it's, it's problematic if you remove it, it's not good. So the less structure, the better but none is is disaster. And so what I said in that tweet was that, you know, the structure is most powerful right before the point, it no longer exists. Structure is most powerful right before the point, it no longer exists, less is more, none is disaster, right?
So this applies to government management project, scaffolding procedure, process instruction, prescription and life goals. It doesn't matter, right? Structure is most powerful right before the point it no longer exists. So we do have some guidance with respect to maybe where to draw that line.
And so I would argue that because we see this pattern where you want to reduce the amount of structure as much as possible, the much of imposed structure should be less, less, less, less but not completely removed that when we think about trying to balance, you know, structure and chaos, it's not really a, you know, 50 50 type of balance.
It's not really like you're striking it in the middle, it's actually trying to remove as much of that structure as you can get away with without removing it all together. And so if we go back to the freedom of speech example, I think there is some guidance and, and, and that's not to say that there's not gonna be any debate or any gray area, but it's a lot better than the polarized speech.
And I think it's stronger also than just saying, let's admit that there is some, some kind of balance in the middle. Let's try to work towards that. It's, it's even better than that. It says what we should do in this example is open up that overton window as much as we can really allow quite a bit of free speech. But let's have guard rails on the more obvious problematic language. Now, not everyone's going to agree with that.
But I'd say that that follows the structure because because most people should be able to agree on at least kind of the bare bones. This is definitely not good stuff, this is stuff that nobody needs to hear. This is definitely hate speech, right? And that more nuanced stuff is where you get into the runaway problem of flexible interpretation. And so some people will be quick to say no, I think this is still problematic. I think this is gonna cause all kind of issues.
Look, this is not going to be perfect, but we have to take a look at how systems operate. We know the complete opening of the window can lead to bad problems. We know that constantly redefining speech can lead to bad problems. So that can't be the decision. We can't allow snowballing to just take off. So we do have to draw the line somewhere. And I think that if you take a look at how you know the the systems that work in nature.
If we take a look at how those work and, and what their properties are more specifically, then we have to realize that the ones that work have the least amount of structure but not no structure.
And so in the context of the freedom of speech, that means to all, you could really do as a kind of a black and white decision is to say, look, we are definitely going to stamp out the, the ones that we all agree on because I think at some level there is hate speech that we can all agree on and that, that, that objectively obviously bad, you know, hate speech that, that can sneak through is not going to be allowed.
But beyond that, we shouldn't interfere because the, the, the interference is gonna cause worse problems than trying to, to think you can get a handle on it than, than, than, than trying to squash it out and thinking you're making the world a better place. Ok. So, so again, just to reiterate, it's not yes, freedom of speech point blank. I don't think that's right. And it's not, uh you know, let's keep redefining it. I don't think that's right.
I think both the left and the right kind of have it wrong and, and it's not that they don't intuitively understand, but it usually gets framed in that polarized fashion and it's, it's also not useful to just say we're going to strike a balance between you know, some level of imposition of structure and some not, I think we got to take a look at the fact that less is more but none is disaster.
We have to, we have to realize that this is the pattern, that structure is most powerful right before the point, it no longer exists. And whether it's freedom of speech or other examples, I would say that's a at least a good starting point to start our conversations and work towards a better solution. And so what this says about intervention in general is that it should only be used in the extreme cases. Ok. So think about medicine. Um you know, that is a type of intervention, right?
Somebody has a, you know, a sickness of disease and medicine is is coming to intervene. I mean, ideally to try to cure it but really just deal with the symptoms, but whatever it is trying to do, it's an intervention, right? It's trying to get in the way of whatever process is happening and hopefully try to make a better open for the patient. Well, you know, the the the ongoing debate of course is is how much of that is necessary.
I mean, with the health care industry being the way it is we have very liberal kind of uh you know, intervention, right, application of medicines to the general public. And and it could easily be argued that it's probably more than it really needs to be but that's not to say that there shouldn't be any. Right. So, the, the kind of very liberal, globally applied intervention, uh, can easily be argued to be a bad thing.
Uh, I think it can cause a lot of problems whether that's addiction or, you know, just, you know, the health problems that come from side effects from over medication, whatever it is, you know, a lot of medication is not a great thing. Most people I would think would probably agree with that, but that's not to say that there aren't cases where, uh, it, it, it's definitely going to be needed. And so the question is, well, where do you draw that line? It's kind of the same, the same problem.
It is the same problem, you know, where do you impose the structure? Where do you intervene? Well, it makes sense to do it in the extreme cases. Right. It makes sense that if somebody, you know, you know, a gunshot victim is going to need surgery and there's gonna be other cases, there's, you know, there's, there's an over prescription of, of antidepressants, but that's not to say that there aren't extreme cases where people should be on antidepressants.
Um, you know, whatever the medication is, you know, if it's, if it's, you know, plastic surgery that's probably, you know, done too liberally, you know, why intervene in something like that. But at the same time, a lot of people would agree that, you know, burn victims should probably have the option to have something like that. Right. So it makes sense from a medical intervention standpoint to use it in the extreme cases.
And so again, that's getting that, that's really what we're saying about intervention. Ultimately, when we say that less is better, less, less, less. But it, you know, at, at that point where you take it away, that's where it goes wrong, right? Structure is most powerful, right? Before the point it no longer exists so that there's an example right there in medicine. And then, and, and so that's why we see that in the freedom of speech example as well. OK?
Is, is the extreme or the a the universally agreed upon parts of speech that we do not want to allow. And I think that does exist, I think there is an objective truth there that if we're all being intellectually honest at some level, we can say, yeah, these are, these are words, we don't want uh people to say these are, these are things that we don't want people to say. And then when you get into the more nuanced stuff, that's when it gets gray.
So so the extreme is the extreme language, the extreme language that we all can objectively agree is wrong. So you can see the the the analogy to the medicine example, right? You're you, you're saying to intervene, to draw that line when uh when, when the situation is extreme and that's, that's just another way of saying really that structure is most powerful right before the point it no longer exists. That's where we should do the intervention. OK. That's it.
So, thank you so much for listening. You can also find non-trivial episodes in article format. If you'd rather read or maybe listen and read, you can find it on substack and medium on substack visit. Shaw mcclure dot substack dot com on medium. That's sham Clare dot medium dot com. If you like what you heard, please consider maybe giving a non trivial a five star rating that would help out a lot. Maybe even a short review. I'm Sean mcclure. This is non trivial. Thank you so much until next time.