Linear vs. lateral thinking: Doomberg (mental models, and how I think).

I haven’t written for quite some time, and while I would like to write about the issue of free speech and comments in this forum, I have decided to leave it for later. I found this video featuring Doomberg, whose videos I have used before and whom I highly respect. I used his video in one of my posts where he talked about Malthusians, population reduction, and how it is connected to the Green agenda:

Doomberg (artificial scarcity, Malthusians, imaginary communism and socialism, Western education and indoctrination, and the culture of woke)

While this topic is controversial, I highly agreed with what he said there, but of course not fully. As I have written many times, I do not agree with anyone 100% because I am a free thinker and I have my own mental model, as Doomberg calls it.

Linear vs. lateral thinking: Doomberg

I will start by providing a transcript of Doomberg's opening monologue where he explains linear vs. lateral thinking. I would like to do this because what he describes here is something I agree with, and it explains how I think.

3:00

"Um, appreciate the opportunity and total coincidence, as I shared with you before we hit record. We're actually writing an entire book on that exact subject, so I appreciate the opportunity to, um, stress test some of the early chapters with you, which I literally just pulled myself away from the keyboard to record with you. So let me give you the headline.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of native thinkers: there are people who think linearly and people who think laterally.

And, um, before diving in, I should say a few things up front. In society, it is popular to characterize lateral thinking as smart, when in fact, it's just unusual in the sense that the vast majority of people are innate linear thinkers and a small number of people—I count myself among them—are innate lateral thinkers. Within the two populations, there's a normal distribution of intelligence. But when you have that sort of overlap in the Venn diagram of a clever lateral thinker, it's so different than what is normal that it appears, um, perhaps more unusual than it is.

So what is linear thinking? Linear thinking is the predominant thinking motif in society. Absent a majority of linear thinkers running society, society would collapse.

Linear thinkers and lateral thinkers differ in the following, most important way: linear thinkers, when they brainstorm around an axiom, make sure that axiom is correct before they begin brainstorming. A lateral thinker has no emotional attachment to the correctness of an axiom at all before they'll play around with it, explore it, and see where it leads you if you assume that axiom is true. That is the biggest difference. There are other differences, which I'll get into, but that's it.

And so in a classic work setting where like most people are linear thinkers, nobody wants to waste time brainstorming around something that is obviously untrue. It can't be true. Why? You know, I'm not wasting my time pondering that. I've got to get home. I've got kids to pick up at the soccer game. I've got dinner to get going. I've got a deadline to deliver for the boss. Where a lateral thinker loves doing that—often does it too long to a fault.

And that's another difference, by the way, between linear and lateral thinkers. A linear thinker is really afraid of being wrong, and a lateral thinker embraces it because it's just the next input into the next iteration, the next brainstorm. Iterating around untrue axioms or true axioms is a dopamine parade for lateral thinkers.

So the best combination is to pair a great linear and a great lateral thinker so that the linear thinker can intervene when the insight is identified, and now it's time to go and implement that, you see.

But we're lateral thinkers. Lateral thinking is in the description of what we do. And so each of the calls that you just described, either we had them before or got to them quickly after the evidence indicated that we needed to pivot. Those are all born out of what you described as a mental model.

What is a mental model? A mental model is an axiom—true or not, and we don't care—that both explains recent history and is useful to predict the future. Once a mental model is what we call operative, we use it to make predictions until it stops working, and then we discard it because we don't care if it's wrong."

Just like Doomberg, I see myself as a ‘lateral thinker’. Here I can show you the first example of how my ‘lateral thinking’ works. When I was listening to this, and Doomberg said:

"Linear thinking is the predominant thinking motif in society. Absent a majority of linear thinkers running society, society would collapse".

My brain instantly made a connection to one of the best and most interesting lectures I have ever heard, which is Aldous Huxley's "The Ultimate Revolution: Brave New World" (Berkeley Speech 1962), which I have even posted before.

22:42 

"Quite clearly, if everybody were extremely unsuggestible, organized society would be quite impossible. And if everybody were extremely suggestible, then dictatorship would be absolutely inevitable. I mean, it's very fortunate we have people who are moderately suggestible in the majority, and who therefore preserve us from dictatorship, but allow committed organized society to be formed". 

In this fragment of the lecture, Huxley talks about suggestibility. He also provides a very interesting number: around 20% of the population is extremely suggestible, and 20% are resistant to suggestibility, while the rest of the population is somewhere in between. Just like Doomberg when he says that ‘Absent a majority of linear thinkers running society, society would collapse,’ Huxley basically says that if the majority were unsuggestible, society would collapse.

Sorry for drifting off topic. I often write that I have problems staying on topic because my brain works laterally, making thousands of connections for me. Basically, almost everything is connected. So if I really wanted to explain something, my rants would never end, and every one of my posts would end up as a book. Since everything I mention I can explain and connect to 10 things, then each of those 10 things I mentioned can connect to another 10, which gives us 100 things. Then each of those 100 things can connect to another 10, which gives us 1000, ‘ad infinitum’.

That’s why it hurt me so much when comments were removed from this forum, because comments allowed me to expand my thought process and my mental model. Every time I write something, I need to leave out thousands of things I would like to write so as not to turn a post into a book.

Afraid of being wrong

Some time ago, I had a very interesting conversation with people in this community in the comments — people whom I really respect and think are smart, but with whom I don't agree. Later, I spoke with a friend whom I really respect and who, in my opinion, represents the same views as those people. Just like the people I argued with in the comments, my friend is not only highly intelligent, but he is also highly educated. This is the difference between them and me, since I am not highly educated, and people who read my posts know what I think about education. Now, my friend said something to me like this:

“Aren’t you afraid of being wrong? You can compromise yourself; I would be afraid of being wrong and compromising myself.” He also said something along the lines of, “If someone is wrong, they are burned to me.”

I argued against what my friend said. In my opinion, just because someone is wrong about something does not mean I should not listen to them at all. Now let’s look at what Doomberg said:

A linear thinker is really afraid of being wrong, and a lateral thinker embraces it because it's just the next input into the next iteration, the next brainstorm. 

My extremely intelligent, friend, just like the people I have argued against in the comments of this forum, represents this ‘linear thinker’. I am not afraid of being wrong, and I also embrace it. That’s why I asked for comments on my posts, because I wanted my ideas to be challenged. Comments that challenge my ideas and prove me wrong are, as Doomberg put it, “just the next input into the next iteration, the next brainstorm.”

I must admit that I am a little too emotional in my writing, and I was not too kind to what Doomberg calls 'linear thinkers', as I refer to them as people living in the ‘reality of the naive’. This does not mean that I don't think they are smart or that I don't respect them. I am simply tired of trying to explain reality to really smart people only to feel like I am hitting a wall. Doomberg explains it this way:

Linear thinkers and lateral thinkers differ in the following, most important way: linear thinkers, when they brainstorm around an axiom, make sure that axiom is correct before they begin brainstorming. A lateral thinker has no emotional attachment to the correctness of an axiom at all before they'll play around with it, explore it, and see where it leads you if you assume that axiom is true. That is the biggest difference. There are other differences, which I'll get into, but that's it.

And so in a classic work setting where like most people are linear thinkers, nobody wants to waste time brainstorming around something that is obviously untrue. It can't be true. Why? You know, I'm not wasting my time pondering that. I've got to get home. I've got kids to pick up at the soccer game. I've got dinner to get going. I've got a deadline to deliver for the boss. Where a lateral thinker loves doing that—often does it too long to a fault. 

So, for example, axioms like ‘Socialism is good’ or axioms for which my friend criticizes me, such as me calling the West ‘our capitalist Empire of Evil ’— to them, those axioms are so wrong that even pondering them is a waste of time. For me, there is no holy truth, no axiom which limits my views and my mental model. So, for example, I assume the axiom of ‘our capitalist Empire of Evil’, and as Doomberg says, I ‘play around with it, explore it, and see where it leads you if you assume that the axiom is true.’ Then I see if predictions based on this axiom come true. Basically, I argued the same thing to my friend before Doomberg made this video. In geopolitics, economics, and politics — the areas I write about most — you don’t know the absolute truth. I don’t have special access or some special information no one else possesses; the only things I have are my knowledge and mental models. I create educated assumptions, and then based on those educated assumptions, I make predictions. The correctness of those predictions shows me if the axiom is true. I know ‘correlation does not imply causation’, but in this world of the ‘reality of the naive’, where basically everything we are told is untrue and where we have the CIA, cognitive infiltration, and cognitive warfare, creating predictions based on axioms is the only way to find the truth.

My friend could not understand that; he thought you could just find the truth. I provided him with the example of the recent India-Pakistan war. Over a year has passed since this war, and I still don’t know who really won. Most commentators think Pakistan won and China's weapons were super effective. I side with a minority opinion represented, for example, by John Helmer, who thinks China's weapons failed and India won. Now, what makes me think that John Helmer is right? Just after this, the Pakistani military leader — who is the de facto leader of Pakistan, since Pakistan is ruled by the military — visited the White House for the first time in history. This visit was not announced and was basically hidden.

Trump hosts Pakistani army chief, disagrees with India over India-Pakistan war mediation

This was the first time a U.S. president had hosted the head of Pakistan's army at the White House.

I already wrote about this, but if Pakistan had won, and China's weapons had been so effective, and India had lost, then we would expect the Pakistani leader to fly to Beijing to visit Xi Jinping and celebrate the victory and the effectiveness of Chinese weapons. Instead, he flew to the White House to meet the US president. This suggests to me that Pakistan indeed lost to India, and they went to the White House to beg the American president to stop India.

Now, this is a conflict between two big countries that happened over a year ago, and to this day, I am not completely sure who won the war. The fact that I can’t even be sure of such a thing shows you how little we know. That’s why the only way to find the truth is through mental models with predictive abilities, like what Doomberg is talking about.

(Side note: I wrote about this before, but according to my mental model, the US used our McJihadists to carry out terrorist attacks in India to give India a justification to attack Pakistan. Basically, Pakistan was getting too close to China, and the US wanted to remind them who their boss was. It worked, since the Pakistani leader went to beg the American president to stop India. India, on the other hand, was pissed off because they spent missiles and money in the war against Pakistan, and I assume they were hoping to take some of Pakistan's land. So when the US told India to stop and not take anything from Pakistan, they were pissed.)

Here again, I would like to show you an example of my ‘lateral thinking’. This war between India and Pakistan makes my brain connect to a quote from another video I have posted and recommend. 

7:48 

This was evident in India, where George Francis Hamilton, Secretary of State for India, wrote in 1886 of the British strategy of using Muslim and Hindu divisions in the country to their advantage, along the lines of the old Roman Imperial strategy of "divide and rule":

‘I think the real danger to our rule—not now, but say 50 years hence—is the gradual adoption and extension of Western ideas of agitation, organization. And if we could break educated Indians into two sections holding widely different views, we should by such a division strengthen our position against the subtle and continuous attack which the spread of education must make upon our system of government. We should so plan educational textbooks that the differences between community and community are further strengthened.’ 

He literally wrote this almost 50 years before the separation of Pakistan and India. They did ‘plan educational textbooks’ well, and this further strengthening of ‘differences between community and community’ led to the separation of Pakistan and India, and to the Islamophobia we see in India today, which is partially represented by Modi.

But again, I drifted off topic because I could connect a thousand things to this. Let’s go back to the main topic.

Sources and Methods

Now let’s look at Doomberg’s sources and methods.

30:32 

"Um, which is fine. It's just a data point. And so, we decided, okay, you know, we have this algorithm. Algorithms want to feed you. Let's do a whole experiment where we just buy a completely new iPad—untouched by Doomberg—get a new email, get a new name, get a new Apple ID, and then spend the first hour… It was literally the first night of the war. You know, the next day, Jeff Bezos was kind enough to hand-deliver a new iPad, and we trained this. The only thing on that iPad to this day—I'm looking at it—the only thing on the iPad is the Twitter app, the X app, I guess.

And we spent an hour training the algorithm that we were pro-Iranian. Boy, it didn't take long to pick up on our cues. And so now we have our legacy Doomberg account with all of its biases and history—the algorithm knows us; it knows when I want a pizza—and this other algorithm. You would just put them side by side and refresh the "For You" tab, and you were watching the parallel universe theory of physics unfold before our eyes.

And so then we have this grading mechanism. Very simple. If you are interesting and you say something useful, you get on our list. After a while, we only really use lists. Once you have a foundation of a list, who they recommend becomes the new way you find people. So you get on the list by being interesting and useful. You stay on the list by resisting the temptation to produce or reproduce fake stuff—obvious AI, deepfakes, things like that.

And so over time, you get a list of a dozen or so authentic, mostly polite [sources]—some of them use language that, you know, we wouldn't put under our masthead, but still useful, still interesting. And the ultimate grade is: were they correct? Right". 

I basically do the same thing. But unfortunately, this war reduced my list significantly, since I heard people whom I have listened to before say things that made me no longer interested in listening to them. This war in Iran significantly reduced the pool of people I listen to. But I still have some people who are really reliable. By the way, Doomberg spoke about starting such an experiment during the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, I wrote about how this experiment started for me around 2006 during the war in Iraq, so I am a little ahead of Doomberg.

Axiom of ‘our Western capitalist Empire of Evil’

Now, before the war in Iran, I wrote that Brian Berletic and John Helmer are two people whom I highly recommend and respect. Of course, they haven’t failed during this war. Why, in my opinion, were both Brian Berletic and John Helmer right and closer to the truth than, for example, The Duran? The answer is the axiom of ‘our Western capitalist Empire of Evil’, which they share with me. While they do not call it this, and I differ in my views slightly with both of them — just as they differ between themselves — at the same time, we share the basic implications of this axiom. Brian Berletic, John Helmer, and I share the axiom of ‘our Western capitalist Empire of Evil’, and based on this axiom we create our mental models. Based on those mental models, we create predictions that come true. Brian Berletic, John Helmer, and I are not smarter than The Duran or other commentators, but we are simply ‘lateral thinkers’ who are not afraid to consider axioms like the ‘our Western capitalist Empire of Evil’ axiom. Meanwhile, The Duran are more ‘linear thinkers’, to whom considering a radical axiom like the ‘our Western capitalist Empire of Evil’ axiom is, as Doomberg said, "wasting time brainstorming around something that is obviously untrue."

I was also criticized because I used the word evil in ‘our Western capitalist Empire of Evil’. I have also often heard Mario Nawfal on his show saying he doesn't like using the word evil.

Maybe it would be more correct not to use the word evil, but I don’t give a FUCK!!! The West is the biggest drug cartel, responsible for most of the illegal drug trade in this world, most of the illegal weapons trade, as well as the slave trade and pedophile organizations, and of course, it is the biggest sponsor and organizer of terrorism with our McJihad. Just look at the case of Jeffrey Epstein.

If calling the West evil — when it’s led by Epstein elites who are responsible for most of the wars and terrorism in this world, and most of the horrible shit in this world — makes me unobjective, then F**K objectivity.

End

I will end here. I would like to write more. I basically had two more pages written, but it was not complete, so I would have to write another 6 pages to add to those 2 pages, adding 8 pages total to this post, which is already pretty long. That’s why I wish we had comments, because in the comments people could ask me questions that would not only allow me to explain my thought process, but also allow me to narrow and concentrate the explanation of my thought process. There are always thousands of things I could write about, and questions allow me to narrow my explanation.

Now, this is the first post I have written in some time, so it could be really bad. Before, I could read comments and improve; now, without proper feedback, I don't know if my posts will even be good. I will try to motivate myself to finally write more. As always, there are thousands of topics I could write about, and I don’t even know which topic to pick.

 

I will end it here, thanks to everyone who stuck with me until the end. And, as always…

 

“Knowledge will make you be free.”

― Socrates

+

“Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.”

― Richard P. Feynman

=

“Freedom is not free, you need to pay attention.”

― Grzegorz Ochman

 

“By seeing the multitude of people around, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself…dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass-man. Now this form of despair goes practically unnoticed in the world. Precisely by losing himself in this way, such a person gains all that is required for a flawless performance in everyday life, yes, for making a great success out of life.…Far from anyone thinking him to be in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be. Naturally the world has generally no understanding of what is truly horrifying. The despair that not only does not cause any inconvenience in life, but makes life convenient and comfortable, is naturally enough in no way regarded as despair.” 

―Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

 

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

 

“The same thing happened to me that, according to legend, happened to Parmeniscus, who in the Trophonean cave lost the ability to laugh but acquired it again on the island of Delos upon seeing a shapeless block that was said to be the image of the goddess Leto. When I was very young, I forgot in the Trophonean cave how to laugh; when I became an adult, when I opened my eyes and saw actuality, then I started to laugh and have never stopped laughing since that time. I saw that the meaning of life was to make a living, its goal to be- come a councilor, that the rich delight of love was to acquire a well-to-do girl, that the blessedness of friendship was to help each other in financial difficulties, that wisdom was whatever the majority assumed it to be, that enthusiasm was to give a speech, that courage was to risk being fined ten dollars, that cordiality was to say "May it do you good" after a meal, that piety was to go to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.”

― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life