You Can't Save America by Being an Informed Citizen

The gun debate is one of America’s most polarized issues. Large mass shootings always bring this debate to the forefront, eliciting strong emotions from both sides of the aisle. Many believe the answer is stricter gun laws, while others see this as government overreach and believe average citizens can better protect themselves by keeping and bearing arms. I argue that neither of these choices are likely to be effective, and put forward a third option that better aligns to how information and decision making work in systems that survive. 

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The gun debate is one of America's most polarized issues. Large mass shootings always bring this debate to the forefront, eliciting strong emotions from both sides of the aisle. Many believe the answer is stricter gun laws. While others see this as government overreach and believe average citizens can better protect themselves by keeping and bearing arms. I argue that neither of these choices are likely to be effective and put forward a third option that better aligns to how information and decision making work in systems that survive. I'm Sean mcclure, you're listening to non trivial. So the gun debate in America is obviously a very hot topic, the gun problem, the gun issue, whatever you wanna call it, you know, uh uh America has had access to all kinds of firearms and, and when I say access really the everyday citizen, right? And uh and the question is, is that the right thing to do is, is it, does it make sense to have a lot of people or your everyday kind of average Joe have access to these uh lethal weapons? And does that, you know, does that cause crime, does that make crime get worse or does it prevent crime? Does it allow people to maybe protect themselves? You know, this debate has been going on really since the founding of the country, the, the gun is a, is a tool where all you gotta do is retract your index finger and then you can actually end someone's life, right? So it's a very powerful tool and the decision as to where, you know, the, the, the control of those weapons should lie. Should it be, you know, more with the government in kind of a centralized control fashion? Should it be with the everyday citizen? Maybe it's something in between uh the book I'm going to be u uh I'm going to use to anchor. Today's conversation is Armed in America by Patrick J Charles armed in America. A history of gun rights from the colonial militias to concealed carry. It's a really good book. He's really done his research. He's got this big chunk of notes and references in the back. You can see he, you know, he's really applied the historical methodology, you know, correctly, arguably to, to the uh interpretation of the second amendment to the history of gun laws and really trying to understand, you know, what did the, you know, the, the, the forefathers mean when they were talking about uh gun rights and the right to keep and carry arms? And uh we're gonna talk about how important it is to interpret the, you know, uh second amendment correctly how it has been done through history, how that kind of changed, how that's led to a lot of the polarization that we now see on the issue like we see in so many issues, we live in a very polarized uh world now, right? And kind of left versus right. We'll see how it kind of led to that. I will, I will peel back and, and expose what I think are the core mechanisms at play here as I always do in nontrivial. And then as I always do, I will use those mechanisms to make my argument as to what I think is a good solution as opposed to the usual two solutions, which is either kind of give everybody guns or impose some harsh regulations or something kind of in between. But I don't think those are particularly effective solutions for reasons that I will talk about. I don't think they respect the way that, you know, systems work and decision making works and aggregations and information and all that kind of good stuff. So I'll use my, my kind of mechanistic understanding of situations like this to, to put forward, but I think it's a better solution. So let us begin by uh you know, and again, that book is Armed In America by Patrick J Charles. Go ahead and check that out. It's really uh a well piece uh a well researched piece of work. And I think regardless of which side of the uh you know, kind of divide you are on or whether or not you sit in the middle or whatever and go ahead and check that out to get a good history of gun rights in America. Um So this really comes down to the second amendment, right? When people are talking about uh the right to keep and carry arms, they're really, uh, you know, kind of alluding or going back to the second amendment, this piece of the constitution that is supposed to be, you know, a piece of writing that we can rely on to, to, to know what, you know, the original founders of the country were thinking and what they were saying. And if this is, you know, still the law, still the rule, then, then we should just follow what the second amendment says and then we know what to do, right. Second amendment says, things like a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. So you've got some interesting language in there. You've got a well regulated militia. Let's talk about what that is for a second. But, and also the right of the people to keep and bear arms. So keep arms means to keep it in your home essentially. So you can protect your family. Bear arms means you can carry it from place to place. Ok. So to keep and bear arms, keep it in your home, carry it around. Well, the language in the Second amendment is not something that is super obvious. And the reason is because this is the change, the language goes through changes uh throughout the decades and throughout the centuries, right? This is what happens linguistically. Uh you know, words don't mean the same thing as they used to. They, they sometimes they do, but a lot of times they don't, you know, there's a different kind of setting, there's different context. You know, we live in a different world then we lived in back then. So when you, when you read things like the people, you know, and well regulated and infringed, you know, you got to really think about what these words mean. Remember in my democracy episode, I was actually talking about, um, you know, the, the, you know, the founders were kind of laying down, you know, the constitution and talking about the rights of the people and that they, you know, they essentially going to be free and, and then, you know, we said, well, we don't really know what they meant by the people. Like, is that every single person that lives in the country as long as you were a citizen? Or is it kind of the elites, is it kind of the people that are more like the founders? Right? And we kind of argued for the latter, uh you know, based on, on John King's book, uh the life and death of democracy. So this is, this is what happens with language. And the reason why this is important to understand is because we cannot just call upon a historical document and say now we know the facts. It's just not that simple. You can't just say, well, this is what the second amendment says, which is true, that's a fact. And therefore, and then after the, therefore, this is when you get in trouble because now what you're doing is interpretation and it's the interpretation of the second amendment that is going to cause a lot of issues because we don't really know what they meant by the, nobody really has the answer to this about what they meant by the people who they meant by the people. And so as Patrick Charles argues, he says, if you really do the proper historical methodology and really take a look at what people were, you know, what, what language meant at the time and how people were interpreting that Second Amendment, they didn't mean the people as, as kind of the everyday citizen or the average Joe to keep and carry arms. They were actually talking about a well regulated militia, which of course is also some language that appears in the second amendment, right, a well regulated militia. So a well regulated militia. What is that? Well, you can kind of think of things and we'll do this throughout this episode in, in, in terms of three levels, three levels where you know the the decision of what to do with a powerful weapon, like firearms can lay that, that the the decision making can happen at the indi individualistic or granular level. That's the everyday citizen of society that you me, your teacher, whoever anybody can have the right to keep and carry arms, they can make life and death decisions with that tool link with those tools. That's the individualistic granular level, the individual, OK. You can interpret the people to mean that, which kind of makes sense. I mean, the way we use the people to pay seems to be kind of more individualistic, right? The other is at the very top level, which would be something like the government, right? The government or a standing army, right? Um You know, you, you gotta imagine there, there was actually debate originally uh in, in the founding of the United States of America, whether or not they even needed a standing army, which kind of sounds funny now. But you gotta remember we talked about this in the democracy episode as well that the United States of America is geographically isolated and uh they didn't really have intentions of going to war or really getting into too many armed conflicts or maybe other than maybe just some kind of internal stuff, right? They've got the battleships over in Britain, protecting them. And uh and the only kind of the only foreign policy by George Washington was basically, you know, let's not go to war, right? Uh To, to paraphrase it. So they're geographically isolated. They had no intentions. Of course, the world wars and other conflicts changed all that. So, so, ok, you got the individual, individualistic granular everyday person that could maybe make the life and death decisions with that tool, what they should do, you know what they, what can they, what can they own the ownership of the firearms can apply to that level or firearms should be more top level government controlled, you know, the standing army has control. And then you've got something in between what you would call a well regulated militia. A militia is a organization or a group that is formed by everyday citizens, but those citizens are trained specifically to use firearms. Ok. So knowledge plays a really, really big role, training plays a really big role. It's not just the everyday Joe grabbing a firearm and then maybe having, you know, a little test that they pass and then they have access to the firearm. It is a group that is, is dedicated to, to constant training and education in how to use the firearms and how to use them in, in specific situations. Uh, you know, if, if citizens are being threatened or whatever, so that, that is the militia. Well, you know, Patrick Charles argues that if you really look at the second amendment and you understand the language of the time what they were referring to when they say the people have the right to keep and bear arms is they meant the people of the militia, the militia has the right to be armed. Ok? And that is the people because it's formed of citizen, but it wasn't the people as an everyday average Joe can go get access to a firearm just so that they can protect themselves. Ok. So that was the interpretation for the majority of us history. Uh, you know, according to Patrick Charles, and if you really look at how people were talking in the day, so, so that's the, you know, the, the quote unquote, correct interpretation of the second amendment. Ok. According to Patrick Charles, now you can imagine that people start to fight against this a little bit and really where this change is, is the passing of the Sullivan Act, the Sullivan Act in New York State 1911. And it basically started to put uh rules and regulations in place that, that forced you to get a permit in order to purchase and carry firearms. And so now we're starting to see some of these and there are different reasons why the Sullivan Act was enacted. You know, you've got, you know, certain kind of high profile cases maybe where people are getting killed. And then there's this kind of public outcry as there is, right? When, like I said in the introduction, whenever a big event happens, there's a public outcry and that public outcry causes people to say, hey, let's do something or just do something. You hear that all the time, right. Quote, unquote, just to do something the government means needs to do something. What are they going to do? And so they, they, you know, being a government, they have to react. I mean, it's, it's kind of the same as COVID. Right? Something happens. It's scary. It's in the news, just do something you're supposed to do something. And so the government has to kind of have these, these reactions for better or worse. So the Sullivan Act was passed and then you have organizations like the NR A as NR A starts to get, you know, the National Rifle Association starts to form, you've got a few other organizations in there but you start to get to get these kind of gun rights, uh, people or activists getting together. Uh, and they were predominantly just about, um, you know, gun safety and marksmanship and hunting. It was never really about trying to squash regulation or trying to go against legislature that, that was trying to instill more gun laws. In fact, they were even a little bit in favor of that too because it was all about just, you know, organizations like the NR A was just, you know, we want to have the right to own our guns, but we just want it for hunting. We want it for, to be able to go outdoors and we do think people should be using these safely. And in fact, we want to be a part of teaching people how to use these safely. But as more and more legislation started to get passed, that brought more and more rules, uh, around how you could purchase firearms, use the carry arms, how you could keep and carry or not those firearms. Then these groups like the NR A start to become more uh in opposition to that to those pieces of legislation. Ok. And, and again, you've got some high profile cases that are happening, but really, you know, overseas, you know, people were starting to view the United States as kind of the country of homicides, quote unquote. You know, there are a lot of, there's just a lot of violence in the United States throughout the 18th century, uh 18 hundreds and 19 hundreds, right? 19/20 century. And uh and, and you know, the government, the forces that be had to figure out a way to deal with that, right? And obviously a lot of those uh crimes were being committed with weapons, right? Pistols, firearms. And so the regulations were starting to get passed. So you got the Sullivan Act that comes into play, then you've got groups like the NR A starting to form and come together and really kind of get themselves organized and as opposed to just promoting the everyday safe use of firearms, it became more about squashing bills, squashing bills and what the nr a very, very good at. So if you ever want to like, look at an organization that kind of mobilizes itself against, uh for or against bills that are being passed, you know, look at the NR A whether you love them or hate them. I mean, they were very, very good at this. They mobilized their members, they would become aware of the bills that were being part of the discussion immediately. They would, you know, basically create these pamphlets or newsletters that would go out to all their members and their members would be mobilized to start, you know, writing or talking to, you know, whatever congressman or people of the Congress, whatever they had to do to basically start to squash that bill. And you, you, you have that this is in stark contrast to, you know, the general public who is becoming more and more aware obviously of the violence in the country and the overwhelming majority of people wanted more gun regulations but, but groups like the NR A started to push against that. Um And so, you know, even though you've got the public really wanting a lot of gun regulation, you still get a lot of the bills getting squashed because organizations like the NR A are just so effective at doing it. So they mobilize their forces, they mobilize their forces. And there's, you know, it's really kind of interesting history that Patrick Charles in his book, Arms in America goes through about the nr A how they get together. They become more organized. They become, uh, quite intelligent actually, in the way that they, they squash the bills and they become very, very effective at what they're doing. They got their own, you know, quote unquote propaganda. You know, they, they, they do a lot of this political straddling again. It's not politicized as it's not very polarized as it is today. It wasn't more of a left or a right issue. You know, sometimes, you know, it would be, uh, people in congress that were on the left that they would agree with and sometimes it would be people on the right. Uh, eventually you have big assassin assassinations like Martin Luther King, Junior, Robert Kennedy, right? 1968. Um, of course, before that you had John F Kennedy. So you've got some big assassinations in there that are, are bringing, you know, gun regulations to the attention of the everyday public. And, uh, you know, you've got JFK who was assassinated by, you know, this Italian kind of carbide weapon and, and he was actually JFK was trying to pass a bill at the time or just previous to that, um, to not allow, uh, that, that specific type of Italian weapon to enter the country. And so there's this kind of question in the public. Well, you know, maybe he wouldn't have been assassinated if that bill had been passed and then you've got this nr a group who's squashing those bills and not, you know, saying, look, that's gonna restrict our rights. Uh, you know, we, we're patriotic, we have rights to these weapons so they keep squash. So basically what's happening is the public is starting to view the NR A as a quote unquote gun lobby because that's really what they're doing, right. They're just constantly lobbying against these bills. Uh They start to take kind of a sour note, they don't look very good and this is kind of thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, right? Those assassinations are happening in the sixties and then you start moving into and, and, and just gonna wrap up a bit of history here, the seventies and the eighties and that's kind of getting into the golden age of the NR A and what's happening here? Remember, I mentioned that the overwhelming amount of research, if not all of it dedicated to the interpretation of the second amendment said that that was really about a well regulated militia. It was not about the everyday citizen, right? It was the a well regulated militia that is meant to have those firearms. Well, the NR A is actually able to switch the research on this. There's this kind of panacea of researchers that they helped fund and they say like we're gonna revisit this because we don't think that's the right way to interpret it. Interpret the Second Amendment which is fair. I mean, you're allowed to do that, you can go do your own research, but they start funding that research and they start to kind of reinterpret the second Amendment and all of a sudden they flip the amount of research, uh, 2 to 1, meaning there's twice as much research. Now, that's, that suggests historical research that suggests the second amendment should be interpreted as the, the right to keep and carry arms for the individual, not a well regulated militia, but that most granular individualistic level of society. And so that they flipped that 2 to 1. So you can see the power of groups like the NR A, these, these, uh you know, essentially what are lobby groups which they eventually kind of embraced the seventies and eighties. You know, NR A basically said, you know what? Yeah, we're, we are lobbying, that's what we do because we think that's what's right. And the, you know, the public kind of kept giving them that moniker. They weren't registered as a true lobby for tax reasons, but they eventually kind of filled that role. But you can see the power of mobilizing people within a group for political reasons, of funding certain research. And then we get to this point where now you've got the public who's largely in favor of as they have been kind of throughout history of uh of gun regulations. But then you've got this other big chunk of people actually, the public starts to become very divided, who are in favor of, you know, the patriotic right to own to keep and carry firearms, right? And that's because now they can the the the the people are getting influenced by the research that's available, right by the, you know, the propaganda that's being used. And so now it's becoming very, very divided. So, so lobbying is very effective, the mobilization of those people to switch and squash bills are very, very effective. Um It, it starts to become the NR A and the gun rights start to become more associated with those on the right republicans for a, a variety of historic reasons. And then it became a left and versus right issue. Uh You've got research to call up on and on and on. And so now we're at the stage where, where it's a very divided issue. A lot of people think, yes, everybody has the right to keep and carry arms. It means the individual, that's the correct way to interpret the second amendment. And I can call upon research to show you that that is the case. And then you got the other side of things that think, no, this is something we do. So we don't really talk about militias anymore and I'll get back to this in a second. It's something that the government should impose that top level that we talked about. That's where the decision making for something as powerful as firearms should be held and, and the government can decide, you know, what kind of guns we have access to and, and, and on and on. And now we've got this kind of left versus right issue of gun rights in America and there's a lot more to it. So, so go check out armed in America by Patrick Charles. It's really, really interesting kind of breakdown of different bills and different tactics that were used. And uh with regards to the calling upon the research, you know, I wanna, I, I say a lot you should not, this is a, a good example of why you should not use research to rest your arguments on, don't use research. And I know that sounds funny, almost bad, right? Like what do you mean? Like, I want to be an informed citizen so I want to be able to call upon, I mean, isn't the best thing I could do is to go look at, you know, whether it's scientific research or historical research, you know, things that academic institutions have put in place from a research perspective and then use that to base my arguments on. Right. It seems like a, a good thing to do that would make me a truly informed citizen. But unfortunately, there's all kinds of problems in there, there's all kinds of uh you know, funding for the studies, there's lobby groups, there's, there's deep bias in that and what you'll find with studies is they flip flop back and forth. I've talked about this before. You know, you could argue, you know, a vegan versus a carnivore maybe is getting into a debate. And the, you know, the carnivore might be saying, well, actually vegans kill more animals than carnivores and, and the vegan might be saying, no, that's not true. I, I found a paper where we don't kill as many animals as you do. You know, and, and it goes back and forth and goes back and forth or you can talk about, you know, saturated fast and nutritional and everybody is going to be able to find studies to support what they want because it's going to flip and flop. The reason why it flips and flops is because of something I like to call proxy distance. So any time you are observing something or making a measurement, there's always a, it, it, it, whatever it is you're looking at is a proxy to the true underlying reality. OK? That's always the case. Now in simple systems, that proxy distance is very small. You know, some of the more simpler physics that you would do where it's basically, you know, bodies acting in vacuums and forces and vectors. You know, it's, it's quite close presumably to the underlying reality. Even though there is still a proxy there, you don't have direct access to the underlying reality, but whatever it is you're measuring is pretty close, goes to the reality, right? But you start getting into chemistry and then biology and then higher, higher complexity all the way to sociology and economics, whatever it is you're looking at observing more and more interpretation has to be layered on to that because whatever it is you're measuring or observing is a proxy that could be quite far from the true underlying reality that we don't have access to. Of course, we don't have access to it for those causal opacity reasons that I've talked about in the past, right? Complex systems don't, don't, uh, condescend to give you the information that's directly attached to reality. So anyway, proxy distance just means whatever you're looking at, it's really just a proxy for something else and it might be not that close to the something else that you think you're measuring. Ok. So, so this is the issue when you get into conflict, you know, is red wine good for you is dark chocolate good for you. Is vegan diet good. Is carnivore diet good. How should we interpret the second amendment? Right? You start to get very, very complex issues and you can go do all the research you want. There's nothing in the statistical arsenal that's going to help you totally isolate on one side. And we know that because that's, you see that it flips and flops and flip, take any issue, you'll see it's flipping and flopping on both sides for any, uh, reasonably nontrivial complex issue. So you shouldn't use studies to anchor your argument. Now, I'm gonna have an answer to this, that I'll wrap up later because obviously that kind of begs the question. What the heck am I supposed to use if I, you know, shouldn't I be an informed citizen and shouldn't I look at scientific and historical research to base that? And I'm not saying it's completely useless, but I'll, I'll tell you a much better approach. But, ok, so, so we talked about the second Amendment, we talked about the interpretation, the fact that we can't use the second amendment as just this historical document, this factual statement that says tells us what we're supposed to do and then it tells us what the founders meant, right? Language changes goes through linguistics goes to different contexts and we can't just take those words to mean what they do today. So we got to do a lot of interpretation on top of that. The proxy distance is very, very large and stuff like that. We talked about the NR A and how they became a lobby group and how they really started to, to just be very, very effective at squashing bills. And you've got all these kind of, you know, you got different assassinations and violence happening and, and yada, yada yada goes to the big polarized setting that we have now, what should we do about the gun problem in America? Well, what I wanna do now is peel back the, the mechanisms like I do in nontrivial. This is the point, right? I, I step back from these situations and I look at them agnostically and I say, look, I don't care if it's about the gun rights. I don't care if it's about abortion. Maybe we're talking about religion, maybe we're talking about science, technology at, at, at, at some level, it doesn't actually matter. Let's step back and understand the four, the fundamental core properties of these types of situations and then use those to start to base our arguments and base our thoughts around and that's a much more effective wise thing to do. So uh let's start with the fact that uh decision making is typically best done at the aggregate level. OK. So I use ant colonies again, I do this a lot just because you can think of them as individual agents or, or you know, pieces that come together into a system and they interact together to solve a very hard problem. OK. So you've got simple problems, right? Which are kind of things that are not overly complex. Uh They're deterministic, you can easily kind of design a solution too and then you've got hard problems that have no obvious solution to them. They're ope you typically have to embrace a lot of trial and error in order to solve them. Well, ants and all kinds of examples in nature, if not all of nature regularly solves hard problems, right? One of those hard problems is trying to, you know, locate resources, food and they want to do this by, you know, essentially finding the shortest path between two points. And I talked about this in the past. Ok. So a lot of ants get together and at the local level, the in the meaning the individual ants, they're actually pretty quote unquote, dumb, right? They just have these local interaction rules where, you know, they kind of come, well, don't just bump into an ant kind of go around it. Uh follow an ant by its smell, right? They release these pheromones. So if I keep following these ants by their smell, um I'll be able to just, well, I'll just follow them and that's it. There's nothing out there, there's no reason behind it other than just follow the pheromones. But at the aggregate level, when you have thousands and thousands of ants going through these little local interaction rules, what ends up happening is they solve a really hard problem, which is to find the shortest path between two points in a complex environment. That's because the shortest path is going to have those pheromones linger in the air longer because you have more ants statistically traveling the shortest path and you do the longer path. So anyway, without getting into too much details, uh if you can kind of envision that or you can go look it up, but basically what happens is you got all these anti they're going around, they're releasing pheromones. And what will emerge out of that is the decision if you will, of which path to take, which ends up being the, the best or one of the best you could possibly take in a environment. That's actually a very hard problem to solve. If you try to just step back and you try to look at your environment and you try to reason about which way you would take, you wouldn't solve that problem effectively. But if you just release, you know, thousands of ants and you allow them to have these little simple rules with, with respect to following pheromones, they will solve that problem. OK. So decision making for really, really hard problems, which is what we see in society. I talk about increasing the complexity, you know, going from chemistry to biology, getting into economics and sociology and all these things, you know, all the way to history, you know, these are really, really complex things, interpretations, tons of factors, tons of variables coming in lots of interacting pieces, you know, those solutions of what to do in these situations to solve these hard problems have to come about by uh methods similar to the problem, you have to have the decision making happen at the aggregate, the decisions have to emerge, the decisions have to emerge. OK? So that, that's a point I wanna make. That's just, it doesn't matter. We're talking about abortion, gun law, whatever it is, right? Whatever the issue is you step back, we know that that's how hard problems get solved. Right. Well, this means let, let, let's bring it back to gun laws now and, and you might say, ok, so the first point I'm gonna make then is that, you know, these kind of life and death important decisions, if you will about guns, how to own them, how much should be given, you know, how many rights are this and that, that shouldn't really be done at the individualistic level because that's not the level that we see good decision making take place for really hard problems. And this is a hard problem. It's a, a lot of different factors at play here. The, you know, the guns can be misused, you know, are we talking about just keeping or just carrying? Is it concealed carry? Is it not? What type of weapon? What about the automatic weapons, the semiotic automatic weapons? What about the assault rifles? You know, age limits, uh, 48 hour cool down periods. Should people be able to mail in their, uh, uh their weapon? Can we get it from a different country, can you? So off the end of it, whatever, on and on and on, there's a lot of complexity. There's a lot of factors that go into what is a very, very powerful tool that can very easily end someone else's life. Should that kind of decision making be made at that granular individualistic level? That's kind of of like saying, we've got this really hard problem with what, you know, finding the shortest path in a complex environment. Should we just let the individual ants make that decision? I mean, on the face that sounds pretty stupid because we know ants are pretty dumb. We don't think about humans as being dumb, but quote unquote, they kind of are and I don't mean that in a kind of derogatory sense, I just mean, we should think of us as individual agents where our intelligence as humanity comes about. Not because we are individuals who are smart. Remember I talked about in that episode on there are no giants, right? There are only shoulders, you know, everything that, that we do as society is because of our social ability to interact, all the inventions that you know, that it doesn't matter if it's a theory of relativity, it doesn't matter if it's Edisons, you know, light bulb doesn't matter what it is. The the inventions, the innovations, the technological progress is because we work together so effectively the social interaction that allows these things to emerge. It's not individuals who are doing it. So to say that the individual should have the ability to, to kind of make decisions around this powerful tool and and what is really a hard problem with respect to how to best use that tool? I mean, think about the situation you would be in, right? You're the teacher of a school and somebody breaks in. Now you're the one who is responsible for, you know, figuring out when, when to pull out the gun, when to shoot, how to protect the Children, how not to hit the Children, how to do new to all this kind of stuff. Should that really be done at the individualistic level? At the granular level? I would argue. No, but now you might be thinking, ok, so you, you're obviously siding on the other side of the debate. So you think the government should just, you know, put a bunch of restrictive, restrictive gun laws in place and that should be that. Well, there's a problem with that side too. Ok. So again, just to really recap really quickly, I said decision making for really hard problems should happen at the aggregate level. It should, it should emerge from many, many people interacting together. So individuals shouldn't really be making their own decision with respect to gun rights to the gun laws. In my opinion, how to use those guns, yada yada. Now, the other side of that is you could say, ok, so I guess the government should have, you know, should be the decision making body. Well, at first blush, that seems kind of true because the government is supposed to be the aggregate decision maker, right? We vote people into power. We elect those individuals and those are the people who are supposed to take, you know, the pop. Remember we talked about the indices of representativeness in the democracy episode, right? They're supposed to represent the popularity, they're supposed to have representation on universality on goodness, right? They're supposed to capture the aggregate most popular kind of emerged emergent if you will decision that's made by the group of people. So the aggregate decision maker, which is where we want decisions to be made for hard problems should be reflected in the government. But think about the world that we're living in now, we're living in a very kind of post truth world, right? We've got a lot of misinformation, disinformation, false news, propaganda, both government and citizens with different agendas. We've got social media, we've got all kinds of uh noise in the channel and when you add a lot of noise into the channel, the otherwise really good aggregate decision maker like the government starts to suffer because democracy doesn't really work under those situations. Think about it, even if you have really, really good representativeness, right? People are, people are looking at the world, they're on social media, they're making their decisions, they think of themselves as informed decisions and then they elect those leaders into power and those powers, those powers that be are reflecting those wishes of the public, that's all true under representative democracy. And I still think it is largely true today. But if the opinions of the people are flawed or thwarted or, or they're, they're having all kinds of bad misinterpretations because of the noise in the channel. Then even with perfect representativeness, the government isn't really doing what it's supposed to do. It's not able to be a good aggregate decision maker. OK. I'll use some examples. You know, we got the Roe V Wade, uh the whole abortion issue going on. You know, you, you could say, well, I ran, you know, a Gallup poll, I ran a poll and I found out that the overwhelming majority of people are in favor of the original kind of Roe V Wade and it shouldn't be overturned or whatever side you want to take. But then you realize, yeah, but people don't actually really understand that, that case. Do they, do? They really understand what we do, they understand what it stands for. And if you actually talk to people, you realize that most people don't, what they really have is kind of the sensationalist kind of social media version that was projected to them. And that probably already resonated with their kind of underlying world view and that's their take on it. Right. And, and that could be for both sides of the equation, whether you're for or against it. Uh, you know, Florida's don't say gay bill. Right. Well, it doesn't even talk about gay, doesn't really talk about that word. It doesn't say that in there and yet people call it the quote unquote, don't say gay bill. So the overwhelming majority of people think that's what it's about and now they're starting to vote based on an opinion that is, that is that is kind of nonsensical, right? Like it's, it's not even based on reality. So this is the problem is you is that the general public will form opinions in a very, very noisy, noisy channel. And those opinions are used to elect people into power into power under the mechanism of representative democracy. But the represent the the representativeness in representative democracy to get this to work as an aggregate decision maker is a necessary but insufficient condition because the other condition needed here is to have the general public know what the hell they're talking about. And the general public today today's climate find it very, very hard to know what the hell they're talking about and it's not to their own fault. It's because of social media, it's because of misinformation, disinformation, post truth propaganda agen, it's everywhere and the internet has exacerbated this problem. And so we are, we are living in such a noisy channel if you will, that we're not getting a good signal from the environment. OK? And it's really hard. So, so the representative democracy is not enough of a mechanism to guarantee that the aggregate decision making going back to gun laws should be done by the government because because they're representing the the the so whatever the public is thinking, they don't really know what they're talking about anyway. They don't know how to discern or discriminate among the information that they should to become a what uh uh uh an informed citizen. It's almost like uh I would argue that you cannot be an informed citizen anymore, right? And then we go back to the problems with the research. Research is getting funded by different groups. It's not like, oh, this is statistically this and therefore it's true because, you know, take the second amendment interpretation. You've got research on both sides, take dark chocolate, red wine, carnivore diet, vegan diet. You've always got research on both sides of the equation. It's always gonna keep changing. It's always gonna keep flipping and flopping. Remember I talked about that proxy distance being very large. You cannot be a informed citizen today. That is a meaningless statement. I would argue, OK, the channel's too noisy. So I'm arguing that you need to aggregate decision making. I'm arguing that it doesn't make sense for gun decisions if you will to be made at the granular level. So I don't think the individual interpretation of the second Amendment is a good one. I don't think individuals should really be getting access to any guns and being able to, to, to defend themselves in situations. Would I be able to defend myself in that? I don't know, you grab a gun and start acting like James Bond. I mean, come on, these are, these are really hard complex situations. I don't think everybody's trained for that, but the government which otherwise would be a good aggregate decision maker. That mechanism is, is deeply, deeply flawed now because of the noise in the channel. So I don't think they're the answer either. OK. Um You can kind of think of it as imagine taking an eye dropper to the ant colony and that eye dropper contains pheromone and I'm dripping pheromone where it's not supposed to be. And now the ants start going off. Course. right? And they start doing wrong things. Remember, I also talked about a few episodes back um about the ant meal or the death spiral, right? The cost of complexity, right? So ants will pick up on pheromones from an ant that's slightly deviated from the right path. And then other ants follow and other ants follow it. And all of a sudden you've got hundreds of ants going around a circle around a circle and they eventually exhaust and die, right? That's called a death spiral or an ant male go look that up and you, and you can say, well, that's so dumb. I mean, why would ants be created like that? Why would they or why would they have evolved like that? Uh to, to kind of just spin off into death. But that's the cost of complexity. That local level dumbness is really, really needed to get really, really good aggregate level decision making, which is what ants do at the top level. OK. Stand too close things look crazy. But you step back, you get the bigger picture, you see why things are OK. So let's just uh kind of wrap this up and move into what I think is a better solution. So again, just really quickly, we talked about the second amendment is really what anchors this debate, this conversation, but it really, really comes down to the interpretation and that interpretation is gonna flip and flop on both sides. We've got lobby groups like the nr A that are able to work against these bills, even if the public overwhelmingly wants something. And we've got the, their ability to kind of do a flip on, on what the research says. So, and, and then you add into that the fact that from a mechanistic standpoint, we, we want aggregate level decision making from a systems perspective, we know that that's really good. And so you might think that means the government should be making decisions about both firearms, but we've got these noisy channels. And so the mechanism of representative democracy really breaks down because even with perfect representativeness, you're representing really kind of dumb misle misleading or, or uh just bad opinions of the public because the, the, the general public is not able to be informed citizens. So it doesn't matter if you got the representation there, the noisy channel precludes the ability to do that. OK. And uh and so now we got to think about what, what a solution might be. Um So ok. If, if, if, what I'm saying now is we can't have the individuals making the decisions but the government is also, uh, not the answer then, then, then what is the answer? Well, I think we need to revisit this idea of a well regulated militia. Now, you could say, well, we have militias today. Right. I mean, um, we've got those private militias that happen where people kind of get together and they're just, they're, they're, they're citizens and they're gun lovers and they probably have some opinions, you know, against government tyranny and things like this. And, uh, yeah, ok. But that's not a true, well regulated militia. It's not standardized, it's not regulated, it's not really what we're talking about. Right? And then you could say, well, we have, um, we've got the National Guard, right, the National Guard. But it kind of fits the technical definition of, of today's militia. But that's not what the founders meant when they said about regulated militia because that's not composed of citizens, right? The National Guard is the army and that's a, a tie to the government, a tie to the army. A soldier is not an everyday citizen. What I'm talking about is, is more what the founders had in mind. And you gotta imagine that founders had these in mind for a reason. They were coming from countries that had a lot of monarchy, a lot of centralization of power. Um, a lot of things that were not going good in their country. And so for them to think up a well regulated militia as a solution to something as powerful as firearms was probably there for a reason. Now, Patrick Charles does talk about the logistics of the militia ended up kind of being hard and it started to kind of degrade over time. But again, that might have been deviating from the true dream of what a true well regulated militia is. Ok. So, remember I talked about, you've got three levels to think about where the decision making for firearms need to take place. It's either at the individ individualistic everyday citizen level, which is one interpretation of the second amendment or it's at the government top level, which, which, which would be kind of the aggregate decision maker. But again, we've got problems. So I've argued we've got problems with both of those in the middle. That kind of third option is a well regulated militia, which does not exist today that the private militias, that's, that's not a true well regulated militia. It's not regulated, it's not standardized, it's, it's got no standards about how to do the training and, and what to do in situations. And then you've got the National Guard, which would be the government and, and that's not good either. That's, that's, you know, kind of directly tied to a standing army. That's not the everyday citizen. A true well regulated militia, something that we don't have today would be comprised of just citizens. So you'd get the representation of true citizens. It would be kind of extra parliamentary. Remember in the democracy episode, we said that if you want to in a monetary democracy sense, make sure the democracy is going well, you have to have a body form that isn't part of that democratic group. The the usual government has to be extra parliamentary. So it can be kind of be like a watchdog on the process of democracy. This is somewhat similar to that the, the a true well regulated militia would kind of be extra parliamentary or extra governmental. It wouldn't be the government. It might have an arm's length connection to the government to help with the standardization of the regulation of the training, but it would not be the government. And the reason why this is important is because if you look at the true goal, when you talk about the gun law, the gun problem, the gun debate, what it really comes down to is two things, one everyday citizens want to know that they can protect themselves. And two, we want to have a check on power so that tyranny can't happen. Ok? And that, that, that's been right from the founding of the United States of America. That was always the case. Citizens have to be able to protect themselves. We have to have a check on tyranny and those are not bad reasons to do things I mean, we got all kind of historic precedent, you know, the majority of human civilization was tyranny, right? Or some kind of centralization of power or dictatorship monarchy. I mean, that's where these, you know, founders were coming from, right, immigrating out from those countries and, and starting something new. So it makes sense like, yes, we have to protect ourselves and yes, we have to check our own power. Those are the true reasons. So when we get into the gun debate and people are like, oh, we need to give a little bit maybe to uh certain amount of guns to the individual. But then the government has to con you know, have the, the power for more of the automatic weapons. And then we got, and then, you know, 48 hour cool down period, mail order. What about the foreign weapons? Can they come in? Can we saw off the end? What about the, did, did, did you start nitpicking? Remember when I talked about the rich camp penny pinch whenever you're into a complex situation and you're doing a lot of this penny pinching in between trying to balance both sides. You, you, you, that's not where the solution is gonna exist. You need a paradigm shift. You need to completely revisit the situation, step outside and come in with a completely new paradigm. And I think that's what the true definition of a militia would be as a potential solution to this problem because it kind of sits in the middle. It's not the private militia. It's not the average Joe. It's not the standing, it's not a, something like a standing army. It's not the National Guard, it's not individuals owning guns, it's not the government owning guns. It's, it's a body that is independent really of either, but it's composed of the citizens. So you've got that good representation. I think that is in line with the true, uh you know, goals or reasons that underlie the gun debate, which is again, we need to protect the citizens and we need to avoid tyranny. OK. So you can imagine something like a well regulated militia, let's say it's a group of citizens. Maybe you create this by sortition. Remember the democracy episode, we said that a good way to get, well, the only way to get a true democracy is not by electing representatives, right? But is to do a random sampling from the population. And you can do it in a way where that random sampling is, uh make sure you get a certain number of minorities in there. You know, you kind of get that breakdown that you expect to be represented. But other than that, it's a random sample. So you randomly sample the citizens that have these and obviously the people want to be part of a militia and that group would be well regulated. They'd be have standardized training, they'd know how to use firearms, they'd know how to handle themselves in specific situations. But it's also so you got that good citizen representation, you got the random sampling, you could put these people potentially into schools. And you might say, well, I don't want people with firearms in schools. Well, we can't pretend that people are not going to own firearms. You can't, sorry, we can't pretend that criminals are not going to get access to firearms. We know that banning doesn't work. I talked about that in my technology is humanity um, episode and I talked about the simultaneous invention mechanism, right, where something's always gonna pop up somewhere. Uh, the banning doesn't really make sense. Uh, criminals are going to get access to weapons no matter what. So let's, let's not be overly quixotic here. Let's be realistic and understand that that's going to be the case. But if guns are gonna find their ways into schools, uh, you know, should it really be the, you know, the teacher who has a glock under his deck that whips it out and, you know, you know, as if he's some kind of superhero to protect the Children or should it be a well regulated militia who has the training has the understanding. It's not gonna be a perfect solution. But I think that makes a lot more sense for the protection of Children in schools or people in public places. Ok. So that, that satisfies the, protecting the public peace. It also satisfies the avoiding uh, the potential avoiding avoidance of tyranny because it's not the government. And so you can imagine that the, the, the militia, the well regulated militia is having their own votes, they're making their own decisions, you know, they might decide. Do you think that, you know, the government is, is, is starting to overreach, you know, but it would be a group of citizens that is randomly sampled that's making that decision. Ok. And here's the real kind of key here is is if you were to do something like forming a well regulated militia by sortition. By random sampling, we know that random sampling is robust to noise, not perfectly but is much more robust to noise. Meaning the biases that people have the agendas, people have the misinformation, disinformation. The random sample helps protect against that representative democracy does not help protect against that because the election mechanism is bringing in people's informed, quote unquote decisions into power, but those decisions are flawed. But if you randomly sample the group that's making the decision, it helps kind of cancel out a lot of those biases. OK. So the random sampling to create the uh the well regulated militia could potentially help be more robust to the noise of, of social media, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and all that. And that would be what you'd want in the aggregate decision maker. Again, we want decisions to be made in aggregate. OK. So that's my my basic solution. So we talked about the interpretation of the second amendment. We talked about how, you know, the NR A and the lobbying and all this kind of led to a lot of the polarization we see today, we said that decision making needs to be made at the aggregate level. We said that you might think that means therefore, the answer is obvious individuals shouldn't be making those decisions. We should leave it to the government. But the representative democratic mechanism that underlies the government is flawed if you have a lot of noise in the channel, which is what we see today. And so, uh you know, II, I obviously led that into uh the, the fact that a well regulated militia might be kind of a nice third option. It's kind of a paradigm shift. It's not about how much does the government get or how many do citizens get. It's a completely extra parliamentary group of people that come together, you do it in a random sampling fashion so that it's more robust to the noise of misinformation. And I think it could satisfy ultimately, the two goals that you really, really want to have when it comes to the, the gun debate, which is to protect the everyday citizen and also put a check on power when it comes to tyranny. OK. So something to think about, I'm sure there's all kinds of logistical challenges to forming a well regulated militia. But I think that's a, a true regulated militia is something that we should revisit. Uh, as an idea today, I just want to end off by saying that really what this is, is the difference between being an informed citizen and a wise citizen. I don't think you can really be an informed citizen today. I think that notion is very problematic because misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, it's very, you know, social media, you're getting pulled in different directions. All these different agendas are, are out there. They're trying to thwart you. It's kind of like the eye dropper of pheromone is dropping into our ant colony and it's leading us to all these different directions. So when you form an opinion on something, whether that's Roe V Wade, whether that's the don't say gay bill, whether that's something related to gun laws, gun rights, you're probably your, your quote unquote informed uh opinion is, is probably deeply flawed and including myself in that. If I, if I'm only gonna use search and I'm only gonna use what I read about in social media to form my opinions, that's going to be deeply flawed. I don't think you can be an informed citizen, but you can be a wise citizen and to be a wise citizen. That means to look at the properties of these situations of these systems, step back from it and say, here's what we do know about how information and how systems work, how, you know, when groups get together, how decision making happens, we know that as general timeless, profound truths, these take place in these types of situations. And now I can set my opinions on top of that. So I don't have to go chase research. I don't have to go chase a bunch of opinions on social media. I can say, hey, you know, in this case, this is the gun law or maybe it's abortion or maybe it's technology, maybe it's religion, whatever it is. I know I have a good understanding of the timeless truths that exist the patterns that keep reemerging in situations like this. And I'm going to use that as my foundation to sit my to, to, to sit my opinions on top of. So don't be an informed citizen, which I argue is impossible. Be a wise citizen, understand the patterns, understand the timeless truths and use that to create your opinions. Ok. That's all for this episode. Don't forget to subscribe to nontrivial on Patreon. So you get to hear my bonus talk after each episode, just head on over to patreon dot com slash nontrivial and click on the become a Patreon button. Please give non-trivial five stars on Apple podcasts. If you like this episode, please send it to a friend you think might enjoy it. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time you're listening to Nontrivial, the podcast that uncovers the patterns that help you understand and navigate our complex world.