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Comment by ssivark | Hacker News Reader

Cognitive dissonance is extremely "expensive". Deliberately suspending one's beliefs takes very good storytelling and/or resources corresponding to a movie budget. All that so that each person could suspend their beliefs for a couple of hours.

For the kind of long-term emotional investment it takes to do research or develop something new, one (typically) needs to have "buy-in" at an emotional level (aka irrationality). Few humans can invest a lot of their time/effort/resources on things they believe are probably not worth the trouble; sustained dissonance would probably cause burnout.

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> Deliberately suspending one's beliefs takes very good storytelling and/or resources corresponding to a movie budget

I think the "cost" entirely depends on the frame in which the truth is held. It is my belief/hypothesis, that internally visualized truths are cheap to be "rational" in the internal frame. Out here, in reality, those "truths" become irrational, i.e. a lot of expensive work must go into manifesting those truths in the "hardness" of reality.

Irrational truths can manifest "on the cheap" here, I think, if they don't involve speaking for other's truths. Sticking to your own vision, for yourself (or a god), seems to be a common teaching across multiple religions and philosophies. Maybe groups can manifest things cheaply here if it is a common truth for a large amount of the group (and only one or two groups).

I appreciate someone else knows about dissonance. It's a powerful force, when involved in complexity.

"...sustained dissonance would probably cause burnout."

Or religion.

Or lack thereof.

Our innate sense of justice, of how things ought to be, clashes with how things are. Thus we have divine retribution. We ought not die, but we do, so after we die we live supernaturally. Dissonance can give way to religion, generally speaking.

there's been a lot of religion that doesn't fit with what you're saying, norse mythology for instance.

Religion is the result of changing the world to fit your beliefs. Lack of religion is the result of changing your beliefs to fit the world. Cognitive dissonance can be resolved in one of two ways.

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