False memories, or why we’re so sure of things we’re wrong about
today.duke.edu
today.duke.edu
Also it's only triggered with certain kind of display of confidence (like aggressive confidence, or confidence mixed with poor vocabulary/skill, etc). E.G: the confidence of a humble but strong expert does not trigger the reaction.
That very much implies it's not hardwired, though, just that it requires unlearning.
I have the same reaction, which is a result of working in and around sales for years. Before that though I think I was just as susceptible.
but people who seem merely reasonably confident slip under your radar, even if they are faking it.
I mean, I guess I would feel a little weird if I thought you felt you needed to fake confidence around me, so there is that.
Is there an optimal level of confidence you can project to get the optimal social response from me, and is that optimal level other than the lowest level possible? Yeah, sure.
My main point was just that my reaction to people who are too confident is immediate, negative and extremely strong. I do my best to ignore it like all other bits of personality that aren't relevant to the role, of course, if it's a role where confidence doesn't matter... but I am human, and these things leak.
I was just bringing this up as a counterpoint to the "humans are hard wired to favor displays of confidence" because, as I mentioned before, I am human, and have a significantly negative (and difficult to consciously suppress) response to levels of confidence that seem to be normal in the marketing professions.
Confidence is basically just a word for "projecting one's own certainty". People like certainty, so they favor the person who knows what they're talking about over the person who's not quite sure.
But unfortunately, confidence isn't a perfect signal. Some people actively exploit the general human bias to find certainty to their own advantage by falsely projecting confidence.
This is a topic I find interesting. And to be fair, not everyone who projects false confidence is doing so maliciously, some (it seems to me) simply have a hard time holding things that aren't absolutes in their head and they tend to round certainty on things to 100% or 0%.
I think that's a major understatement.
There's the Dunning–Kruger effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
and the world is complex and it's very difficult to get a clear and definitive picture of it. The better your understanding, the more hedged and less definitive it will tend to be, and that does not tend to come across as confidence in your understanding.
Your post is an illustration of the false Dunning-Kruger effect that is astoundingly commonly seen in forum posts citing the Dunning-Kruger effect.
"The group of competent students underestimated their class ranks, while the group of incompetent students overestimated their ranks; yet the incompetent group did not estimate their class ranks as higher than the ranks estimated by the competent group."
E.g., if I admit that, not only am I not confident, but I see the world as so complex that I can't be possibly confident about it, how can I decide what to do?
If my view of the world is correct than my actions would at best have unpredictable results and at worst would be reckless. So the best course of action would be not to do anything.
However, would strip me of all agency and any ability to do anything about things in the world I see as problematic.
You get input from others with knowledge, consider things as much as you can, and recommend a course of action / make a decision based on what you know, understanding that it might not end up being the right one.
I've seen it happen often in small businesses and startups I've worked with, and I've seen people make what in hindsight were the wrong decision. But that's just the way things are for everyone, really.
You can't see the future but have to make a decision anyway at some point.
You need to learn to face uncertainty. You know some of your data is incorrect, and that you sometimes make mistakes processing that data. But if you are calibrated correctly, you should be more sure of some things (that the sun will rise tomorrow) than others (that I'll get that job I just interviewed for) - I mean, I think both of those things are true, but one I'm very certain of the first, the other? I'd say it has a 60% chance of happening.
It's totally reasonable to make a bet that will cause me to lose something important if the sun doesn't come up tomorrow. It's much less reasonable to make a bet that will cause me to lose something important if I don't get that job.
>If my view of the world is correct than my actions would at best have unpredictable results and at worst would be reckless. So the best course of action would be not to do anything.
If you literally make no conscious effort to do anything? It's likely you will die of dehydration in the next few days.
Doing nothing is very likely to be much worse than randomly picking from actions deemed culturally reasonable... and you can probably do a lot better than random through weighing what uncertain information you have.
I mean, complexity is hard, but it's ultimately going to get you better decisions than a system where you are absolutely certain of things.
^ I was writting with more confidence and assertively than usual there ;)
I absolutely agree that people like certainty. I would even go so far to say that they actually don't like the '95% chance' of anything. In that case, they would say "I believe this to be 100% correct", which is basically saying that you can't tell for sure, but you believe it to be 100% correct. Not an objective 'real' chance of maybe 90%.
Take for example religion. Nobody can be 100% sure whether there is some sort of god or not. But you won't hear anybody make any % predictions, especially the ones who believe. They believe 100% for sure there is a god. Atheist are on that front the same, and believe 100% there is no god. They are unable to make a % prediction, or really don't want to because it would break something inside of them (their belief). Very strange. I like to work with chances a lot.
Since I do not understand how we could know anything about "God", there could be no 'probability' associated with it. What would it mean to say 50%? That, were the universe run 100 times -- 50 runs would have a god in them?
I am an atheist in exactly the same way that I am an a-leprechaun-ist. The proposition "God Exists" is one I believe to be false for extra-empirical reasons. Namely, that the inexistance of God is consistent with every given observation -- and the content of the idea seems deeply anthropocentric and psychological.
Those ideas which have had no explanatory content (ie., could not be used to predict anything) and which have had a clearly human psychological construction have all turned out to be "reasonably false". At the moment holding that god does not exist is "unreasonably false" according to people (eg. You) whereas holding that leprachuans do not exist is "reasonably fasle".
I believe this distinction to have everything to do with saving people's feelings and nothing to do with the content and nature of the ideas.
Objects which have no explanatory power (magic, gods, etc.) are "bugs" in human thinking. No one ought believe that any of them exist.
To dismiss a pervasive category of human beliefs as a "bug" that serves no purpose is incredibly egotistical and arrogant. The sheer pervasiveness of these types of beliefs point at them serving an evolutionary / competitive purpose.
I believe your mistake is based on a lack of understanding of the reasons why we hold beliefs and the purposes of knowledge.
Belief and knowledge are not purely about making predictions.
They provide the rules by which we operate as individuals and as a society. They provide the basis for value attribution and define our self identity.
While some knowledge derives much of it value from it's ability to accurately make predictions, that is not the core reason that we have knowledge. Knowledge is fundamentally judged by the utility it provides to individuals and societies.
Newtonian physics is my favorite example. It is not the most predictively powerful version of our knowledge about physics (since we know there are areas where its predictions break down), yet we still teach Newtonian physics because it is simpler and easier to understand and use than General Relativity or Reletavistic Statistical Mechanics.
> I am an atheist in exactly the same way that I am an a-leprechaun-ist. The proposition "God Exists" is one I believe to be false for extra-empirical reasons. Namely, that the inexistance of God is consistent with every given observation -- and the content of the idea seems deeply anthropocentric and psychological.
You claim that "God Exists" has no predictive power, this means that "God Does Not Exist" also has no predictive power. The existence of God is also consistent with every given observation. Thus your Atheism is another example of beliefs whose value arises not from their predictive power but from some other form of utility.
TLDR: It's not a "bug" it's a "feature".
Suppose I say to you I have a magical creature in my bedroom. Surely you'd want to know more about it?
Well for every question you ask, I will describe a property it has that prevents me from answering your question.
Where is it? Everywhere. What does it weigh? It has no weight. How do i see it? Its invisible. And so on.
These are "buggy objects". They actually possess no properties. The term "magical creature in my bedroom" doesnt actually refer to anything. But we are still able to speak of it as-if it does. And thus go around constructing speech around it: "I love my magical creature!".
I am an atheist because God clearly falls into this pattern of buggy-object-generation. Take some idea that seems concrete and remove from it every impactful dimension so that what remains seems something, but is in fact, nothing.
For the idea of God to even be true there ought to be something that it means for it to be true. Some property which, if absent, would make a difference.
False beliefs may have other "value". Faires and sprites may be "fun" and "bring families together".
But they are pure bugs. Whatever feel-good factor you want to have can be had without them. I don't believe in any of them as a class. God just happens to fall into this group.
To claim that it is reasonable to believe that any object of this kind exists i think breaks reasonable thought to such a shattering degree. At that point I do not know what principles you have left to deny any form of nonesense.
That is, why is "leprechauns do not exist" overwhelmingly reasonable but "god does not exist" not?
There is no reason. At some point you need to draw a line and debug your reasoning. That isnt an empirical issue, its a thinking issue.
Are you 100% sure our universe is not a simulation? Because if it would be, that opens up a whole lot of realism to "God". A creator, a possible afterlife, etc.
I am reasonably sure that the best explanation for the causal structure of the world is the causal structure of the world -- not some other world which, in some grand mystical paranoia, behaves as-if it were the world.
Global scepticism is another "bug" of a different kind. It is a scepticism-loop, like conspiracy theories.
In rational thought, doubt attenuates, it doesnt build. The more occurances of events occur which pertain to one hypothesis, the more confidence you should have in that hypothesis.
The problem with global scepticism is that it declares, by assertion, that every event cannot reduce doubt -- for some magical reason. And so it makes escape from doubt and explanation itself, impossible.
Magical reasoning of this kind is another error. Remove any unjustifiable extra-empirical premises that cause doubt to multiply rather than attenuate. If you spiral into doubt, you're in a loop. Delete the unjustifiable premise.
{Simulation, Cartesian Daemon, Dreaming...} is this set.. now, of "empty substances" out of which every object is meant to be made. These are buggy.
Premises of reasoning which begin, "everything is drawn from... a simulation/dream/blah" are thought-traps that cause doubt to spiral. They are, of themselves, simply made up. That they cause these spirals of doubt is nothing profound.. its in the nature of the setup.
This is true, you cannot and should not be able to decrease absolute doubt. All you can do is reduce relative doubt given a certain set of premises.
> The more occurances of events occur which pertain to one hypothesis, the more confidence you should have in that hypothesis.
This is rational only given the assumption the of the Doctrine of Uniformity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism)
That doctrine allows us to build pretty much all of our useful knowledge systems and is the basis for most of our certainty. However, if we are epistemologically honest with our selves, all of our certainly only exists given that this doctrine is true.
Your "magical reasoning" is what allows us to accept and use unprovable premises because we find the knowledge systems we can create with them provide functional utility. This is precisely why I call it a "feature" and not a "bug".
Neither starting point has any effect on what makes "the earth goes around the sun" true. It is true iff there is an earth and iff it goes around the sun.
If we are all deceived then that claim is false, regardless of its utility.
Utility is a criterion for the most general starting point of our reasoning: how are we going to think. It isn't a criterion for truth, nor for the truth of particular beliefs. Nor does the fact that utility features in my methodological criteria mean that I am not entitled to reasonably infer truth from the method.
The factory is made of steel (utility) its products are made of wood (truth), that utility features in the production mechanism does not mean it features in the product.
My observation about "the simulation hypothesis" is that it isnt a hypothesis at all. It is just an alternative formulation of how to think: ie., to deny that evidence builds in support of conclusions about how the world works.
It is not mysterious then that "nothing seems to work" if we presume simulation. That's by design of the thought process. Since how I think is my choice. I can chose to use the steel factory over the playdo factory. And my products are clearly of a better quality for any person concerned for production (ie., for the making of truth-claims).
Whether they are true or not, my method reasonably entitles me to infer they are. The playdo method is a thought trap, and a pretty juvenile one at that.
This is the trick being played: simulationy people want you to think "simulation" is just like "the earth goes around the sun". They are both, meant to be, healthy products of reasoning and thus plausible. The former is a bug in this sense: it is in fact a change to the method of truth-production it isnt one among many plausible products (truths). It is broken machinery producing nonesense.
Not really, knowledge is relative: Our claim of "The earth goes around the sun" claim is equally true, regardless of whether we are in a simulation or not. If we are in a simulation, there may not be a real earth, and real gravity may function differently than our gravity. Obviously this piece of knowledge is about our own earth and our own gravity.
If we are in a simulation, then the claims we make are about the simulation and are still provable. If one of use were removed from the simulation, they would be forced to potentially learn an entirely new set of rules and facts. Their knowledge about the our simulation wouldn't be false, but it would have to qualified as about a particular simulation rather than as about reality.
> The factory is made of steel (utility) its products are made of wood (truth), that utility features in the production mechanism does not mean it features in the product.
I don't understand this metaphor.
Truth and Utility are measures we use to evaluate beliefs or claims. In your metaphor, they would be the QA process in the factory. At best they are the QA process as the factory builds itself.
The Doctrine of Uniformity, the scientific method, mathematical proof, visual proof, trust in experts, holy texts, and really the entire sum of our existing knowledge are what make up the factory that produces our beliefs and claims.
> My observation about "the simulation hypothesis" is that it isnt a hypothesis at all.
It certainly is a hypothesis, but may not be a scientific (i.e. testable) hypothesis if there are no associated testable predictions.
I don't get people like you who seem to think there is some magical set of "true claims" that somehow exist outside of any knowledge structure. To me, claims can only be made within a knowledge structure and those claims can only have meaning (let alone truth) by being evaluated within that knowledge structure. I'd be curious to hear you explain how it could be anything else.
I personally think our sense of "truth" arose as an instinctive heuristic for estimating the utility of a claim given our limited existing knowledge and experience.
The western world is pretty focused on rational thinking. This indeed doesn't mean that a society with some irrational thinking ingrained into it, has a better chance of surviving.
And indeed, if you look at the world, religious thinking did a pretty good job at surviving in about any culture in the world. While it might not be 100% correct, the things they believe, it might give them an extra psychological edge to survive. All evidence points that way.
Aunt Maple wants to use sugar water for her cancer treatment...
Hmm.. strange, how much the value of false things overlaps with the number of wishful things. And how the ones we ought keep are those you like to wish for, and not those terrible wants other people wish for.
One might wonder: is the false really that valuable? Do we need to revive the Norse Gods for their "value"? Or rather, is it much simpler: falsehood is a kind of oppression which limits our ability to act.
"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness."
Doesn't really matter what you, me or anyone else thinks, no? Nature decides who survives.
Nature does not determine importance. Survival is an event, it isnt a value.
We determine what matters. And I do, in particular, when I am speaking of the things I care about.
Nothing I was discussing can be considered a falsehood. These are unprovable beliefs. They cannot be proved and they cannot be disproved. (or rather: we have yet to discover the means to prove or disprove them)
> Hmm.. strange, how much the value of false things overlaps with the number of wishful things. And how the ones we ought keep are those you like to wish for, and not those terrible wants other people wish for.
I believe you are making mistaken assumptions about what I believe.
The functional utility of wide classes of beliefs has changed rapidly over the last several hundred years. I am not arguing that everything people believe has or continues to have functional utility. In fact, I believe to ideologies to succeed over time, they must repeatedly adapt and evolve to maintain their utility.
My issue is that Mjburgess dismissed an entire category of human cognitive function as a "bug" when it seems much more likely that such a pervasive trait is in fact an adaptive feature of human cognition.
I have great admiration for skeptics who attempt to disprove provably false beliefs. I also have no problem with atheists and many of them are intellectual heroes of mine. However, I take issue with atheists to believe their belief in the 'non-existence of all gods' is somehow epistemologically superior to people who hold religious beliefs despite them being similarly unprovable.
The question simply isn't meaningful enough to give a meaningful answer? The ultimate answer isn't going to be true or false - it's null.
Humans seem peculiarly blind to the notion that sometimes questions just aren't meaningful enough to produce a meaningful answer. Or at least, the humans I tend to run into are. Maybe there are tribes in Africa where this notion is obvious.
This is a false statement. The rest of your post is supposition and anecdote.
Is doubt a positive feature of christianity in your view?
Is 'more thoughtful believers' an oxymoron?
Is probability, or indeed statistics, a sensible approach to people's belief in things they can't prove?
For the two latter questions, not sure what you're getting at, but, no and no.
Okay. I thought that 100% certainty in the existence of God (who is also Jesus Christ) is in fact something Christians do as a consequence of being Christians.
For the latter two questions, I was getting at being thoughtful belies being a believer (in the sense of 'believing something without evidence') and questioning the reliance on statistical probability for any faith-based religious belief.
There are plenty of things you accept and believe without evidence. The world, and especially the inner lives of humans, isn't made up exclusively (in some aspects not even predominantly) of empirically observable facts.
The idea that believing is incompatible with being thoughtful is not worthy of something who (presumably) considers themselves thoughtful. You can do better.
Totally agree. I think.
> There are plenty of things you accept and believe without evidence.
Incorrect.
Unless you're going the solipsistic route, actually knowing (not in in the biblical, but rather merely just the physical / actual sense) people is a major factor.
And that's without getting into what "actually knowing" someone really means, and how you evaluate your spouse's claim that she loves you. At least you can feel your own feelings.
I'm not saying that these feelings aren't true, I'm sure they are. I'm contesting your assertion that you take nothing on faith.
None of the religious people I know would say there is a small chance god doesn't exist. That would be a betrayal of their belief.
One of my favorite quotes of all time. We want certainty, and when that fails, certainty about the uncertainty.
In the past when we were all living in little groups in the wild, it mattered to the person who was making a statement whether he really knew that this new plant you'd come across was edible and not poisonous. He'd have seen someone eat it, personally tried it, or had some firsthand knowledge of whatever the situation was. So if a guy said "let's eat this thing, I'm sure it's good" he'd both have skin in the game AND actually have evidence.
Nowadays almost all knowledge is second hand. Trust me, quantum tunnelling is a thing, and the earth is flat. But we're still wired to believe in the confident guy.
Just "all go for it" would be evolutionary very hindering as there are many, many poisonous plants out there.
It makes sense in other scenarios, though. Or just in general, should we take path A or B. Doing a "maybe" decision won't get you anywhere in many situations. Like when you either have to go far in that direction, or in the other direction. Staying means starving, but finally reaching A or B could mean food. So it is better to go choose and be determined, even when you don't know for sure whether the prey really will be there and not the stronger enemy tribe.
Still true today.
Just not in all the scenarios, our "leaders" wants us to believe...
Yet another reason to never talk to the police.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/people-ca...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/scientists-explore-the-illusio...
One year she was disappointed that we didn't come to spend Christmas Eve with her. She never called to make plans because she imagined we'd just come over because "that's what we always do." In reality--we have never spent xmas eve together-- ever.
She insists there was a ghost in her house which played pranks on her and-- in full view of two other people levitated a potted plant and threw it at her.
and her masterpiece-- blaming me for her husband's death (of cancer) because I asked him to come to his daughter's graduation ceremony. I don't even know what to do with this one.
The maddening thing is, these people absolutely believe these things. They will argue until they are blue and tell you that you're crazy. It's hard to even blame them in the end.
Edit: added spoiler warning
Edit: I have now added a spoiler warning to my original comment (I hadn't thought about this possibility, sorry)
I habitually avoid videos on the internet, and with the summary, I was able to at least get the gist of the video, whereas otherwise, I would have never watched it.
Even TED talks? :(
>Ultimately, we want to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying these kinds of cognitive processes to generate models that can contribute to computer programs and artificial intelligence.
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that." - Hal
A great start would be to use the espoused rubric on Duke students and/or faculty to see if they are willing to lie about bribery in NCAA Basketball recruiting vis-a-vie success.
For example, another commenter reports that his mother seemingly remembers things that never happened; the first thing I thought (because of similar experiences) was that perhaps his mother had lied to friends about family coming over to visit.
Basically, semantically related lures can lead to false memories for items not actually presented.
Interestingly, younger children do not have this type of false memories as frequently. That is theorized to be because a)a reliance on verbatim memory traces, an b)under-developed semantic knowledge
Simply put, if you're aware of seven concepts, that's a hard limiting wall for your creativity when it comes to inventing false memories. What would the false memories consist of? They can only consist of what you know. And further restricting that limited set, is the ways in which you understand to arrange/rearrange what you know.
You understand the concept table. You know the generally defining characteristics visually of a table. You know some of the ways a table is or can be used, however you only possess a limited knowledge of tables and how they can be used. That limited knowledge set of "table," restricts your ability to utilize the concept "table" in your false memories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy-trace_theory
and more generally: Confabulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation
On the other hand, perhaps in some cases there really are different editions of the film that use different takes for certain scenes, though the films I watch twice are not usually the big-budget productions that are well-known for having multiple editions.
Anyone else experience this?
The loss of the reliability of my memory is probably the thing I most about my youth.
It is not like my memory is bad now (it is still better than nearly everyone I know), it just is not as good as it used to be. I have to write things now in my diary and use bookmarks when I read, rather than just remember which page I was up to.
I have found that as I get older, I know much more than I ever have, but am also less sure than ever.
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."
Eeh, so a wise-arse, eh?
Great interview. I'm reading Kurt Anderson's 'Fantasyland (How America went Haywire)' ... and the idea of false memories features large.
I wonder about the mentality or outlook of people who approach any session of false memory exploration with a 'too open' mind.
Except that the brain often will generate vivid details to replace or fill in gaps.
E.g. I had extremely vivid memories of a movie I hadn't seen for years, so I was surprised when I watched it again and I was very wrong in those vivid details. I had only retained the outline of things, some snapshots of things.
I kept on telling my dad this story when I was a kid and he didn't believe it. But when I told it a long time later on, he too thinks he might have seen it.
Maybe he formed those memories from my story.
/s