Major Flaws of Human Thinking
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For example, in the linked example of "Conformity", a person taking a test with several other people doesn't immediately leave the room when observing smoke and hearing a smoke alarm. This is IMO, a completely legitimate response: If several other people are calmly carrying on their business it's much more likely to assume they know something you don't rather than them all being just sitting lemmings oblivious to their own demise (or that they are all goons in on a televised hoax at your expense). Just imagine how intolerable life would be if every single person would want to investigate every single request or stated fact for themselves, just to discover the request is usually logical and the fact true (consider for example, a "Dead End" sign with every single driver checking if it's actually true).
Obviously the edge cases of these heuristics (the "illusions") should be examined, and care taken when appropriate, but it's important to remember that these human tendency are basically what allows complex societies (with many individuals with partial knowledge) to function.
I cannot agree more. If we determined to point to a "Major Flaw", that I'd propose something like inability to judge difficulty of a task a posteriori. It is the most strikingly could be seen in children:
> For instance, we can show the children a familiar candy box. Anyone who sees it will leap to the conclusion that there's candy inside. When we open it, it turns out to be a trick: there are actually pencils inside. Then we can ask the children simple questions about this series of events. What did you think was inside it? What will your friend Nicky think is inside it, if he sees it all closed up like this?[1]
Three years old children consistently believe that Nicky will think that there are pencils inside the candy box. With age people become wiser, but there are a lot of people who cannot grasp it for more complex setups. They resort to a modified version of a Hanlon's Razor[2]: if we cannot understand why someone had made a mistake, then it is because of stupidity. If a decision led to a mistake, than it was a stupid decision.
I personally believe, that it is a problem of bayesian mind, which updates probabilities after observation. Some patching could help, but only in a limited way. One cannot replay a past state of a mind on a full scale, it would require a bigger mind.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Crib-Early-Learning-Tells/d... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
There is no reason to investigate something if it doesn't contradict your knowledge. It's reasonable to investigate the "Dead End" sign only if every other driver goes under it. Because this is inconsistency. And not to drive just like others, but ask for an explanation first.
Yes, those "heuristics" may be good enough in a lot of situations. Just like instincts, they can be useful too. But we can't let instincts rule over our rational mind. This doesn't work. There would be no civilization in such case.
Of course, in the modern world group norms may not have caught up with our rapidly changing environment, so there are likely to be more cases where individual thinking can improve things. There should clearly be a balance between following the group and thinking for yourself; neither is good on its own.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domestic...
While this can often be true, it's not always true. Furthermore, it's often a testable hypothesis, and in those cases, it should be tested, not just assumed.
Also, the "conformity" case in the article involves a group of people (the confederates trying to manipulate the unwitting test-taker) who are violating a common norm (namely, that the normal behavior of people when a fire alarm goes off and smoke is seen is to get out, not calmly continue going about their business). So that case is not testing "how well do you follow group norms that make sense"; it's testing "how willingly will people follow a group that is doing something that obviously does not make sense". That's a different thing.
If you're assured by other people that, "it's fine, this happens", it's even more understandable to not panic in this situation.
To be clear, I scanned the entire video but didn't watch it minute by minute, so I may have missed something. (Different from "I stopped when...") But I'm genuinely curious if anyone knows the context behind whether people asked questions because it really throws the premise into doubt.
Would be interested to get OP's take in particular, but I think I'm nested into oblivion at this point.
I did. Your (weird) insistence on critiquing the study as if it was a thought experiment / hypothetical / work of fiction (i.e. a piece where the author is asking you to believe something that's just too unbelievable)... is a reason altogether to downvote.
What makes you think this was a study? Is there a published work referenced somewhere that I missed?
Lately, in response to the relatively intense polarization of beliefs, I've been contemplating open-mindedness, and whether discussions starting with establishing an open-minded context could get people talking again.
To me, open-mindedness means that you're receptive to new ideas and experiences and generally do not reject them outright. When presented with implausible or seemingly impossible information, an open-minded person will listen to the basis of ideas, concepts and information and weigh that basis before making a determination about whether or not the idea is true and worth assimilating. Or they may try a new experience with less pre-judgment of whether they'll appreciate it.
In my view, there is a critical nuance in open-mindedness: It applies whether or not the idea is consistent with what I already believe to be true. As an open-minded person, I feel that I need to regularly reevaluate my beliefs as new information comes to light, even if that new information directly contradicts a basis for a firmly held belief.
I'm curious to know examples that you've had where you've learned new information that contradicted what you already firmly believed, and through open-mindedness, changed your belief accordingly.
It wasn't that long ago that some crackpot tried to convince me that the modern atmosphere had damaged my lungs, so to replace the oxygen I was missing I needed to buy hydrogen peroxide injections. The claim as a whole either needs to have major structural flaws or overturn sizable portions of modern chemistry and physics to have a chance at plausibility, and my biases strongly suggest that instead somebody was trying to skirt legal oversight in order to con me.
It's also got to be a matter of sufficient consequence to be worth the time.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, etc.
That is why it is important to support your local crackpot. Much as staid English society always valued their eccentrics. The more ultrarational the person, the more important for that person to spend quality time at the fringes.
There's also the claim that someone is being "close-minded", when they reject an idea they have soundly researched and therefore need not waste any more time on. As Harlan Ellison so eloquently put it: "I'd gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas" in regards to the god hypothesis. More often than not, "close-minded" is a conversation stopper, designed to deflect from the accuser's very own ignorance and credulity.
Same thing goes for creationism, AGW denial, anti-vaxx, anti-mask, the QAnon cult, trickle-down economics, etc.
I find that breaking the habit of being quick to judge leads to open-mindedness. This is also a tenet of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - your first thought and subsequent feelings that arise from that thought are often wrong.
but, in my experience, most people that put "I'm open minded" in a self description are signaling they believe in certain specific policies and they are actually close minded about whether those policies are good or bad. They've already decided they are good and won't consider (have an open mind) to any suggestions otherwise.
The former may be useful. The latter is usually just annoying.
Of course, I agree with you that open-mindedness is important when dealing with intellectually honest people.
But I think there is a middle ground or maybe it is not in the middle but off to the side somewhere. We can be aware of these biases and try to be conscious of when we are relying in part or entirely on them and still choose to abide by them especially in the absence of better information.
Understanding that one is behaving out of conformity or conservatism or another bias doesn't consign one to intermable mental litigation. You can be aware of this fact and still know you do not and may never have sufficient information to challenge and overturn the bias.
However, when we suspect we are acting solely out of one of these biases and we see a compelling reason to challenge it, that awareness becomes the tool that allows us to change. A compelling examples is the acceptance of homosexuality in Europe and the U.S. The conformist beliefs that were leading to the supression of individuals were doing harm. As more people "came out" the conformist foundation of the supression arguments weakened. For most I think it has become clear that the risk of overruling conformity was insufficient in the face of the material harm homosexual individuals were enduring.
Awareness is definitely the key. If you recognize you're self-projecting, then now you can account for it. If you're aware of what the group thinks, you can be aware of when you're aligned with it. And so on.
Critical thinking is the ability to expand awareness and unimmerse yourself to the point where you can analyze an idea selflessly. Then you can dive in again to reconnect with how everything feels.
1. Thinking you know anything with an even remotely high degree of certainty.
2. Confirmation Bias - thinking you are right and searching for evidence to prove you are right, reaffirming your own beliefs in the process and actively ignoring or providing excuses for counter examples and contradictory evidence.
3. Difficulty/Inability of looking only at the facts without interpreting them as you would like them to be or not to be.
3. Inability/Difficulty of admitting you are wrong/made a mistake and also remember it and learn from it.
4. Inability/Difficulty of acknowledging you are an irrational, flawed monkey stumbling around trying to make sense of about a billion things you don't understand and never will understand.
Trying to still make progress given all the above.
Remember -- "If it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey."
Embrace the inner ape. Instead of looking at our limitations, look at how well we have done. We have microwave ovens, digital watches, and even ice cream. Reflecting on what it takes to go from swinging in the trees to where we are today, I think we have done pretty well for ourselves, all things considered.
Being alive is better than being correct, rationality is correct only if all the premises are correct with perfect information. So to manage this world of uncertainity our brain must use heuristics, heuristics that are really good, so good that we somehow survive.
Nature would say "Its a feature, not a bug"
Compared to dumb animals, these are fantastic. They keep man alive, help him thrive.
But for advanced civilization management and the modern world? They don't work quite as well.
Perhaps a less self-aggrandizing and hand-wavy way to address the subject would be to actually look at proper research such as CBT in psychology pointing out cognitive distortions[1], which are incredibly helpful to recognize and identify in the self in order to correct both the big issues (some aspects of depression, anxiety) and small ones (everyday life for most people).
[1] https://www.psychologytools.com/articles/unhelpful-thinking-...
Indeed, common research on this topic is in psychology. But I consider this as software flaws, that can be patched by increased awareness.
Psychology is speculative sometimes, in my opinion. For example, my view of self-projection is different from a conventional psychological projection. I think we are projecting just for prediction (everything else is a consequence). I don't consider it as a self-defense mechanism of bullies, like explained here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
Rather than be disappointed by the negative comments you might read in this thread, I recommend that you consider them from the perspective of the article itself. There are only 40 comments here so far, and there is already more than enough rich irony for a followup article, particularly considering that most people on HN are on the higher end of the intelligence spectrum.
This way, the article then kind of has a cool ARG (Alternate Reality Game) aspect to it - write about a topic, seed it into an ecosystem of the very thing you are talking about, and then write about how the ecosystem responds to it. And then to make it even more fun, let everyone in on the joke! So then not only are you playing an ARG, but everyone is playing it together - we (humanity itself, and each of us as individuals [1]) are the very joke that we're laughing at!
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/breaking-the-fourth-wall
I have a theory that some interesting consequences could come out of this sort of thing, but it requires a fair amount of work to set up properly.
[1] For example, the "people" who downvote this post - it is "you" whom I am speaking about! Does your mind (as opposed to "you") find this idea/situation pleasing?
I saw a comment from someone at the center for applied rationality a while ago that said that one of the top reasons why people want to take their workshop was to be able to pinpoint issues in other people's thinking.
Of course the question of "is our thinking flawed" is not terribly relevant, much of the time: our actions are influenced as much by things like body needs we're often oblivious about.
1. Find flaws in my thinking. 2. Find flaws in other people’s thinking.
In other words, some people may have ranked them as you did, but many people ranked them in the opposite order.
Needless to say the same applies to HN, and to every one of us.
A similar argument could be made for conservatism's relationship with social structures. Rapidly changing social structures leads to unpredictable futures, which can lead to economic insecurity at the individual level.
Every organism alive now evolved over millions of years. What's so special about human thinking? Why not cat thinking, dog thinking, cow thinking, insect thinking?
Evolution isn't about truth. It's about survival and reproduction. Which often involves lying and deception. Sometimes even deceiving oneself.
[Edit: To clarify, I quoted the linked article not to criticize it but to criticize the point I was replying to, which I took to be a human-centric fallacy about evolution.]
Humans don't think with insect-like sub-brains throughout their body.
The title of the article has "human" in it so it makes sense to have a human-centric discussion about it.
Humans are likely smarter than all of the other animals, but that's a pretty low bar. The competition for "smartest Earth species" is fairly weak.
> you can't just handwave "evolution"
If you believe the brain is part of the body, and that the body evolved, you believe _some_ part of evolutionary psychology. It's not handwaving.
That part of the article suggests that societal unrest creates say, fascist leaders, and not the other way around.
Yes, you did, because you seem to continue to think that I was arguing against the article, when in fact I was merely arguing against the comment by amadeuspagel that I replied to.
amadeuspagel was arguing against the article, claiming that these thought patterns shouldn't necessarily be considered "flaws", because they're the product of evolution. I dispute that, because non-human thinking, which we all consider to be inferior, is also a product of evolution. That's what I meant by handwaving. I do believe that humans are smarter, but I also believe that human thinking is very far from perfect, still heavily flawed. As are all products of evolution.
That section very clearly describes the idea of hero-worship, and focusing on individuals instead of larger patterns. There's a good chance the author meant person centric, and (given the last name) just speaks English as a second language and picked a slightly wrong wording.
"the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual's observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior"
e.g: when you're late, some external force is the cause; when co-worker is late, he's just "a person who is the type to be late".
If you knew your coworker better, if you've formed your own theory about how he is likely to be late, than if he is late you'll probably assume that he faced some external force which became a cause of his lateness.
I've been able to counter this somewhat by adopting a default assumption that my understanding is incomplete. That's an easier self-sell than being wrong.
Painting conservatism as purely a human flaw is poor thinking in itself. The positive side of conservative thinking was neatly summarized by G.K. Chesterton: "Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place."
There may be things you don't know, or which have never been known, which the conservative solution to a problem addresses either by accident or design. For examples, see traditional methods of food preparation. Indigenous peoples in South America have passed down numerous traditional recipes for the cassava plant. Every recipe involves a process to remove cyanogenic glycosides [0], which are present in all parts of the cassava plant and lethal if ingested. These recipes were developed without any modern understanding of chemistry or toxicology. Deviation from the old recipes without this knowledge, e.g. to apply a new time-saving cooking technique, could have disastrous consequences. Old knowledge often runs deep.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/jun/22/cassava...
Daniel Kahneman states most of the flaws from the article come from "system 1" that's responsible for taking quick decisions without "deep thinking"
I'd strongly recommend the read. It helped me act less reactively.
We are incapable of doing this especially when we've already invested years and years of our lives onto object oriented programming.
Humans always like to construct logical scaffolds around a biased agenda and they are unable to deconstruct that scaffold when presented with contradictory evidence.
And no one is consciously aware of that this is happening. Contradictory evidence can be right in front of their eyes but if the programmer already has 10 years of Object Oriented Programming under his belt he's not going to flip on a dime and admit that he's been doing it wrong for 10 years, it just doesn't happen. Instead the person needs to unconsciously recreate a logical perspective of the universe that fits his personal agenda.
Another thing to consider is that this and the flaws mentioned in the article exist within our minds because they aided in our survival. These "flaws" were biologically advantageous and that's why we think this way.
Maybe lying to yourself is technically wrong, but in the end you may be better for it, especially when you've already invested so much time reading and practicing Object Oriented Programming.
Does anyone have any examples of their own illogical and illusive scaffolds about world views that they've built to support their biased agenda?
If so please reply! I set this post up so that it will be very easy for you to find your own examples.
While I have no problem admitting that I've been wrong, it's still a problem when others of the same beliefs still haven't realized it's bullshit. So excuse me if I don't share any of the examples.
In most cases where you'd want to convince others about something, the political connotations of various arguments matter just as much (or even more) as how sound these arguments are logically.
Obviously, there are certain avenues of thinking where we'd want to perform a pure rational, impartial analysis while explicitly disregarding any politics. However, that's a minority of the cases, and even then when trying to communicate that analysis, politics becomes relevant once again. Even the desire to carefully describe a particular analysis as apolitical is driven by political motivations i.e. to make that analysis more convincing to others with different political alignment.
As Aristotle said, "Man is by nature a social animal" - it makes all sense that our default mode of thinking and the associated decisionmaking shortcuts are heavily driven by social and political aspects, because in many circumstances the social impact and political perception of some statement is more important than whether it's technically true.
So to that end, the reason i'm liberal is that i believe there is a balance between social safety nets and capitalist incentives. In my view, we are currently the conservative dream. Very few protections for workers, less and less than years past - with increasing benefits for corporations that see little to no benefits trickled down to the workers. Walmart and Comcast are what i see as the natural result of conservative practice.
I simply want what will result in the least suffering. Yet i see suffering in mass in the very pro-0.01% behavior. Walmart does great in this environment - it's employees, less so. Worse yet if you lose your Walmart job, as the safety nets are being dismantled left and right by conservatives.
So, what reading would you recommend i do to show me that fiscal conservative behavior here and that further more reducing lower/middle class protections is beneficial to them?
I certainly do not claim to know all, or any, answers. All i know is the state of the poor is very unsettling to me in America. What reading would you suggest?
In addition, your attack on Walmart is lazy and typical. When Walmart moves into a neighborhood the first group to get hit are whatever retailers already exist in the area--because all the best workers immediately line up to work at Walmart instead. Better pay, better benefits, etc. Just a typical case.
So, what should you read? Anything but /r/politics would probably help some.
(Assuming you’re talking about the US)
Which worker protections have been rolled back? What do you think workers aren’t protected from now that they were protected against when there were no overtime, minimum wage, or really any safety laws?
Not necessarily. Back in early March of this year, "conformism" with respect to social distancing and wearing masks would have meant not doing it, because practically nobody else was doing it and all of the public health authorities were still saying it wasn't necessary for the general population. Based on how the pandemic spread during that time period, that conformism was not a good idea. (And my wife and I did not conform; we started social distancing and wearing masks and gloves when making unavoidable trips to crowded places like the grocery store, at the end of February. Neither of us have had any health issues.)
>5. False associations, confusion of causation and correlation
I dont think they accept vaccinations because others do it.
The later through Science/logic where it's possible.