Need for cognition
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
There's a pattern where human beings are wired to enjoy things that are important for their survival and thriving, but that these instincts are easily hijacked for aimless gratification.
Eating junk food (vs stuff that gives you health and energy) or whacking off to porn (instead of healthy relationships and procreation) are examples of this.
Anyway "the need for cognition"...
I noticed that there's a class of people who are objectively "smart" in the sense that they can solve hard puzzles, crush it at trivia, etc. But at the same time these folks haven't been able to / bothered to get into lucrative professions that leverage these smarts and actually have a sort of not great lives (eg: unhealthy weight, no partner, etc.)
So they are sort of scratching their itch for cognition, but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)
It's late and I'm tired so most likely I'm not understanding your point properly. Aren't those literally the most fundamental and nearly universally known (i.e. preached by popular science) results from (a) evolution and (b) neuroscience research, respectively?
Financial reward isn't the only way to make someone's life objectively better. A sense of autonomy, freedom to explore and create, and high satisfaction with one's output are just as important, if not more so. Sometimes pursuing a lucrative career is at odds with these other goals.
I am talking about people who are super smart but whose lives aren't good (agree, I took a narrative shortcut by talking about the financial angle only - it's more than that)
Maybe they wouldn't enjoy doing it professionally or don't care about "objectively" min-maxing their careers. Nothing wrong with that imho.
I solve mathdoku before bedtime for fun, but when it comes to “business” I usually want to take a board and smash these smiling snakefaces with it, because that is the most logical move. E.g. in chess they call it “simplification”. Unfortunately that’s illegal, so the best bet is to leave cognition at home.
but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)
Most of our features are essential for small groups of 10-100 humans. Individual successes are irrelevant for survival. A whole group wins (over another group) when one ape solves a puzzle and shares benefits.
But where cognition is needed in business it is knowing how to outsmart these snakefaces, how to think a few moves ahead of them, how to know the stuff that matters before they know it.
Smashing these faces is no more logical than smashing a chessboard when the stupid stubborn pieces won't move the way you had anticipated. It is tantamount to admitting that cognition has not been successfully applied, or maybe even engaged.
Look at artificially produced puzzles that tickle your cognition gland the same way you look at artificially produced snacks, optimized to tickle your taste buds and hijack your sense of "delicious", without providing anything nutritious.
Look at real-world, gnarly, complicated, seemingly self-contradictory problems as you look at natural, raw produce, with its variety of nutrients, vitamins, fibers, etc, all tangled together, with a taste which may not be as refined as refined sugar, but which is really rich.
It's a "sour grapes" situation that usually invites cooling down and actually thinking a bit more. Which apparently is not your situation (good).
" We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity."
https://medium.com/chris-messina/surrogate-activities-the-po...
whacking off to porn (instead of healthy relationships and procreation)
There are even aggregates like : https://ofloveandfriendship.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/the-deb...
Of course it might go against your worldview or political views, so you might reject all arguments.
a sappy marriage and family studies student at Brigham Young University-Idaho
Sure, it's a valid view of the world, but a globally niche PoV.
I am certainly not a fan of Mormons, but that doesn't invalidate every single thing they have to say
That said, if you had to pick a group who can claim that they have figured out what it takes to have many children, Mormons are it, right?
While I see what you're getting at, I take issue with your main point here:
> So they are sort of scratching their itch for cognition, but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)
Evolutionarily, there is no such thing "the reason" why we have any drive. Rather over time certain characteristics are selected for by their fitness in the environment. That might seem like a semantic or not important distinction, except that this drive for cognition has effects way beyond the individual.
The key thing is these people who go after what most would consider "unproductive" things, IE not using their smarts to go after lucrative professions, serve an important role in society to break out of local maxima and ultimately bring society to entirely new places. But this drive is obviously not a precise tool, it is just as likely to go towards some non-productive ends as productive (the cognitive equivalent of junk food or whacking off).
Some people simply have a larger drive towards cognition than to social status, and that occasionally leads to changing the world.
(Footnote: this is simplified - obviously evolution/selection happens on the individual level, but as a society we place value on intellectualism because of the outsized impact, which alters the environment to select for this drive - and people often reach their achievements later in life, so the "evolutionary success" of having kids is based on their potential for greatness, even if they never reach it. This way selection can favor drives that actually hurt most individuals with the drive, because the ones that change the world have such an outsized impact - this only works because humans are adaptable enough to alter their selection criteria based on the broader environment - think fat people used to be attractive when nobody had much food)
This is such a transient thing.
If you're not primed to notice a self driving car (already thinking about it / having read it) you may miss it.
And once you've seen it a few times, the novelty decreases a lot.
I try to keep wonder for things that I have experienced already (Holy crap; I'm in a metal tube that's going close to the speed of sound 7 miles high!) But pretty soon other things win (How long do I have to sit in this little seat? And I'm hungry...).
Arguably the thing that is most extraordinary is that we've made these wonderful, bizarre things such a matter of routine. Look around you. Nearly every object in the civilized world is a constructed object, borne from human thought. Every street, every edifice, every artifice. Even almost all of the foods and raw ingredients have been crafted to meet our needs. Wow. But flour is a >30,000 year old technology and not something people get excited about...
Sure, Uber passes 60-75% of the fare to drivers, but that pays for the depreciation/opportunity cost of the vehicle, the energy to move the vehicle, the insurance, the cleaning, etc.
A lot of the problems that these 'no brainer' new technology start-ups face (e.g., the autonomous delivery robots) is actually that they aren't that much cheaper than humans (for now).
It's kinda like the invisible gorilla experiment: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html
It was a much, much better and far less obvious version, I can't tell because obviously I knew what I was expecting, but I strongly feel with this 1999 version I absolutely would've caught it. Very poorly done compared to the other one I've seen.
Ah, here it is, this one uses a 'moonwalking bear'. Upon seeing them both again, I 110% agree with my assessment that the bear version is far, far superior.
The space the original video uses is too small, and maybe it's that the camera angle is poor; it's so hard to tell but I'd honestly be surprised if too many people fell for the original today.
I actually had troubles following the ball because the gorilla was just too obvious and distracting.
The whole point is that selective attention can make seeing even very obvious things difficult.
> it's so hard to tell but I'd honestly be surprised if too many people fell for the original today.
I used it on a class full of middle school science students two years ago. 21 out of 24 missed it in the first class. 5 out of 24 in the second, though they insisted no one warned them :D
And the opportunity for curiosity for purely seeing a thing is only the first few times you see it. You were in that window, but how do you know they were in that window?
When I am walking around in a big city, traffic is more of an annoying fact of life than something I would regard as interesting.
This reminds me of a flight I was on a few months ago. There was a new flight attendant on board, and amazingly it was also her first time traveling in an airplane. She was looking out the window and commented to another flight attendant about how astonishing it was that you could see the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas or the canyons in Utah from that vantage point. Then she paused, looked around the cabin, and asked "Why does everyone have their window shade down? This view is breathtaking." The other flight attendant laughed and replied, "They're all desensitized to it by now."
I’m not judging. It makes them happy. Great. But spending hours there I just feel my brain dying. It’s not for me.
But the opposite happens at my family’s dinner table. My poor wife once commented, “my brain began dying about 30 mins into you and your brothers discussing the philosophy of his Supreme Court brief.”
Furthermore: my incessant “need for cognition” is kind of screwing me up. I can’t sleep without medication anymore. My brain will not go to sleep on its own. I think and think and think. My wife puts on a stupid firefighter show where nobody ever wears helmets and passes out in ten minutes.
Haha, my wife is similar—"If you and your dad start another four hour conversation about AI, I'm going to bed". My response: "You're more than welcome to discuss Solomonoff induction along with us."
Somehow we do manage to find topics that we both enjoy though.
Hah. Same. I have to pace around for hours and hours a day, thinking about random shit. I do an unhealthy amount of pacing. I'm not anxiously pacing. Just thinking about stuff. At least I get my steps in.
I have some friends with whom I might try to poke at the nuances of the philosophy of a Supreme Court decision, but I have other friends who would be bored out of their mind. They also have a need for cognition and love to tear topics apart, but _different_ topics.
Forging a healthy, functional, durable marriage is quite the trick. Maybe they figured it out.
This seems counter intuitive to me; I would consider myself someone that has a "need for cognition", but I am good at puzzles precisely because _I do not like being puzzled_. When I encounter something that doesn't make sense to me (a puzzle), it disturbs me so that I need to solve the puzzle and figure out why my assumptions were incorrect. I therefore dislike puzzles and I do not want them in my life. Puzzles are a contradiction of my assumptions. Maybe this is all "intolerance of ambiguity"
I'm sure it gives you the same dopamine boost it gives me everytime that apparent conflict between my assumptions and reality gets resolved.
Obviously, they're not the same. NFC pertains more to the desire to go through the process of cognition, whereas dogmatism pertains more to defects of cognition (e.g. giving too much weight to our priors, being unwilling to update our priors).
But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not."
Similarly, both point to a lack of curiosity about the world or anything other that what we already know. (And, I would wager, both probably have a link to anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism, where we assume that whoever is in charge knows what they're doing better than the rest of us do.)
The unaligned are considered "fodder" by the ideologically committed.
Not everyone needs to be recruited. Most people can be kept in line by ensuring everyone knows what the "safe" view is within a specific group and occasionally punishing defectors.
Lets make an imaginary situation where you live on an island and are running out of trees. There are mostly two sides here. The people that are burning though trees at a faster rate than they grow are the problem. Not caring about the problem, especially in the case you are the ones burning those trees is going to ensure 'Tree 0 day' comes.
Everyone will get affected if you reach that point.
It's absolutely true that for many values of X, being "unaligned" or "uncertain" on X does some harm.
What I'm saying is that human social dynamics mean that there's usually a range of acceptable beliefs for issues X, Y & Z and it's wise to understand when it's acceptable to express uncertainty and when it's not.
Uncertainty is a stance, a position, which can easily be outside the range of socially acceptable beliefs.
For example, I have zero opinion on "body positivity". But I know that many groups will hold the opinion "it does no good if only we believe in body positivity, ALL of society needs to change". Expressing uncertainty or indifference in these situations will be construed as social defection by True Believers and punished.
I've felt this way for a long time. American fiction and films are heavily skewed towards protagonists strong-willed protagonists that "trust their gut" and have a high bias to action. That leads people to believe that if you're right, you will immediately know that you're right and that spending time thinking about a problem means you're weak-willed.
It's a toxic aspect of our culture. Obviously, courage and action are important. But so is learning from others, cooperating, and understanding ambiguity.
There’s a huge gap between what is entertaining and what is good outside of fiction. “reality tv” makes this particularly dangerous as horrible (though entertaining) people become more and more famous, again and again. This spills over into some really dire consequences globally. For example — and you wouldn’t believe this unless you’d seen it happen — the most powerful nation on Earth actually went so far as to elect a reality tv star to their highest office!
See: the Big 5 personality matrix.
> Need for cognition is closely related to the five factor model domain openness to experience, typical intellectual engagement, and epistemic curiosity
At some point the algorithms in our head has to stop trying to think about things and instead just go with an option. That happens at different points for everyone, some stop thinking earlier while others basically never stops thinking about things so have a hard time getting started with anything.
I don't think that it is fair to say that one is better than the other, they are just different and are good at solving different kinds of problems.
Traditionalism and conservatism are vital aspects of human nature, not necessarily for the individual, definitely for at least some larger groups.
When do you stop doing your own research about vaccines and trust doctors? When do you stop writing your own code and trust a software library?
The world literally is too overwhelmingly complicated. It seems like the more you know about a facet of the world, the more complicated it starts to seem. At some point, you have appeal to specialization of authority and stop thinking or you'll be permanently DDoSed into inaction, make horrible mistakes, or both.
But cognition is as precious a resource as attention or compute these days, so maybe there's something to learn from them.
NO. You are completely wrong. Dogmatism Is not laziness.
It's fear of social dominance. It's too overwhelming to be humiliated socially by some other person on hacker news so dogmatic people end up taking the dogmatic route in order to defend their integrity. It's purely a social thing, not an intellectual thing.
In fact, it takes more intelligence, more effort, more grit to defend a point that is, in actuality, wrong. It's basically hard mode.
Here's the other thing. sometimes, these "dogmatic" people are actually RIGHT. Galileo was essentially a flat earther during his time. So the reality is nobody really knows the difference between dogmatism and high NFC. You could be either, it all depends on whether you're in actuality right or wrong.
>But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not."
This is wrong and insulting. Because the fact of the matter is most people have extremely high dogmatism. Who on the face of this earth will believe in something for 10 years and suddenly flip that belief in an instant when presented with solid evidence that the belief isn't true? Nobody. Because everyone is dogmatic.
99.99% of all debates and arguments on Hacker news are people finding evidence support a point, not using evidence to find a point. Key difference. People just don't function like that.
And, unfortunately, neither do you.
Is this comment serious or some kind of meta-joke?
It's a bit of joke. But it's more commentary about how everyone on HackerNews gets off on these "intelligence" articles when really they're just normal human beings with normal NFC and normal dogmatic tendencies.
> NFC has been found to be strongly associated with a number of independently developed constructs, specifically epistemic curiosity, typical intellectual engagement, and openness to ideas.
I haven't come across the term "dogmatism" in the psychological literature. But the way you're presenting it seems extremely judgmental ("defects", "laziness", "immaturity"). You might be more interested in the more objective formulation:
There are even well-established scales for measuring it, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/44/2/211/222790...
It is not synonymous with the Big 5 trait of openness to experience, but it is certainly related to it.
Just meant it's not really a term that's commonly used in psychology, not a standard viewpoint that's used much when discussing personality traits generally today. Unless there's a paradigm here I'm not familiar with. (And I'm sure there are niche studies on dogmatism specifically, as opposed to part of a broader model.)
I mean, maybe. It also feels like how you describe a particular dog as needing a lot of mental stimulation (food puzzles, fulfilling work, etc)
since I'm guessing about the nutrient usage, I'm less comfortable including it in a hypothesis, but perhaps low NFC and high dogmatism are related to low maximum energy output or poor energy efficiency in the brain.
in my own personal experience, when I'm energy-tired, or ill, or depressed, I'm much less willing to approach new ideas, new experiences, or really anything that doesn't just follow pre-existing pathways
You know, I could believe that, but I can't help wondering if the people who do research in psychology (or most people in academia really) are not more likely to be high-NFC types, and thus not exactly objective in deciding what potential advantages/disadvantages to research. For example, who is less likely to be swayed by empirical evidence?
Ultimately research is conducted by humans and we are all prone to any normal human biases
I later learned that my world view has a logical layer.
In contrast others around me have a world view learned by their surroundings.
That made it for me so much clearer why people can life with logical conflicts.
Like the gay people still want to be part of the church.
Or acting different in similar situations.
Or stealing.
A test of your own personal philosophy is when you encounter adversity. Do you apply what you've learned, or make up something on-the-fly?
Looking like a high school Powerpoint presentation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model#/...
There was a time, when infographics used to be artistic…
My default is deeper thought, occasionally to my detriment. I can only operate quickly if I have extensive experience doing that thing.
Learning new sports or new mental tasks is slow and requires a lot of discomfort, intentionally pushing my body and mind to just do something they don't feel ready for.
I sometimes do wish I could act more quickly but thus far the only method which works is to do the thing a lot.
https://reasonedeclecticism.substack.com/p/peter-watts-and-c...
However, big brother has never lied to us and only the worst people do not love big brother, so I don't officially support or believe any conspiracy theories. Also its too much work to check legacy media to see what's been admitted recently.
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So basically your average conspiracy theorist.
Take it from the entire field of philosophy of science if you won't take it from me.
There are some other interesting references in this blog post: https://culturecog.blog/2021/06/15/a-sociology-of-thinking-d...