Cognitive distortions that undermine clear thinking
leadingsapiens.com
leadingsapiens.com
On average, X is more likely than Y, therefore in any specific case, X is more likely than Y.
This is not true at all, and leads to some really dumb conclusions. Not a perfect example but : gun owners in the USA on average are more likely to hurt themselves with their firearm than successfully use the firearm on an intruder. Now, if you follow proper firearm practices, then your chance of hurting yourself is basically 0. This average number includes the vast swathe of people who really have no business owning a firearm. If you are educated and take it seriously, though, you won't hurt yourself. And yet this statistic has really stuck with people and I hear people use it all the time to assert that anyone that owns a gun is putting their own life at risk, regardless of how they treat the gun.
If you take an average across the entire population, that is actually the average if you were to randomly select an individual from the population (i.e. the long-run value after repeated sampling).
However, if you were to examine particular subgroups, they may wildly deviate from the average, and so in any particular subgroup, the mean is not at all like the population average.
If you have more information on the particular subgroup you are sampling from, then you should of course use that information to estimate the relevant average. If you don't, or the claim you're making spans many comparable subgroups, then perhaps a broader average applies.
I'll take this a bit further. X is more likely than Y so Y is not going to happen & we should not consider Y.
There's a book, recommended by Bill Gates no less, "How to lie with statistics".
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
> Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling". It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality, for example by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, so that differences seem larger than they are, or by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, so that the reader forgets that the images do not scale the same way the quantities do.
I'll claim that statistics & even extracting quanta from qualia is going to have data loss from the sampling. So forecasting from statistics requires context on what is being forecasted.
The way to overcome this is to start with the average risk and subtract from it by naming specific mitigations that must be in place to reduce risk. Unfortunately, it seems that in the US, there isn’t a voice of “responsible gun owners” in the conversation. There are only two voices: those who would ban them outright and those who would make any restriction illegal.
By the way, the largest victim of gun violence in the US is gun owners due to suicide. It’s unclear what mitigations one could put in place to prevent that.
At any rate I agree, the moderate educated gun owner is a majorly minority viewpoint for sure.
A key factor to look at when someone is experiencing suicidal ideation is to evaluate whether they have a concrete plan. Someone is much more likely to succeed or even attempt suicide if they have a thought out plan of actionable steps.
Most non-gun methods I can think of off the top of my head come with risk factors that would require more complex planning. But, with easy access to a firearm, the planning becomes much simpler in many ways.
The mitigations probably are: free and accessible mental health counseling, shifting societal views of acceptable emotional openness, and normalizing conversations about depression and other struggles.
Just to make it clear how much I agree: everyone reading this, talk to your friends, especially male friends, about what you are going through and ask them what they are going through. Be there for them. Everyone needs this.
Proper firearm practices don't protect you from deliberate self-harm, nor does it protect the other people living in the space from a resident motivated to do them harm. Following proper safe firearm practices protects you and your family from negligent discharge and from someone turning your firearms against you. But it does absolutely nothing to protect you from yourself, nor protect your friends/family from you. You know who doesn't shoot their friends/family/self whilst in the grip of a severe, acute mental health episode? A person who doesn't have easy access to guns.
About 42% of adults in the US live in a household with guns[0]. If your claim is that the statistics [that show living in a household with guns is more dangerous than not] are easily mitigated via good practices, then a HUGE number of people must not be following those practices. Why else would the statistics be so clear on that point? Either a large proportion of people are not following those practices, in which case some other mitigation is necessary, or those practices are not as effective as you claim, in which case some other mitigation is necessary.
I bring this up because my wife and I have discussed at length whether or not to conveniently locate our firearms for self-defense, and concluded that, for now at least, adequately keeping our kids safe from using the guns without supervision basically precludes using the firearm for self-defense (that old "when seconds count..." saw), to the extent that we don't keep our firearms in our home.
0. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts...
- A roughly 12 year old jumping out of a van, pulling a pistol directly from his waistband, and firing downrange without ever taking a safety off.
Also most gun owners I know just keep their guns like, on a shelf somewhere, with the bullets either in the gun or nearby.
So yeah there are a lot of people that don't use any brain cells whatsoever when handling firearms. Get your youtube algorithm to start serving you shorts from the hip-hop enthusiast gun-modification community, you'll see some real idiocy in short order.
Here is another example. On average, retail investors lose money. However, a highly intelligent, highly motivated, skilled retail investor will make money. In fact there is always some subset of retail investors that will always make money. But on average, retail loses money.
Because on average retail loses money does not imply that any given retail investor is more likely to lose money than to make money.
Also it is very obvious that a huge portion of people that own guns do not adhere to strict gun safety principles, so not sure what argument you are trying to make there.
The point I'm making is that good, safe gun ownership and gun storage practices only mitigate very specific parts (and not even the largest parts) of the statistical observation that people who live in a home with guns are considerably more likely to be killed or injured by gun violence. A person can very carefully follow the basic rules of gun safety (treat every gun as if it's loaded, don't point it at something you're not prepared to shoot, etc) and still use it on themself. Or their kids. Or their spouse. Or their roommate. These are not mutually exclusive. That person can very conscientiously store their (unloaded) firearm in an appropriate locked cabinet, with trigger locks, away from their ammunition, and still do any of those things. So I reject completely your initial claim that being a "safe" gun owner makes you somehow an exception to the observed phenomenon.
> The point I'm making is that good, safe gun ownership and gun storage practices only mitigate very specific parts (and not even the largest parts) of the statistical observation that people who live in a home with guns are considerably more likely to be killed or injured by gun violence. A person can very carefully follow the basic rules of gun safety (treat every gun as if it's loaded, don't point it at something you're not prepared to shoot, etc) and still use it on themself. Or their kids. Or their spouse. Or their roommate. These are not mutually exclusive. That person can very conscientiously store their (unloaded) firearm in an appropriate locked cabinet, with trigger locks, away from their ammunition, and still do any of those things. So I reject completely your initial claim that being a "safe" gun owner makes you somehow an exception to the observed phenomenon.
The point being made is simply one of statistics. "On average," retail investors will lose money. This "average" is taken across the entire population of investors. There are subpopulations of investors, however, who tend to be better educated, motivated and so on, and who do not lose money "on average." It isn't a no true Scotsman fallacy.
You are missing the point of my post which is basically people have such a hard on for arbitrary statistics that they will completely ignore that likely outcomes are very easy to identify in many cases. Because I know myself, I know I am not part of the population of the average which contributes to the "self/family harm" side of the statistic. And its ridiculous for you to suggest that I am somehow just as likely as the average to murder my family or kill myself or have an accident.
Congratulations that you and your spouse are completely immune from ever experiencing brain tumors or traumatic brain injuries that cause wild behavioral changes. You should really let us all know how you know, a priori, that you'll never experience such a psychologically traumatizing event that it would push you into such an action. That would save millions of veterans' lives.
I am not saying that people shouldn't own or keep firearms in light of these statistics. I'm saying that "I observe safe practices with my firearms, so those statistics don't describe me" is along the same lines as "I know I'm a good driver, so all the statistics about most dangerous days/times/situations to drive are irrelevant to me". It's a failure of imagination on your part. You can still mitigate the how's and why's of those statistics, but it takes a lot more than a gun safe and a trigger lock, and it's stuff that is never actually characterized as "gun safety".
If you have 100 coins and 1 of them has heads on both sides, on average the likelihood that flipping a rabdom coin will give heads is about 50, and approaches 50 as your number of them increases. For the 1 coin with 2 heads though, the probability is always 100 percent.
The point I am trying to make is that people take a generalized statistic and when you say "okay but that really isnt all that applicable in this specific case" they have an anuerysm and accuse you of exceptionalism instead of just listening to reason. The law of large numbers applies only to the aggregate. If you have any information whatsoever about a specific case it can dramatically change the math.
Here's an illustrative example from my realm of experience: between the fall of 2009 and spring of 2023, 363 people have died in avalanches in the US. Of those, 173 were skiers or snowboarders, and 17 of those were "inbounds" [0]. Somewhere on the order of 60 million people visit ski resorts each year[1]. A surface level understanding of those numbers might cause a ski-hill operator to conclude "the money I spend on avalanche mitigation is wasted, since deadly avalanches are significantly less likely at ski resorts".
Obviously this is a straw-man. But there are a number of ways to misinterpret the data to arrive at a conclusion you want (to whit, in that time period, 3 times as many skiers than snowboarders died in avalanches, and more than twice as many snowmobiler/snowbikers died in avalanches than snowboarders. But it takes really digging in to realize that a) there are also a lot fewer backcountry snowboarders vs backcountry skiers and b) snowmobiliers are consistently the least avalanche-educated of all backcountry users who actually play on avalanche prone slopes)
You're entirely correct that statistics don't dictate outcomes. But understanding what does dictate outcomes, without bias, can help you change those outcomes.
0. https://avalanche.org/avalanche-accidents/
1. https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/29/national-ski-areas-record...
In fact, I currently have no bullets in my house at all, and have no plans to purchase any. So right now my chance of injury is 0. It is not possible for me to be in the same cohort as the people with average risk of injuring themselves.
I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder when somebody says "oh, this doesn't apply to me, I'm just that good". Most of the time, in my experience, that's somebody who can't be bothered to follow the rule, and not somebody who is actually a valid exception to the rule. I tend to throw water on such people whenever I can, to try to counter that effect.
I used to teach people how to rock climb, and the sketchiest people I knew were my fellow instructors, because they always had some complicated reasoning why the rules we taught (which, as the saying goes, are written in blood) didn't actually apply to themselves. It's some weird Dunning-Kruger thing going on, where they somehow convince themselves that all of this time spent avoiding death or serious injury by shear luck is somehow evidence of their greater skill and capability to manage the risks.
I watched several of these people take bad falls, walk away from them, and just go right back to what they were doing, with no behavioral change whatsoever.
When I called one of them out for not following a some minor rule around equipment checkout, he said "I don't need to follow that rule, I'll just be responsible". He went on to do a series of dangerous things that probably caused his students to quit climbing afterwards, and was ultimately fired because of gross misconduct surrounding (you guessed it) irresponsible behavior.
Reading climbing and mountaineering accident reports, the accounts from those involved are stacked with "it had always been ok in the past" or "it looked solid to me" or "I had done 'x' (which was completely unrelated to the outcome of the incident), so I thought we'd be ok".
There is less daylight between "there's no scenario where I won't flip out and turn my gun on somebody else" and "I was the last to use that firearm, so I know its unloaded, I don't need to check" than I think either of us are entirely comfortable.
I'll also say that the standard "good" practice is to just store your weapons and ammo in separate lockers, not entirely separate locations. That's a mitigation above and beyond (and punters need to understand why that makes a difference in the statistics).
But I see from your other comments that you have a crystal ball with 200% certainty of being right about the future, so it's a pointless argument
Okay how about this : Lets say over the next week, on average, 10% of the population will eat more calories than their maintenance requirements. Now for me, is my probability 10%? No, because I can actively decide which side of that I want to end up on. If I want to eat under maintenance, my chance is 0% if I want to overeat, my chance is 100% (provided adequate access to calories)
Is this making my point any more clear?
Im saying that if mitigation strategies exist for gun safety exist, then it makes no sense to say that 2 people with wildly different safety standards have the same probability of injurying themselves just because a particular average statistic has been studied and published at some point.
I wholly disagree with this foundational principle of CBT. Feelings of, say, anxiety or depression can completely bypass rational thought. For me this is easily testable by having a cup of coffee. After that drink I will (often) feel less depressed and (sometimes) be more anxious. I may have thoughts that stem from these sensations. Just as sometimes I may have sensations that stem from thoughts. The system to me seems more complex than thoughts > emotions.
But those thoughts are ultimately interpretations of the emotion, and those interpretations are built on a foundation of past experience and external factors. The feeling of anxiety and the feeling of excitement are remarkably similar, and "I'm anxious about this upcoming event" and "I'm excited about this upcoming event" are two potential interpretations of the same feeling.
> But in many, many cases it's clear the emotions preceded the thoughts.
The question is: what preceded the emotions that preceded those thoughts? I think that in many cases, it's hard to trace this all the way back. There are times when thoughts (e.g. incessant rumination) directly lead to the negative emotions, which then lead to thoughts, but now there's a feedback loop and it's hard to tell where it started.
There's a certain kind of co-emergence that seems to happen, and the interpretive layer has a lot to do with how it plays out. And as interpretations change, so do the resulting chains of thoughts/emotions.
- Sometimes, emotions precede (and at least set the stage) for thoughts.
- The reality is not so clear cut as the CBTs state. ie, they say that "Thoughts [always] dictate emotions."
That said, CBT is still very effective, and will yield improvements for most people. It's just that their core tenant seems to be an oversimplification.
But yeah, my belief in CBT is mostly for its utility.
As a side note, I've found some of Lisa Feldman Barrett's work on emotions to be pretty interesting. It dives into newer research behind how emotions are intrinsically connected to other bodily processes, and explores some of ways that the emergence of emotional states doesn't match our intuitions.
On this tangent, I’ve found mindfulness meditation to be one of the most useful tools when navigating the harder feelings. In that mode of observation, you start to notice these things just unfolding in the space of consciousness.
It made a lot of the ideas I’d been introduced to in therapy actually become real experientially, e.g. the idea that I am not my thoughts sounds nice, but while meditating, I begin to experience this as thoughts come and go like waves, and eventually just stop. But I’m still aware. It was the first time I could really feel the difference between “me” and “a thought my brain is thinking right now”. Getting that separation makes dealing with the harder thoughts significantly easier.
"bad emotions -> negative thoughts -> worse emotions -> worse thoughts -> ..."
with:
"bad emotions -> reflective, moderated thoughts -> equally bad or slightly better emotions -> reflective, moderated thoughts -> ..."
CBT is just a tool. It works for some things. Not everything.
Why? It's a circular thing, the reason anxiety or depression can bypass rational thought is that they're drawing your focus to a particular train of thought. There are many thoughts going on in our heads at one time, and emotions can shift our focus to ones of greater emotional impact. IMHO the really strong emotions are often due to unresolved issues or unprocessed past trauma. Once you get those taken care of (no easy task), it's easier to choose a way to look at something that causes you the least distress. Sure, it may not be the ground truth but when it comes to interactions with humans there often isn't an underlying "correct" interpretation of things, so you may as well adopt a view that doesn't bother you and get on with your day.
This anxiety does not have to reflex reality at all (consider my father and his dementia). The stimuli is inconsequential for a rational observer, but latched onto by the anxious. 'Fixing/dealing' the thought causing the anxiety does nothing to alleviate his anxiety - as there will always be something to be anxious about.
It's not that trains of thoughts are causing his anxiety: it is very clearly his anxiety searching the tracks until it can get on the most disturbing it can find...
One of the biggest "aha" moments for me was the day that I realized that other people around me interpreted certain events in a way that was entirely unlike my own thought process. There were pessimistic defaults hammered into me from a young age, and my interpretation of circumstances always happened through that lens. I knew that everyone had their own experience of things, but it didn't really dawn on me how drastically different those experiences can be, and how much they're colored by past experience.
> Feelings of, say, anxiety or depression can completely bypass rational thought.
I think this is a matter of framing. I'd say that feelings of anxiety and depression co-exist with rational thought, but often surface as stronger signals. They're brain processes that manifest in the same space of conscious awareness as siblings to each other. They also seem to interact and modulate each other.
Now that I have tools to reframe/manage my depressive episodes, I can observe my depression and anxiety while also having a rational conversation with myself about the experience. I can both feel the anxiety and understand that the anxiety is an echo of past experience that has no current purpose. So as much as the anxiety is "overriding" rational thought, it's also possible to override the anxiety with rational thought. It just takes intentional work, which is where the "it's how you look at things" comes into play.
Very early in the process, I couldn't see past the anxiety/depression. Someone could point out the irrationality of it, and all I could conclude was "that's nice, but what about the depression?". At some point, it became clear that this was itself a kind of fallacy. A false dichotomy. The depression can exist alongside higher order thinking, and that higher order thinking modulates the depression over time. What I'd fallen into was a form of learned helplessness, where I had convinced myself that doing something wouldn't matter. The equivalent of drowning in 2 feet of water because I didn't believe that standing up would make a difference, because I didn't know that it could make a difference.
This is why external intervention can be very effective. Someone outside your currently compromised brain helps you start to reframe things and see them from another perspective. This jump starts new modes of thinking, and eventually builds the core tools to counteract the depressive thinking. At some point, it dawned on me that I could choose other modes of thought.
Once I realized this, I was off to the races. There was a point when I realized that my experience of a thing was modulated by my own brain, and to whatever degree I could get involved in that process, I could change my experience of things. This isn't to say it's easy or automatic - it has been anything but that - but it has also transformed my life.
Or more accurately, it feels that the only things I want/need in those moments are unavailable, and anything else I just don't want to do.
But the more I focus on doing “the work”, the shorter they are, and there haven’t been as many. For me, that has meant: Weekly therapy, Get good sleep, Eat decent food, daily mindfulness meditation and Yoga, several long walks every week, daily if possible. Journaling to clear thoughts out of my head.
This would have sounded like an insurmountable list at one point, and in reality happened gradually. One thing built on the next.
If I could deliver a message to my former self when I was stuck in a much deeper and longer rut, it’d be:
0. I need to start loving myself, as strange as that feels. Especially when the love isn’t there from outside, find it from inside if I can (this was fucking hard at first but got easier)
1. The only person who can change me is me (but get external help)
2. I don’t actually like wallowing in it. I just have a deeply ingrained habit of wallowing in it and it feels “normal”. It’ll stay normal until replaced with a new normal
3. Get better sleep above all else. Everything else gets easier. It took me 6 months of gradually shifting my schedule but I’d have buckled down sooner if I had realized how much it would help.
4. I won’t wake up one day and suddenly feel like doing the things I need to do - so I should stop waiting for that day and do it anyway. Doing it might feel like the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Do it anyway. Starting is the hard part. Doing it is usually far easier.
5. When I start to wallow or abandon good habits, don’t get upset about it, just begin again. It’s more like surfing than mountain climbing. Falling down is part of the process.
I don’t know how I would have received this message from my future self. I might have struggled to receive it. But these are some of the bigger things that I realized along the way, and continue to realize as I work through this.
I would add to that the importance of doing creative work. I would've been inclined to say this is personal, but I'm leaning more into believing that just like you don't need to be "a type of person" to get into mindfulness and yoga, everyone can and should benefit from having a physical space and allocated time to play with some form of creative activity. I might feel lonely or wish my life was better but if I'm being creative it's like I'm in contact with a part of me that is a friend.
It's related to your point about loving yourself, because sometimes it's hard to be convinced that I'm worthy of self love if I'm just indulging in depressive thoughts. But when examined, there's two components to that, the thoughts, and the indulging. If I focus on the indulging but I'm not mindful, I can slip into addiction. But if I do it with the mindset that I'm giving myself "permission" to indulge in child-like play, then I'm becoming a kkind of person I'd like to be around, so it becomes easy to love myself.
Wishing you the best with all of this.
Part of CBT is recognizing that so you can try to train yourself not to experience emotions as deeply and/or to be able to clamp down on these reactions before they spiral.
By applying some form of mindfulness like CBT, you can avoid these cognitive distortions that are likely to lead you down unnecessarily negative thought paths. These patterns typically compromise us. They are more likely to lead us to negative thoughts about our experiences. By avoiding them, over time we may find ourselves feeling better as a result.
I don’t believe in free will in a very immediate sense. It seems our greatest form of control is in choosing how we react internally to what occurs in the world, or what “bubbles up”. By choosing wisely we can gradually steer the ship in better directions. Yet we never seem to have full control over it, by any means.
Sometimes I feel like a passenger rather than a driver, and I’m constantly telling the driver how to operate the vehicle. Over time, the driver will hopefully become a bit more conscientious, skilled, and capable of avoiding accidents. In the immediate sense, I just have to relax and be prepared for fender benders and other nonsense and deal with it when it happens.
For instance, anxiety therapy requires both the cognitive part where you work on your thought and the behavioral part, exposure, where you physically expose yourself to your fears (assuming it's something in the real world).
As for depression and anxiety levels changing through caffeine intake, it's in the same ballpark as alcohol--you affect your internal chemistry, so different processes start to work differently, and so a given train of thought can be temporarily boosted or silenced. But because you still have the same core beliefs, as soon as you return to your baseline, you'll get back to the same psychical state as before.
Intelligent people require power, or the approval of those in power, to thrive, and knowing logical fallacies in other peoples thinking or actions, or sometimes in your own, doesnt by itself give you the power to change anything and can in fact be even more dispiriting.
“Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!” - Bertrand Russell
I've seen them recycled targeting different audiences but the same core principles are used. I just recommend "Feeling Good" because it's on Libby / Amazon < $5.
I started keeping a weekly spreadsheet tracking my BURNS score and made an effort to regularly write down when I have a bad thought and put it on trial to see if it fits any of these distortions.
That paired with exercise alone has made a big difference in my mood.
But that's just all anecdotal.
What I do is think "what would I do if this was all Monopoly money, and I'm just playing Monopoly with it?" I usually discover I would allocate things very differently.
I'm still not able to overcome my biases when dealing with actual money, but I can move in that direction. It helps.
The structure or grand narrative to organize these concepts into a coherent whole is always missing though.
Not sure about it.
We build more sophisticated programming architectures than pop psychology presents to us in these articles.
Me: "Just the one, right?" Him: "huh?" Me: "Denial"
Cognitive dissonance.