Delusions shape our reality
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Hardly! I know plenty of conspiracy believing nutjobs who could teach me a thing or two about cooking or even philosophy.
> we can stop assuming that they are where agency goes to die
Being willing to listen to just about anyone, yet filter what I want for myself does not mean I have taken away their agency. It just means I don't trust their every word, and rightfully so. That's basically the definition of being rational.
Those with authority may say or do agreeable things I know to be false in subtle or not so subtle ways. I know their authority does not come from individuals, but crowds. I'm either in or out. The ones with the least agency are the rest of us who care more about truth than clout.
I think this article was interesting, but misguided. Crowds are ephemeral and already made up their minds long before anyone they gave authority was before them. They're not going to be convinced by mere opinion pieces. Their beliefs came from their own thoughts validated by others and long before anyone embodied it. This validation process is often random and meaningless. What matters more is that enough people arrived at the same thoughts independently and usually from gentle suggestion building off previous authority. Filling that void by becoming that icon is how most con artists operate, and great artists steal.
So they simultaneously hold delusions and reality-close beliefs/thoughts etc, as is common, but you describe them as conspiracy believing nutjobs. What I construe the article as saying is that we ascribe a negative tint to delusions, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt that there is a meaningful reason that they have this belief and not just that they're nutjobs, it could be evolutionarily advantageous or cognitively economical or just the best explanation at hand in a short time-frame for their unique life-experience. What I mean is, since you're calling them nutjobs you're agreeing that calling beliefs delusional is not a neutral description. But I also get that you mean that they still have the capacity to produce and share knowledge, with the multidimensional example of some nonrigorous beliefs and some more reality-grounded beliefs or skills.
Vetting others beliefs is great, especially from crowds and people with authority.
Who knows if you're rational by saying those with least agency are those who care more about truth than clout, but I found this article inspiring because of the hopeful message of influencing reality, for example with the optimism-bias example, and so to try it out, maybe try challenging your belief that crowds are unconvinced by articles and that truth pursuers have less agency. Good journalism, if you can find it, does exist and meets these beliefs head-on. I admit that it could go the other way, your life experience could give you excellent reasons to have these beliefs and they could serve you well, but I don't have the lens to see it immediately.
I've had my fair share of delusions that turned out to be long term positive, because the world is complex and our minds small, if we push far enough we will discover more elaborate reasonings for good hunches that epistemologically initially were on unsure foundation.
>> Filling that void by becoming that icon is how most con artists operate, and great artists steal.
We have too many con artists in this world and I feel like this article is encouraging people to ignore rational thought. I'm not going to take anyone as a leader. That's for the ignorant and insecure. We should all lead ourselves. Ideas are more important than people. Just because I agree with a few things someone says doesn't mean I'm going to let them walk all over me.
If we take seriously the idea that "the line separating good and evil [or rational and irrational, if you prefer] runs through every human heart" then we all hold "delusional" beliefs. There are ideas I hold and defend, right now, which do not align with reality. I don't know what they are just yet, but I'm trying to figure that out, and am (or should be) willing to listen to anyone else along the way.
In practice, though... Whew! I mean, my uncle Dan knows a hell of a lot more about guns than I ever will, and I'd value his opinion about the relative merits of this or that firearm very highly. On the other hand, inviting that conversation means engaging / filtering all of the other opinions he'll inevitably express along the way. It's a ton of mental effort, and not usually worth it, especially since I'm not all that interested in guns. He knows much more than I do about cars, as well, and has fewer (not none, but fewer) conspiratorial beliefs attached to that subject, so that's where I'll usually lead our conversations.
I've found that this gets easier over time as you interact with the same person. Most people want you to "define the relationship" and avoid friction with them. They are flattered when you take them seriously about something.
The "mental effort" is worth it to me. I try to keep friends of all kinds. Adults don't reject, they just maintain boundaries.
Thank you. That's an insightful idea.
[Edit, because glancing at your comment once again: Lol. "Avoid friction" is not part of my uncle Dan's makeup. He's one of those people who goes out of his way to create it. He's a bully, quite frankly. He's also my uncle, and so not someone I can avoid, without cutting myself off from a lot of other people I value highly. He's also not all bad. He's generous with his tools and time and advice when my car needs work. He's a good storyteller, and knows more about my family's history than anyone else in it. He's promised to protect me, even though I'm a Liberal, when the civil war he hopes will happen breaks out, and people like him get out their guns and start killing people like me. (Yes, literally.) That's... Um, the sort of topic I try to steer him away from.]
> What matters more is that enough people arrived at the same thoughts independently and usually from gentle suggestion building off previous authority.
Highly debatable. Most ideas spread as opposed to originating independently millions of times over.
Humans construct an internal Bayesian like model of the world, that is not itself the 'Real' world. It is a 'Delusion'.
And since our brains are just pattern matching, on best guesses.
If you feed people a lot of garbage 'IN', it is possible to get people that only spew garbage 'OUT'.
Eventually your internal model can be so off base, that others think you are crazy, or living in an 'alternate reality'. You were fed so much garbage your internal state has hard time interpreting anymore.
But, it is for everything. What we call 'garbage' changes with time. We no longer think the sun revolves around the earth, but was it 'garbage' back when everyone believed that.
Part of our internal model update functions, is trying to adapt to everyone else's internal models. There are very few 'facts' in the world, far more interpretations, and those are all subject to this 'delusion'.
(I think what the article is actually saying, is yes, all humans live in an 'illusion', so we should stop saying the word 'delusion' since it is viewed as derogatory for something that happens to everyone. We pick and choose who we say is 'delusional' and stigmatize them, without realizing everyone is in an 'illusion'. And this framing is preventing reaching them to help update the 'delusions').
What is it you’re saying is a delusion?
There may yet be a correlation beteeen genius and madness.
Take Tesla’s Wardenclyffe experiment. Assuming we don’t believe he would have succeeded, it was a delusional dream. He had spent his life thinking radically and having it align with reality, so he didn’t doubt his hunch about wireless power.
Perhaps delusional thoughts are a result of accurate guesses growing up which don’t compensate for mental faculty decline. This brings fear and defensive attitudes and ultimately leads to a thick headed belief that is static.
I wouldn't advocate that people with delusional beliefs should be ignored 100% of the time, but it's hard to remain curious in the face of a lot of delusional beliefs that you've heard a hundred times before. Yeah, sure, 5G gives you Covid. That was a fun one to unpack the first time - definitely worth being curious about where that came from. But eventually you start to recognize patterns of nonsense, and it just becomes boring, so we arrive at dismissal as a time-saving heuristic.
I’m all up for hearing some novel delusions.
Asking out of curiosity rather than cynicism - did you actually encounter that one in the wild? Where? I've never met anyone who believed that, despite the remarkable amount of effort that seems to go in to debunking it.
The guy has a PhD from a respectable university.
In the case of people being profoundly ignorant, there's so much you have to explain about how the world works, including really basic things like "how you know something is true", before you have enough common ground to have a reasonable conversation about it.
In the case of people who have motivated reasoning, they believe those things for reasons that are entirely immune to any kind of rational argument, because they are starting with the conclusion they want and only see evidence and rational arguments as tools to persuade others of that belief and not as a means of getting to "the truth". They're not crazy, they just don't care about what's true. You can be deeply wrong about a lot of things in life and it _never matters_. Does it matter if you believe the world is flat or not? In almost all cases, no it doesn't. So if it makes you feel better, why not believe that?
Seriously? Delusional thinking is a dysfunctional process almost by definition, since it produces invalid conclusions.
> these cognitive biases are a common feature of human cognition and not a dysfunction giving rise to a pathology
That’s like saying that cancer is OK because it arises commonly in many humans.
However, murder can also be fruitful for some people, but I think we’d still call it dysfunctional.
His point is that delusional thinking is _normal_ and almost all people have deeply held delusions of one kind or another. There is nothing about _any particular delusion_ which implies some kind of disorder, which implies the person lacks agency or any ability to be talked out of them.
I think that is different that saying that there is no disorder which can give rise to delusions, only that having some particular delusional belief does not imply that you have such a disorder, necessarily.
So, it may be normal to have some delusional thoughts, but delusional thoughts are not normal thoughts.
It does not automatically follow that invalid conclusions are the result of a dysfunctional process.
Another way to frame this is that a process that is stressed beyond its design parameters and fed inputs outside bounds of what is considered “normal” will result in invalid conclusions, where “valid” is based on a relatively new (in terms of the existence of human brains) understanding of science and ability to rigorously define validity.
In other words, you and I may not be able to understand the delusions of those around us, but had we been subject to the same environmental factors, they might make perfect sense to us.
I think the general point is that thinking that appears delusional doesn’t automatically indicate some inherent defect in the brain, and likely has causes that make sense if we could trace the history of inputs to the brain.
The conclusion that we should be more open to engaging with delusional people and less quick to discard them outright seems like a reasonable one.
Anecdotally, I have family who gravitate to certain conspiracy theories, and based on what I know of their traumatic past (war vet, physically abused), I understand why they have deeply embedded mistrust of government and other people that causes them to accept beliefs that help them make sense of their lived reality.
They’re still otherwise very intelligent. Expert in their chosen craft, and capable of nuanced understanding of deeply technical subjects. But their human brains are also shaped by events that would likely have a similar impact on anyone else who went though the same set if life experiences.
> That’s like saying that cancer is OK because it arises commonly in many humans
I don’t think this analogy works. Cancer invades the body. Our cognition is something we all share, and the way it operates is not inherently dysfunctional, even while it is always susceptible to trauma and conditioning. And even in trauma, what appears “dysfunctional” externally is most likely helping the person survive.
When my mom's dementia had her worried about a puddle of gasoline on the floor or her grandchildren turning into squirrels, the problem wasn't me not listening or failing to respect her views on reality.
There's a little more room to listen when someone has gotten to some strange conclusion about the weather or whatever.