Ode to a world-saving idea: attribution error and cognitive empathy (2021)
nonzero.substack.com
nonzero.substack.com
It is quite possible for one person to have certain beliefs, and have those beliefs be part of their identity, while another has the same beliefs but does not have them as part of their identity.
Why would anyone over the age of 7 or so have beliefs? Are you all so good at life that you play it with a handicap, like some expert golfer slumming it with us losers?
behaviour
capabilities
beliefs
values
identity
My personality enjoys the meditative aspect of long distance sports. People who observe these behaviors call me a runner (identity). I don’t consider myself a runner but cant argue that when you see me running for 2 hours, saying “hey look a runner” is a reasonable thing to say.
This depends on whether one is using normative/colloquial or strict/"pedantic" epistemology. The latter tends to be inaccessible / disallowed except in a few disciplines like math and physics, where it is revered, otherwise it is condemned (if you push it after an initial warning to stop).
I often wonder if this unfair advantage is a big part of the reason why the hard sciences are so much more successful than the soft sciences.
strict: following rules exactly
knowledge: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJ... (Justified True Belief)
Simply: it is the difference between one's opinion of what is true, and what is actually true. But, it is even further complicated by the "truth" (colloquial) of the unknown being evaluated (by the mind, according to cultural/ideological conditioning, generating "is") as equal to the "consensus" opinion/theory (of the dominant metaphysical ideology of the era or geographical region one exists in), ie: "the reality is".
> If the latter is the kind that involves formal proofs, how do you account for the difficulty in applying those methods to normative considerations? Others have tried and failed. Does your theory equip you to explain how?
Yes: acknowledge that which is unknown. But this is very taboo in the culture we live in, people (once properly conditioned) get extremely emotionally worked up if one points out that certain(!) cultural "truths" are actually unknown (despite that being the explicit technical standard of the ideology's scriptures, and an argument in favour of its superiority). This can be difficult to realize, but comparing the effect ideas have on adults compared to on children in various stages of development makes it quite easy to see the phenomenon[1].
Or another approach: by default the mind thinks in binary (true /false), and according to its training set - forcefully override this intuition and think in more complex forms of logic, and forcefully re-resolve all truths (recalculate reality).
tl;dr: "Row row row your boat, gently down the stream...."
Full disclosure: this topic is far too complicated to do justice in casual comments on a text message board, not to mention I am in no way qualified to explain it. I am just doing my best.
[1] Which you'd think would set off some ideas related to the topic of discussion in people's heads....but alas, we are stuck in a bootstrap paradox.
The ignorant mind finds binary distinctions most facile to draw. The clever but ungrounded one unfortunately tends most easily into more complex modes of error.
I'm not sure what you mean, could you explain please?
> The ignorant mind finds binary distinctions most facile to draw. The clever but ungrounded one unfortunately tends most easily into more complex modes of error.
Is this an accusation directed towards me? If so, please provide more detail so I can realize my error.
I wouldn't precisely call it an accusation. If it's anything beyond me being a bit bitchy on a hot and unpleasant day, it's a suggestion from one autodidact, perhaps to another, to bear in mind that the moment of "I have a great idea!" is best followed by a moment of "I wonder who's had something to say about it before."
So there are others I see...it's a shame there's no way for anomalous agents to locate each other in this simulation. :(
Religion has filled the gap between that absolutely blissful state that one can achieve in his own nature, and one’s present level of instability. If you are looking for solace, it is definitely needed. Most people are looking for solace, not liberation. Solace is like a tranquilizer – it puts you to sleep.“
https://isha.sadhguru.org/en/wisdom/article/spirituality-vs-...
For science I guess the symbol would just be "science"? Not sure what one would use for mystics.
Are there more than these three?
> Religion has filled the gap between that absolutely blissful state that one can achieve in his own nature, and one’s present level of instability.
Interestingly, this is a faith based belief: "X has Y" ("has" varies...."explains", "is caused by", "is the fault of", etc are some other variations) is reductive, and speculative. If it is presented as fact rather than opinion/belief, then it is belief without adequate supporting evidence, aka Faith. Or it could also be propaganda, misinformation, etc.
This is probably in violation of the dominant metaphysical framework of the era/region though, in which case how about we attach a "That's pedantic" or "Just joking!" label and call it even.
I'm actually a big Sadhguru fan, but he himself admits that he avoids reading too much so as to avoid contamination by ideological frameworks (like in this case, say...Set Theory, Semantics/Semiotics, Taoism, etc).
And presumably he is optimizing for personal peace and comfort. That is all well and good, but I personally have great concern for others suffering around the world, and brushing things under the carpet (to achieve solace, ironically) with Meme Magic like his is a big part of what causes those problems to persist across generations and centuries, even though it is (presumably) not necessary.
When COVID was on the scene, the well being of others was a big deal...but now that it's largely gone, we are back to "every man for himself", or "that's just the way it is". Disgraceful imho.
Sorry, I find it to be an interesting and important perspective.
The poster you are replying to is fundamentally anti-meritocratic, against equality of opportunity, and supportive of equality of outcome. Any amount of reward doled out to the competent as a function of their competence is 'too much' when the incompetent aren't being rewarded identically, in the world view of these types. There is no way to appease them besides nobody receiving any distinct recognition, effectiveness and efficiency of solutions be damned.
I say this with such confidence because there's only one type of mindset that accuses the successful and competent of being 'rewarded too much', it is the mindset of those who have never really emotionally accepted that life is unfair, and that some human beings are simply more useful than other human beings. The poster is coming from a place of empathy for the less useful human beings. Good intentions, sure, but implementing their preferred solutions will inevitably result in a broad degradation of the quality of goods and services (and thus quality of life) across the board wherever their ideas are implemented.
This is because some humans are more useful than other humans, and meritocratic systems are efficient at grouping people based on how useful they are. Removing the meritocratic systems that lead to unequal reward will simply allow the incompetent to flourish in environments where a lack of competence is fatal. Feelings saved, lives lost.
See: Boeing today vs Boeing 30 years ago.
To use your formulation, let’s say as true meritocrats, we want to reward ‘competency’. Well then surely we would like equal competency to receive equal reward (but assuming competency is not evenly distributed, this will necessarily lead to unequal outcomes - but justly so, for us meritocrats)
But OP is decrying a world where we reward ‘success’, and sadly ‘competence’ doesn’t guarantee success (nor vice versa). Success is a function of circumstance and competence (and indeed in some circumstances success can manifest even for the utterly incompetent) so our current ‘success’ system rewards some people ‘too much’.
If not that, then what is the relative position against which 'too much' is even being determined?
You’re entitled to that belief but I’d encourage you to exercise some cognitive empathy and reckon with the possibility that other people might have good reasons for disagreeing with that premise.
The original comment might as well be about successful people being over rewarded by a non-meritocratic system, because their actual merit is lower.
They might also mean something completely differently.
I'm just not interested in feel good fantasies people telling themselves to keep going and others to exploit them. I'm just spreading awareness that where and when you are is more important than who you are, what you think or often even what you do if you are not hellbent on sucking the setup dry (See: Boeing today vs Boeing 30 years ago). A thing about life that's really not up for belief because it was researched from various angles.
Also, I never spoke of any reward. Just attribution. Alteration of reward may or may not follow.
How does the reader appease you - what is your proposed solution?
Also your other comments makes me think of the term “sealioning”. Hope this is unintentional.
For instance, Elon Musk is one of the richest people in the world. He inherited a ton of wealth, made some good decisions, and made a ton of bad decisions. In your version of the world, because he is the richest person in the world, he is also the most “competent” person in the world.
You’re completely ignoring the possibility that the poster is lamenting that there isn’t enough meritocracy, not that there’s too much of it, because you are for some reason assuming we all live in a 100% meritocratic world, or at least that’s the impression you give in this post.
Why do you assume that? It’s for a very similar reason that you attribute others not being able to accept the unfairness of meritocracy. You are presumably relatively successful, or think you will be, and don’t want to live in a world where that’s not 100% because you are more competent than others. You don’t want luck to have played a role.
It may be frustrating to hear someone who doesn’t know you make a ton of possibly false assumptions about you, your circumstances, and your motivations, but I’d say you invited that on yourself when you did the same.
> The poster you are replying to is fundamentally anti-meritocratic, against equality of opportunity, and supportive of equality of outcome.
> there's only one type of mindset...
How could you possibly know these things? How would you even know if you're wrong?
Feelings indeed. There's no "medicine" here.
A second layer of it is that it involves the unknown, which also forces System 1 processing. So it's like a double whammy in this case (at least...there are surely many others in play).
War is particularly scary because people's minds have been filled with skilfully written but untrue stories, and this is what System 1 uses to generate "the reality" of the situation and what should be done about it (what they have been told in stories should be done about it).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion
If you think about it, it's kind of funny how much understanding humans have of themselves, but for the most part all they ever do with this knowledge is talk about it. We seem to be fundamentally motivated by short-term pleasure, with some exceptions like the possibility of financial reward (thinking about which likely invokes pleasure?).
War is interesting. Like COVID, it involves preventable death. Unlike COVID though, people don't consider these deaths to be something we must(!) do something about. I wonder what the (actual) cause(s) of this inconsistency is. I also wonder why people don't find paradoxes like this to be interesting.
So how do we separate and weight how much the situation and the personality influence on the outcome? Not having a way of doing this and just saying 'our tendency in most situations to downplay the role of circumstance' seems oddly shallow and irresponsible
Yet over the years I have had encounters with many people on such programs in many different places and walks of life. And some of those people have indeed confirmed that belief that people would act in that way. But many more have not, and even those that have in many circumstances have done so in response to the nature of the benefit programs that encourage such behavior by implementing policies that ironically are intended to discourage that behavior.
By overweighting the necessity to distinguish the “good” intentions from the “bad” intentions, we’ve designed programs that not only encourage more bad behavior, but equally do harm to those that need the help of those programs.
If instead such programs were designed to assume good intent / circumstantial behavior rather than nefarious intent, yes we might waste some money and effort on people we otherwise shouldn’t. But is that irresponsible or just the cost of doing maximal good with the resources we have?
Epistemic soundness tends to be rather boring and unattractive. Maybe that's why people are so susceptible to facts that lack proof, or are unknowable (as is the case here).
Perhaps I am falling victim to “attribution error”, but I would bet considerable money that most cases I have witnessed of someone skipping a queue have nothing remotely like a dying relative behind it. This seems like a nice kumbaya sort of explanation that misdiagnoses reality.
i think it is easy to laugh it off even in a world full of inconsiderate jerks, i don’t have to pretend that they were somehow in the right just to not get upset
This is the cynical negative worldview that a therapist would attempt to steer a patient away from. The more time a person spends in a negative headspace the more easily that person will find themselves in a negative headspace - just like a muscle the brain will build neural pathways to find that negative pattern faster and more efficiently. And the longer that person spends there the stronger that pattern building will get.
Of course the person cutting in line's mother didn't die, more than likely they were lost in thought about their bills piling up, or feeling incredibly self-conscious about their weight, their husband's difficulty in finding a job or not ever being able to buy a home in these market conditions. If you had touched them gently on the shoulder and reminded them of the line they'd apologize profusely and move to the back.
At the end of the day, you will be forced to reckon with the fact that the optimal amount of cheating is almost certainly not 0. Which sucks in many ways. But does not change that you are better not escalating anything.
getting up in arms about it is another thing altogether and i don’t need to pretend that the line cutter has some pure motive to not confront or escalate.
I am also not arguing for you having to assume pure motivation, oddly; but against assuming bad motive. My reasoning for this would be pointing at how many people are constantly escalating small encounters.
Thing is though, another part of the culture is that if you get angry about it, it reflects poorly on you to lose your cool. So, nobody seems to get upset about these things either. Somehow it all just works.
but i don’t see the need to engage in fairytale thinking about the motivations of the person involved is all
A much much better example IMO is driving mistakes and bad driving. In my neck of the US, most people are acceptably good at driving safely. I recently was in Florida and it was clear that is not the case there, so I have to make my circumstances clear first:
Humans struggle to see cars as actual machines driven by normal, fallible humans, for various psychological reasons. We are hypercritical of the failures of others on the road, while being hyperprotective of our own feelings after mistakes. Think of any time you have been angry or road ragey about someone doing something in traffic, and then think of the time you did nearly the same thing because of an honest misunderstanding, mistake, or poor choice. Even 95th percentile drivers will make a mistake often enough that they should be able to empathize with the other driver who is very likely just making an honest mistake or bad choice.
Have you really, honestly, never cut off someone in traffic? Remember that the next time someone cuts you off in traffic, and it could literally save lives.
> A 2014 article in Psychology Today titled ‘Why We Don’t Give Each Other a Break’ used the example of someone who cuts into a line in front of you. You might think, “What a jerk,” when in reality this person has never skipped ahead in a line before and is doing so now only because he would otherwise miss a flight to see a dying relative.
That’s certainly possible, but extremely unlikely. The most likely explanation is that they’re in a hurry and selfish enough to ignore the other people in line.
As a side note, I firmly believe that cutting in line (or late merging into a turn lane) is the worst, most selfish thing that people do all the time.
Skipping this quip's obliviousness of imagination to what constitutes the worst selfishness, cutting in line amidst a standing queue is only marginally comparable to late merging in vehicular traffic.
The situational awareness, shared state, temporality, and protocol dynamics are distinct.
A standing queue is a holding pattern for a next available resource. It is centrally mediated via a global awareness of position for access to a singular threshold.
Merging traffic is autonomously mediated flow across and between variously overlapping thresholds.
The late merge is a rational and fair approach to not joining a queue unless you have to, and joining it as reluctantly as possible.
Late merging is a fair approach for everyone in zones of contention-- assuming all other strictures (rules) are being obeyed (and accepting the hazard of human volition, because people should not be expected to behave like sheep).
To comprehend the truth of this observation, step back from the pet peeve about what superficially seems like greed to examine what makes for effective driving: it's the efficient use of space on the road. Efficiency from an individual driver's perspective is taking only space that's needed as soon as it becomes available and freeing that space as opportunistically as possible.
The inverse observation is: do not take space you don't need, keep space only for as long as you need it, and occupy space fluidly.
You accomplish this first by avoiding zones of contention, and second by minimizing disruption within zones of contention. The best way to deal with contention is to not be there.
Formal politeness is as hindering to flow as oafishness. Malingering in flow is harmful to everyone behind you.
The opportunities for formal politeness in flow are naturally limited to conditions where you are stopped, because it's absurd to conduct an exchange of etiquette in moving automobile traffic.
The best approximation of polite deferral is smooth egress from zones of congestion and observing a proper round-robin in situations of full contention.
It may seem paradoxical, but heading into zones of contention and alternating is effective both for you and for the group, and should be preferred to queueing early because it maximizes your egress potential at no cost in fairness to those around you; your can't avoid occupying your share of turf in the flow, but you can minimize the time and disruption of occupation.
The early merge to a zone of contention is at best self-sacrificial and at worst a collective hindrance. Regarding opportunistic changing of position within a flow, you have to feel your way through. With experience, you learn to trade off minimizing disruption and maximizing opportunity according to the design parameters of the thoroughfare.
As to peeves about greediness, if you prize generosity above your own progress, pull over, get out of the way and let others move on.
Do not assume others have the same situational awareness. Polite deferral is only meaningful among those who share an encounter, with the recognition that every encounter is shared with yourself and you must reckon your own standards of propriety.
When traffic becomes gridlocked, self responsibility dictates escaping the blockage. In severe circumstances of gridlock, formal rules of the road are rendered meaningless. This is a matter of design failure and in the worst cases death may be consequent. You can't begrudge a fellow traveler from trying to survive, even though you may disdain his lack of honor in his thrashing. This is a personal matter between a man and God.
https://living.acg.aaa.com/auto/zipper-merge-keeps-traffic-m...
The thing that is *not* ok is when someone flies by 20-100 cars then blocks their entire lane while forcing their way into the front of the line where there is no space for them to enter.
Not only are they being "selfish" by cutting in line, they're also being incredibly dangerous AND creating traffic by blocking their lane.
There's nothing like encountering 3 lanes of parked cars on a 65MPH highway as they all try to exit in 1 lane they could have entered half a mile ago.