More on cognitive dissonance
First cognitive dissonance here
https://advances.in/psychology/10.56296/aip00018/
by Clara Pretus1,2*, Helena Gil-Buitrago2, Irene Cisma3, Rosamunde C. Hendricks2, & Daniela Lizarazo-Villarreal1,2
“Misinformation has been listed as the “most severe short-term risk the world faces”, as reported by members of the World Economic Forum (World Economic Forum, 2024). One reason for this is that it threatens democracy and can destabilize society through ideological polarization (Au et al., 2021; Spohr, 2017). Polarization is fueled by people’s tendency to amplify moralized content that favors “my side”, regardless of its accuracy (Marie et al., 2023; Pretus et al., 2023; Rathje et al., 2021). This process can arise from rational belief updating given a set of priors (Cook & Lewandowsky, 2016).”
3 measures
1 trust in source
2 dissonance (cognitive)-
3 previous belief or current belief
wisdom of the crowd
cognitive immunization
social norms
descriptive norms
injunctive non-societal expectations
decision making
update priors- Bayesian
psychological discomfort
Clara Pretus Psychobiologist
Hari Seldon- Psychohistorian
Algorithmic transparency
see also
Heuristics Scott Alexander
from Lesswrong
Confirmation bias (also known as positive bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or strengthens one's prior personal beliefs or hypotheses [1]. For example, one might test hypotheses with positive rather than negative examples, thus missing obvious disconfirming tests.
“I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.” - Charles Darwin (autobiography)
See also: Motivated skepticism, Privileging the hypothesis, Falsifiability, Heuristics and Biases, Availability heuristic, Surprise, Narrative fallacy
Speculations on the Future of Science by Kevin Kelly
On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task by P.C. Wason
Confirmation Bias, Wikipedia
Perception
Proprioception
from Scott Alexander
“I want to tie this back to one of my occasional hobbyhorses - discussion of "dog whistles". This is the theory that sometimes politicians say things whose literal meaning is completely innocuous, but which secretly convey reprehensible views, in a way other people with those reprehensible views can detect and appreciate. For example, in the 2016 election, Ted Cruz said he was against Hillary Clinton's "New York values". This sounded innocent - sure, people from the Heartland think big cities have a screwed-up moral compass. But various news sources argued it was actually Cruz's way of signaling support for anti-Semitism (because New York = Jews). Since then, almost anything any candidate from any party says has been accused of being a dog-whistle for something terrible - for example, apparently Joe Biden's comments about Black Lives Matter were dog-whistling his support for rioters burning down American cities.
Maybe this kind of thing is real sometimes. But think about how it interacts with a trapped prior. Whenever the party you don't like says something seemingly reasonable, you can interpret in context as them wanting something horrible. Whenever they want a seemingly desirable thing, you secretly know it means they want a horrible moral atrocity. If a Republican talks about "law and order", it doesn't mean they're concerned about the victims of violent crime, it means they want to lock up as many black people as possible to strike a blow for white supremacy. When a Democrat talks about "gay rights", it doesn't mean letting people marry the people they love, it means destroying the family so they can replace it with state control over your children. I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-life conservative really cares about fetuses, they just want to punish women for being sluts by denying them control over their bodies. And I've had arguments with people who believe that no pro-lockdown liberal really cares about COVID deaths, they just like the government being able to force people to wear masks as a sign of submission. Once you're at the point where all these things sound plausible, you are doomed.“
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hNqte2p48nqKux3wS/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem-of-rationality
“This happens because of a phenomenon known as the wisdom of the crowds, which was first discussed more than a century ago (Galton, 1907),”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton
