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stuff On making chaos into meaning

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Cogntive dissonance often describes a bias towards seeing ourselves as coherent. Sure, it’s sneaky and prevalent, but entirely necessary. And, other times we tolerate how noisy we are, keeping us open to new insights and better equipped for a complex world.

Preferring Coherence

Article

The concept of cognitive dissonance gets flogged online. It’s always this malevolent feature of our minds lurking back there making us do outrageous stuff. But cognitive dissonance isn’t really this. It’s just another example of bias—optimising us for certain features of a messy world so we can get on with things. Of course this doesn’t always help. But actually most of the time it does. And people don’t often talk about the fact that we don’t always worry about conflicting cognitions. But we don’t—sometimes we’re open to the noise too.

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article

Cognitive dissonance is often thought of as the discomfort we have with conflicting cognitions. But it’s really about how the brain will smooth over dissonant cognitions, whether they’re uncomfortable or not. It happens a lot.

Cognitive dissonance isn't discomfort

Article

I’ve never written an article about the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, even though I’ve referenced it a lot. It’s so mainstream that I assume everyone knows what it is. But, actually, people don’t. And even the guy who came up with it was a little disappointed by where the literature around it went. So I thought we’d revisit it, and keep it short and fun.

Cognitive dissonance is often thought of as the discomfort we have with conflicting cognitions. But it’s really about how the brain will smooth over dissonant cognitions, whether they’re uncomfortable or not. It happens a lot.

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betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-aesthetics on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture wealth-architecture

article

Without time-travel, evolutionary narratives can only identify theories that don’t make sense (like death drives). It can’t tell you what theories do make sense, because you can make many to explain the same thing. All they do is let you see what people wish the world was like.

Evolution is overrated

Article

People love a good evolutionary narrative. I wouldn’t be able to count the number of times I’ve heard “back in our evolutionary past…”. Somewhere along the line, evolutionary theories went from a useful way to fix psychological theories, to a generator of some of the most superficially idiotic. And I think, reading between the lines, we can find a new use for them. But first, let me convince you that evolutionary narratives aren’t usually worth very much.

Without time-travel, evolutionary narratives can only identify theories that don’t make sense (like death drives). It can’t tell you what theories do make sense, because you can make many to explain the same thing. All they do is let you see what people wish the world was like.

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betterment on-aesthetics on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture

article

AI has human-like output, but a very different environment and different values for than environment, and until all three align, they will never actually be human-like.

AI is never human-like

Article

People treat lots of stuff like they treat humans. AI is one of them. We talk about how human-like they are. How long until their ‘intelligence’ is like our intelligence. How long until they start doing human things, like murdering their competitors. Things like this. But AI isn’t even approaching human-like. In two very fundamental ways. And until those things change, they’ll continue to be completely incomprehensible to us.

AI has human-like output, but a very different environment and different values for than environment, and until all three align, they will never actually be human-like.

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article

Cultural and aesthetic ‘facts’ are as real as any ‘objective’ truths. They’re just centred on different kinds of meaning. Trivialising them because they ‘go against’ the evidence is failing to recognise what evidence they care about.

Aesthetics are facts too

Article

Facts are just a special kind of belief… Because there isn’t really anything tangible that distinguishes a belief from a fact. Cultural and aesthetic beliefs are facts too, in a certain light—we’re tracing the fuzzy boundaries of our religions, theories, and convictions to put certain meaningful aspects of the world at the centre. They’re just as true as the facts that are more stable, and objective. They’re just centring on something different.

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