Newsletter
Cognitive dissonance isn't discomfort and other things
April 25, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Cognitive dissonance isn’t discomfort
Excerpt: 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.
Main idea: 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.
Newsfeed vulnerabilities:
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, blocked news from its apps in Canada in 2023 after a new law required the social media giant to pay Canadian news publishers a tax for publishing their content. The ban applies to all news outlets irrespective of origin, including The New York Times.
Amid the news void … dozens of … partisan pages are rising in popularity on Facebook and Instagram before the election … cryptocurrency scams and ads that mimic legitimate news sources have proliferated on the platforms … few voters are aware of this shift, with research showing that only one in five Canadians knows that news has been blocked on Facebook and Instagram feeds.
The result is a “continued spiral” for Canada’s online ecosystem toward disinformation and division … Meta’s decision has left Canadians “more vulnerable to generative A.I., fake news websites and less likely to encounter ideas and facts that challenge their worldviews,”
AI will probably end up being a solution for this, but I’m still very pro-RSS feed.
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Pretty accurate AI generated DMT trips.
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Nostalgia as a parasite:
It is now commonly understood that nostalgia can also be a prosocial emotion in the sense that it helps us recognise what is universal to all of us, such as a lost childhood or a longing to be part of romanticised versions of the past
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The 17th-century medical-scientific literature possessed a weirdly inhuman and morbid philosophy of the effects of nostalgia, their diagnoses of homesickness resembling a grim tale of the fantastique.
Something like nostalgia being a fuel for an overactive imagination. Interesting read.
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o3 Is a Lying Liar. Zvi on the faults between all the excitement.
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The mystery of Pope Francis. I have been watching the articles on him, wondering why I know much more about Pope Francis than other Popes. Looks like it wasn’t because I was more news attentive, but because he was a very confusing Pope. Fun read.
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Distraction is mind obesity. It’s another ‘the attention economy is bad’ article. But I liked it because it’s not just about taking our attention away, it’s about how that process sort-of removes us from living our lives:
Everyone knows that office worker who complains about emails all day and then spends their free time doing email. Studies have shown that our attention wanders if a phone is merely visible on the table
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At its highest pitch this kind of stimulation can strip people of their humanity. The book’s most shocking passages are about the hi-tech slot machines in casinos, engineered to such a point of perfection that players routinely wet themselves while playing …
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Screens are only part of the problem. Modern cars are being continually upgraded with features that remove the driver from the experience of being on the road. From the Toyota recall in 2008 came the surprising nugget that there are electronics in the brakes, designed to mimic the feeling you get under the pedal when hydraulic brakes start to wear. … Even children’s TV has changed. Rather than using his own ingenuity, Mickey Mouse now enlists a device called the Handy Dandy Machine, which magicks an appropriate solution to his dilemma.
As usual, no solutions. Best kind of creepypasta.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,