Newsletter
Bias vs Noise pt. IV: Cognitive Dissonance and other things
May 2, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Bias vs Noise pt. IV: Cognitive Dissonance
Excerpt: 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.
Main idea: 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.
Policy-oriented political philosophy. The article frames it best:
how does political philosophy relate to policy?
What I found interesting is this:
it is therefore often not the content of philosophical theories, but the ability to think things through, which philosophers can bring to the table. The work is very much about seeing the relations between different values and principles and connecting them to with what different parties could live with, i.e. what might make for feasible policy
and
philosophy is not about the lone thinker, but very much about dialogue: about being willing to listen to others and connecting one’s contribution to theirs.
Which is actually something that I’ve noticed constantly about consulting. People rarely pay me for my actual knowledge. I complain plenty around here about how obscenely low the literacy around brain and behaviour science is out there, and how no one seems to care. And they don’t really. What they pay for, I think, is help to find the right questions. So here’s a little more evidence for the value of that skillset. Unless AI does that better, I guess.
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Metaphors shape minds:
Scientific analogies can crackle too. Consider one of the puzzles of the visual system: saccades, those rapid, darting eye movements we make a few times per second. These are one of the fastest movements our body can produce – the eye takes only about 20 milliseconds to traverse our field of vision, before settling on the next object of attention. But these rapid eye movements are notoriously sluggish to get going. There’s a whopping gap of around 200 milliseconds from when a visual target appears before a saccade even gets started. The vision neuroscientist Roger Carpenter asked us to imagine it like this:
A fire station receives an urgent summons by telephone. But for nearly an hour absolutely nothing appears to happen; then all of a sudden the firemen leap into action: the doors are flung open and the fire-engines rush off at break-neck speed with their bells ringing, arriving at the fire in less than five minutes.
He offered this analogy to drive home just how odd this situation is, giving us pause to ponder: what on earth is going on while the eye waits to make its move?
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When analogy lands, it adds another dimension to our thinking, so the light hits it in a different way. It can help us understand something more deeply because we have another inroad to it.
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Is there danger, then, in these analogies that can delight and inspire? One risk is that they close down possibilities. They can shut down our thinking, coercing it to fit the shape of someone else’s comparison rather than our own. In feeding you an analogy, I’m not just telling you about a thing – I’m telling you how you should think about that thing and, in doing so, robbing all opportunity for your thoughts to take their own meandering leap into unmapped territories
Then uses lots of example to illustrate, but obviously I liked the brain one:
Our brain isn’t a passive input-output machine. It’s embedded in our body, which is embedded in a world that we need to actively respond to and control. While some ideas from computers have been useful guiding principles for brain research (and vice versa), the story is a much more complicated one: a brain that evolved, over a long sequence of opportunistic and sometimes clumsy adaptations; a brain with billions of diverse neurons and other cells, their connections, and their nonlinear properties. It’s a story we are still only touching the surface of in neuroscience.
It’s a much quicker version of my own article on this.
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Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased? Once, sentences were very long, now sentences are super short.
The article explores a bunch of ideas, but favours the idea that writing is now about readability, whereas once is was about how easily you could read it out loud to others.
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What’s the deal with autism rates. A good analysis of the rate increase in the US. I think you’ll find that the rate is not that surprising and is mostly methodology changes. But because autism is trendy now, I also suspect that we are having a shifting cultural moment around it (which is already nice and quantified for ADHD).
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ADHD TikToks are not about ADHD:
… in the top 100 #ADHD TikTok videos. Despite the videos’ immense popularity (collectively amassing nearly half a billion views), fewer than 50% of the claims about ADHD symptoms were judged to align with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In Study 2, 843 undergraduate students (no ADHD = 224, ADHD self-diagnosis = 421, ADHD formal diagnosis = 198) were asked about their typical frequency of viewing #ADHD content on TikTok and their perceptions of ADHD and were shown the top 5 and bottom 5 psychologist-rated videos from Study 1. A greater typical frequency of watching ADHD-related TikToks was linked to a greater willingness to recommend both the top and bottom-rated videos from Study 1, after controlling for demographics and ADHD diagnostic status. It was also linked to estimating a higher prevalence of ADHD in the general population and greater challenges faced by those with ADHD. Our findings highlight a discrepancy between mental health professionals and young adults regarding the psychoeducational value of #ADHD content on TikTok. Addressing this is crucial to improving access to treatment and enhancing support for those with ADHD.
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Endometriosis is scary! It’s a nice article too.
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Social Media and Moore’s Law. From Tyler Cowan, who is confusing me recently, but I still like his predictions. I have a draft article that goes a little like this, exploring why the internet has failed to bring us together. This seems more concise:
- Moore’s Law plus the internet makes smart people smarter, and stupid people less smart.
- Manipulable people can be reached with a greater flood of information, so over time as data on them accumulate, they become more manipulable.
- It is often easier to manipulate smart people than stupid people, because the latter may be oblivious to a greater set of cues and clues.
- Social media bring smarter people together with the less smart more than used to be the case, Twitter more so than Facebook. Members of each group are appalled by what they experience. The smarter people see the lesser smarts of many others. The less smart people — who often are not entirely so stupid after all — can see how manipulated the smarter people are. They also see that the smarter people look down on them and attack their motives and intellects. Both groups go away thinking less of each other.
4b. The smarter people, in reacting this way, in fact are being manipulated by the (stupider) powers that be.
- “There is a performative dimension that renders both sides more rigid and dishonest.” From a correspondent.
- Consider a second distinction, namely between people who are too sensitive to social information, and people who are relatively insensitive to social information. A quick test of this one is to ask how often a person’s tweets (and thoughts) refer to the motivations, intentions, or status hierarchies held by others. Get the picture? (Here is an A+ example.)
- People who are overly sensitive to social information will be driven to distraction by Twitter. They will find the world to be intolerably bad. The status distinctions they value will be violated so, so many times, and in a manner which becomes common knowledge. And they will perceive what are at times the questionable motives held by others. Twitter is like negative catnip for them. In fact, they will find it more and more necessary to focus on negative social information, thereby exacerbating their own tendencies toward oversensitivity.
- People who are not so sensitive to social information will pursue social media with greater equanimity, and they may find those media productivity-enhancing. Nevertheless they will become rather visibly introduced to a relatively new category of people for them — those who are overly sensitive to social information. This group will become so transparent, so in their face, and also somewhat annoying. Even those extremely insensitive to social information will not be able to help perceiving this alternate approach, and also the sometimes bad motivations that lie behind it. The overly sensitive ones in turn will notice that another group is under-sensitive to the social considerations they value. These two groups will think less and less of each other. The insensitive will have been made sensitive. It’s like playing “overrated vs. underrated” almost 24/7 on issues you really care about, and which affect your own personal status.
- The philosophy of Stoicism will return to Silicon Valley. It will gain adherents but fail, because the rest of the system is stacked against it.
- The socially sensitive, very smart people will become the most despairing, the most manipulated, and the most angry. The socially insensitive will either jump ship into the camp of the socially sensitive, or they will cultivate new methods of detachment, with or without Stoicism. Straussianism will compete with Stoicism.
- Parts of social media will peel off into smaller, more private groups. At the end of the day, many will wonder which economies of scale and scope have been lost. And gained. Others will be too manipulated to wonder such things.
- The “finance guy” in me thinks: how can I use all this for intellectual arbitrage? Which camp does that put me in?
- What bounds this process?
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AI isn’t changing anything yet (pdf):
AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%. Modest productivity gains (average time savings of 2.8%), combined with weak wage pass-through, help explain these limited labor market effects. Our findings challenge narratives of imminent labor market transformation due to Generative AI.
But we knew that, because of the time-horizon.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,