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How You Know

paulgraham.com

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Re: How You Know

#221

Post by philwelch »

flipside wrote: post #194
nilkn wrote: post #10

There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects…

There's an opportunity to outsource mental models to software in a similar way to how we've outsourced basic math to calculators and basic facts to search engines. A benefit to a digital mental model is that it could be updated based on new data independent of the owner which has all kinds of (possibly disturbing) implications.

I'd love to see the bug reports for that.

"Your program says I should now believe that it's morally acceptable to kill infants. I don't agree with its reasoning."

Re: How You Know

#222

Post by philwelch »

snori74 wrote: post #197
slayed0 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this? Are you suggesting that most of the people who say these things publicly don't actually believe them but are instead just trying to fit in to a certain social group?

I'm not VLM, but yes, peer-pressure in another guise. Just think about your attitudes and beliefs on (a) handgun ownership, (b) creationism and (c) Israel. It's very likely that if you're in a social group with strong homogeneous view on one of these items, that there will be a matching "party line" on the others - even though they're completely unrelated. Chances are low that you'll argue the point, you'll probably…

I think that's just groupthink. People tend to act on their beliefs about things like vaccines, Israel, and handgun ownership.

Of course, it's one of the earliest results in psychology that social conformity has an influence on people's beliefs, even on readily accessible questions like whether line A is longer or shorter than line B. To me, if somebody professes a belief, acts on that belief, and works to convince others of that belief, then they effectively hold that belief.

Re: How You Know

#223

Post by philwelch »

eaurouge wrote: post #109
nilkn wrote: post #10

There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects…

There's always a danger that you'll introduce a bug in your code at some point, right? If you 'pull' from a lot or sources, at some point one of those sources will introduce a bug. But if you have a lot of high quality committers (book authors) and you continue to pull (read) from those sources, you stand a good chance of discovering and squashing these bugs eventually. In fact, as your code (mind) matures, you start…

You know this is just confirmation bias, right? This is another way of saying you're going to increase your confidence in sources that already agree with your existing mental model, which is the exact problem you're trying to solve!

Re: How You Know

#224

Post by philwelch »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #201
lazyant wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse (at least with emotional political opinions); when confronted with adversarial data we tend to become more entrenched in our positions.

That's the fight or flight response. We view intellectual questioning of positions we hold as an attack on our person. Our rationality goes out the window, our aggression ramps up, and it becomes impossible to back down. It's the main causative agent for flame wars.

pg wrote about that as well: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Re: How You Know

#225

Post by applecore »

themodelplumber wrote: post #82
pacalleri wrote: post #67

While I was reading came to my mind the Borges's short story "Funes the memorious". It's about someone who can't forget any detail. He remembers absolutely all the things and the infinite instances of them through the time. At some point of the story Borges conjectures: "I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget the difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly re…

Great passage. As a digital artist who works with fractals, that really resonates with me. Visual fractal detail quite often converges to visual noise (and looks remarkably like a noise function as expressed on e.g. a TV set). I usually need to remove or de-emphasize that noise in order to clarify the direction and abstract intent of the work. One of my favorite films that works along these lines is the 1998 Japanese…

I've noticed that whenever truly original thinkers encounter a problem, they'll quickly establish a workable model—even if it's known to be flawed or wrong—just so they can begin testing it “against the world's experience.”

(I had no idea this style of thinking was associated with INTJ types.)

Re: How You Know

#226

Post by philwelch »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #56
nilkn wrote: post #10

There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your model precisely because you don't remember what your source was. You may even read about the debunking of the source but fail to draw the connection and realize the implications that it has for your own view of the world. I think that perhaps very squishy subjects…

In the analogy, it seems more likely that a mistaken short in the wiring is created, than we compile and lose the code all the time. Most of us have good ideas of the provenance of our prejudices (I am pretty sure I can remember which side of most debates arguments I get from Fox Mews and which from the BBC, even if the specifics are hazy.) There are always areas where we do forget the provenance. In my case I stood…

I've accidentally gotten my wife into trouble this way because one of my hobbies is to tell elaborate lies and she can't always tell when I'm doing it.

Re: How You Know

#227

Post by philwelch »

igonvalue wrote: post #148

> And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. This was reassuring to hear from someone else, because I've had this exact feeling about books I read, films I've watched, conversations I've had, work projects I've completed, etc. This is true even in cases when I was completely engaged in, for example, reading the book, and the book left a positive imp…

I've found that when I reexpose myself to the same subject or book or whatever, I recall or relearn the information a lot more easily than I did the first time. A lot of times it was just in cold storage the whole time.

Re: How You Know

#228

Post by diydsp »

mherdeg wrote: post #173
jayro wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Research shows that even when news reports have been retracted, and we are aware of the retraction, our beliefs are largely based on the initial erroneous version of the story. This is particularly true when we are motivated to approve of the initial account." - http://mindhacks.com/2011/05/04/why-the-truth-will-out-but-d... Original Paper: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/16/3/190

I've always wanted a short name for this phenomenon, where a lie takes hold and never leaves no matter how thoroughly it is debunked. Maybe the 'swift boat effect'?

It's the importance of first impressions.

Re: How You Know

#229

Post by Qwertious »

arasmussen wrote: post #127

I don't like the use of the word "compiled". It's more like a program that modifies it's source at runtime. This reminds me of how JavaScript used to be simply interpreted but now with V8 (and friends) the hottest paths are optimized at runtime so that the result is more performant than any compilation because you have more information than you do statically.

You're describing JIT.

Re: How You Know

#230

Post by sirsar »

Most people equate the term "memory" with what is more accurately termed episodic memory - little movies in your head. Most people can't remember when "Christmas" was first defined for them, but they can rattle off many things about it - the date, the religious meaning, the corporate meaning, etc. This is semantic memory, and together they form your conscious explicit memory or declarative memory (there are differences between the two that are not relevant here). The brain often throws away the episode but keeps the concept, and that is what Paul is talking about here.

But there's more to it than that. Your unconscious implicit memory includes things you can't even articulate. That's the difference between the date of Christmas and how to ride a bike: the latter is nondeclarative. Learning a different way to ride a bike, or approach programming, is even more difficult than recomputing semantic memory.

You can (and should) read a new books and gain new episodes to base your facts and opinions on. Read diverse material with abandon. But when learning something nondeclarative, like a weight-lifting technique, it can be well worth seeking out an expert and learning it right the first time. With nondeclarative memory, what you don't know can hurt you.

For more on the science and classification of memory, the Wikipedia page is as good a starting place as any.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory

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