111–120 of 155 posts
If you create art, even if it's primitive or ugly, if you can repeat something within one artwork or across multiple works, the works suddenly gain some merit, feel more like art, less like random doodle, just due to repetition.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that's the only way to invoke perception of truth or perception of beauty. It's just something I observed while trying to appreciate some contemporary art.
Basically, we learn patterns real well. Doesn't matter the nature of the pattern, if we have no counter-example of significant or equivalent weight.
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Ok, I didn't mean to beg the question by simply claiming that people can rationally evaluate statements. The things people learn are not noise. They have structure, they have hidden consistencies. Whatever you think of the rationality or otherwise of thought, surely you will agree that trying to learn inconsistent facts is going to be more trouble than learning consistent facts which support each other in a cumulativ…
I guess we look at the world very differently, because: > They are unlikely to ever agree with/be persuaded by complete inconsistent nonsense, however often it is repeated. Like, I mean nonsense that doesn't even have linguistic structure or maybe any meaning. If the US election hasn't persuaded you that complete gibberish can be persuasive when repeated endlessly, there's nothing I can say that will.
But what about Feynman's injunction: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." Is that kind of empirical principle just out of reach for the standard human?
In terms of repetition, I think David Hume's theory of causal inference is pretty relevant too.
Just because something is repeated regularly, e.g. seems to happen every day doesn't mean that on the day when it doesn't happen, our heads explode because we have built a rigid expectation. Instead we can usually discern possible, exceptional, reasons why it isn't happening.
I'm totally in agreement with you on the role of repetition in eroding the landscape of memory to create convictions. We might rarely remember a one off event that is never referred to. But you seem to be claiming that there's no higher-level activity, or even possibility of higher-level activity involved in mentally evaluating what to believe.
The famous Star Trek scene where Picard is encouraged/"brainwashed" to lie about the number of lights he sees comes to mind. He resists and continues to report what his senses tell him. This cultural theme of reason resisting the repetition of lies is a big one, and you haven't really presented any convincing evidence to discredit it.
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Buddhist sermons are an excellent example for that.
Mantras, christian chants, and others. Repeat ad infinitum.
http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Read_Iliad.htm
> For an oral poet, however, such repetition is not a fault, but a vital technique (Lord 3–67). Repetition is a psychological necessity in oral discourse, which vanishes as soon as it is uttered
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Have you applied it to your own beliefs? Which ones? Do you no longer believe in them?
Triangulation. Take in news sources from opposite sides of the political (scientific etc) spectrum and take them all in in equal size/depth. They'll repeat their own message to make you believe you are "on the right side of the issue" but with triangulation both brainwashing attempts cancel out.
Repetition makes lies seem true, but repetition also makes truth seem true. All persuasion (and indoctrination) happens through repetition, whether in a classroom setting, a forum like this one, or in sales. This realization is also deeply depressing, because it means you're doomed to repeat yourself over and over if you want to persuade people. Let's take Noam Chomsky for instance. He gives more than a hundred talks…
> This realization is also deeply depressing, because it means you're doomed to repeat yourself over and over if you want to persuade people. Yes. Embrace this. Patience is a virtue; and not getting angry because the person you've stated something to doesn't get it even the third time you've stated it. I actually find it fun to try and come up with different ways to state things such that people might better understa…
The biggest component of success in communication comes down to saying things enough times that your message can actually be listened to and digested at least once. You can vary the way you say things each time, but literal repetition works nearly as well, because the problem is almost never "I don't know what those words in that order mean" but rather "I didn't hear half that sentence" or "I was thinking about lunch" or "that might have been important but it just sort of passed by and I forgot."
So here is another human psyche detail - when someone removes the actual details (such as what these 3 exec orders are and the specifics of the mentioned crimes), they are doing so to protect the narrative...
I'll give you an example: "Ban of majority Muslim countries" vs. "Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen".
The reason the media removes the list of countries and replaces them with the quote, is because when people see the names of these countries, they realize that they are an open death-sentence destination for Americans, and have a large public that often chants death threats to America.
And that is a problem for the narrative the media is using (to exploit the situation). So the details have to be removed.
This is the first step of the manipulation of public opinion. The second step is the repetition.
Repetition makes lies seem true, but repetition also makes truth seem true. All persuasion (and indoctrination) happens through repetition, whether in a classroom setting, a forum like this one, or in sales. This realization is also deeply depressing, because it means you're doomed to repeat yourself over and over if you want to persuade people. Let's take Noam Chomsky for instance. He gives more than a hundred talks…
As that old Lincoln saying goes, you can fool some people all the time, all people some of the time, but you can't fool all people all the time.
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Mantras, christian chants, and others. Repeat ad infinitum.
I think this is simply survivors bias for every information transmitted orally. It had to be repetitive, or people couldnt remember it. See here for the Ilyad: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Read_Iliad.htm > For an oral poet, however, such repetition is not a fault, but a vital technique (Lord 3–67). Repetition is a psychological necessity in oral discourse, which vanishes as soon as it is uttered