71–80 of 116 posts
>Need for cognition has been variously defined as "a need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways" and "a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world" - So basically your average conspiracy theorist.
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I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty. If you're a low NFC person, there are a bunch of high status people that take public dogmatic stances, and demonstrate that you have high confidence in a worldview of sweeping generalizations without having to think too hard if only you adopt the Dogma. But I can't really think of role models where someone says "X, Y, Z are all complex and the thing th…
> I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty. I've felt this way for a long time. American fiction and films are heavily skewed towards protagonists strong-willed protagonists that "trust their gut" and have a high bias to action. That leads people to believe that if you're right, you will immediately know that you're right and that spending time thinking about a problem means you're weak-willed…
There’s a huge gap between what is entertaining and what is good outside of fiction. “reality tv” makes this particularly dangerous as horrible (though entertaining) people become more and more famous, again and again. This spills over into some really dire consequences globally. For example — and you wouldn’t believe this unless you’d seen it happen — the most powerful nation on Earth actually went so far as to elect a reality tv star to their highest office!
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This happens with everything, people are only aware of things they are focusing on, the surroundings are just "assumed" to be there. It's kinda like the invisible gorilla experiment: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html
Oh, wow - I had seen a version of this, years ago, as; I believe, a commercial. It was a much , much better and far less obvious version, I can't tell because obviously I knew what I was expecting, but I strongly feel with this 1999 version I absolutely would've caught it. Very poorly done compared to the other one I've seen. Ah, here it is, this one uses a 'moonwalking bear'. Upon seeing them both again, I 110% agre…
The whole point is that selective attention can make seeing even very obvious things difficult.
> it's so hard to tell but I'd honestly be surprised if too many people fell for the original today.
I used it on a class full of middle school science students two years ago. 21 out of 24 missed it in the first class. 5 out of 24 in the second, though they insisted no one warned them :D
>Need for cognition has been variously defined as "a need to structure relevant situations in meaningful, integrated ways" and "a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world" - So basically your average conspiracy theorist.
You are aware though that yesterday's conspiracy theories have now repeatedly proven to become tomorrow's mainstream headlines, right?
Too much thinking is like a heavy dish, it makes you sluggish and sleepy. Remember that everything that moves quickly and elegantly through the world does so without too much thought.
https://reasonedeclecticism.substack.com/p/peter-watts-and-c...
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I’m not that impressed by self driving cars because while the tech is cool it’s not really solving anything in my personal life. A car is basically self driving when I pay someone else to drive me where I go - end result is the same, I get where I need to go without having to drive the car.
For real? An Uber trip across the city costing $5 rather than $50 would be a game changer, as would finally being able to kill carparks on main roads.
> Psychological research on the need for cognition has been conducted using self-report tests, where research participants answered a series of statements such as "I prefer my life to be filled with puzzles that I must solve" and were scored on how much they felt the statements represented them. This seems counter intuitive to me; I would consider myself someone that has a "need for cognition", but I am good at puzzl…
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"Reasonable" is pretty subjective.
"Being reasonable" is more or less universally defined as "balancing between parsimony and explainability in a good-faith analysis". Take it from the entire field of philosophy of science if you won't take it from me.
There's a pattern where human beings are wired to enjoy things that are important for their survival and thriving, but that these instincts are easily hijacked for aimless gratification.
Eating junk food (vs stuff that gives you health and energy) or whacking off to porn (instead of healthy relationships and procreation) are examples of this.
Anyway "the need for cognition"...
I noticed that there's a class of people who are objectively "smart" in the sense that they can solve hard puzzles, crush it at trivia, etc. But at the same time these folks haven't been able to / bothered to get into lucrative professions that leverage these smarts and actually have a sort of not great lives (eg: unhealthy weight, no partner, etc.)
So they are sort of scratching their itch for cognition, but not in a way that makes their life better in an objective way (which is most likely the reason we have this drive)