Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

Thinking about it, the only way that this course of action is "not logical" is that it is not "deciding on a course of action and following it regardless of the approach of one's fellows", maybe that it's not oriented to looking the terrain instead of following emotions. But all these more like skills or "personality makeup" and as such, they aren't even applicable to every situation. If you're starting a situation where individual would be bonding over a long period, congregating with one's fellows may be a good or "objective" strategy.

Borrowing from Clay Shirkey's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", the world is a surprisingly information-rich space, and humans (or any other information-processing system, biological or otherwise) simply aren't equipped to deal with more than a minuscule fraction of it.

We aim for a useful fraction. It paints an incomplete, but useful picture.

Even a bad model has utility if it rejects information cheaply: without conscious effort, without physical effort, and without lingering concerns or apprehensions. It's a no-FOMO mechanism.

Usually, what happens is that we apply our bad models to a given scenario, act, process the new resulting scenario, and notice that that is obviously not favourable, and take appropriate actions to correct the new circumstance. Net loss: one round of interaction. Net gain: not succumbing to analysis paralysis or having to hunt for a new and improved worldview (especially: a new concensus worldview shared with numerous others, creating a large coordination problem).

Sometimes that doesn't work out and people (or companies, or governments, or cultures) get stuck in a nonproductive rut, often characterised by "doing the one thing we know how to do, only harder".

The big problem comes when there's a recognition that a former large-scale world model no longer applies. I'm leaning strongly to the notion that this is behind many psychological conditions: Grief, denial, meloncholia, depression, PTSD. Possibly burnout and ADHD.[1]

Classic grief is triggered by the loss of a loved one, or in the "five stages of grief" study, news of the subject's own impending mortality (a fatal disease prognosis). That triggered denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

It's a pattern once recognised that one sees repeated across numerous scenarios -- almost any disaster, epidemics, global catastrophic risks, wartime attacks, business failures, relationship breakups, and on.

What's curious to me is what the threshold for grief or denial is. There are some surprises which don't elicit this response: almost all humour is based on the principle of surprise, and horror films and thrill rides are based on the premise of surprise or extreme experience, but rarely result in a traumatic response. We go through our daily lives experiencing small and medium-sized suprises and disappointments all the time. The grief/denial response seems to be triggered only above a magnitude or repetition threshold. (Though that can differ markedly between individuals.)

________________________________

Notes:

1. I'm not claiming that all PTSD, burnout, and ADHD are greif responses, but rather that there are at least strong similarities. Early psychologists linked grief and melancholia (itself then considered a much stronger longing, to the point of mental illness). The mechanisms for overload might be internal -- chemical, physical, illness, injury, or genetic in origin -- or external. But there's a common thread that seems to run through these conditions, ultimately an inability to cope with a level of change.

May be "hardwiredness" is not all that hard wired. Or, put it other way, the hardwiredness is not in humans under study but in humans who study them.

I don't think that humans would achieve what we have today being hardwired to dismiss facts that don't fit their worldview.

But if you believe GM foods have adverse health effects, and you design a study to look for them, and try to get it funded you'll be turned down. Literally thousands of scientists have had the same idea and done the same thing, and they all found nothing. Scientists listen to data, so if you wanted to go on looking for health effects, you would probably start with very subtle ones that haven't been looked for yet. If it were me, I would start by trying to find ways genetically modified protein gets past the digestive system, which destroys genetic information by breaking all protein down down into its constituent amino acids. Not an easy problem, but better than some of the others.

If you don't want to work on the problem scientifically, you also have the option of thinking about it non-scientifically. A non-scientific opinion can be whatever you want, but holding one means lumping yourself in with a lot of people who object to genetic engineering without knowing the central dogma or even what a gene is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-sa...

PS. You don’t really binary pass/fail the assessments. They tend to inform whether and how you and others can complement or guardrail each other on mission as a team.