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  • I've been talking about this for a while, but it goes well beyond those who simply have "lower cognitive ability". Plenty of intelligent people fall victim to traps in their thinking.

    A few observations I've made on the matter.

    • People, in my observations, are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty. In general, people will prefer a wrong belief on a matter or issue, rather than holding back from having any belief at all. As well, most people do not seem to understand uncertainty as a principal, and specifically, the relationship between how they use the word and think about the concept of "truth", versus, "truth" in the context of the scientific method and data. I've witnessed, first hand, well placed, highly intelligent professionals choosing to believe things they know to be wrong, on issues that have consequences for millions of people and billions of dollars in resources. My assertion is that people would rather be confidently wrong than not have an answer, or have to hold onto uncertainty.
    • People take great pleasure in being "holders of the secret knowledge". Its my observation, that because we live in a grossly dis-empowering society, which in a social manner is authoritarian to its core, people will embrace any kind of thinking or believe that gives them a sense of power over others. This includes racism, sexism, nationalism, and all forms of authoritarianism. But it goes well beyond this, especially in regards to things like conspiracy theory. The sensation, the idea that you have the "secret knowledge", that you know something that no one else knows. The dopamine release that comes from the sensation of knowing something other people don't, even if its false knowledge and maybe somewhere deep in your core you know its false, its a real thing. It also creates an identity structure based on in-group/ out-group mentality; you get to be a part of the selected few. Its my belief that this structure was fundamental to the rise of the MAGA movement, although one might argue that in some senses their secret knowledge 'became' real knowledge. For example, the phrase "stand back and stand by" went from pseudo-conspiratorial "secret knowledge" to real "secret knowledge" by evidence of the act on behalf of Trump. This structure has been exponentially expanded with the elevation of extreme conspiracy high priests like RFK Jr, MTG, and even Trump themselves.
    • And perhaps most importantly, the high priests of this new religion of psuedo-consipiratorial, baseless but pleasurable belief, are both victim to, and creator of these structures. Trump is not immune to the same thinking his base falls victim to in this regard, and I belief that in a sense, there has been a propaganda campaign built for one, targeting Trump directly, going on for decades. But the broader point is that the purveyors of this snake oil are they themselves also victim to their own poison. It becomes a recursive "amplification of idiocy" process where a high priest puts out some bullshit, the followers make up bullshit to support the claims of the high priest, and the high priest cites that bullshit to confirm their belief. The result is a runaway amplification of "wrong think" feedback, like feedback into a PA system, or how when you feed output from an ML process back in on itself,it goes completely off the rails.

    I used right wing examples here to make the point, but I want to be very clear, that there are those on the left and most specifically, those who identify as "centrists" or "moderates"; those we might classify as "blue dog" or "blue maga" who also are extremely vulnerable to the kind of "pleasurable in-group self sucking" to end up in intellectual and ideological positions that are utterly untenable. This issue goes well beyond particular ideologies, and may find its basis in human evolution, where it might be a positive selective trait to "believe something extreme", even if that belief is utterly wrong or incoherent.

32 comments