Cognitive Bias Can Explain Post-Truth

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-cognitive-bias-can-explain-post-truth/

by endlessvoid94 • 6 years ago

70 22 6 years ago

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

ilaksh3• 6 years ago

Check out https://www.improvethenews.org/ if you are interested in cognitive bias and news distribution. It is also from MIT.

rkhassen9• 6 years ago

And filter bubbles. I mean, if you live in an information echo chamber, which we all do now, of course you’ll keep getting feedback that what you hear is true. People seem very unaware of their filter bubbles and how to see out of them.

minikites2• 5 years ago

I think addressing this is the right idea at the wrong scale. The problem is information and media literacy more broadly. Think about who benefits from the general societal rejection of expertise and what that means for information and media literacy.

mariodiana2• 5 years ago

Is expertise being rejected per se? My problem with experts is that their advice often seems to take into consideration only a very circumscribed set of concerns, and that their tacit assumptions -- normative assumptions, particularly -- are rarely questioned sufficiently, if at all.

Let me share a quip, one that pertains to one specific type of expert: namely, lawyers. "Legal training sharpens the mind by narrowing it."

Experts give advice, which by all means should be considered. Read that last clause carefully. I argue that we have a kind of cult of expertise where careful consideration of expert advice within the context of larger concerns -- the full picture -- is too often given short shrift.

eli_gottlieb• 5 years ago

Sure, but is there any supposed cognitive failure that "cognitive bias" cannot explain? An omni-explanation explains nothing.

BitwiseFool2• 5 years ago

It's a mistake to think that the populace was ever rational and that there was a "truth" period that preceded the current "post-truth" era.

I don't even consider myself to be a rational person. Everything I think and do is through the perspective of my worldview, personality, and my peers. Human beings didn't evolve to be rational creatures - we're not Vulcans. We're born with good-enough rules for making sense of the environment around us and maintaining harmony with the people around us. It's a mistake to believe otherwise. In fact, I look at the "post-truth" label as just another non-rational attack against the other side.

PH014• 5 years ago

In fact, I look at the "post-truth" label as just another non-rational attack against the other side.

This is an odd perspective to see on ycombinator. The negation of knowledge as a fundamental concept is nihilism. I find it very hard to accept that "alternative facts" are true. A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false.

If you work in technology do you believe in booleans or do you think they are also open to individual interpretation?

ilaksh3• 5 years ago

Real-world issues are not boolean variables.

eindiran• 5 years ago

I don't understand how you took the idea that OP doesn't believe in truth from their post. Their point was that the "post-truth" framing implies that there was some golden age of rationality where we cared about truth and now we don't; but humans aren't exactly rational on their best days, so in some sense we've always been "post-truth".

No one is asking that you think that "alternative facts" are true; OP is just saying that there wasn't significantly more truth in the media/discussions in the commons 30 years ago (or whenever the fabled golden age of truth was supposed to have occurred).

BitwiseFool2• 5 years ago

I do work in technology and I'm not trying to be nihilistic or Socratic (in the sense that nothing is knowable). As for your boolean example I don't deny that you can prove things using formal logic. But I do believe those formal proofs are only really applicable to the mathematical and the abstract. Subjects where human emotion and human perception don't come into play.

In societal subjects the same facts can be used to justify different conclusions. As an example, look at all the wildly different economic policies that are recommended by different economists who are all looking at the same data published by The Fed.

I know that "Alternative Facts" has a lot of vernacular baggage around it due to the crowd size fiasco with Donald Trump's inauguration. Putting that aside, an alternative fact can really just be a datapoint from a different perspective. And that's often how I see every argument. I don't use "Alternative Facts" as a synonym for lying.

shoes_for_thee• 5 years ago

I don't think the issue is whether or not people are more or less rational now than in previous era. The issue, from my view, is that people are just as irrational as they've always been, but the consensus facts of reality are suddenly up for debate.

There's a new marketplace of facts supplementing the marketplace of ideas and the combined effect is catastrophic.

When I refer to post-truth or transpostmodernism or whatever, I'm not talking about people who have arrived at different conclusions based on the same facts -- I'm talking about people who have based their conclusions on opposing, contradictory facts.

brigandish• 5 years ago

the combined effect is catastrophic.

Where is the catastrophe? What I see is people arguing online. You can point to real world events but I’ll ask next what makes them out of the ordinary and of greater size or import than other years, and it’ll be hard to say they are. But the din online suggests they are. What should we expect when communication tech becomes cheaper and more widespread?

I don’t see any catastrophe though. More speech is a good thing, power to the people and all that.

AnimalMuppet• 5 years ago

Most of what you say is true. What's more, we all kind of know it - about ourselves, and about others. But the difference is, people thought that rationalism was possible and desirable, and now they think it isn't. (Isn't possible, at least, which renders moot the question of whether it would be desirable.)

We used to think that there were objectively right conclusions, and, if people were careful, they could be rational enough at least some of the time to reach those conclusions. And now we don't. We now think that all truth claims are only about power, and not at all about actual truth. There's no point in even trying to reach the truth, because it isn't there to reach. It doesn't exist.

And that's a radical difference from the previous mind-set, whether or not the rationality of individuals changed.

ilaksh3• 5 years ago

Take a look at Jonathan Haidt's work such as The Righteous Mind.

He is not coming to the conclusion that there is no point. He is suggesting that people need to be aware of their strongly-held preconceived ideas, and work hard to understand the other side's worldview, before being able to make more objective conclusions or have constructive discussions.

It's really about taking time to absorb some of the alternate information streams to understand what a different perspective they are coming from.

The problem is that most information sources are highly polarized at this point.

Cognitive Bias Can Explain Post-Truth

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