Hello, welcome to another edition of Busyminds Monday Map, the first 0f the New Year. Today I officially resume writing. I am pumped and excited about all I will be doing this year.
If everything goes according to plan, I will write more on mental models. I will also run more sociocultural commentaries and analyses. Oh my! This would be interesting. You can help me grow my email subscribers list by sharing my best articles with people you love or you can share my worst posts with the people you hate. All are welcome.
But then, how do you do and what are your grand plans for the year?
In a quick sweep on today’s map, I will share about disconfirmation bias, the fast-food joint of opinions, and becoming articulate. These three short topics will greatly push your intellectual life in a healthy direction. But before then, you can check my Twitter for a Twitter thread titled Palliative Human Nature.
DISCONFIRMATION BIAS
I have on my Medium account, treated confirmation bias as a mental model. And just in case you don’t know about confirmation bias, I will reiterate it here.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to find, believe, and accept information that supports and confirms an already held notion. Example: The tendency to believe information that portrays a person you dislike as negative over information that presents them as positive is confirmation bias. I know this is familiar.
Confirmation bias is as common as being human. But it is detrimental to your intellectual life. The more you accede to this bias, the duller your faculties of rigorous reasoning become. Soon enough, you should be a hollow-walking vessel of useless information. So what is the way out? Disconfirmation bias.
Unlike confirmation bias, you have to seek out disconfirmation. You have to seek out the information that negates what you already hold in thought or belief. And there are two advantages of disconfirmation bias: you either learn that you were right all along, or you will find out how wrong you were and then correct your notion and hold the right one.
The fear of being wrong is the obstacle to developing a disconfirmation bias. But then, the fear of being wrong is just your ego looking protect itself. However, if you want to reduce your ego’s power over you, developing a disconfirmation bias is your way out. I always tell folks that being wrong is not that bad. It is just proof that you are human.
So, in character and learning, the disconfirmation bias is a great asset in your intellectual toolbox. You should use it more. Get on with it now.
INTERNET: THE FAST-FOOD JOINT OF OPINIONS
To begin this, I need you to imagine with me.
Imagine that you are wealthy with infinite amounts of wealth and cash from the day you were born until now. Imagine that you didn’t have to cook, you had staff who did the cooking. Yet, your dream is to be a chef. But even worse now, you can afford fast-food. You order a meal, and you get it in less than fifteen minutes. And that is how you have fed all your life. How is it possible that you will have the cooking skills of a chef? Even more, how can you come up with the special recipe you want to be known for?
To anyone whose sense works, we both know the result: that you will never have good skills for a chef because you never do any cooking, and you will most likely be unhealthy eating food prepared in fifteen minutes. How then do you expect to be a clear, rigorous, and coherent thinker from feeding only on the microwave content of the fast-food internet?
The internet is the fast-food joint of opinions. You can order any kind of opinion (even ones that support pedophilia) on the web and be served in a couple of seconds.
Whatever advantages the internet provides will never substitute the rigorous wisdom of books. And this is why books will never go out of fashion. However, people can be seduced into the superfluity that they give up on books. The quote below by Neil Postman expresses my concern:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”
In short, the age of the internet is what Huxley feared. The age of the internet rewards opinions with little or no rigorous thought as long as they have sensational appeal. You may not see the damage until you are in a position where someone defeats your coherent and rigorous claim with a sensational story. Being a web user myself, I can tell you that the reality on the web is not always facts over feelings. Many times, feelings rule the day.
The fast-food joint of opinions has many true-sounding statements that if thoroughly investigated, are proven as false. Yet, we swallow them up. This is implied in the Dr. Fox effect which says that most people trust the words of an eloquent speaker, often failing to notice breaches in logic or even false information.
Until you withdraw from this fast-food joint, and go into your kitchen, and do your own cooking, you can be sure to bid your dreams of being a chef (a rigorous thinker) goodbye. So, the choice is yours.
BEING ARTICULATE
Why do we admire articulate people? Is it because they know something that we don’t? No. It is because they say what we already know and conceive in a way we could never have thought of or spoken about.
Articulate people are special because they know how to use the right words to convey that which is already familiar. Imagine you have something to say but don’t quite know how to say it. Then someone comes along and communicates your thoughts in a precise way. The feeling that brings is what makes articulate folks stand out.
Articulate people are like water companies. Water is abundant everywhere. But we pay water companies for water. No, we pay water companies to process water and make them potable. In the same vein, knowledge like water is abundant everywhere. But we give articulate people their due because, like water companies, they process knowledge into concise words and present them to us. We love articulate people. Be one. Listen to my podcast on articulation titled Read to Make Sense of the World.
Till we see again this week. Until then, hold this picture:
Ciao,
Busyminds.
Hmmm, well said. Thank you