jonathanwarner

Your brain is dumb

Just a quick set of ideas you can use for your own constructive self-delusion. Remember kids, we do this all the time already — might as well direct it yourself for your own happiness.

This is the followup to yesterday’s post.

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 11/20/11 — 2:49am Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZdZSOyCA0acw Filed under: #tumblrize #cognitive bia #cognitive biases #mindhack #nanowrimo #the brain

Ritalin in the Water and Misinterpretations

Jonah Lehrer writes in the linked article about some surprising things he found, just from looking into an internet troll’s vitriolic comment. I’m taking a different tack than Jonah on this, however: While the questions he raises are interesting regarding how we view cognitive enhancers, I find the leaps the trolls went through to justify their beliefs more fascinating.

First, consider the study that many people cannot understand basic English. Then consider the fact that people don’t necessarily read words but instead read the word shape. Lastly consider that everyone suffers from cognitive distortions in the form of confirmation bias, base rate fallacy, and framing (to list a few from the wikipedia list of common biases. Oh, and the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect.

What this all means is that these people aren’t stupid, they’re not malicious, they’re not willfully ignorant. No, what they are is extremely poor at comprehension. A statistically significant portion of the population does not understand basic grammar, so it is inevitable that they will interpret things through their own distorted lens of reality. These poor people, unable to parse half-perceived words through a set of rules foreign to them, fall back on basic pattern recognition to understand what people are talking about. Yet they are oblivious to the fact that they might have missed a word or two, skipped an adjective, blanked on a negation. If you read the Wired article, you’ll see that the referenced document doesn’t even support what the troll claims it supports! *

In any event, this actually makes me happy about humanity. If this interpretation is true, then it’s not that people are mean, it’s just that they suck at words.**

*… or will you?
** This also pretty much means that this post is not as understandable as I think it is.

8/9/10 — 9:21pm Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZdZSOytPjBA Filed under: #epiphany #realization #cognition #wired #blog #meta #trolls #the internet #cognitive biases #reading #comprehension #blogging #science #the mind

Sometimes you’re not a unique snowflake

Sometimes you’re just another butterfly.

I don’t want to be just like everyone else, I want to stand out. Sure, I want to “fit in”, but there are points where I don’t want to go with the flow, don’t want to match statistics, don’t want to be the same as the rest of society. I would rather be viewed as a creative and unique individual rather than “just like a man”, or “like every other computer geek”, or “the same as every other wife’s husband” (or some other arbitrary label). This dovetails with another post I wrote about labels.

Too bad reality makes itself known so frequently.