This story reminds me of another point I want to touch on about this all.
When you believe in a thing you know isn’t real, it’s called cognitive dissonance. It’s easy to recognize in people who have supernatural or religious beliefs, but we all do this all day long about a thousand different things.
Cognitive dissonance is not a bug in human cognition, it’s a part of our architecture. We are not reasonable, logical beings. We have brains that do one thing and one thing only: write stories to explain our feelings. Nearly every major societal issue comes from this fact, from international wars to your own struggles with anxiety and depression.
I don’t know if it’s universal, but it seems a common memory many of us have about arguing with our friend who was convinced that WWF wrestling was real. They know that weapons and necromancy are probably not allowed in a real sport, but they also feel so strongly attached to the storyline that they also believe it’s real.
Our species is very, very good at holding ideas we know are untrue on some level. When you don’t have good language skills and can’t take complex ideas and make them abstract using language inside your head, you lack the ability to properly analyze an idea and have any critical thought about it. Language is our key to escape cognitive dissonance and we are being deliberately stripped of this power with a million different distractions. Social media that feeds us imagery and sounds with minimal interaction, AI that does your writing and reading for you. As well as of course, games and other electronic entertainment.
These aren’t bad things on their own, but we’re also being swamped with agendas and grifters and oligarchs who want split out the people most susceptible to influence in this way, providing them with stories that their brains can latch onto to explain their misery or pain. They may know that say, trans kids aren’t the reason that they’re broke, overworked and suffering, but it feels good to have a target who can’t hurt you. If you’re not really paying attention to what you’re thinking about what you feel, you can easily believe a hundred contradictory things.
And once they realize that it’s okay, that you CAN in fact believe in things that are objectively untrue, but you will get people supporting you and praising for believing that thing, you won’t let it go, your brain will even double-down and strengthen that pathway.
We have to get better about understanding our vulnerabilities, because there are systems coming online that are going to be even better at twisting our motivations and thinking.
This story reminds me of another point I want to touch on about this all.
When you believe in a thing you know isn’t real, it’s called cognitive dissonance. It’s easy to recognize in people who have supernatural or religious beliefs, but we all do this all day long about a thousand different things.
Cognitive dissonance is not a bug in human cognition, it’s a part of our architecture. We are not reasonable, logical beings. We have brains that do one thing and one thing only: write stories to explain our feelings. Nearly every major societal issue comes from this fact, from international wars to your own struggles with anxiety and depression.
I don’t know if it’s universal, but it seems a common memory many of us have about arguing with our friend who was convinced that WWF wrestling was real. They know that weapons and necromancy are probably not allowed in a real sport, but they also feel so strongly attached to the storyline that they also believe it’s real.
Our species is very, very good at holding ideas we know are untrue on some level. When you don’t have good language skills and can’t take complex ideas and make them abstract using language inside your head, you lack the ability to properly analyze an idea and have any critical thought about it. Language is our key to escape cognitive dissonance and we are being deliberately stripped of this power with a million different distractions. Social media that feeds us imagery and sounds with minimal interaction, AI that does your writing and reading for you. As well as of course, games and other electronic entertainment.
These aren’t bad things on their own, but we’re also being swamped with agendas and grifters and oligarchs who want split out the people most susceptible to influence in this way, providing them with stories that their brains can latch onto to explain their misery or pain. They may know that say, trans kids aren’t the reason that they’re broke, overworked and suffering, but it feels good to have a target who can’t hurt you. If you’re not really paying attention to what you’re thinking about what you feel, you can easily believe a hundred contradictory things.
And once they realize that it’s okay, that you CAN in fact believe in things that are objectively untrue, but you will get people supporting you and praising for believing that thing, you won’t let it go, your brain will even double-down and strengthen that pathway.
We have to get better about understanding our vulnerabilities, because there are systems coming online that are going to be even better at twisting our motivations and thinking.
Ok I know it’s not what your comment is about, but there is necromancy in WWF? How cool. I need to look into it.