#bad cognition

[essektheylyss]

coming out as a cliffhanger apologist. I feel like cliffhangers are a thing that have gotten a bad rep, and I won't stand for it any longer. in fact I think cliffhangers are good for you and they should happen more often. all the time even. I think the most foundational use of storytelling is for learning to cope with uncertainty and cliffhangers are an absolutely crucial element of that. a well-executed cliffhanger is worth its weight in fucking gold. we lost sight of this because cliffhangers started becoming cheap fodder without soul, but that's because so much mass media has lacked soul lately. the soul of the cliffhanger is the combination of genuine heartwrenching emotion and panache.

[shouldprobablybereading]

Since baby champion was made canon any cracktheory should be possible, I will therefore theorize that Shallan and Adolin’s baby is actually a set of triplets who get one of their haircolors each

Like this

[mentalisttraceur]

You're wrong and I don't like that! But seriously though:

TL;DR heuristic: give every wrongness a presumption of more harmfulness than you can see.

I fully agree with OP as practical on-the-ground advice. This perspective will help you be effective. It also, I suspect, correlates strongly to better mental health.

But the problem I have is that you are severely under-valuing how reliably stochastically harmful being wrong can be, and how much preventative/corrective impact a general opposition to wrongness can have if correctly directed. Though full disclosure, I do err too much the other way, so take the severity/emphaticness of my words with a grain of salt.

You cannot isolate objective errors of facts and reasoning to the point that they stop having significant probability of real harmful consequences.

Sound logic and true beliefs are profoundly interlocking. When you have enough of those two things, you are so thoroughly, game-changingly empowered to make your life better, that the mere absence of that is a serious harm (both to the wrong person, which is already bad enough life damage to be worth fighting for if you care about them, but also to anyone they have sufficiently strong influence on, especially any children who are still taking authoritatively presented statements as True and Right and carving their first moral intuitions with emotional reactions to how others react to them and treat them).

Every confidently held error can only exist by either being isolated to the point of not affecting behavior and externally consequential thought, or by warping your system of beliefs and reasoning to accommodate it (I like to call the generalization of this idea "logic bending", a more neutral term since technically it goes both ways: introducing more true beliefs and sound conclusions, or other psychological rewards for valid reasoning, can bend a warped sense of logic into closer alignment with sound logic).

Meanwhile, the life-improving and empowering benefits of being systematically righter only really start to snowball when your system of beliefs and reasoning has grown very comprehensive, allowing you to start getting those efficiency gains where many seemingly disparate things start to fold into elegantly unifying principles which in turn enables you to cover more ground in more problem spaces with less thought, less special-cases habitualized into the wetware of your brain, and less bits of knowledge... Such systems would struggle to fit much error without losing too much of the unifyingly-simplifying-yet-still-reliably-correct shape they need to stay as effective.

Also, errors are subject to memetic and cognetic evolution. Some errors are best thought of as literal parasites, evolved to virally spread themselves and co-opt their host humans into spreading them (in symbiosis with other errors, because errors cannot avoid noticable contradiction with the real-world without cancelling out their effects in the most obvious cases - which crucially is not the same thing as the most ethically important cases).

Anyway, if your criteria is just "observably ok results", you're necessarily going to underestimate the harm potential, because you'll be limited to just the concrete harms within your ability to see or within the ability of people around you to explain in a way that's compelling to you. When you treat every error as what it is - a reproducing landmine which will blow up into real harm when given the right circumstances - your estimate of harm probability distribution over possibilities in the absence of full comprehensive observation and analysis is going to be more accurate.

P.S. I spent most of my conscious life being able to observe the not-ok results of various ways people were wrong in their heads, but it would take literally 15-20 years for me to gain the ability to translate that shape of wrongness, hurt/harm, and causal relationship between them into words that others reliably understood and which I could at least in principle defend against most dismissals/rationalizations/etc. (Moving countries as a kid probably added a couple years to that 15-20; having access to the internet, English, and the results of modern psychology probably shaved off a decade or four.) At the latest by my mid teens, I even had an intuitive grasp of "cognetic opening" as an abstraction of the commonality between a lot of little wrongs in the mind with material ethical consequences that basically everyone infuriatingly blindly thought harmless. I struggled to put it into words for at least a decade to get anyone else to see it, even though I thought with it fluently. And it is overwhelmingly the pattern in my life that when I react to some cognition as bad, I can't think of a concrete example that the person finds compelling, but inevitably they or someone else eventually has something go worse because of it.

Hmm. Right, ok, so, there's two grounds on which you can evaluate an "ideology".

One ground is like, its abstract correctness. Are its factual claims right? Are its ethical claims agreeable to you?

This is how you should evaluate your own belief system. Being correct is very useful, so it's in your interest to try to be correct.

The other way you can evaluate an ideology is like... does it produce generally ok policies? What are its effects?

This is a lower bar. An ideology which is factually and ethically correct (by your standards) will necessarily produce ok effects (by your standards) when you believe it. Uh actually this probably isn't strictly true but it's true enough.

Anyway, it's the second criterion that you should use to evaluate other people's belief systems, I contend, unless you know them really well and know them to be amenable to certain kinds of rational debate.

Why?

Because asking that everyone be actually correct is far too much. That will never happen. It's a pipe dream. You're going to have to get used to living in a world full of people you think are wrong about shit. On the other hand, asking that everyone (or most people, or everyone in power, or whatever) believe stuff that leads to not-too-heinous consequences is a more reasonable goal. It's something I can get behind.

"This ideology produces observably ok results, but it's Wrong" is not a complaint I find very sympathetic. Ok, it's Wrong. So don't believe it and move on.

I think this follows from my "leave other people be unless you really have to" moral intuition. A guy believing a wrong thing is not enough to make your frustration at him sympathetic to me. I mean in a serious context, not just in terms of shooting the shit and complaining online. It's not enough. The guy needs to actually be doing something problematic. Otherwise "he's wrong and I don't like that" doesn't compel me.

[normal-with-adhd-is-a-joke]

Being prone to medication side effects sucks so bad. Yes this medication helped with a symptom that was really bothering me. Unfortunately it also ruined my life.

[thisusernameisalreadytakwn]

Okay I’m actually replaying patho 1 now and I just need to say

Daniil is not that rude. Like he is kind of pretentious but overall he is honestly really polite and very willing to cooperate and help the people he is talking to when he first arrives in town.

Like the only exceptions are the olgimskys who are just straight up lying to his face and the second convo with Georgi. You know, the one where he basically says “yeah the plague would be really bad so let’s ignore it and keep investigating for murder”. And honestly calling him an idiot in Latin is kind of an appropriate response to that. And even then his options are mostly just expressing his (very understandable) frustration with the situation he has been put in.

Like he seems more just exasperated and frustrated that everyone around him is not taking the problem seriously and constantly playing games with him. And that’s day one lmao I haven’t even finished day 2. You know the day that is all about people playing games with you while you try to prevent an epidemic.

[pixierainbows]

Pixie have good bad day, both.

went to plant store today with guardian Librarian ! Pixie really happy get time with guardian Librarian ! and ! also really like go to plant store

Pixie get pretty pretty flower plants !!! and a very happy tomato plant !!!

and ! Pixie look very carefully for to get good plants for guardian Wizard too , who could not go plant store because guardian Wizard have work hard

too late for pictures today but will get pictures later

but also . stranger person just walk right up to Sunshine and petted Sunshine and make Pixie sick …

but is good example of Pixies disabled brain , how Pixie brain move much much too slow to stop people and not can just TELL people afterwards either , Pixie nonverbal, not can speak at all .

guardian Librarian stop other stranger person from doing same .

Pixie very grateful when guardians protect Pixie and Sunshine

and but ... happy new baby plants for play with !!!

[spacetimeaccordionfolder]

Beings of Raw Investure change by people's perception of them, right? Like Cognitive Shadows sometimes change from who they were over time as people think about them? So, for example, if a lot of people thought about telepathically projecting their period cramps on to Kelsier,

[youaskedfurret]

The lack of media literacy in the baldurs gate fandom is astounding. There's a good ending for Astarion and a bad ending for him and people keep picking the bad ending for him and being shocked when he's mean to them LMAO.

[torchstelechos]

I hope Siffrin made his lil shitty faces from act 5 when he was a teen because holy fuck does he deserve to go ham around that age. Imagine not knowing the language of the country you are in, have no money, no memory, and no one exactly helps you past "here young one have some soup and a place to rest before you head out for your journey :)" because they don't understand you, and you're also trying to figure out your gender. They deserve to make the shittiest fucking faces while doing vaugardian McDonald's esque jobs while getting microaggressed every five minutes as a TEENAGER

[simcardiac-arrested]

you were anything but.

[gingerswagfreckles]

Well they caught him. If he wasn't the exact kind of person tumblr loves, the conspiracy theories about this being a random person being framed would have continued to spread. But he's an attractive 26 year old white man who was caught carrying a manifesto about corporate America and has an internet history that matches up with tumblr's general politics. So everyone is going to get excited about how he's a martyr and go back to acknowledging reality in that there isn't a conspiracy to frame the wrong guy.

The discussions over whether or not this man should be lionized as a hero are honestly not as relevant as the comfort with which people are going to drop the conspiracy theory they would have been fully committed to if this man's politics turned out to be nuts. The ease with which the userbase of this website switches between realities based on whether or not they confirm their biases is really alarming. I just hope people understand how weird it is to claim a random person is 100% going to be framed by the FBI on one day, and then drop that by the next day when it becomes clear that the person being "framed" is the exact kind of communist you had hoped.

[vaguely-concerned]

there's a self-help/mental health adjacent post that's going around and it seems to be really helpful for a lot of people which is very good. I also personally hate it with all my fucking heart

[tilbageidanmark]

A list of cognitive biases

[jewreallythinkthat]

The insanity of what I've just read in the antisemitism tag. People talking about how the one Jewish state, Israel, must be destroyed and is evil, but also "antisemitism is evil" in the same sentence is mind-blowing.

I mean, I guess if they're tagging it as hastag antisemitism, they are self aware right? Right??

[pixierainbows]

what's your favorite part of animal crossing?

Everybody like Pixie and want is friends with Pixie ! is very very not-like in-person people who mostly not like pixie .

And ! Pixie can play with no help ! most other games get too complicated for Pixie to play alone …

[likeabxrdinflight]

tired of early 20-somethings acting like harry potter was never good or had no value in its day like shut the fuck up half of you weren't even there when it peaked