We’re all going to run headlong into a very difficult inflection point in human development as a species very, very soon. Which is the looming divide between people who have no idea how their own minds work, and those who have even a shred of self-awareness.
And not a “facebook/twitter argument” type of self-awareness, but understanding that your intelligence and your understanding of things are entirely separate factors. We are species of cognitive dissonance. It’s baked-in. Everyone, even YOU personally reading this, has some level of contradictory ideas or feelings that you can’t pry apart without effort.
Some people think about how they think, and come to conclusion that they need to make effort to balance out their values and understanding of the world. Other people are going “brain go vroom” and conclude any idea they have, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it aligns with how they feel at that moment, MUST be true because they still think brains are fact-finding machines, not story-telling machines. This is why we have anti-vax doctors and climate-change-denying scientists (although rare) which is because they live in reaction and story-telling, not reason. If anything, education can make it much, much harder to break out of story-telling-reaction mode, because you think your own thoughts far less fallible.
So yeah, education is only part of the problem. We are going to have to figure out ways to teach people self-awareness, how to think about their own thoughts, or we’re going to have billions of brains rotting in an AI/social-media/emotional-porn cesspit in the next decade and they vote and carry guns.
It reminds me of the “missing missing reasons” post, which describes how for some people reality creates emotions, but for other people emotions create reality
The first viewpoint, “emotion creates reality,” is truth for a great many people. Not a healthy truth, not a truth that promotes good relationships, but a deep, lived truth nonetheless. It’s seductive. It means that whatever you’re feeling is just and right, that you’re never in the wrong unless you feel you’re in the wrong. For people whose self-image is so battered and fragile that they can’t bear anything but validation, often it feels like the only way they can face the world.
We’re all going to run headlong into a very difficult inflection point in human development as a species very, very soon. Which is the looming divide between people who have no idea how their own minds work, and those who have even a shred of self-awareness.
And not a “facebook/twitter argument” type of self-awareness, but understanding that your intelligence and your understanding of things are entirely separate factors. We are species of cognitive dissonance. It’s baked-in. Everyone, even YOU personally reading this, has some level of contradictory ideas or feelings that you can’t pry apart without effort.
Some people think about how they think, and come to conclusion that they need to make effort to balance out their values and understanding of the world. Other people are going “brain go vroom” and conclude any idea they have, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it aligns with how they feel at that moment, MUST be true because they still think brains are fact-finding machines, not story-telling machines. This is why we have anti-vax doctors and climate-change-denying scientists (although rare) which is because they live in reaction and story-telling, not reason. If anything, education can make it much, much harder to break out of story-telling-reaction mode, because you think your own thoughts far less fallible.
So yeah, education is only part of the problem. We are going to have to figure out ways to teach people self-awareness, how to think about their own thoughts, or we’re going to have billions of brains rotting in an AI/social-media/emotional-porn cesspit in the next decade and they vote and carry guns.
It reminds me of the “missing missing reasons” post, which describes how for some people reality creates emotions, but for other people emotions create reality