5 ms·

Tolerating some amount of cognitive dissonance is one of the best things that I was able to develop in myself recently. In coding for example, I used to suffer

• danieltillett 10y ago
  Furthermore the unforgiving drive for consistency is a reason why people don't update their beliefs when new evidence comes to light. Only if you reject the evidence that does not fit with your beliefs. If you use the new evidence to examine and update your beliefs then you can be both open to new evidence and avoid cognitive dissonance.
  • amasad 10y ago
    What if the new evidence puts you at even (or close to even) odds? Then you have to live with the cognitive dissonance until further evidence.
    • deciplex 10y ago
      There is a difference between managing probability mass and "managing" cognitive dissonance. If one of two events will occur, or only one of two hypotheses can be true, with equal probability according to the information you possess, it is not cognitive dissonance to hold that fact in your head. Cognitive dissonance would be more like formulating two hypotheses in logical contradiction to each other, and insisting they must both be true.
      • dancompton 10y ago
        It is rare that an arbitrary function negates another for all possible inputs.
        • deciplex 10y ago
          If it negates it for the majority of inputs, but you insist it negates it for very few or no inputs, I would call that cognitive dissonance as well. In other words, if it's highly unlikely that two things are both true, but you consider it very likely they are both true, that's probably cognitive dissonance even if the two propositions are not logical contradictions.
          • dancompton 10y ago
            Do you disagree that given a bag of all functions which accept N inputs, it is unlikely that 2 chosen at random would negate each other across all N inputs?
            • deciplex 10y ago
              Obviously I don't disagree with that. Where are you going with this? People don't formulate their beliefs by picking randomly from a collection of all theoretically-possible beliefs. To expand on your example, if you are selecting from a bag of beliefs according to some criteria (based on some combination of morality, desire, etc) which are themselves in conflict (e.g. "I wish to be feared; I wish to be loved") then I think you are more likely to pick some beliefs which happen to contradict each other (again, if not logically, then for most inputs) than you would just by selecting randomly. Or, probably, if your criteria are more in tune with one another.
              • dancompton 10y ago
                How do people formulate their beliefs?
      • amasad 10y ago
    • danieltillett 10y ago
      If you are using a Bayesian approach then all new evidence does is adjust the probability of your belief being true. Only those impervious to new information have beliefs with 0 or 1 probabilities.
    • Dylan16807 10y ago
      Cognitive dissonance is not picking X sometimes and !X sometimes, because they're both around 50%. Cognitive dissonance is saying that X is 90% certain and that !X is also 90% certain.
• Natanael_L 10y ago
  Like a benign version of doublethink?
• jules 10y ago
  The ability to deal with uncertainty is not the same as cognitive dissonance. There is no cognitive dissonance involved in accepting that mutually contradictory propositions P and Q could be true, you just don't know yet which is. Cognitive dissonance is when you believe that both P and Q are true at the same time. Humans have a tendency to jump to conclusions because they don't like not knowing something, and any answer is better than no answer. It's precisely those people who can't deal with uncertainty who must deal with the most cognitive dissonance when the conclusion they jumped to turned out to be wrong, particularly when they've turned that conclusion into dogma.
  • amasad 10y ago
    Everyone must jump to a conclusion at some point -- you can't possibly collect all the evidence in the world. I think it is also a case of cognitive dissonance in believing that you can believe otherwise.
    • pessimizer 10y ago
      You never have to decide that something is absolutely true regardless of any new evidence.
      • bonobo3000 10y ago
        If you are only thinking about it, yes. If you want to take a decision based on the thought process, you have to pick a side at one point, knowing that it might not be the right side.
        • pessimizer 10y ago
          Only if you think your decisions purely based on fact, rather than thinking of your decisions as based on the best facts you have at the time. Cognitive dissonance is believing that two contradictory theories are most likely true based on the evidence you have. Since the evidence of the truth of one is also evidence for the untruth of the other, it means that when evaluating the evidence for one, you discount a different set of evidence than you do when evaluating the evidence for the other. This is never rational, and never something that you have to do. It's usually done to avoid conclusions that would force you (according to your own ethics) to give up something that you have, or not take something that you want.
• wwweston 10y ago
  Yeah. "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." (F. Scott Fitzgerald) I've also noticed something about the term "cognitive dissonance" in popular discussion. It's used as a pejorative explanation when the speaker can't figure out how someone else harmonizes two apparently inconsistent or contradictory positions. But when it's a speaker responding to someone else's accusation of cognitive dissonance, something like Fitzgerald's line usually comes up. It's probably a useful concept in the context of doing actual psychology (either science or therapy), but I've come to believe that in an argument it's often a form of ad hominem attack, like most stories participants in arguments tend to spin about each other.