21 ms·

Good work here on the teleological bias. The question is what's behind it? My working conjecture is that it is some people that cannot tolerate the ambiguity

by toss1 8y ago

Good work here on the teleological bias. The question is what's behind it? My working conjecture is that it is some people that cannot tolerate the ambiguity of many events being essentially random, chaotic, or stochastic. They'd rather have an evil cabal deliberately executing the 9/11 attacks, or school shootings, or faking the school shootings, than to accept that sometimes things just get very far out of hand. But, other than rough observation (and likely confirmation bias), I've not done much to substantiate this conjecture. Comments?

toasterlovin 8y ago
We evolved in small groups of people (around 100 people or so). Conspiracies are much more feasible at that scale. It’s basically your standard political intrigue and backstabbing. So that, IMO, is the genesis of conspiratorial thinking. Then I think people have a very hard time thinking about large scale systems, so they revert to explaining the difficult to understand with conspiracy.
pythonslayer 8y ago
I agree this paper doesn’t seem to present any issues. I can’t speak to whether it is useful, though. As for your questions, I will put forth a theory that really isn’t all that crazy, or esoteric, but might help. If religion, despite it’s means, has, over time (hundreds, thousands of years) encouraged adherence to social structures beneficial to survival and psychologically healthy livelihoods, shouldn’t that basis alone justify it’s prevalence? If the only reason to deny this is the lucid awareness we ourselves experience, I cannot agree we are adhering to the dialectical approach we celebrate in the scientific method. In this theory, religion serves a benefit to the ends of survival, giving these beliefs an evolutionary origin wildly entangled with the emergence of cognition and self-identity. If this is the case, how do we reconcile that with science? Seems easier to me than any other way. Of course, these are our ancestors. This stuff is surely not simple. This alone just begs for more questions that I think are classically best handled by humanities, but if I’m not mistaken this begs of multidisciplinary introspection. Granted, much of the humanities doesn’t take theology seriously these days but that’s a fairly recent issue. If you’re interested, there’s nobody stopping you from diving in. Carl Jung is a useful place to start in terms of these natural cognitive mappings. Coincidentally Freud was actually a link between Jung and modern psychology these links are not much acknowledged these days. It’s all both very hand wavy and contentious depending who you ask. Anyhow, with Jung you don’t need to agree with his conclusions but he defines a map that can at least give an idea of what we could be working with and it leans heavily on mythology and imagination. It introduces some foundational stuff on how these unstable symbolic mappings could have assisted the transition into the lucid awareness that eventually became modern science. If you’ve never ‘gone here’ before, I will warn you: it’s big and deep. There is a field of “Jungian psychology” but it’s mostly trying to find use in his work and I would recommend going strait to his work. “Man And His Symbols” is approachable enough to start. I’ve opened a can of worms here, but it’s a fruitful one and very related to your interest because I am afraid these contentions with our own self-identities mark a cognitive recursion we are not seriously contending with.
soundwave106 8y ago
First Google I came up with the psychological profile of a conspiracy theorist is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/ Lots of interesting points IMHO. It is mentioned that those who "habitually seek meaning and patterns in the environment" and cannot tolerate mundane or unclear explanations for big world events are more prone to conspiracy theories. So on one hand, on this, I think you are right. On the other hand, a lot of the article is devoted to the notion that conspiracy theories are a social defense mechanism among the more vulnerable, threatened, and/or powerless population. Narcissism -- both of the self, and tribal narcissism, is also mentioned as a factor. (Ironically, as the article mentions, conspiracy theories tend to make it less likely that individuals will take actions that, in the long run, might boost their autonomy and control. Thus the article calls conspiracy theories a "self-defeating form of motivated social cognition".) I'll buy that it is a messy combination of any or all of the above factors that lead to a belief in conspiracy theories -- such make sense from my small sample of people I know who are more prone to conspiracy theories. (They do note that "vulnerable and disadvantaged populations that have been identified as most likely to benefit from [conspiracy theories]" have not been as extensively studied as they would like to see. Interesting conclusions so far though.)
- dnomad 8y ago
  There's a good chunk of literature that demonstrates conpiracists have different brain structures. This is why people who believe in one conspiracy theory are more likely to also believe in other (conflicting) conspiracy theories and, on an individual level, what you're dealing with is a paranoid cognitive style [1]. The other part of this is that there seems to be a strong element of social contagion. The research here is still new but it's becoming more and more clear that social media can virally amplify paranoia within a population [2]. So there's probably a good chunk of people who might exhibit excessive paranoia (some studies put this at 10% [3] but I recall numbers as high as 30% after 9/11) but then it may be possible to technologically amplify this. [1] https://qz.com/1286982/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-because-they-want-to-feel-unique/ https://qz.com/1286982/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-t... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-attacks-germany.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-ref... [3] https://www.livescience.com/37419-paranoid-beliefs-common.html https://www.livescience.com/37419-paranoid-beliefs-common.ht...
adrianratnapala 8y ago
> evil cabal deliberately executing the 9/11 attacks An evil cabal really did execute those attacks. Your examples about school shootings are closer to the point you are trying to make, but even they are non-random in the crucial sense that they are the work of deliberate malevolent wills (though not usually conspiracies). So I suppose ultimately I am agreeing with you that many people have habit of explaining the social world in terms of the deliberate acts of humans. But that's only because that is a perfectly good mental habit to have, it's an essential part of our toolkit. And like all tools it sometimes gets overused, and out in the tails it is no surprise that produces wacky conspiracy theories.
- toss1 8y ago
  >evil cabal Ha! Right, you are! I suppose AQ does meet that definition, just not the one I was referring to -- the evil cabal is (supposed to be) the one the runs the world (shadowy Illuminati, lizard people, whatever), not a random enemy cabal that happens to pull off a spectacularly deadly stunt by exploiting our security weaknesses.
  - adrianratnapala 8y ago
    Ok, I thought you had in mind the kinds of folks who just thought e.g. that GWB or maybe Zionists faked the attacks. In which case it isn't an overactive intention detector but rather just partisanship induced delusion. But yes. Illuminati type theories are something else again. Some people's intention detectors misfire so strongly that it is not enough that terrible events can be caused by an evil cabal that is merely trying to conquer us all.
dnomad 8y ago
> My working conjecture is that it is some people that cannot tolerate the ambiguity of many events being essentially random, chaotic, or stochastic. A lot of people aren't willing to seriously entertain complexity and so rely paranoid thought processes. There's a good chunk of scientific evidence to think that this is driven by basic brain structures. You sometimes see this reported in the US as the difference between "liberal and conservative brains" [1] but this really distracts from the underlying issue. What's interesting is the growing evidence that this sort of paranoid thinking is encouraged by social media and the internet [2]. What you get are models where the intense paranoia of a few can be technologically amplified and virally overtake whole populations. Paranoia and fear is highly contagious and it seems the internet, rather than reducing such thinking by providing plentiful information, helps it spread. [1] eg https://www.businessinsider.com/psychological-differences-between-conservatives-and-liberals-2018-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/psychological-differences-be..., https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/study-predicts-political-beliefs-with-83-percent-accuracy-17536124/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/study-predicts... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-attacks-germany.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-ref...
- toss1 8y ago
  YES, this study finding these effects from Facebook are extremely interesting. "Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent." "[the FB] algorithm is built around a core mission: promote content that will maximize user engagement. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, perform best and so proliferate." This selfish (to FB, Google, YouTube, etc) emphasis on engagement over truth has always disturbed me, but without any sound data. Now that some emerges, it much more rapidly than I expected approaches truly frightening levels. I'm normally start from libertarian, but this seems to be actively damaging society (albeit unwittingly) for their own profit, a true tragedy of the commons.

by toss1 8y ago

toasterlovin 8y ago

We evolved in small groups of people (around 100 people or so). Conspiracies are much more feasible at that scale. It’s basically your standard political intrigue and backstabbing. So that, IMO, is the genesis of conspiratorial thinking. Then I think people have a very hard time thinking about large scale systems, so they revert to explaining the difficult to understand with conspiracy.

pythonslayer 8y ago

I agree this paper doesn’t seem to present any issues. I can’t speak to whether it is useful, though. As for your questions, I will put forth a theory that really isn’t all that crazy, or esoteric, but might help. If religion, despite it’s means, has, over time (hundreds, thousands of years) encouraged adherence to social structures beneficial to survival and psychologically healthy livelihoods, shouldn’t that basis alone justify it’s prevalence? If the only reason to deny this is the lucid awareness we ourselves experience, I cannot agree we are adhering to the dialectical approach we celebrate in the scientific method. In this theory, religion serves a benefit to the ends of survival, giving these beliefs an evolutionary origin wildly entangled with the emergence of cognition and self-identity. If this is the case, how do we reconcile that with science? Seems easier to me than any other way. Of course, these are our ancestors. This stuff is surely not simple. This alone just begs for more questions that I think are classically best handled by humanities, but if I’m not mistaken this begs of multidisciplinary introspection. Granted, much of the humanities doesn’t take theology seriously these days but that’s a fairly recent issue. If you’re interested, there’s nobody stopping you from diving in. Carl Jung is a useful place to start in terms of these natural cognitive mappings. Coincidentally Freud was actually a link between Jung and modern psychology these links are not much acknowledged these days. It’s all both very hand wavy and contentious depending who you ask. Anyhow, with Jung you don’t need to agree with his conclusions but he defines a map that can at least give an idea of what we could be working with and it leans heavily on mythology and imagination. It introduces some foundational stuff on how these unstable symbolic mappings could have assisted the transition into the lucid awareness that eventually became modern science. If you’ve never ‘gone here’ before, I will warn you: it’s big and deep. There is a field of “Jungian psychology” but it’s mostly trying to find use in his work and I would recommend going strait to his work. “Man And His Symbols” is approachable enough to start. I’ve opened a can of worms here, but it’s a fruitful one and very related to your interest because I am afraid these contentions with our own self-identities mark a cognitive recursion we are not seriously contending with.

soundwave106 8y ago

First Google I came up with the psychological profile of a conspiracy theorist is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5724570/ Lots of interesting points IMHO. It is mentioned that those who "habitually seek meaning and patterns in the environment" and cannot tolerate mundane or unclear explanations for big world events are more prone to conspiracy theories. So on one hand, on this, I think you are right. On the other hand, a lot of the article is devoted to the notion that conspiracy theories are a social defense mechanism among the more vulnerable, threatened, and/or powerless population. Narcissism -- both of the self, and tribal narcissism, is also mentioned as a factor. (Ironically, as the article mentions, conspiracy theories tend to make it less likely that individuals will take actions that, in the long run, might boost their autonomy and control. Thus the article calls conspiracy theories a "self-defeating form of motivated social cognition".) I'll buy that it is a messy combination of any or all of the above factors that lead to a belief in conspiracy theories -- such make sense from my small sample of people I know who are more prone to conspiracy theories. (They do note that "vulnerable and disadvantaged populations that have been identified as most likely to benefit from [conspiracy theories]" have not been as extensively studied as they would like to see. Interesting conclusions so far though.)

dnomad 8y ago
There's a good chunk of literature that demonstrates conpiracists have different brain structures. This is why people who believe in one conspiracy theory are more likely to also believe in other (conflicting) conspiracy theories and, on an individual level, what you're dealing with is a paranoid cognitive style [1]. The other part of this is that there seems to be a strong element of social contagion. The research here is still new but it's becoming more and more clear that social media can virally amplify paranoia within a population [2]. So there's probably a good chunk of people who might exhibit excessive paranoia (some studies put this at 10% [3] but I recall numbers as high as 30% after 9/11) but then it may be possible to technologically amplify this. [1] https://qz.com/1286982/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-because-they-want-to-feel-unique/ https://qz.com/1286982/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-t... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-attacks-germany.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-ref... [3] https://www.livescience.com/37419-paranoid-beliefs-common.html https://www.livescience.com/37419-paranoid-beliefs-common.ht...

adrianratnapala 8y ago

> evil cabal deliberately executing the 9/11 attacks An evil cabal really did execute those attacks. Your examples about school shootings are closer to the point you are trying to make, but even they are non-random in the crucial sense that they are the work of deliberate malevolent wills (though not usually conspiracies). So I suppose ultimately I am agreeing with you that many people have habit of explaining the social world in terms of the deliberate acts of humans. But that's only because that is a perfectly good mental habit to have, it's an essential part of our toolkit. And like all tools it sometimes gets overused, and out in the tails it is no surprise that produces wacky conspiracy theories.

toss1 8y ago
>evil cabal Ha! Right, you are! I suppose AQ does meet that definition, just not the one I was referring to -- the evil cabal is (supposed to be) the one the runs the world (shadowy Illuminati, lizard people, whatever), not a random enemy cabal that happens to pull off a spectacularly deadly stunt by exploiting our security weaknesses.
- adrianratnapala 8y ago
  Ok, I thought you had in mind the kinds of folks who just thought e.g. that GWB or maybe Zionists faked the attacks. In which case it isn't an overactive intention detector but rather just partisanship induced delusion. But yes. Illuminati type theories are something else again. Some people's intention detectors misfire so strongly that it is not enough that terrible events can be caused by an evil cabal that is merely trying to conquer us all.

dnomad 8y ago

> My working conjecture is that it is some people that cannot tolerate the ambiguity of many events being essentially random, chaotic, or stochastic. A lot of people aren't willing to seriously entertain complexity and so rely paranoid thought processes. There's a good chunk of scientific evidence to think that this is driven by basic brain structures. You sometimes see this reported in the US as the difference between "liberal and conservative brains" [1] but this really distracts from the underlying issue. What's interesting is the growing evidence that this sort of paranoid thinking is encouraged by social media and the internet [2]. What you get are models where the intense paranoia of a few can be technologically amplified and virally overtake whole populations. Paranoia and fear is highly contagious and it seems the internet, rather than reducing such thinking by providing plentiful information, helps it spread. [1] eg https://www.businessinsider.com/psychological-differences-between-conservatives-and-liberals-2018-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/psychological-differences-be..., https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/study-predicts-political-beliefs-with-83-percent-accuracy-17536124/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/study-predicts... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-refugee-attacks-germany.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/world/europe/facebook-ref...

toss1 8y ago
YES, this study finding these effects from Facebook are extremely interesting. "Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent." "[the FB] algorithm is built around a core mission: promote content that will maximize user engagement. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, perform best and so proliferate." This selfish (to FB, Google, YouTube, etc) emphasis on engagement over truth has always disturbed me, but without any sound data. Now that some emerges, it much more rapidly than I expected approaches truly frightening levels. I'm normally start from libertarian, but this seems to be actively damaging society (albeit unwittingly) for their own profit, a true tragedy of the commons.