9 ms·

I think there is too much information around for the average person to filter and process and digest. All three are important parts of living in a society and i

I think there is too much information around for the average person to filter and process and digest. All three are important parts of living in a society and it looks to me like even with e.g. economic issues alone, it's just very hard for (to be fair) anybody to keep up. In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations. My theory, sort of.

tankenmate 6y ago
I have a similar vein of thought; Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto, changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence is better because your evidence is just your opinion.
- dahart 6y ago
  > Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. No, this isn't true. References to Dunning-Kruger need to die. I haven't seen a case yet where using Dunning-Kruger to explain behavior is not misinformation. Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. There was a positive correlation in people's ability to judge themselves, in the experiments. The only question was why the correlation wasn't higher. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
  - sellyme 6y ago
    > Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. It also demonstrated that the worst-performing individuals estimated themselves to perform MUCH better than they did, while the best-performing individuals expected to perform slightly worse than they did. This comports with the average reference to the phenomenon ("stupid people think they're smarter than they are, smart people think they're stupider than they are"). The article you linked for some reason makes this comparison: > So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. [...] they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good. This is just categorically false, and the chart linked not one paragraph above completely torpedoes it. The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals. Perhaps the author meant to write "not that [they] think they're better than competent people do", which would be correct, but the rest of the conclusions seem to follow off of this flawed reading of the data.
    - dahart 6y ago
      > The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals. I think you’re misunderstanding what Dunning & Kruger presented, which is precisely why references to this paper need to stop. You cannot read literally into the graph as saying that the bottom quartile of people believed they were at the 57th percentile of ability, that’s not what the experiment measured. Have you read the actual paper? The respondents were 1- all Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra class credit, 2- asked to rank themselves, not to rate their abilities, 3- asked about such “skills” as the ability to get a joke. It seems pretty wild that anyone ever took this paper seriously. The conclusions that it makes in it’s wordy prose are not supported by the data they present. Take a little more time to understand Tal’s primary argument - that this paper most likely is measuring regression to the mean. Because these kids were asked to rank themselves, and they didn’t know how good their peers were, there is good reason to expect a correllation less than 1. Because the authors were barely out of undergrad school themselves at the time, and not studying statistics per se, there is plenty of reason to suspect that the methodology isn’t perfect ... beyond the fact that it wasn’t a random sample of the population, it studied all rich kids who (self-selected) needed extra credit, it included no difficult mental skills, and that followup papers have shown a complete reversal of whatever effect is there, when applied to more difficult skills like law or engineering.
henrikschroder 6y ago
There was research last year that showed that cynicism is a way for less intelligent people to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know you're not smart enough to figure out if other people are genuine or out to scam you, defaulting to assuming that all strangers are lying is a winning strategy. The same kind of logic fuels conspiracy-minded people. The one thing they all have in common is that they reject the mainstream view, they reject the consensus. And in turn, they embrace outlandish explanations, and the communities around those, because it gives them a false sense of superiority. They know something the rest of the sheep don't! So these two psychological defense mechanisms interact with each other, and when the information flow in society is increasing, the threshold for how smart you need to be to keep up also increases. So people in general probably aren't getting stupider, but they're getting more and more overwhelmed, which looks the same.
- TallGuyShort 6y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. I'd be curious for a link or reference to that research if you remember any details.
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    On cynicism: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0146167218783195 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616721878319... On conspiracy beliefs: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786
- reader_mode 6y ago
  >There was research last year that showed that cynicism is a way for less intelligent people to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know you're not smart enough to figure out if other people are genuine or out to scam you, defaulting to assuming that all strangers are lying is a winning strategy. That narrative is ridiculous - what does intelligence have to do with it ? I guarantee you you are uninformed on so many issues and you could easily be taken advantage of no matter how intelligent you were by someone who spent time preparing/specialising in deception - especially if the negative outcome is less then the cost of investigating the issue. Nobody has the time to investigate every choice so by your logic cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in.
mistermann 6y ago
I think many neurotypical people suffer from the same information overload, in that they treat mainstream media news the same way that many conspiracy theory enthusiasts treat their "news": zero skepticism (someone I trust said it is true, so I will accept it as true, regardless of the quality of or existence of evidence). Now obviously there's a significant difference in degree of accuracy between the two worlds, but then one shouldn't forget that they're not dealing with equally difficult stories to investigate, or have access to the same investigative resources. Regardless, the same illogical behavior can be observed in both types, and an overload of complexity & information sounds like a very reasonable explanation.
mdorazio 6y ago
I think this theory is missing a component: the erosion of respect for experts. It at least seems like pre-internet, when people didn't understand the world around them they would default to trusting what scientists/doctors/researchers told them was true. But today, we've gone so far down the disinformation "fake news" rabbit hole that a large portion of the general public, at least in America, just straight up doesn't trust what actual experts have to say on many topics.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  This is not just because of disinformation though. Now, it's easier than ever to second-guess your doctor and any other expert (and I know because I've done this, and even been right on occasion). For example, every time someone worries about their health, they can sort through all possible diagnoses online, and convince themselves they have a certain sickness just because the symptoms match. A doctor will use Bayesian reasoning and conclude the problem is really a very common infection or something, but when the untrained mind is overwhelmed with information, Occam's Razor doesn't hold. The same goes for everything else. Information is dangerous for those who don't know how to reason about it carefully and properly, which is most of us, in most fields.
- autokad 6y ago
  well the experts were saying in March, 2020 that masks do not work and are not recommended. I was basically attacked at work as being xenophobic and insular for saying if we are going out we should wear a mask. so where were your experts on that one? sure f*#!ed up that one.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > well the experts were saying in March, 2020 that masks do not work and are not recommended. As I recall, at the time experts were saying "Don't recommend that everyone wear a mask, we have a shortage and need to save them for health care workers."
    - Schiendelman 6y ago
k0mplex 6y ago
this makes a lot of sense
TallGuyShort 6y ago
Yeah that crossed my mind as well. People who have so little understanding of the mechanics behind it all that they think it's impossible we've put anything in Earth orbit - how could ANYONE understand that? In one case though I had someone say that I wasn't hitting satellites, I was hitting a solar-powered high altitude plane. When I pointed out that it would have to be going at 23 times the speed of sound at sea level and flying at 120,000 km, they said of course: technology is amazing. While in the same conversation claiming that satellites were impossible. At that point I stopped believing they even had basic common sense.
- mcbits 6y ago
  My conclusion about flat-earthers is that the vast majority are just trolling. There are probably also a fair number who get sucked in by the idea, but they aren't the ones out there making the arguments for it. The frustratingly persistent people who can come up with one outlandish argument after another are too smart to actually believe what they're saying.
  - d_tr 6y ago
    I am not a mental health expert but I do not think of this type of persistent trolling as healthy behaviour. At the very least it is shitty and disrespectful behaviour towards someone trying to make a point using facts.
- Krasnol 6y ago
  They've probably been just improvising. They become quite good at it as it follows simple rules.
- josalhor 6y ago
  This thread also summarizes my experience pretty well. To take this even further: I encounter in my day to day many instances of people making claims that are easily refuted with a quick online search. I have realized that correcting people over their lack of scientific knowledge is perceived as nitpicking and inappropriate. We got our incentives backwards. If we cannot speak up over misinformation to our peers, then they will spread faster than the truth. Sadly, I've had to accept that in order to be perceived as a much stronger source of truth, I have to correct people less.
hhjinks 6y ago
How does that work when flat earthers actually weave elaborate "theories" about the physics and mechanics leading everyone else to conclude that it is round? It's not like they say it's flat and stick their fingers in their ears. They respond with plausible-sounding retorts that, while obviously untrue, often make sense in isolation. For everyone else, the explanation of "the earth is round and gravity goes brr" is far less cognitively intensive than all the mental gymnastics flat earthers engage in.
asdff 6y ago
I don't think there is too much information. There are plenty of very busy people with very good grasps on the world. I think it's more that people don't give time to information, and prefer entertainment. People in the U.S. spend on average 4 hours a day watching TV, not reading newspapers.

tankenmate 6y ago

I have a similar vein of thought; Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto, changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence is better because your evidence is just your opinion.

dahart 6y ago
> Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. No, this isn't true. References to Dunning-Kruger need to die. I haven't seen a case yet where using Dunning-Kruger to explain behavior is not misinformation. Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. There was a positive correlation in people's ability to judge themselves, in the experiments. The only question was why the correlation wasn't higher. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
- sellyme 6y ago
  > Dunning-Kruger's data actually demonstrated that the more confident someone is in their ability, the higher their ability, statistically. It also demonstrated that the worst-performing individuals estimated themselves to perform MUCH better than they did, while the best-performing individuals expected to perform slightly worse than they did. This comports with the average reference to the phenomenon ("stupid people think they're smarter than they are, smart people think they're stupider than they are"). The article you linked for some reason makes this comparison: > So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. [...] they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good. This is just categorically false, and the chart linked not one paragraph above completely torpedoes it. The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals. Perhaps the author meant to write "not that [they] think they're better than competent people do", which would be correct, but the rest of the conclusions seem to follow off of this flawed reading of the data.
  - dahart 6y ago
    > The bottom quartile of people thought that they would perform at around the 57th percentile. They clearly expected to perform better than more competent individuals. I think you’re misunderstanding what Dunning & Kruger presented, which is precisely why references to this paper need to stop. You cannot read literally into the graph as saying that the bottom quartile of people believed they were at the 57th percentile of ability, that’s not what the experiment measured. Have you read the actual paper? The respondents were 1- all Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra class credit, 2- asked to rank themselves, not to rate their abilities, 3- asked about such “skills” as the ability to get a joke. It seems pretty wild that anyone ever took this paper seriously. The conclusions that it makes in it’s wordy prose are not supported by the data they present. Take a little more time to understand Tal’s primary argument - that this paper most likely is measuring regression to the mean. Because these kids were asked to rank themselves, and they didn’t know how good their peers were, there is good reason to expect a correllation less than 1. Because the authors were barely out of undergrad school themselves at the time, and not studying statistics per se, there is plenty of reason to suspect that the methodology isn’t perfect ... beyond the fact that it wasn’t a random sample of the population, it studied all rich kids who (self-selected) needed extra credit, it included no difficult mental skills, and that followup papers have shown a complete reversal of whatever effect is there, when applied to more difficult skills like law or engineering.

henrikschroder 6y ago

There was research last year that showed that cynicism is a way for less intelligent people to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know you're not smart enough to figure out if other people are genuine or out to scam you, defaulting to assuming that all strangers are lying is a winning strategy. The same kind of logic fuels conspiracy-minded people. The one thing they all have in common is that they reject the mainstream view, they reject the consensus. And in turn, they embrace outlandish explanations, and the communities around those, because it gives them a false sense of superiority. They know something the rest of the sheep don't! So these two psychological defense mechanisms interact with each other, and when the information flow in society is increasing, the threshold for how smart you need to be to keep up also increases. So people in general probably aren't getting stupider, but they're getting more and more overwhelmed, which looks the same.

TallGuyShort 6y ago
That makes a lot of sense. I'd be curious for a link or reference to that research if you remember any details.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  On cynicism: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0146167218783195 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/014616721878319... On conspiracy beliefs: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550611434786
reader_mode 6y ago
>There was research last year that showed that cynicism is a way for less intelligent people to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. Basically, if you know you're not smart enough to figure out if other people are genuine or out to scam you, defaulting to assuming that all strangers are lying is a winning strategy. That narrative is ridiculous - what does intelligence have to do with it ? I guarantee you you are uninformed on so many issues and you could easily be taken advantage of no matter how intelligent you were by someone who spent time preparing/specialising in deception - especially if the negative outcome is less then the cost of investigating the issue. Nobody has the time to investigate every choice so by your logic cynicism should be a default strategy for everything you're not an expert in.

mistermann 6y ago

I think many neurotypical people suffer from the same information overload, in that they treat mainstream media news the same way that many conspiracy theory enthusiasts treat their "news": zero skepticism (someone I trust said it is true, so I will accept it as true, regardless of the quality of or existence of evidence). Now obviously there's a significant difference in degree of accuracy between the two worlds, but then one shouldn't forget that they're not dealing with equally difficult stories to investigate, or have access to the same investigative resources. Regardless, the same illogical behavior can be observed in both types, and an overload of complexity & information sounds like a very reasonable explanation.

mdorazio 6y ago

I think this theory is missing a component: the erosion of respect for experts. It at least seems like pre-internet, when people didn't understand the world around them they would default to trusting what scientists/doctors/researchers told them was true. But today, we've gone so far down the disinformation "fake news" rabbit hole that a large portion of the general public, at least in America, just straight up doesn't trust what actual experts have to say on many topics.

sebmellen 6y ago
This is not just because of disinformation though. Now, it's easier than ever to second-guess your doctor and any other expert (and I know because I've done this, and even been right on occasion). For example, every time someone worries about their health, they can sort through all possible diagnoses online, and convince themselves they have a certain sickness just because the symptoms match. A doctor will use Bayesian reasoning and conclude the problem is really a very common infection or something, but when the untrained mind is overwhelmed with information, Occam's Razor doesn't hold. The same goes for everything else. Information is dangerous for those who don't know how to reason about it carefully and properly, which is most of us, in most fields.
autokad 6y ago
well the experts were saying in March, 2020 that masks do not work and are not recommended. I was basically attacked at work as being xenophobic and insular for saying if we are going out we should wear a mask. so where were your experts on that one? sure f*#!ed up that one.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > well the experts were saying in March, 2020 that masks do not work and are not recommended. As I recall, at the time experts were saying "Don't recommend that everyone wear a mask, we have a shortage and need to save them for health care workers."
  - Schiendelman 6y ago

k0mplex 6y ago

this makes a lot of sense

TallGuyShort 6y ago

Yeah that crossed my mind as well. People who have so little understanding of the mechanics behind it all that they think it's impossible we've put anything in Earth orbit - how could ANYONE understand that? In one case though I had someone say that I wasn't hitting satellites, I was hitting a solar-powered high altitude plane. When I pointed out that it would have to be going at 23 times the speed of sound at sea level and flying at 120,000 km, they said of course: technology is amazing. While in the same conversation claiming that satellites were impossible. At that point I stopped believing they even had basic common sense.

mcbits 6y ago
My conclusion about flat-earthers is that the vast majority are just trolling. There are probably also a fair number who get sucked in by the idea, but they aren't the ones out there making the arguments for it. The frustratingly persistent people who can come up with one outlandish argument after another are too smart to actually believe what they're saying.
- d_tr 6y ago
  I am not a mental health expert but I do not think of this type of persistent trolling as healthy behaviour. At the very least it is shitty and disrespectful behaviour towards someone trying to make a point using facts.
Krasnol 6y ago
They've probably been just improvising. They become quite good at it as it follows simple rules.
josalhor 6y ago
This thread also summarizes my experience pretty well. To take this even further: I encounter in my day to day many instances of people making claims that are easily refuted with a quick online search. I have realized that correcting people over their lack of scientific knowledge is perceived as nitpicking and inappropriate. We got our incentives backwards. If we cannot speak up over misinformation to our peers, then they will spread faster than the truth. Sadly, I've had to accept that in order to be perceived as a much stronger source of truth, I have to correct people less.

hhjinks 6y ago

How does that work when flat earthers actually weave elaborate "theories" about the physics and mechanics leading everyone else to conclude that it is round? It's not like they say it's flat and stick their fingers in their ears. They respond with plausible-sounding retorts that, while obviously untrue, often make sense in isolation. For everyone else, the explanation of "the earth is round and gravity goes brr" is far less cognitively intensive than all the mental gymnastics flat earthers engage in.

asdff 6y ago

I don't think there is too much information. There are plenty of very busy people with very good grasps on the world. I think it's more that people don't give time to information, and prefer entertainment. People in the U.S. spend on average 4 hours a day watching TV, not reading newspapers.