7 ms·

I haven't looked at the research yet, but this feels like it may have some correlation with a psychological trait called dogmatism, which is a defined as exhibi

by jawns 4y ago

I haven't looked at the research yet, but this feels like it may have some correlation with a psychological trait called dogmatism, which is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views and an unwillingness to consider new evidence, or an unwillingness to adjust one's views in light of new evidence. Obviously, they're not the same. NFC pertains more to the desire to go through the process of cognition, whereas dogmatism pertains more to defects of cognition (e.g. giving too much weight to our priors, being unwilling to update our priors). But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not." Similarly, both point to a lack of curiosity about the world or anything other that what we already know. (And, I would wager, both probably have a link to anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism, where we assume that whoever is in charge knows what they're doing better than the rest of us do.)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
abeppu 4y ago
I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty. If you're a low NFC person, there are a bunch of high status people that take public dogmatic stances, and demonstrate that you have high confidence in a worldview of sweeping generalizations without having to think too hard if only you adopt the Dogma. But I can't really think of role models where someone says "X, Y, Z are all complex and the thing that's valuable in my life is W, so it's healthy and intentional that I neither think about X, Y, Z or have an opinion on them" and that's socially validated or even celebrated.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  The Dogma usually includes statements like "people who don't care about X are part of the problem" and considerable social effort is spent on recruiting more "soldiers" and influencing group norms. The unaligned are considered "fodder" by the ideologically committed. Not everyone needs to be recruited. Most people can be kept in line by ensuring everyone knows what the "safe" view is within a specific group and occasionally punishing defectors.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    This is generally but not always true. Lets make an imaginary situation where you live on an island and are running out of trees. There are mostly two sides here. The people that are burning though trees at a faster rate than they grow are the problem. Not caring about the problem, especially in the case you are the ones burning those trees is going to ensure 'Tree 0 day' comes. Everyone will get affected if you reach that point.
    - xyzzy123 4y ago
      I think we might be talking slightly past each other. It's absolutely true that for many values of X, being "unaligned" or "uncertain" on X does some harm. What I'm saying is that human social dynamics mean that there's usually a range of acceptable beliefs for issues X, Y & Z and it's wise to understand when it's acceptable to express uncertainty and when it's not. Uncertainty is a stance, a position, which can easily be outside the range of socially acceptable beliefs. For example, I have zero opinion on "body positivity". But I know that many groups will hold the opinion "it does no good if only we believe in body positivity, ALL of society needs to change". Expressing uncertainty or indifference in these situations will be construed as social defection by True Believers and punished.
- munificent 4y ago
  > I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty. I've felt this way for a long time. American fiction and films are heavily skewed towards protagonists strong-willed protagonists that "trust their gut" and have a high bias to action. That leads people to believe that if you're right, you will immediately know that you're right and that spending time thinking about a problem means you're weak-willed. It's a toxic aspect of our culture. Obviously, courage and action are important. But so is learning from others, cooperating, and understanding ambiguity.
  - LeonB 4y ago
    Very true. Anyone urging caution, or any government department with “standards” is universally the bad guy in film. There’s a huge gap between what is entertaining and what is good outside of fiction. “reality tv” makes this particularly dangerous as horrible (though entertaining) people become more and more famous, again and again. This spills over into some really dire consequences globally. For example — and you wouldn’t believe this unless you’d seen it happen — the most powerful nation on Earth actually went so far as to elect a reality tv star to their highest office!
prettyStandard 4y ago
Update: I agree. Seems like low NFC is related to high dogmatism, and/or low openness. See: the Big 5 personality matrix. > Need for cognition is closely related to the five factor model domain openness to experience, typical intellectual engagement, and epistemic curiosity
Jensson 4y ago
> Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not." At some point the algorithms in our head has to stop trying to think about things and instead just go with an option. That happens at different points for everyone, some stop thinking earlier while others basically never stops thinking about things so have a hard time getting started with anything. I don't think that it is fair to say that one is better than the other, they are just different and are good at solving different kinds of problems.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  One would have thought this was obvious, but I guess some people just don't think too much about it. Traditionalism and conservatism are vital aspects of human nature, not necessarily for the individual, definitely for at least some larger groups.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  Yep. I would say a crucial cognitive skill is to realize when it's a good point to stop processing and apply a probability heuristic (e.g., "dogma"). When do you stop doing your own research about vaccines and trust doctors? When do you stop writing your own code and trust a software library? The world literally is too overwhelmingly complicated. It seems like the more you know about a facet of the world, the more complicated it starts to seem. At some point, you have appeal to specialization of authority and stop thinking or you'll be permanently DDoSed into inaction, make horrible mistakes, or both.
macrolocal 4y ago
Low NFC people get a bad rap because they're quick to dress up intellectual laziness with moral posturing. But cognition is as precious a resource as attention or compute these days, so maybe there's something to learn from them.
kilgnad 4y ago
>But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not." NO. You are completely wrong. Dogmatism Is not laziness. It's fear of social dominance. It's too overwhelming to be humiliated socially by some other person on hacker news so dogmatic people end up taking the dogmatic route in order to defend their integrity. It's purely a social thing, not an intellectual thing. In fact, it takes more intelligence, more effort, more grit to defend a point that is, in actuality, wrong. It's basically hard mode. Here's the other thing. sometimes, these "dogmatic" people are actually RIGHT. Galileo was essentially a flat earther during his time. So the reality is nobody really knows the difference between dogmatism and high NFC. You could be either, it all depends on whether you're in actuality right or wrong. >But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not." This is wrong and insulting. Because the fact of the matter is most people have extremely high dogmatism. Who on the face of this earth will believe in something for 10 years and suddenly flip that belief in an instant when presented with solid evidence that the belief isn't true? Nobody. Because everyone is dogmatic. 99.99% of all debates and arguments on Hacker news are people finding evidence support a point, not using evidence to find a point. Key difference. People just don't function like that. And, unfortunately, neither do you.
- munificent 4y ago
  Are you dogmatically arguing about a definition of "dogmatic"? Is this comment serious or some kind of meta-joke?
  - kilgnad 4y ago
    The meta meta thing about this is that not only am I dogmatically arguing for dogmatism, but what I say is logically true in such a way that people who disagree with me can't formulate an argument against it. They can only dogmatically downvote me rather then keep an open mind about dogmatism. It's a bit of joke. But it's more commentary about how everyone on HackerNews gets off on these "intelligence" articles when really they're just normal human beings with normal NFC and normal dogmatic tendencies.
crazygringo 4y ago
The article discusses this explicitly, if what you're calling dogmatism is the inverse of the "openness to ideas" or "openness to experience", one of the Big 5 traits: > NFC has been found to be strongly associated with a number of independently developed constructs, specifically epistemic curiosity, typical intellectual engagement, and openness to ideas. I haven't come across the term "dogmatism" in the psychological literature. But the way you're presenting it seems extremely judgmental ("defects", "laziness", "immaturity"). You might be more interested in the more objective formulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience
- jawns 4y ago
  Let me Google that for you: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dogmatism https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dogmatism There are even well-established scales for measuring it, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/44/2/211/2227902 https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/44/2/211/222790... It is not synonymous with the Big 5 trait of openness to experience, but it is certainly related to it.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Thanks. Of course there's literature generally around it, although most of the citations seem to be in areas of philosophy, anthropology, and religion -- where you'd expect. Just meant it's not really a term that's commonly used in psychology, not a standard viewpoint that's used much when discussing personality traits generally today. Unless there's a paradigm here I'm not familiar with. (And I'm sure there are niche studies on dogmatism specifically, as opposed to part of a broader model.)
hammock 4y ago
> but this feels like it may have some correlation with a psychological trait called dogmatism, which is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views I mean, maybe. It also feels like how you describe a particular dog as needing a lot of mental stimulation (food puzzles, fulfilling work, etc)
permo-w 4y ago
perhaps it can be looked at as a function of bodily resource consumption. taking in new ideas and updating your priors is very, very energy intensive and I would guess requires the use of expensive bodily nutrients to build the pathways since I'm guessing about the nutrient usage, I'm less comfortable including it in a hypothesis, but perhaps low NFC and high dogmatism are related to low maximum energy output or poor energy efficiency in the brain. in my own personal experience, when I'm energy-tired, or ill, or depressed, I'm much less willing to approach new ideas, new experiences, or really anything that doesn't just follow pre-existing pathways

by jawns 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

abeppu 4y ago

I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty. If you're a low NFC person, there are a bunch of high status people that take public dogmatic stances, and demonstrate that you have high confidence in a worldview of sweeping generalizations without having to think too hard if only you adopt the Dogma. But I can't really think of role models where someone says "X, Y, Z are all complex and the thing that's valuable in my life is W, so it's healthy and intentional that I neither think about X, Y, Z or have an opinion on them" and that's socially validated or even celebrated.

xyzzy123 4y ago
The Dogma usually includes statements like "people who don't care about X are part of the problem" and considerable social effort is spent on recruiting more "soldiers" and influencing group norms. The unaligned are considered "fodder" by the ideologically committed. Not everyone needs to be recruited. Most people can be kept in line by ensuring everyone knows what the "safe" view is within a specific group and occasionally punishing defectors.
- pixl97 4y ago
  This is generally but not always true. Lets make an imaginary situation where you live on an island and are running out of trees. There are mostly two sides here. The people that are burning though trees at a faster rate than they grow are the problem. Not caring about the problem, especially in the case you are the ones burning those trees is going to ensure 'Tree 0 day' comes. Everyone will get affected if you reach that point.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    I think we might be talking slightly past each other. It's absolutely true that for many values of X, being "unaligned" or "uncertain" on X does some harm. What I'm saying is that human social dynamics mean that there's usually a range of acceptable beliefs for issues X, Y & Z and it's wise to understand when it's acceptable to express uncertainty and when it's not. Uncertainty is a stance, a position, which can easily be outside the range of socially acceptable beliefs. For example, I have zero opinion on "body positivity". But I know that many groups will hold the opinion "it does no good if only we believe in body positivity, ALL of society needs to change". Expressing uncertainty or indifference in these situations will be construed as social defection by True Believers and punished.
munificent 4y ago
> I wonder if we need better role models for embracing uncertainty. I've felt this way for a long time. American fiction and films are heavily skewed towards protagonists strong-willed protagonists that "trust their gut" and have a high bias to action. That leads people to believe that if you're right, you will immediately know that you're right and that spending time thinking about a problem means you're weak-willed. It's a toxic aspect of our culture. Obviously, courage and action are important. But so is learning from others, cooperating, and understanding ambiguity.
- LeonB 4y ago
  Very true. Anyone urging caution, or any government department with “standards” is universally the bad guy in film. There’s a huge gap between what is entertaining and what is good outside of fiction. “reality tv” makes this particularly dangerous as horrible (though entertaining) people become more and more famous, again and again. This spills over into some really dire consequences globally. For example — and you wouldn’t believe this unless you’d seen it happen — the most powerful nation on Earth actually went so far as to elect a reality tv star to their highest office!

prettyStandard 4y ago

Update: I agree. Seems like low NFC is related to high dogmatism, and/or low openness. See: the Big 5 personality matrix. > Need for cognition is closely related to the five factor model domain openness to experience, typical intellectual engagement, and epistemic curiosity

Jensson 4y ago

> Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not." At some point the algorithms in our head has to stop trying to think about things and instead just go with an option. That happens at different points for everyone, some stop thinking earlier while others basically never stops thinking about things so have a hard time getting started with anything. I don't think that it is fair to say that one is better than the other, they are just different and are good at solving different kinds of problems.

TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
One would have thought this was obvious, but I guess some people just don't think too much about it. Traditionalism and conservatism are vital aspects of human nature, not necessarily for the individual, definitely for at least some larger groups.
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
Yep. I would say a crucial cognitive skill is to realize when it's a good point to stop processing and apply a probability heuristic (e.g., "dogma"). When do you stop doing your own research about vaccines and trust doctors? When do you stop writing your own code and trust a software library? The world literally is too overwhelmingly complicated. It seems like the more you know about a facet of the world, the more complicated it starts to seem. At some point, you have appeal to specialization of authority and stop thinking or you'll be permanently DDoSed into inaction, make horrible mistakes, or both.

macrolocal 4y ago

Low NFC people get a bad rap because they're quick to dress up intellectual laziness with moral posturing. But cognition is as precious a resource as attention or compute these days, so maybe there's something to learn from them.

kilgnad 4y ago

>But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not." NO. You are completely wrong. Dogmatism Is not laziness. It's fear of social dominance. It's too overwhelming to be humiliated socially by some other person on hacker news so dogmatic people end up taking the dogmatic route in order to defend their integrity. It's purely a social thing, not an intellectual thing. In fact, it takes more intelligence, more effort, more grit to defend a point that is, in actuality, wrong. It's basically hard mode. Here's the other thing. sometimes, these "dogmatic" people are actually RIGHT. Galileo was essentially a flat earther during his time. So the reality is nobody really knows the difference between dogmatism and high NFC. You could be either, it all depends on whether you're in actuality right or wrong. >But in the cases of both low NFC and high dogmatism, it feels like there's a type of intellectual laziness or cognitive immaturity at play. Almost like "It's too overwhelming for me to actually think this through, so I'm choosing to just not." This is wrong and insulting. Because the fact of the matter is most people have extremely high dogmatism. Who on the face of this earth will believe in something for 10 years and suddenly flip that belief in an instant when presented with solid evidence that the belief isn't true? Nobody. Because everyone is dogmatic. 99.99% of all debates and arguments on Hacker news are people finding evidence support a point, not using evidence to find a point. Key difference. People just don't function like that. And, unfortunately, neither do you.

munificent 4y ago
Are you dogmatically arguing about a definition of "dogmatic"? Is this comment serious or some kind of meta-joke?
- kilgnad 4y ago
  The meta meta thing about this is that not only am I dogmatically arguing for dogmatism, but what I say is logically true in such a way that people who disagree with me can't formulate an argument against it. They can only dogmatically downvote me rather then keep an open mind about dogmatism. It's a bit of joke. But it's more commentary about how everyone on HackerNews gets off on these "intelligence" articles when really they're just normal human beings with normal NFC and normal dogmatic tendencies.

crazygringo 4y ago

The article discusses this explicitly, if what you're calling dogmatism is the inverse of the "openness to ideas" or "openness to experience", one of the Big 5 traits: > NFC has been found to be strongly associated with a number of independently developed constructs, specifically epistemic curiosity, typical intellectual engagement, and openness to ideas. I haven't come across the term "dogmatism" in the psychological literature. But the way you're presenting it seems extremely judgmental ("defects", "laziness", "immaturity"). You might be more interested in the more objective formulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience

jawns 4y ago
Let me Google that for you: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dogmatism https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dogmatism There are even well-established scales for measuring it, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/44/2/211/2227902 https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/44/2/211/222790... It is not synonymous with the Big 5 trait of openness to experience, but it is certainly related to it.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Thanks. Of course there's literature generally around it, although most of the citations seem to be in areas of philosophy, anthropology, and religion -- where you'd expect. Just meant it's not really a term that's commonly used in psychology, not a standard viewpoint that's used much when discussing personality traits generally today. Unless there's a paradigm here I'm not familiar with. (And I'm sure there are niche studies on dogmatism specifically, as opposed to part of a broader model.)

hammock 4y ago

> but this feels like it may have some correlation with a psychological trait called dogmatism, which is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views I mean, maybe. It also feels like how you describe a particular dog as needing a lot of mental stimulation (food puzzles, fulfilling work, etc)

permo-w 4y ago

perhaps it can be looked at as a function of bodily resource consumption. taking in new ideas and updating your priors is very, very energy intensive and I would guess requires the use of expensive bodily nutrients to build the pathways since I'm guessing about the nutrient usage, I'm less comfortable including it in a hypothesis, but perhaps low NFC and high dogmatism are related to low maximum energy output or poor energy efficiency in the brain. in my own personal experience, when I'm energy-tired, or ill, or depressed, I'm much less willing to approach new ideas, new experiences, or really anything that doesn't just follow pre-existing pathways