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There's also a danger associated to this phenomenon. If the source of your mental model is later debunked, you may not realize that you need to revise your mode

• etrautmann 12y ago
  Great point - a possible explanation for a wide range of phenomenologically bizarre viewpoints (e.g.: anti-vaccers, birthers, chem-trails, creationists, etc.)
  • VLM 12y ago
    Most of your examples are social membership tests. You have to publicly say "XYZ" to join the club, where "XYZ" doesn't necessarily mean anything, but joining the club does. Like saying Abracadabra to open a door. (Spoiler alert don't read till the 26th) Do you believe in Santa? I believe in Santa. Oh how nice you also believe in Santa. Aren't we all happy members of our club? It would be so antisocial for someone to say Santa doesn't exist, because then how would we tell who is in our club? This is the best club ever. Santa? Who's that? We just talk about him to pledge allegiance to each other, we don't actually care about fat dudes in red suits.
    • slayed0 12y ago
      Can you expand on this? Are you suggesting that most of the people who say these things publicly don't actually believe them but are instead just trying to fit in to a certain social group?
      • snori74 12y ago
        I'm not VLM, but yes, peer-pressure in another guise. Just think about your attitudes and beliefs on (a) handgun ownership, (b) creationism and (c) Israel. It's very likely that if you're in a social group with strong homogeneous view on one of these items, that there will be a matching "party line" on the others - even though they're completely unrelated. Chances are low that you'll argue the point, you'll probably just stay quiet - but many people will enthusiastically take that party line as their own.
        • philwelch 12y ago
          I think that's just groupthink. People tend to act on their beliefs about things like vaccines, Israel, and handgun ownership. Of course, it's one of the earliest results in psychology that social conformity has an influence on people's beliefs, even on readily accessible questions like whether line A is longer or shorter than line B. To me, if somebody professes a belief, acts on that belief, and works to convince others of that belief, then they effectively hold that belief.
• arjunnarayan 12y ago
  This is an important corollary of Paul's essay that I wish he mentioned. Sometimes when you update your model of the world significantly, you still have a cache of previously computed facts that were computed using the old model. You have to clear out that cache and recompute with the new model, and that takes a significant amount of time. Often, rereading is a core part of that, since it forces you to revisit a lot of source material and recompute.
  • deleted 12y ago
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  • gatehouse 12y ago
    For an example of this, ask yourself: What is the world population? The longer it has been since you checked, the further off the number will be. https://www.google.com/search?q=world+population https://www.google.com/search?q=world+population
    • jimbokun 12y ago
      My kids recently caught me claiming the world population is 6 billion people. Having learned the number more recently, they had the more accurate value.
      • deleted 12y ago
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    • argumentum 12y ago
      Unless you've checked the number enough to have realized a pattern (in this case a growth rate).
      • marcosdumay 12y ago
        People don't grasp exponential growth[1]. That pattern will be useful for a very short time, and then you are wrong again. And then, when you finally accept that you don't grasp it and start calculating with a formal growth rate, the growth rate suddenly changes. [1] Nobody does. Some people know they don't, some are completely naive, the others lie to themselves. The first group have a chance of dealing correctly with it.
• ColinDabritz 12y ago
  Over time, my 'urban legend' bullshit detector has been refined, and is much improved from earlier in my life. I have, on a few occasions, found myself relating some 'fact' or 'story' and realized immediately that it was likely an urban legend. Both times, the detector was right, and a quick search cleared it up. I wonder if there is a good way to intentionally 'paw through' your repository on purposes, and apply your life experience to them on purpose.
  • skaplun 12y ago
    very interesting
    • deleted 12y ago
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• not_that_noob 12y ago
  In practice, people rarely if ever revise their mental model as the world around them changes. Which is why a younger generation without this baggage inevitably rises to supplant the older one.
  • poppup 12y ago
    Perhaps this is the function of conflict (ideally nonviolent and hopefully led by smart people), to speed up the process of change by injecting humanity's shared model(s) with new ideas. When older models become problematic, people have a duty to overturn them, toppling them like tables outside a synagogue. "The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me. … It is no secret that the past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority. I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity." Janet Yellen
  • nl 12y ago
    "It's not that old theories are disproved, their supporters just die out". The best people adapt to new information, no matter their age.
    • napoleond 12y ago
      The best people do, indeed. I'm still fairly young, but I'm starting to understand that "adapting to new information" is not something that happens by accident. "Continuous learning" is a lifestyle thing; I've never had to think about it. But forcing myself to re-evaluate things that I already thought I knew--that is a conscious and often difficult process.
      • jakobegger 12y ago
        The hardest part about this is accepting that you might be wrong. That your entire world view might be wrong, or one-sided. We humans have this uncanny ability to justify anything we just did, or said. It takes a lot of conscious effort to accept that the other person might be right. But only if you truly realise that you are not infallible, can you learn new things, and continue to grow.
• lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  In the analogy, it seems more likely that a mistaken short in the wiring is created, than we compile and lose the code all the time. Most of us have good ideas of the provenance of our prejudices (I am pretty sure I can remember which side of most debates arguments I get from Fox Mews and which from the BBC, even if the specifics are hazy.) There are always areas where we do forget the provenance. In my case I stood up amoung friends in my thirties and announced that Ice cream was made from seaweed. After a few blank stares I remembered my father explaining to a much younger self on the beach that I did not want an ice cream - because they were made from that horrible floppy green muck. And he did not have to make a half mile trek back up the beach. Yet that "fact" and it's provenance stayed at the back of my brain for twenty years. But even so the provenance was quickly recovered. I am not convinced we easily lose our source code. We can usually point to the module or package even if the line numbers are hazy. But trauma does rewire us, and quickly, and is not to be discounted - I just think it is not the normal course of events.
  • jonah 12y ago
    While it seems your father had his reason for informing you of that fact at that particular time, he was likely correct[0]. ;) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrageenan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrageenan
  • philwelch 12y ago
    I've accidentally gotten my wife into trouble this way because one of my hobbies is to tell elaborate lies and she can't always tell when I'm doing it.
• amatix 12y ago
  An article by Ted Chiang: The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling -- talks about some of these issues from a couple of different & interesting perspectives which I found really intriguing. One of which being a thought exercise about what it would mean to have the ability to accurately replay everything we'd ever seen or done. And how two people who went through the same experiences can come out with vastly different memories and interpretations. It's a good read :) http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...
  • fumar 12y ago
    The idea of replaying moments of our lives reminds me of a Black Mirror episode from Season 1. "Set in an alternative reality where most people have a 'grain' implanted behind their ear which records everything they do, see or hear. This allows memories to be played back either in front of the person's eyes or on a screen, a process known as a 're-do'." Without giving too much away, the episode explores how new solutions to human-problems create unforeseen issues. *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
    • michaelochurch 12y ago
      I found that one to be one of the less dystopian episodes. My explanation is linked because I don't want to spoil the episode. (Also spoils 15 Million Merits.) http://paste.lisp.org/display/144706 http://paste.lisp.org/display/144706
      • randallsquared 12y ago
        Phrasing to avoid spoilers for Black Mirror... I think that the efficiency of technology shown in TV shows and movies shouldn't be assumed to imply something about the world therein, unless it's explicitly called out in the work itself. The writers are much more likely to have gone with something because it sounded cool than because there was a sound technological reason for it. The bit in the matrix where someone refers to someone else as "copper-top" is an example, I think.
• drcomputer 12y ago
  I wouldn't call that a danger. I would call that being human. We all have models of the world that deviate in some ways from one another, otherwise we would all have identical minds, identical environments and origins, identical heritages, identical ways of interpreting information, and identical ways of composing information into new creations. Making an erroneous assumption or a mistake can mean that a particular sentiment is expressed "incorrectly", but that doesn't mean it's existence is useless. It may prove to be very useful eventually. The idea that mental models can be incorrect by being compared to other mental models is a strange concept to me. It requires assumptions that can not be proven in their entirety.
  • mentos 12y ago
    >>It may prove to be very useful eventually. Even if accidentally.
• fsloth 12y ago
  "I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten." Not only disconnect: What I've read of psychological studies indicate the mind amplifies those facts that support it's current model of the world and actively ignores those that do not. Which goes a long way to explain why it's nearly pointless to argue with fanatics of one kind or another.
• mathattack 12y ago
  "Let's not let facts get in the way of a good argument." :-) Many times we tune out feedback that isn't congruent with our worldview and get locked in. That's why it's good to follow Paul's lead on rereading and revisiting. Sometimes it's hard to remember the anecdote or story that steers us, but finding it again allows us to question it. There was a specific retelling of a Vonnegut (of all authors) story that got me interesting in technology. Rereading the story in it's original form 20+ years later allowed me to understand the first better.
• eaurouge 12y ago
  There's always a danger that you'll introduce a bug in your code at some point, right? If you 'pull' from a lot or sources, at some point one of those sources will introduce a bug. But if you have a lot of high quality committers (book authors) and you continue to pull (read) from those sources, you stand a good chance of discovering and squashing these bugs eventually. In fact, as your code (mind) matures, you start to develop procedures to test unproven pull requests (theories/ideas) before merging and committing. You'll be especially careful of unknown authors or authors that have introduced buggy code in the past, while possibly giving full commit access to authors you trust.
  • icebraining 12y ago
    "You can take my life, but you will never take my .gitignore"?
  • philwelch 12y ago
    You know this is just confirmation bias, right? This is another way of saying you're going to increase your confidence in sources that already agree with your existing mental model, which is the exact problem you're trying to solve!
• salimane 12y ago
  That's why, always checking for the origin of things is very valuable, asking why we currently do things the way we do them :)
• lazyant 12y ago
  It's even worse (at least with emotional political opinions); when confronted with adversarial data we tend to become more entrenched in our positions.
  • InclinedPlane 12y ago
    That's the fight or flight response. We view intellectual questioning of positions we hold as an attack on our person. Our rationality goes out the window, our aggression ramps up, and it becomes impossible to back down. It's the main causative agent for flame wars.
    • philwelch 12y ago
      pg wrote about that as well: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
• programmarchy 12y ago
  This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles. Before adding anything to your model, it should be filtered through proper logic. This makes it easier to build stable models without contradiction in the first place, and also makes it easier to follow a chain of reasoning about a complex viewpoint back to first principles. "Philosophizing in midstream" leads to incoherent thought with unchecked premises. The method of loci, for building/encoding hierarchical "memory palaces", works well for remembering key ideas or facts and building upon them to compose your models. Also, using software like "The Brain" [1] and other mind mapping tools are useful aids for organizing information so you can easily go back to remember. [1] http://www.thebrain.com http://www.thebrain.com
  • wwweston 12y ago
    > This is why it is imperative to build your model up from first principles That sounds... time consuming. > "Philosophizing in midstream" Since you're picking axioms/first principles, isn't it all philosophizing in midstream to one degree or another?
  • nikki93 12y ago
    But what if parts of your model are based on 'feeling'? Like improvisation in music, for example, or art. There is no 'filtering through logic' here -- of course there is some element of technique, such as mixing of colors or how you hit a drum -- but ultimately it is all about a human element that is complex and hard to convert into logical statements. It seems as if becoming proficient at something indeed involves moving more knowledge into intuition, same as how you had to purposely look at the rear view mirror and watch cars closely as you learned to drive but now it becomes something of intuition. You had to pay special care to syntax and to grammar initially, but now all of that is habit and you can concentrate on the 'design' of a program, or the 'characters' and 'themes' in a piece of literature. What if these 'logical arguments' we make for things are simply retrofitted justifications on top of our feelings? Pro-choice 'feels right,' but of course that won't fly in court and so I'll make up some argument for it, becoming disingenuous thus not just to others but even to myself, distancing myself from who I am and causing some amount of strife within. I hope to think I am a perfect rational thinker, but am I really? I am driven by drives, by passions. Maybe I should become aware of this and proceed, acknowledge the person inside me rather than attempt to destroy it with reason. Maybe I should just stop and listen and stop trying to rationalize, both to others and to myself, stop thinking, open my eyes and see life in HD.
• deleted 12y ago
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• argumentum 12y ago
  He did mention Stephen Fry discovering a "bug" in his mind related to childhood trauma.
• flipside 12y ago
  There's an opportunity to outsource mental models to software in a similar way to how we've outsourced basic math to calculators and basic facts to search engines. A benefit to a digital mental model is that it could be updated based on new data independent of the owner which has all kinds of (possibly disturbing) implications.
  • philwelch 12y ago
    I'd love to see the bug reports for that. "Your program says I should now believe that it's morally acceptable to kill infants. I don't agree with its reasoning."
• noobermin 12y ago
  I'm curious, do you think it would be beneficial to make a list of where you got your ideas from? Like a sort of list of citations for your model of the world.
• tmaly 12y ago
  This reminds me of something I read of Objectivism. The idea that you revise your model of your knowledge as you learn new things. It seems like a difficult task given how our minds work.