Brain food

Current and recent reads.

Just where are we these days in the neurosciences (including implications for AI)? Comparing some current, learned views. Stay tuned. How do humans reason? WHY do humans reason? (Hint: "The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword." Whether any given "pen" is an effective purveyor of BS is wholly another matter.)

to wit,

UPDATE

 

Lots to cross-eompare in these books. "Livewired" was particularly enlightening and inspiring. David Eagleman concludes:

…If you’ve ever doubted the significance of brain plasticity, rest assured that its tendrils reach from the individual to the society.

Because of livewiring, we are each a vessel of space and time. We drop into a particular spot on the world and vacuum in the details of that spot. We become, in essence, a recording device for our moment in the world.

When you meet an older person and feel shocked by the opinions or worldview she holds, you can try to empathize with her as a recording device for her window of time and her set of experiences. Someday your brain will be that time-ossified snapshot that frustrates the next generation.

Here’s a nugget from my vessel: I remember a song produced in 1985 called “We Are the World.” Dozens of superstar musicians performed it to raise money for impoverished children in Africa. The theme was that each of us shares responsibility for the well-being of everyone. Looking back on the song now, I can’t help but see another interpretation through my lens as a neuroscientist. We generally go through life thinking there’s me and there’s the world. But as we’ve seen in this book, who you are emerges from everything you’ve interacted with: your environment, all of your experiences, your friends, your enemies, your culture, your belief system, your era—all of it. Although we value statements such as “he’s his own man” or “she’s an independent thinker,” there is in fact no way to separate yourself from the rich context in which you’re embedded. There is no you without the external. Your beliefs and dogmas and aspirations are shaped by it, inside and out, like a sculpture from a block of marble. Thanks to livewiring, each of us is the world.

Eagleman, David. Livewired (pp. 244-245). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

'eh?

 

apropos:

 

Got onto this author and his new book by way of an Atlantic article.

 

 

Goes to the questions "How and Why Do Humans Reason?"

FORTY YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE MY PARENTS WERE PURSUED BY THE KGB over the simple right to read, write, and listen to what they chose and say what they wanted. Today, the world they hoped for, where censorship would fall like the Berlin Wall, can seem much closer: we live in what some academics call an era of “information abundance.” But the assumptions that underlay the struggles for rights and freedoms in the twentieth century—between citizens armed with truth and information, and regimes with their censors and secret police—have been turned upside down. We now have more information than ever before—but it hasn’t brought only the benefits we expected.

More information was supposed to mean more freedom to stand up to the powerful. But it also has given the powerful new ways to crush and silence dissent. More information was supposed to mean a more informed debate, but we seem less capable of deliberation than ever. More information was supposed to mean mutual understanding across borders, but it has also made possible new and more subtle forms of conflict and subversion. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, fake news, deep fakes, brainwashing, trolls, ISIS, Putin, Trump…

Pomerantsev, Peter. This Is Not Propaganda (pp. x-xi). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.

"Deliberation?"

_________

"Deliberation Science" readings update

"Deliberation Science?"

 

There's so much yet to learn. And, even more yet to "unlearn." Some current readings.

First, a Christmas gift book from my sister.

 

The past several years, we’ve felt as if we’re all stuck in some weird Twilight Zone nightmare where we are constantly, relentlessly gaslit. Up is down, left is right, right is wrong. It feels as if the values of our society have changed almost overnight. We feel disoriented, frustrated, disaffected, and distrustful of each other. We ask ourselves whether we’ve gone crazy, or the world has, or both. No wonder people in the United States are waging a kind of war on trust, building elaborate castles of suspicion that imperil our personal happiness and national prosperity.

All around the world, democracy is now under strain due in part to social problems that cannot be solved through legislation or technology. In a very real sense, collective illusions do the most damage in free societies, precisely because they depend on shared reality, common values, and the willingness to engage with different viewpoints in order to function, let alone flourish. That is why I see collective illusions as an existential threat.

 The bad news is that we are all responsible for what is happening. And yet that is also the good news, because it means we have the power, individually and together, to solve the problem. The best news of all is that, as powerful as collective illusions are, they are also fragile because they are rooted in lies and can be dismantled through individual actions. With the right tools and some wise guidance, we can dismantle them…

…While our social nature is part of our biology, our reaction to our social instincts is within our control. When we’re armed with the right knowledge and skills, we don’t have to choose between being a maverick or being a lemming. This book aims to give you the tools you need to truly understand why and how we conform, how conformity leads directly to collective illusions, and how you can learn to control social influence so that it doesn’t control you…

…we often conform because we’re afraid of being embarrassed. Our stress levels rise at the thought of being mocked or viewed as incompetent, and when that happens, the fear-based part of the brain takes over. Confused and unsure of ourselves, we surrender to the crowd because doing so relieves our stress. Caving to the majority opinion also diffuses our personal responsibility for our decisions, making it easier to bear mistakes. When you find yourself making a decision on your own, it can feel isolating, and the personal responsibility can be intimidating. Indeed, whether our actions are right or wrong, they always feel better if we take them together with others.

Rose, Todd (2022-01-31T22:58:59.000). Collective Illusions. Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

Persuasive case, eloquently made.
 

 

Think about Robert Cialdini's venerable "Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion" and how his "levers" model fits with Todd's thesis:

Liking;

Reciprocity;

Consistency and Commitment;

Social Proof;

Appeals to Evidence;

Appeals to Authority;

Appeals to Scarcity.

Dr. Cialdini's work is widely known in the advertising / marketing domains, re principles and techniques going to being "influential." Dr. Rose's work reveals an unhappy flip side of that—our vulnerability to malign influence given our social anxieties regarding "fitting in" to socioculturural norms (which includes the political space).

How about some Justin Gregg?

I would also recommend Todd Kashdan's book apropos of this topic:

 

 

Also, more on principles of influence by our esteemed Zoe B. Chance in a prior post.

I recently subscribed to some useful Substack readings. This recent Steven Pinker offering stood out:

Reason To Believe
How and why irrationality takes hold, and what do to about it.

When I tell people that I teach and write about human rationality, they aren’t curious about the canons of reason like logic and probability, nor the classic findings from the psychology lab on how people flout them. They want to know why humanity appears to be losing its mind…

…Can anything be done? Explicit instruction in “critical thinking” is a common suggestion. These curricula try to impart an awareness of fallacies such as arguments from anecdote and authority, and of cognitive biases such as motivated reasoning. They try to inculcate habits of active open-mindedness, namely to seek disconfirmatory as well as confirmatory evidence and to change one’s mind as the evidence changes.

But jaded teachers know that lessons tend to be forgotten as soon as the ink is dry on the exam. It’s hard, but vital, to embed active open-mindedness in our norms of intellectual exchange wherever it takes place. It should be conventional wisdom that humans are fallible and misconceptions ubiquitous in human history, and that the only route to knowledge is to broach and then evaluate hypotheses. Arguing ad hominem or by anecdote should be as mortifying as arguing from horoscopes or animal entrails; repressing honest opinion should be seen as risible as the doctrines of biblical inerrancy or Papal infallibility.

But of course we can no more engineer norms of discourse than we can dictate styles of hairstyling or tattooing. The norms of rationality must be implemented as the ground rules of institutions. It’s such institutions that resolve the paradox of how humanity has mustered feats of great rationality even though every human is vulnerable to fallacies. Though each of us is blind to the flaws in our own thinking, we tend to be better at spotting the flaws in other people’s thinking, and that is a talent that institutions can put to use. An arena in which one person broaches a hypothesis and others can evaluate it makes us more rational collectively than any of us is individually.

Examples of these rationality-promoting institutions include science, with its demands for empirical testing and peer review; democratic governance, with its checks and balances and freedom of speech and the press; journalism, with its demands for editing and fact-checking; and the judiciary, with its adversarial proceedings. Wikipedia, surprisingly reliable despite its decentralization, achieves its accuracy through a community of editors that correct each other's work, all of them committed to principles of objectivity, neutrality, and sourcing. (The same cannot be said for web platforms that are driven by instant sharing and liking.)

If we are to have any hope of advancing rational beliefs against the riptide of myside bias, primitive intuitions, and mythological thinking, we must safeguard the credibility of these institutions. Experts such as public health officials should be prepared to show their work rather than deliver pronouncements ex cathedra. Fallibility should be acknowledged: we all start out ignorant about everything, and whenever changing evidence calls for changing advice, that should be touted as a readiness to learn rather than stifled as a concession of weakness.

Perhaps most important, the gratuitous politicization of our truth-seeking institutions should be halted, since it stokes the cognitively crippling myside bias. Universities, scientific societies, scholarly journals, and public-interest nonprofits have increasingly been branding themselves with woke boilerplate and left-wing shibboleths. The institutions should not be surprised when they are then blown off by the center and right which make up the majority of the population. The results have been disastrous, including resistance to climate action and vaccination.

The defense of freedom of speech and thought must not be allowed to suffer that fate. Its champions should have at their fingertips the historical examples in which free speech has been indispensable to progressive causes such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and gay rights. They should go after the censors on the right as vigorously as those on the left, and should not give a pass to conservative intellectuals or firebrands who are no friends to free speech, but are merely enemies of their enemies.

The creed of universal truth-seeking is not the natural human way of believing. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is cognitively unnatural. The norms and institutions that support this radical creed are constantly undermined by our backsliding into tribalism and magical thinking, and must constantly be cherished and secured…

Hmmm… “critical thinking?” Yeah. “Necessary but insufficient?” One wonders.

Dr. Pinker cites Professor Keith Stanovich:

Myside bias is displayed by people holding all sorts of belief systems, values, and convictions. It is not limited to those with a particular worldview. Any belief that is held with conviction—any distal belief, to use Robert Abelson’s (1986) term—can be the driving force behind myside thinking. In short, as an information processing tendency, myside cognition is ubiquitous.

Some might argue that something so ubiquitous and universal must be grounded in the evolution of our cognitive systems (either as an adaptation or as a by-product). Others, however, might argue that myside bias could not be grounded in evolution because evolutionary mechanisms would be truth seeking, and myside bias is not. In fact, evolution does not guarantee perfect rationality in the maximizing sense used throughout cognitive science—whether as maximizing true beliefs (epistemic rationality) or as maximizing subjective expected utility (instrumental rationality). Although organisms have evolved to increase their reproductive fitness, increases in fitness do not always entail increases in epistemic or instrumental rationality. Beliefs need not always track the world with maximum accuracy in order for fitness to increase.

Evolution might fail to select out epistemic mechanisms of high accuracy when they are costly in terms of resources, such as memory, energy, or attention. Evolution operates on the same cost-benefit logic that signal detection theory does. Some of our perceptual processes and mechanisms of belief fixation are deeply unintelligent in that they yield many false alarms, but if the lack of intelligence confers other advantages such as extreme speed of processing and the noninterruption of other cognitive activities , the belief fixation errors might be worth their cost (Fodor 1983; Friedrich 1993; Haselton and Buss 2000; Haselton, Nettle, and Murray 2016). Likewise, since myside bias might tend to increase errors of a certain type but reduce errors of another type, there would be nothing strange about such a bias from an evolutionary point of view (Haselton, Nettle, and Murray 2016; Johnson and Fowler 2011; Kurzban and Aktipis 2007; McKay and Dennett 2009; Stanovich 2004). What might be the nature of such a trade-off?

For many years in cognitive science, there has been a growing tendency to see the roots of reasoning in the social world of early humans rather than in their need to understand the natural world (Dunbar 1998, 2016). Indeed, Stephen Levinson (1995) is just one of many theorists who speculate that evolutionary pressures were focused more on negotiating cooperative mutual intersubjectivity than on understanding the natural world. The view that some of our reasoning tendencies are grounded in the evolution of communication dates back at least to the work of Nicholas Humphrey (1976), and there are many variants of this view. For example, Robert Nozick (1993) has argued that in prehistory, when mechanisms for revealing what is true about the world were few, a crude route to reliable knowledge might have been to demand reasons for assertions by conspecifics (see also Dennett 1996, 126–127). Kim Sterelny (2001) developed similar ideas in arguing that social intelligence was the basis of our early ability to simulate (see also Gibbard 1990; Mithen 1996, 2000; Nichols and Stich 2003). All of these views are, despite subtle differences between them, sketching the genetic-cultural coevolutionary history (Richerson and Boyd 2005) of the negotiation of argument with conspecifics.

The most influential synthesis of these views—and the most relevant to myside bias—was achieved by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2011, 2017),whose subtle, nuanced theory of reasoning is grounded in the logic of the evolution of communication. Mercier and Sperber’s theory posits that reasoning evolved for the social function of persuading others through arguments. If persuasion by argument is the goal, then reasoning will be characterized by myside bias. We humans are programmed to try to convince others with arguments, not to use arguments to ferret out the truth. Like Levinson (1995) and the other theorists mentioned earlier, Mercier and Sperber (2011, 2017) see our reasoning abilities as arising from our need not to solve problems in the natural world but to persuade others in the social world. As Daniel Dennett (2017, 220) puts it: “Our skills were honed for taking sides, persuading others in debate, not necessarily getting things right.”

In several steps, Mercier and Sperber’s (2011, 2017) theory takes us from the evolution of reasoning to our ubiquitous tendency, as humans, to reason with myside bias. We must have a way of exercising what Mercier and Sperber call “epistemic vigilance.” Although we could adopt the inefficient strategy of differentiating trustworthy people from untrustworthy people by simply memorizing the history of our interactions with them, such a strategy would not work with new individuals. Mercier and Sperber (2011, 2017) point out that argumentation helps us to evaluate the truth of communications based simply on content rather than on prior knowledge about particular persons. Likewise, we learn to produce coherent and convincing arguments when we wish to transmit information to others with whom we have not established a trusting relationship. These skills of producing and evaluating arguments allow members of a society to exchange information with other members without the need to establish a prior relationship of trust with them.

If, however, the origins of our reasoning abilities lie in their having as a prime function the persuasion of others through argumentation, then our reasoning abilities in all domains will be strongly colored by persuasive argumentation. If the function of producing an argument is to convince another person, it is unlikely that the arguments produced will be an unbiased selection from both sides of the issue at hand. Such arguments would be unconvincing. Instead, we can be expected to have an overwhelming tendency to produce arguments that support our own opinion (see Mercier 2016).

Mercier and Sperber (2011) argue that this myside bias carries over into situations where we are reasoning on our own about one of our opinions and that, in such situations, we are likely to anticipate a dialogue with others (see Kuhn 2019). The anticipation of a future dialogue will also cause us to think to ourselves in a mysided manner. Mercier and Sperber’s (2016, 2017) theory makes differential predictions about our ability to evaluate the arguments of others. Basically, it predicts that, though we will display a myside bias in evaluating arguments if the issue in question concerns a distal belief, we will display much less of a myside bias when the issue in question is a testable belief.

In short, Mercier and Sperber (2011, 2017) provide a model of how myside bias is inherent in the evolutionary foundations of reasoning. From their evolutionary story of origins, it is not hard to imagine how the gene-culture coevolutionary history (see Richerson and Boyd 2005) of argumentation abilities would reinforce the myside properties of our cognition (a subject of much speculation I can only allude to here). For example, in an early discussion of myside costs and benefits, Joshua Klayman (1995) suggests some of the gene-culture coevolutionary trade-offs that may have been involved. He discusses the cognitive costs of generating ideas outside the mainstream—“Just keeping an open mind can have psychic costs” (Klayman 1995, 411)—and the potential social disapproval of those who waffle. And he discusses the often-immediate benefits of myside confidence triumphing over the more long-term benefits of doubt and uncertainty. Anticipating Mercier and Sperber (2011) in some ways, Klayman (1995, 411) argues that “when other people lack good information about the accuracy of one’s judgments, they may take consistency as a sign of correctness”; he points to the many characteristics of myside argumentation (e.g., consistency, confidence) that can bootstrap social benefits to the individual and group. Dan Kahan’s discussions of his concept of identity protective cognition (Kahan 2013, 2015; see also Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, and Braman 2011; Kahan et al. 2017) likewise suggest other potential mechanisms for myside bias to confer evolutionary benefit by facilitating group cohesion. These possible social benefits must be taken into account when we assess the overall rationality of mysided thinking…

Stanovich, Keith E. (2021-08-30T23:58:59.000). The Bias That Divides Us. MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

That blew me away. I am a long-time fan of Mercier & Sperber's "Why Do Humans Reason?"

 

"Why do humans reason?" Uhhh... to WIN the argument at hand. If objective truth happens along the way, so much the better.

A "Pen is Mightier Than The Sword" riff.

ANOTHER READ

 

I agreed to accept a comp hardcopy to read, evaluate, and review this book. Just finished it. Review pending. Tangential to the topic of this post, a Very enjoyable read nonetheless. The above quote sums it up succinctly and accurately. While the "pursuit of happiness" is an widely enduring yet often "aspirational" ideal, orienting toward consistently having more deliberate "fun" is easier to accomplish and helps in the achievement of rational, prosocial, stable "happiness."

RELATEDLY

Click

Goes beyond “fun.”

OFF-TOPIC TECH ERRATUM

You know those recent iPhone Max Pro ads, “Hollywood in your pocket?“ I guess we’re fixin’ to see. I just ordered the full Monty—a 14 Max Pro with a terabyte of capacity.

“Baltimore in my pocket.”

__________

 

More new reading

apropos of so called "Deliberation Science"

Dr. Ahn's book has just been released. Kim Wehle's is fairly recent (I've read and cited her before). I'm reading these two side by side. Very illuminating. 

 

I'm deep into Dr. Ahn's book straight away. Chapter 2 (on "confirmation bias") alone was worth the price. She runs this outfit (below) at Yale.

 

 

This is likely to be a long post. Stay tuned. For now, among other prior posts, ponder Dr. Justin Gregg.

Also, older blog stuff, via searching "Critical Thinking."

 

UPDATE: A NEW TITLE SERENDIPITOUSLY INTRUDES.

 

Saw this touted on Twitter. Had to check it out. Only $4.99. Looks topically relevant.

 

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Table of Contents
Foreword
I. Concept of primatology
II. Evolutionary trees
III. Power relations in animal societies
IV. Power relations in the tree of Homo sapiens
V. Comparing human and animal societies
VI. Evolution of human societies
VII. Politics within a society
VIII. Evolutionary foundations of conservatism and liberalism
IX. Evolutionary theory of politics: evidence and applications
X. Predicting politics in human societies
XI. Recap
About the Author

 

...Our nature will always lead us to compete for more resources. That is, to change “from primates to politicians” as part of our survival instinct. That fight is part of our day-to-day and makes us a true political animal. Not in the sense that Aristotle contemplated, but in the sense of a competition for power in which the only ethical principle that seems to be universal is the need for certainty of punishment.

Such certainty of punishment is not the responsibility of governments alone: society is called to demand justice, to pave conditions that allow fair and equitable competition.

Corrupt politicians, clientelists, despots, populists and other subgenres: these are not who betrays us. Society betrays itself, every time it allows the ascent of a leader without the right profile to provide adequate social governance. We betray ourselves as individuals and as a society every time we expect “someone else” to take control of the situation, or every time we turn a blind eye to the rants of the current heads of state…

The “evolutionary theory of politics” developed in this book explains the oscillations in leadership styles throughout history. Cycles of authoritarianism alternated with equity seem to be the natural response of the societies created by our species, in the face of the stress that our own technological advances represent.

Regarding the inevitable question of whether liberals or conservatives do a better job of governing, we could say that both ideologies are necessary, that rotation in power is good, and that the clear ideological definition of political currents enriches democracy. The balance between conservatives and liberals prevents liberals from making changes so fast that things get out of hand and end up in anarchy similar to the French revolution, just as it prevents conservatives from establishing a kind of monarchy that would return us to the obscurantism of the Middle Ages. Social progress depends on both ideologies for changes to take place gradually, at a speed that allows their assimilation by the majority in an atmosphere of social organization, without leading to chaos…

There is no doubt that our brain is complex, as is our biology. Our societies are even more complex since they are the result of the interaction between our biological characteristics and the evolution of the brain of the most intelligent animal on the planet.

But no matter how intelligent, sophisticated and complex we become, our ancestors will always be hanging around backstage in our DNA. Our politicians will always be primates, and primates will always be politicians.

[From Primate to Politicians, pp. 191-194.]

Brings to mind the question "Why do humans 'reason'?".  (Answer: To "win" the argument; the Pen is Mightier Than the Sword. —an evolutionary 'adaptive utility' riff.)

___

 

QUICK DIVERSION

Recall my recent review of Justin Gregg's new book "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal."

 

Here's a killer review by Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler.

Consider the Chickens

I OWE CHICKENS AN APOLOGY. Not only have I been eating them until very recently, but I have refused to even consider the possibility of a chicken having any kind of inner life. This estimation was not made from a lack of interaction. As children, my twin brother and I purchased baby chicks from a street vendor. We did this unfazed by the fact that quite often, the chickens would die. Once, when we were nine, we had two that lived, a hen and a rooster. No one told us that we should probably get more hens. Not having any other female companions, the rooster exerted his attentions on the one chicken. She would lay an egg or two every day, much to our delight, but soon sickened and died. Then there was only an incel rooster who roamed our compound and terrorized the women. After a few ugly incidents, he was “given away” to one of the women who worked at our house. We were never told what happened to him, and I didn’t care. There is nothing worse than an incel rooster patrolling your house all day long.

Now, so many years later, I’ve found my way to animal behaviorist Justin Gregg’s brilliant new book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. Gregg’s chicken coop is “a huge enclosed area” with high rafters, because as an animal scientist, he knows them to be jungle birds who need perches on which to sleep at night. But it is not only the magisterial heights of Gregg’s discussion of chickens that stayed with me. I was struck also by Gregg’s description of his chickens’ varied personalities, one anxious, another friendly, and so on; he tells us that these chickens do have inner lives and thus a consciousness of themselves as distinct from others. Instead of the feckless creatures I (and most people) assume them to be, chickens have just the sort of intelligence that is necessary for their own survival. They don’t think like humans, Gregg tells us, because they do not need to.

Intelligence, in Gregg’s explanation, does not exist in the way SATs or other IQ tests would have you believe. Those tests quantify a certain kind of ability to process information. People who do not do well on such tests may have other kinds of abilities that simply are not being measured. Intelligence is not one easily definable thing; engineers working on artificial intelligence cannot agree on a definition of it. But what humans have is a tendency to ask why things operate in a certain way. In Gregg’s terminology, humans are “why specialists,” a proclivity that in natural selection terms is no advantage and perhaps even a liability. A narwhal swimming around in the sea, for instance, would never have the kind of mental breakdown that the German philosopher pondering nihilism suffered toward the end of his life. Animal intelligence is practical and does not get caught up in abstract thought. By and large, animals make calculations based on what they can observe; ideas such as “causality,” which lie at the crux of human intelligence, are outside their capacity for thought…

Read all of it. Excellent. Majorly. I was not aware of Rafia Zakaria. I am remiss.

UPDATE

Finished both Dr. Ahn's book and Kim Wehle's book. I was reminded of a number of others in my stash.

 

I think I'll continue this topic in a subsequent post. I'll leave you with this for now.

When we believe something to be true, we tend also to see the very process of arriving at it as clear and objective, and therefore the kind of thing we can achieve on our own; when we hold that a given notion is false, we ascribe belief in it to some unfortunate wrong turning, usually taken because an inquirer was led astray, like Hansel and Gretel being tempted into the oven by a wicked witch. And yet even the briefest reflection would demonstrate to us that nothing of the sort is the case: there is no connection between independence and correctness, or social thinking and wrongness...

Jacobs, Alan. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (p. 38). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Also (noted in a prior post):

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT the individual genetic and developmental differences that impact the sensory portions of our nervous systems, it’s remarkable that we can agree on a shared reality at all…

…Each of us operates from a different perception of the world and a different perception of ourselves.

A portion of the individual variation in sensory systems is innate. But those innate effects are elaborated and magnified with time as we accumulate experiences, expectations, and memories, filtered through and in turn modifying those very same sensory systems. In this way, the interacting forces of heredity, experience, plasticity, and development resonate to make us unique.

Linden, David. Unique (pp. 253-254). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

And,

…If you’ve ever doubted the significance of brain plasticity, rest assured that its tendrils reach from the individual to the society.

Because of livewiring, we are each a vessel of space and time. We drop into a particular spot on the world and vacuum in the details of that spot. We become, in essence, a recording device for our moment in the world.

When you meet an older person and feel shocked by the opinions or worldview she holds, you can try to empathize with her as a recording device for her window of time and her set of experiences. Someday your brain will be that time-ossified snapshot that frustrates the next generation.

Here’s a nugget from my vessel: I remember a song produced in 1985 called “We Are the World.” Dozens of superstar musicians performed it to raise money for impoverished children in Africa. The theme was that each of us shares responsibility for the well-being of everyone. Looking back on the song now, I can’t help but see another interpretation through my lens as a neuroscientist. We generally go through life thinking there’s me and there’s the world. But as we’ve seen in this book, who you are emerges from everything you’ve interacted with: your environment, all of your experiences, your friends, your enemies, your culture, your belief system, your era—all of it. Although we value statements such as “he’s his own man” or “she’s an independent thinker,” there is in fact no way to separate yourself from the rich context in which you’re embedded. There is no you without the external. Your beliefs and dogmas and aspirations are shaped by it, inside and out, like a sculpture from a block of marble. Thanks to livewiring, each of us is the world.

Eagleman, David. Livewired (pp. 244-245). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

'eh?

 

How does all this stuff go to so-called "Deliberation Science?"

__________

 

"Mental Immunity?"

Hmmm... cue the Cognitive Antivaxxers in 3, 2, 1?

Is the marketing metaphor broadly apt, or potentially problematic? (Let a thousand Marxist Woke Lib Re-Education Camps proliferate.) Are there identifiable material neural cognitive "pathogens" equivalent to bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa, worms, and prions? Will we find them in "the Electrome amid "the battle for your brain?"

More stuff to study.

Looking fairly promising early on.

 

Click for detail.

 

Oh, so, it's merely an "analogy? OK.

 

Andy Norman gets big props for this:

 

 

That was imparted to me in grad school a quarter century ago. This is the first time since then I've encountered someone else succinctly making the same point. Major brownie points, Sir. Very cool. 

apropos: "What image does the word philosopher conjure? Maybe Socrates, bearded and barefoot, counseling Plato on the agora; Rousseau on one of his solitary walks around the outskirts of Paris; Sartre sucking pensively on his pipe at the Café de Flore. What it may not call to mind is a woman.."

'eh?

 

BTW: I would also commend backing up a bit to Adrian Bardon's deft "The Truth About Denial."

 

All of this stuff goes to my ongoing Jones regarding so-called "Deliberation Science."

 

A SMH headline this morning.

 

 

Okeee dokeee, then.

 

Moving along. Dr. Norman:

 

I taught undergrad "Critical Thinking" and then graduate "Argument Analysis" as an Adjunct for a number of years (evening school part-time faculty; day gig risk analyst in a bank at the time). I loved it (notwithstanding the crap compensation), but, I never really dug the conventional phrase "critical thinking." Whole 'nuther digression, that...

 

But, first, Dr. Norman:

The Twentieth Century’s Critical Thinking Crusade

A third initiative centers on the concept of critical thinking. A hundred years ago, the philosopher John Dewey introduced the phrase to name a quasi-scientific frame of mind. His insight was sound: responsible thinkers test ideas and try not to rely on the ones that don’t survive scrutiny. As we now like to put it: we can teach people how to “think critically,” and thereby reduce their susceptibility to bad ideas.

This approach, too, has fallen short of expectations. Despite being the focal point of higher education for one hundred years, our species remains distressingly prone to irrational thinking. There’s some evidence that higher education imparts a limited immunity to some forms of ideological contagion, but on all accounts, the effect is weaker than hoped. One study found that “many colleges fail to improve critical thinking skills.” Another found that, while a large majority of professors claim to impart critical thinking skills, relatively few can say what they mean by critical thinking or explain how their teaching imparts it. In 2016, 43 percent of American college graduates voted for the disastrously unqualified and unprincipled Donald Trump. This massive failure of America’s critical thinking factory should be a wake-up call for us all.

I no longer find the concept of critical thinking particularly useful. It’s mostly a vague, feel-good term that means “the way we educated people like to think.” It’s really a conceptual black box, one that hides important differences. It’s not a solution, but a placeholder for one. Yes, the term critical hints at the need to reduce our susceptibility to bad ideas, but the concept of critical thinking does little more than gesture clumsily at the traits that make that possible.

Immunity to bad ideas depends on far more than the critical thinking skills we like to talk about in higher education. Indeed, our focus on skills has led us to overlook the better part of the mind’s defenses. (It’s more important to shape the deep sensibilities that marshal these skills for one or another purpose, and mold the resulting habits of mind.) Meanwhile, we need to acknowledge this truth: the critical thinking paradigm has not served us particularly well.

Reason, science, and critical thinking: these concepts give shape to some of our best efforts to prevent outbreaks of bad ideas. Each effort is well intentioned and worthy of admiration. None, though, can claim true success. Now we can see why: each approach has limitations rooted in its defining concept. The conceptual toolbox we’ve inherited isn’t channeling our efforts in the right way. As a result, we’re not doing enough—or enough of the right things—to promote responsible cognition. In this sense, philosophy’s reason project—and its science and critical thinking–based variants—are failing us.

Norman, Andy. Mental Immunity (pp. 28-29). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Resonates with me. My initial faculty experience was also that too many of my students assumed that the "Critical" part meant that they'd get to endlessly criticize each other, and vent off their pet peeves via classroom verbal free-for-alls. Moreover, I'd look out over my classes and think "man, most of you people need to re-take high school English." And that was no mere irascible elitist conceit; the university publicly admitted during my tenure (1999-2004) that more than half of incoming freshman had to be remanded to remedial English.

FROM A PRIOR POST: BOBBYG'S RANDOM MUSINGS ON COGNITION

Some things that bedevil our thinking, particularly as it goes to persuasion and influence:

There is no first-person singular present-tense active voice usage of the word "wrong." No one ever says "I AM wrong."

 

[props to Kathryn Schulz]  Our aggregate default is that we're right about everything. To the extent that we continue to survive, that's an understandable assumption—as it pertains to minor, inconsequential issues, anyway, and it inexorably tilts us toward "confirmation bias."

 

Our education system mostly tells us there's one "right answer" to every question—lurking amid a boatload of "wrong ones."

 

And, those who quickly alight on the "right answer" get reinforced and nurtured as they move through the system.

 

Being wrong is not a synonym for being "stupid" or ignorant. 

Neither is "ignorant" a synonym for "stupid." But it's mostly epithetically spun that way

Humans "reason" to WIN the argument.

 Should truth happen along the way, so much the better. (See "Why Do Humans Reason?" by Sperber & Mercier) Evolutionary adaptive utility, "The Pen is Mightier Than The Sword."

He/She with the best story WINS!

Trial Lawyering 101. Prior to writing and movable type, stories were the whole ballgame. Hence, our evolved affinity.

Once you decide that X is right or wrong / good or bad, you cannot unring that bell.

A staple look-before-you-leap admonishment of mine back when I was teaching "Critical Thinking."

If, when it's all said and done, your logic is impeccable, and your facts and evidence are bulletproof, yet you remain unpersuasive, what have you really accomplished?''

Another classroom staple of mine. That one was "exceeding my brief" as it were, but my Sups never noticed or cared. Anyway, my overall teach-to-the-text priority focus as a piddly Adjunct necessarily had to be "OK, here's how this stuff works. Take it or leave it."

BACK TO ZOE

 

Once you finish her book you will have a firm grip on just why. I love it when I learn stuff.

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT the individual genetic and developmental differences that impact the sensory portions of our nervous systems, it’s remarkable that we can agree on a shared reality at all.  Linden, David. Unique (p. 253). Basic Books. Kindle Edition

 Stay tuned. More to come...

__________

 

On Deck: Calling all AI "Influencers."

As newly published in Science Magazine

HOW TO PERSUADE OTHERS has been on our minds for millennia. Texts such as the Instruction of Ptahhotep, written around 2300 B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, give advice on how to win an argument. And from the beginning, people were wary of the power of new technologies—including writing itself—to persuade. In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Plato analyzed rhetoric and persuasion in his work Phaedrus and warned that the written word allowed people to convince others of their ideas without presenting them an opportunity to challenge them. Many technologies since then—from radio to TV to computers—have brought up similar concerns... 

apropos, a prior post of mine addressing "Influence." Also, is there a "Science of Deliberation?" A "Science of Storytelling?" "Selling Science?" "Conflict & Resolution?" Also, "Why Do Humans Reason?" "Raising AI?"

 

More from the Science report:

EVEN AS THE EVIDENCE accumulated that AI chatbots could change minds, Hackenburg felt there was a gap. “I still didn’t have a real sense of how persuasive these models are compared to the people who actually persuade in the real world,” he says.

So Hackenburg pitted the chatbots not just against laypeople, but also against a paid group of 56 elite debaters, including world champions. As a further incentive, the debaters received a bonus tied to how persuasive they were.

The humans took different approaches. For instance, one of the highest performing debaters used proverbs from his home country of Nigeria to persuade people, Hackenburg says. “These were humans from all over the world giving it their best shot and trying approaches and techniques that were very specific to their culture and context.” But it wasn’t enough. Although they were better than laypeople, the champion debaters were significantly less persuasive than AI.

Hackenburg even gave his humans some AI help. He built a coaching tool for the elite debaters that showed them their past conversations with study participants, how much they had swayed each one, and what the AIs would have said at various points in those conversations. Using the tool for 8 hours improved the humans’ performance a bit, but AI still came out on top. “In the end it wasn’t particularly close,” Hackenburg says. His team even found that participants were more likely to give money to Save the Children, an international charity, after talking to a persuasive AI bot than after talking to professional canvassers who had worked for the group for years.

But what gives chatbots the edge? Some early research had suggested it was the AI’s ability to personalize arguments using details about its human partner provided by the experimenter. However, other studies have found that giving a chatbot extra personal information does little to improve its persuasiveness. That doesn’t mean microtargeting is not at play; instead, an LLM may glean enough from its counterpart in a chat that additional demographic information makes no difference.

 Like Willer in his foundational study, other researchers have shown that AI’s powers rely on appeals to facts and evidence. In a 2025 preprint, a follow-up to their Science paper, Costello and his colleagues found that the only time the chatbot was unsuccessful in convincing people out of conspiracy theories was when it was forbidden from using evidence or rational arguments. “It tries to say, ‘Oh, well, you shouldn’t believe this. This is really damaging, and it could hurt people,’” Pennycook says. “People are like, ‘You haven’t given me any reasons to change my mind.’ And so they don’t change their mind.”

The study confirms people will listen to good arguments, Pennycook says. “Facts and evidence really matter.” But this doesn’t mean the facts used by chatbots necessarily have to be accurate. In a Science paper published last year, Hackenburg found that models trained to become more persuasive also ended up being less truthful. It’s possible the models learn that “facts” seem to be the thing that most persuades people, Hackenburg says, and end up filling their conversations with dubious or simply false ones. “They start scraping the bottom of the barrel of the facts that they have and know and so the quality of facts just sort of degrades,” he says. Even in Hackenburg’s recent preprint, Claude spouted numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods when persuading the U.K.-based participant to support tougher penalties for disruptive protests... 

TANGENTIAL UPDATE

 

Ed Zitron is just spot-on.

 

 

AND, CHECK THIS OUT

 

Click

Ben Goertzel, man.

My friend Gary Marcus put out a nice blog post earlier this week titled “Leopold’s Folly,” which uses the late-July implosion of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s tragicomically-named Situational Awareness hedge fund — $45 billion of assets compressed to roughly $10 billion in a matter of days, the whole public book sold to Citadel under margin pressure — as a symbol for the financial structure of the entire AI economy.

Gary’s essay is vivid and, on its central financial observation, more right than his critics will want to admit. All the circular financing in the modern AI and hardware world does have a Ponzi-esque smell to it, at least on the surface — and it’s clear there are some eventualities where this whiff leads to a Ponzi-crash-style reality...

A lengthy, challenging read. 

 

More in a bit...