Coronavirus thread

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Oh, now, cognitive biases and fallacies find purchase with or without the State.

How would you know, state-born?
Your'e like a fish arguing that nothing is different for land-dwellers, but your fishy-tail has been swishing in the water every second of your little fish life.

You're right. Perhaps the noble savage, or whatever, is free from cognitive failures.

[DBTrek]

Oh, now, cognitive biases and fallacies find purchase with or without the State.

How would you know, state-born?
Your'e like a fish arguing that nothing is different for land-dwellers, but your fishy-tail has been swishing in the water every second of your little fish life.

You're right. Perhaps the noble savage, or whatever, is free from cognitive failures.

You said cognitive bias, not failures.
You know . .. that state indoctrinated bias.
The very programming that has the hypnotized masses vapidly nodding along with the broadcast buzzword chants . . . racism . . . sexism . . . xenophobia . . . wealth gap . . . exploitation . . . nod, nod, nod.

You think there are Bushmen out there doing that shit?
No.
You think the few indigenous tribes in the Amazon are falling prey to mass messaging?
Nope.

So they aren't suffering from cognitive bias because they aren't constantly programmed with erroneous preconceptions on how things work. Their worldview rests upon experience, the empirical, and the spiritual.

But it's hard to conceive of that mindset, when you were born into the kingdom of mindless call-and-response chant nodding.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

How would you know, state-born?
Your'e like a fish arguing that nothing is different for land-dwellers, but your fishy-tail has been swishing in the water every second of your little fish life.

You're right. Perhaps the noble savage, or whatever, is free from cognitive failures.

You said cognitive bias, not failures.
You know . .. that state indoctrinated bias.
The very programming that has the hypnotized masses vapidly nodding along with the broadcast buzzword chants . . . racism . . . sexism . . . xenophobia . . . wealth gap . . . exploitation . . . nod, nod, nod.

You think there are Bushmen out there doing that shit?
No.
You think the few indigenous tribes in the Amazon are falling prey to mass messaging?
Nope.

So they aren't suffering from cognitive bias because they aren't constantly programmed with erroneous preconceptions on how things work. Their worldview rests upon experience, the empirical, and the spiritual.

But it's hard to conceive of that mindset, when you were born into the kingdom of mindless call-and-response chant nodding.

I don't know where you are getting all of that. I was talking about well observed cognitive biases and fallacies (I used failures to describe them both) such as the sunk cost fallacy, recency bias, novelty bias, false positive bias, et cetera. Cognitive failures that seem to be pretty deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology and psychology. I could be wrong. They could be recent developments of human cognition that Bushman are blessedly free form. But I doubt it.

[DBTrek]

I don't know where you are getting all of that.

Just made it up on the fly.

Cognitive failures that seem to be pretty deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology and psychology. I could be wrong. They could be recent developments of human cognition that Bushman are blessedly free form.

That's right bro, they could be.
So remember that shit.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Do you have a compelling reason to think they are? I would be fascinated to hear it.

[Speaker to Animals]

You're right. Perhaps the noble savage, or whatever, is free from cognitive failures.

You said cognitive bias, not failures.
You know . .. that state indoctrinated bias.
The very programming that has the hypnotized masses vapidly nodding along with the broadcast buzzword chants . . . racism . . . sexism . . . xenophobia . . . wealth gap . . . exploitation . . . nod, nod, nod.

You think there are Bushmen out there doing that shit?
No.
You think the few indigenous tribes in the Amazon are falling prey to mass messaging?
Nope.

So they aren't suffering from cognitive bias because they aren't constantly programmed with erroneous preconceptions on how things work. Their worldview rests upon experience, the empirical, and the spiritual.

But it's hard to conceive of that mindset, when you were born into the kingdom of mindless call-and-response chant nodding.

I don't know where you are getting all of that. I was talking about well observed cognitive biases and fallacies (I used failures to describe them both) such as the sunk cost fallacy, recency bias, novelty bias, false positive bias, et cetera. Cognitive failures that seem to be pretty deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology and psychology. I could be wrong. They could be recent developments of human cognition that Bushman are blessedly free form. But I doubt it.

I used to keep up on linguistics a bit in graduate school, and was interested in the evolution of the human language (really, there is just one with many branches). I read about a language for a primitive people in some rain forest somewhere. They actually had separate inflections for nouns depending upon things like visibility. For instance, if I were to say "there is a monkey in that tree", there is really only one way to inflect the word monkey in English. But in this language, there was an inflection for a monkey in the tree that the speaker has seen, another for a monkey the speaker has detected but not seen, and so on.

I don't know about these savages being somehow better than us in any way, but it occurs to me that their language was better and its ability to weed out certain fallacies came to mind when I read your post.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

You said cognitive bias, not failures.
You know . .. that state indoctrinated bias.
The very programming that has the hypnotized masses vapidly nodding along with the broadcast buzzword chants . . . racism . . . sexism . . . xenophobia . . . wealth gap . . . exploitation . . . nod, nod, nod.

You think there are Bushmen out there doing that shit?
No.
You think the few indigenous tribes in the Amazon are falling prey to mass messaging?
Nope.

So they aren't suffering from cognitive bias because they aren't constantly programmed with erroneous preconceptions on how things work. Their worldview rests upon experience, the empirical, and the spiritual.

But it's hard to conceive of that mindset, when you were born into the kingdom of mindless call-and-response chant nodding.

I don't know where you are getting all of that. I was talking about well observed cognitive biases and fallacies (I used failures to describe them both) such as the sunk cost fallacy, recency bias, novelty bias, false positive bias, et cetera. Cognitive failures that seem to be pretty deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology and psychology. I could be wrong. They could be recent developments of human cognition that Bushman are blessedly free form. But I doubt it.

I used to keep up on linguistics a bit in graduate school, and was interested in the evolution of the human language (really, there is just one with many branches). I read about a language for a primitive people in some rain forest somewhere. They actually had separate inflections for nouns depending upon things like visibility. For instance, if I were to say "there is a monkey in that tree", there is really only one way to inflect the word monkey in English. But in this language, there was an inflection for a monkey in the tree that the speaker has seen, another for a monkey the speaker has detected but not seen, and so on.

I don't know about these savages being somehow better than us in any way, but it occurs to me that their language was better and its ability to weed out certain fallacies came to mind when I read your post.

We would just say, "there may be a monkey in that tree." Easy peasy lemon-squeezy.

Either way, if their language had tools for correcting for fallacies, that would suggest their brains fell prey to them, just as ours.

(Sorry if that came off flippant. It is an interesting point.)

[Speaker to Animals]

I don't know where you are getting all of that. I was talking about well observed cognitive biases and fallacies (I used failures to describe them both) such as the sunk cost fallacy, recency bias, novelty bias, false positive bias, et cetera. Cognitive failures that seem to be pretty deeply rooted in our evolutionary biology and psychology. I could be wrong. They could be recent developments of human cognition that Bushman are blessedly free form. But I doubt it.

I used to keep up on linguistics a bit in graduate school, and was interested in the evolution of the human language (really, there is just one with many branches). I read about a language for a primitive people in some rain forest somewhere. They actually had separate inflections for nouns depending upon things like visibility. For instance, if I were to say "there is a monkey in that tree", there is really only one way to inflect the word monkey in English. But in this language, there was an inflection for a monkey in the tree that the speaker has seen, another for a monkey the speaker has detected but not seen, and so on.

I don't know about these savages being somehow better than us in any way, but it occurs to me that their language was better and its ability to weed out certain fallacies came to mind when I read your post.

We would just say, "there may be a monkey in that tree." Easy peasy lemon-squeezy.

Either way, if their language had tools for correcting for fallacies, that would suggest their brains fell prey to them, just as ours.

(Sorry if that came off flippant. It is an interesting point.)

I think the language features had more to do with living in a jungle. Because they are surrounded by dense jungle foliage and hidden beneath thick canopies, surrounded by things you might detect but cannot see, visibility becomes an obvious problem in most language interactions about the world. Our problem is similar, but our jungle is an abstraction of ideas, statistics, and relationships. Our jungle is not so obvious and in your face, and our language was developed long before that jungle came to exist as we experience it today.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

I used to keep up on linguistics a bit in graduate school, and was interested in the evolution of the human language (really, there is just one with many branches). I read about a language for a primitive people in some rain forest somewhere. They actually had separate inflections for nouns depending upon things like visibility. For instance, if I were to say "there is a monkey in that tree", there is really only one way to inflect the word monkey in English. But in this language, there was an inflection for a monkey in the tree that the speaker has seen, another for a monkey the speaker has detected but not seen, and so on.

I don't know about these savages being somehow better than us in any way, but it occurs to me that their language was better and its ability to weed out certain fallacies came to mind when I read your post.

We would just say, "there may be a monkey in that tree." Easy peasy lemon-squeezy.

Either way, if their language had tools for correcting for fallacies, that would suggest their brains fell prey to them, just as ours.

(Sorry if that came off flippant. It is an interesting point.)

I think the language features had more to do with living in a jungle. Because they are surrounded by dense jungle foliage and hidden beneath thick canopies, surrounded by things you might detect but cannot see, visibility becomes an obvious problem in most language interactions about the world. Our problem is similar, but our jungle is an abstraction of ideas, statistics, and relationships. Our jungle is not so obvious and in your face, and our language was developed long before that jungle came to exist as we experience it today.

Our language isn't great at talking about hidden things with much granularity. It comes off sounding occult, ooky-spooky, or paranoid. But, we do have different inflections that denote various levels of certainty, even if they aren't particularly well codified.

My contention was that our cognitive biases also developed long before our current situation. We should develop better methods of communicating about them.

[DBTrek]

I think it's probably harder to form emotional biases if your day is very much rooted in concrete realities than in comfortable abstractions. Well fed, well protected, leisurely people have time to learn about racism, and classism, and sexism, and all the abstract -isms that become the replacement for actual struggles in life.

Everyone naturally struggling in life is dealing with just making it to the next day. So they don't have time to indulge in fantasy oppression, or vague notions of peoples represented by ideas and cultures clashing over time, and who owes what to whom for bygone wrongs.

Nope.
Their mentality is a lot more grounded in the present, the near-term, their direct circle of influence.

So can they have cognitive bias?
Probably, if cognitive bias is just a catch phrase for "mental shortcuts" we all use to get from A to F without stopping at B,C,D,E along the way.

But will they self-isolate in groupthink media bubbles and self radicalize?
I dunno about that.
I doubt it.

That sounds more like something citizens of a modern state would have time to do.