p style=clear: both;img class=size-thumbnail wp-image-189 title=Whiskey Tango Foxtrot src=http://rickgibson.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/wtf-th-wa-150×150.png alt= width=150 height=150 /I was browsing through The Week and came across this a title=Made Up Minds href=http://theweek.com/article/index/215257/made-up-minds target=_blankarticle/a about political beliefs being rooted in emotion and thus nearly completely protected from modification on the basis of facts./p
p style=clear: both;One section spoke to me, as its topic is a source of constant confusion for me. Specifically, when affect is mistaken for reason./p
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p style=clear: both;strongTHE THEORY OF/strong motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion — what researchers often call affect. Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds — fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of them. That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. Its a basic human survival skill, explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators but to data itself./p
p style=clear: both;In other words, by the time were consciously reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing our prior emotional commitments./p
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p style=clear: both;Ive noticed this in a more casual way as a younger person and now in adulthood its a topic that greatly interests me. How people make decisions, what they think are their best interests, and the concept of I feel this is what I should do, so Ill do it and not bother to think about the reasons I might feel this way nor the consequences of my actions./p
p style=clear: both;Ive found over the course of years of discussion with people that many of them are able to work through complicated mental gymnastics, avoiding key facts, tumbling through the hoop of cognitive dissonance, and looping the non-parallel bars of justification by precedent, achieving a self-delusional conclusion that they ranked well in that thought process but achieving no insight or rational outcome./p
p style=clear: both;One of the reasons why this bothers me is that it gets people into trouble; bad breakups of an otherwise healthy relationship, destroying a career, or deciding that the extra dram of Glenlivet before driving home was OK. It leads to acting against ones own goals because of a behavior that is in place: this is what Ive done before and I was fine so Ill follow the same pattern. Sometimes that fine, but its helpful to be mindful of behavior, analyze it, and be ones own critic such that the manner in which we conduct ourselves may be improved and let us more closely achieve approximation of our own theoretical ideal of our best selves and goals./p
p style=clear: both;Aside from the problems it can cause for the person suffering from the lack of reason-based action, it causes a considerable amount of inconvenience for persons like myself who attempt to be more deliberate and also caution of the evolutionarily-inherited pitfalls of our minds. At time, I feel like I must speak a difference language to someone with whom I would hold a normal discourse, almost in the way one speaks to a person without the same context. Imagine trying to explain the Internet to an ancient Greek: itd be difficult because the concepts, the knowledge that seems mundane to us in modern society, would be absent and have to be built up in the other persons database. On more than one occasion, in the context of achieving a goal but being blocked for a non-reason, Ive deliberately changed my own approach, altering the loudness of voice, diction, body posture and language, in order to better communicate the idea. The article makes reference to this as well:/p
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p style=clear: both;If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it in a context that doesnt trigger a defensive, emotional reaction./p
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p style=clear: both;Given all that we know, Im disappointed that as a culture we dont discuss these facts to the extent called for. Pragmatically speaking, its in everyones best interests to be aware of our faulty wiring because it would prevent us from getting in our own way. It seems to be that our society wishes to believe that humans act in a directed way for their own best interests, when it can be shown that people are easily fooled, both by themselves and others. If instead the facts were more popularly known that, we all might achieve a less stressful, more productive, happier life by working toward our goals and doing our best to leave our dangerous evolutionary baggage like hatred, jealously, and magical thinking behind./p
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FINALLY! I’ve set up my WordPress to automatically update to facebook. It’s been something I’ve wanted to cross of my list for weeks, maybe even months. Now it’s done and I’ll start writing more often. Stay tuned.
Two weeks ago, over Labor Day weekend, I flew down to Atlanta, Georgia to experience my first DragonCon, a convention that’s been described as “Geek Mardi-Gras”. Over the four days of the con, one vividly experienced science fiction, gaming, science, skepticism, cosplay and a smattering of dozens of other genres that all came together under the umbrella of four hotels in downtown Atlanta. Here’s a snapshot at the Hyatt, as people shuffled from one place to another to try and catch the excellent programming.
