Why You Should Consider Caring About What (Some) Other People Think

If you are a normal human being who already cares about what other people think, and know how to discriminate between the ones you should care about and the ones you shouldn't, this post isn't for you. Please look away.

In childhood, I often got this advice: you shouldn't care about what other people think. I wonder if this advice is given less true now then when I was a kid. It certainly is given less often in most other countries relative to the hyper-individualist culture of the U.S. But in my early life, it came from multiple quarters - parents, advertising, peers. And like many things in life, part of the social test is knowing how seriously to take the repetitive slogans broadcast everywhere. I probably took it more seriously than most, hence the italicized disclaimer that began this post. If, like me you need a reason to be a normal healthy fully socialized human, then here are some reasons why you might consider caring what other people think.

1. Someone who truly does not care what others think is much more likely than the average person to be a psychopath. Consider whether you want to be like a psychopath.
   
   
2. Related, a big part of caring what other people think is empathy; if you don't care what they think, you don't care if you hurt them or offend them. Announcing that you don't care what they think and don't care if they're offended is broadcasting that you may hurt them, if not hurting them would inconvenience you. At the very least, it suggests you're not a reliable cooperator. (Story time: I used to love going out of my way to tell people I thought sports were a waste of time. I once did this at a small social gathering, and in a later discussion, one person I'd just met for the first time that day said "You already announced you're incapable of loyalty, no need to weigh in further." While that's not true - I am capable of loyalty where it matters - i.e., not sports - I've realized that intentionally announcing this in a casual social setting to someone who clearly does like sports, does nothing but potentially leave certain kinds of people with this impression, which doesn't help. I'm taking a risk here because this isn't a casual social setting, and it's much less combative to say this in an essay sitting inert online than to choose to say it at an oppositional moment.)
   
   
3. Rejecting and denigrating another person's cherished beliefs in public, is a dramatic announcement of #2 above. You're announcing that you don't care if you're hurting people and disrupting their culture. That may be worth it to you, but be clear and honest with yourself WHY it's worth it to you, before you do it. Also, confirmation bias is a bitch - if you let a black cat cross your path, call a superstitious person a moron for saying something about it, and then lose your wallet that same day, you'll be ridiculed and (when you've rejected more serious beliefs) a self-destructive moron that others should avoid. So they have a false belief - so does everyone! If it harms you or people you love, fine, call it out.
   
   
4. It turns out you can benefit from interacting and coordinating with irrational people. The company you choose to work for may even be an example! But, you should balance the benefits you gain from such coordination against exposure to these people because you may reinforce their irrationality and bad values, you will become more like them, and they will have more influence over your life.
   
   
5. It also turns out that people sometimes have to rapidly (in literal seconds) make snap judgments about you, using easily available information - your appearance, your clothing, your reputation. Even if you think you're valuable in the context where you're being evaluated (meeting with senior leadership at your company, a speed-dating lunch, salesman OR customer), they have no way of knowing that in the seconds where they're making a first impression. (The need to make snap judgments on increasingly dubious proxy indicators starts happening more and more when a small company grows rapidly beyond a certain point, meaning you can no longer know everyone.) AND even if you're so high-value that you're initially rejected and then an evaluator runs across you again later and realizes you're valuable, the evaluator might still think "That person could have succeeded/built confidence sooner/faster if they had just worn the thing/acted the way that they were supposed to; that shows arrogance, passive-aggression, and/or poor social awareness, and remains a negative predictor for the future."
   
   
6. For rationalists: it's actually not good to change your mind in public too often. Each time you change your mind to another position in public, your audience's "needle" quite rationally edges over toward "listen to someone else besides this person, because they're an inferior decision-maker" (at best) to "they are capricious and unpredictable and their commitment is not meaningful." The exception is if you're so powerful you can afford to be capricious, because you have something others want and they have no choice but to put up with you. But, you're almost certainly not that powerful.

IMPORTANT: it's hard to start caring what others think later in life, because it doesn't come automatically, and you might start caring about everyone, or caring about the wrong people. It's kind of like trying to pick up a sport in adulthood. You're just not going to be as good at it as people who have been practicing since they were kids. So once you start caring about other people, as a guide think: does this person share my values? Do I want to be like them? Am I likely to spend more time around them in the future? Pragmatically, do they have some impact over your life? Then that's a good candidate for caring what they think about you. (Notice that this is still focused on real actual people, not some hypothetical person on the internet or at a club that you haven't met.)

You might say, "Well, you're still a psychopath. Everything so far has been about how you have learned to react to what other people say and do, rather than whether you actually care." Controlling your response is the beginning of caring. For those people who you've realized are specifically worth more of your attention than the average human, what they say and do (about and to you) is worth more of your consideration, as are the way they feel when they're around you. And you just can't care about everyone: not only do you not have the bandwidth, but what people care about frequently conflicts in important ways.

You (or my naive past self) might ask, "Great, so then we should just tolerate everyone's religions, superstitions, and irrational beliefs?" No, but you don't have to announce your negative impressions and beliefs about the people around you every time they pop into your mind, even the people you don't care that much about. "Oh, so we should be sneaky and lie and smile while silently detesting and devaluing them?" Also no. In any given moment, there is a literally infinite number of true statements you can make to another person, and an also literally infinite number of reasons you might say them. Take your, and your fellow humans', social reality into account, and how it is likely to affect your future.

Toward a Unified Account of Finding the Truth: Quine and Bayes on Dogma Versus Good Authority

Scott Alexander recently posted a great account (and critique) of reasoning and communication, beginning with criticism of science communication. He then expands this into an argument about how a real Bayesian evaluation of truth claims requires us to sometimes reject "higher standards" of evidence that produce results in conflict with what we think we already know. In so doing he begins to unify every day reasoning within a Bayesian framework. This is valuable, because honest rationalists have noticed gaps between what we consider high-quality evidence, and what we actually use to update - not because we are hypocrites, but because there are other considerations when we want to really get the right answer.

To begin with a critique of simplistic "levels of evidence": even those of us most enthusiastic about peer-review make almost every decision in life without it. You don't insist on a peer-reviewed journal when figuring out how to give yourself administrator rights to a PC you just got for free (a situation I just found myself in.) Your decision process is a combination of evaluations of the cost, time, and likely consequences of whatever you do, along with deciding what sources to trust based on the decisions' specialization beyond daily experience of subject matter, speed of feedback, and possible perverse incentives. In this case, I just watched a Youtube video and it worked like a charm. It's a free computer I'm playing with so I didn't care much if it was ruined by the attempt.

Taking all these things into account is actually Bayesian even if we aren't thinking explicitly about the Bayes equation. But it turns out the model we use in science is actually a special case of Bayesian reasoning - and even victims of dogmatism are using Bayesian reasoning. The second statement is much more controversial than the first; scroll down to that section if you like.


Recasting Popperian Falsification in Bayesian Terms

Karl Popper's model of hypothesis testing is that we can only falsify a hypothesis, we can never be sure it's true. Looking at Anscombe' quartet above, you can see that there are multiple data sets which can produce the same statistics. Stopping after inadequate positive predictions may lead you to the wrong equation. Therefore, the only answer that provides certainty is to falsify a hypothesis.

There are two important aspects to this approach to finding out the truth. The first, and the more underemphasized, is its appreciation of human psychology. Stephen Toulmin noted that the way humans actually reason is to start with premises and conclusion first, and then build a rhetorical bridge between them. If you're a rationalist, you make sure that your rhetorical bridge is not just verbal/emotional sleight of hand but rather an actual argument. The point is that even in Popperian science, we start with a conclusion. The difference is that we explicitly declare, in public, ahead of time, that we're not sure if the conclusion is right (it's less than a thesis - a "hypo" thesis, if you will.) Then you test it.

And, the way you test it is by creating an experience that will give you an unexpected result if it's wrong - to falsify it. The question is, does a hypothesis-supporting experiment (that produces the results we expect) really give us zero information? No, but it usually doesn't give us as much information as a falsification.

A falsification is usually more strongly weighted information - it "moves the needle" much more, because it's more likely to be surprising. Indeed to equate heavier weighting with surprise is almost tautology. So we can place Popperian hypothesis-testing in a Bayesian framework by saying, instead of a false binary of "support equals zero information equals bad" and falsification good", note that ideally an experiment is trying to create that experience which is most likely to produce a surprise, and most efficiently provide information.


Finding Truth in the Real World - Where Other Humans Also Live

But people don't always do this. We live in a complicated world and have had to learn to weight truth claims based on something besides immediate experience. You almost certainly have not done an experiment on biological evolution, and few if any true retrodictive studies.[1] You can't function otherwise, unless you live in a cabin in the wilderness by yourself.

One thing we use in the real world is a web of beliefs, in the Quinean sense. Recasting this in Bayesian terms, no belief is an island, with each belief in the web serving as part of the weighting for your prior. Most beliefs will have many other beliefs bearing on it, updating the belief in question and holding its prediction in place. If you have reasonable confidence in those many other beliefs, then a counterclaim or weird observation just doesn't outweight them. (I am not a statistician, but Elo ratings seem analagous to this. Just because the Packers had an off night and lost to the Detroit Lions doesn't mean you should bet against the Packers going forward - move your needle? Yes, but this is what it means for one loss to be a fluke.)[2] This is why in the linked article, Scott describes how it is right to reject peer-reviewed homeopathy studies - because they are on their face improbable, in large part because of our rich web of other beliefs about how the world works.

Another way we weight beliefs is by giving credence to authority. I think differing confidence in authorities (based partly on our innate cognitive/emotional makeup and partly on life experience) explains the majority of major differences people have in beliefs about the world - not their direct experience of things or reasoning ability. The truth is that people often say "I believe X because an authority I trust said so." In fact, fellow rationalist, you often say that. And again, to function, you must. (Education is a formal example of this. You don't need to do every experiment back to Newton to be a physicist.) Yet during the pandemic, it has become painfully clear that people differ in what authorities they listen to.


Why Dogmatists Are Actually Still Bayesians: Good Authorities and Bad Authorities

I once had the privilege to give a talk to the Sacramento Freethinkers, Atheists and Nonbelievers (SacFAN) about the function of beliefs. At one point I stated that to have good beliefs, you had to pick good authorities. An audience member asked me "How do you define a good authority?" At the time I answered humorously, deflecting the question only because of my discomfort at realizing I didn't have a ready answer.

First let's define authority: a personal source of data (a person or institution) whose truth claims you weight more heavily than others' without first requiring evidence.

We all have our authorities. To function, we must. Sometimes they are formal (academic scientists); more often they are informal (someone you hike with who seems to know the trails and conditions in your part of the world.)

But there are many claimed authorities with poor justification for their beliefs, that promulgate false beliefs, and if we are updating based on what they tell us, we will be wrong too. A current near-canonical example for my likely readers would be a religious leader claiming that mRNA vaccines will kill you. But scientists can be wrong too, and not just because they haven't generated enough data to update their beliefs. Nobel Prize winners going off the rails are something of an institution now, so how do we know to ignore Kary Mullis or Linus Pauling's weirder moments? Not so scary, you say: partly the conflict with the web of beliefs as noted before, and partly because they're speculating outside of their expertise or reproducible experiment. Fair enough.

Returning to the pandemic, the CDC said for at least first month that masks didn't help. (Was this deliberate obfuscation to keep non-medical people from hoarding masks, or an error? Either way, that's what they communicated, and in any event I'm not sure which is worse.) If you still think, despite this, that the CDC is still a better authority than a preacher, why?


Is Someone Who Calls Himself a Rationalist Claiming Dogmatists are Rational?

In an article about people in middle America who refused the vaccine and got severe COVID, I was struck by the following statement (paraphrasing since I can't find the original): "We didn't think it was real, just like everybody else."

When you are surrounded by people who believe X, all of whom (along with you) admire a leader who believes X, and only people who everyone around you has told you are liars are telling you not-X - then, in the absence of (thusfar) immediately contradictory experience, you will continue to believe X. This is the case for COVID victims like those I paraphrased. Given the information they have, they were being good Quineans and good Bayesians.


Early Life Experience and Emotional Makeup Clearly Influence Our Weightings

You might be asking incredulously: is this guy seriously arguing that people following bad authorities are good Bayesians? And (assuming that's true), does that mean people are really in an inescapable hole if they follow the wrong authority, absent any profound contradictory evidence? The respective answers are technically yes, and sometimes no.

To the first point, you might object that many of these people certainly did have experts providing them better information, and they incorrectly underweighted this information, so they were NOT good Bayesians. But there's a problem: large inferential distance. Everyone around them has told them that (Fauci, academics, etc.) are bad, lying, immoral people who are trying to harm you, and should be ignored. With this information, and very little information about how to identity good authorities, from their perspective, if they give credence to Fauci, they have no justification for not also listening to every crank who comes along. Similarly, it's hard to see how someone in North Korea should somehow just know that people in the West really don't have it out for them. These people do not have trapped priors in the sense that that a belief is somehow innately more inert - as if it has a higher specific epistemological gravity - but their priors are pinned down by a dense web of beliefs whose strands are numerous and have strong weightings because they date to early life experience.

To the second question about whether it's hopeless to get people with bad authorities out of their delusion box, as often happens with the rationalist community, in our public discussions we're playing catch-up centuries after salesmen, politicians and religious leaders figured these things out, though in fairness, they had a greater incentive with more immediate feedback loops. The trick is to find someone who they recognize as an authority. Usually this is as simple as finding people providing better information who share with their audience superficial markers of cultural affinity - afiliations with religions or regions, class, dress, language. Yes these people should understand how to select an authority, but the inferential distance is too great. Put them in touch with someone with the same accent instead. Concentrate forces by looking for people who do not demonstrate "authority monoculture." You can also decrease inferential distance by engaging with people who are already having doubts. (Again, not a news flash, but it may help rationalists to understand if I put it in these terms. See what I did there?)


How to Differentiate Dogmatists from Good Authorities

Let's define dogmatists (or charlatans, or whatever other term you like) as someone who wants the benefits of being an authority, but is not interested in the the truth of the beliefs they promulgate, in terms of actions and consequences. Whether or not they genuinely believe they are interested in the truth is irrelevant, and either way, they will certainly claim they are committed to the truth. There's an analogy here to the relationship between tribal team cheers (shibboleths) that appear on the surface to be truth claims, and proper truth claims, like dolphins and fish. Similarly, dogmatists do their best to masquerade[3] as good authorities, but they're really something else entirely - dogmatists might be considered the viceroys to the good authorities' monarchs.

But there are characteristics of good authorities which are "expensive" for dogmatists to maintain. These are:

1. They have some feedback loop betwen their claims and outcomes (and are interested in it.) Example: physicians and patient outcomes; politicians and legislative impact.
2. They do not avoid being tracked by others in their outcomes or predictions.
3. They minimally appeal to or rely on those early-life, emotional, identity-overweighted beliefs in their audience's web.
4. Their feedback loop is not distorted by perverse interests. Example: TV news pundits trying to get ratings by avoiding predictions that conflict with their audience's values. Paraphrasing Charlie Munger, when you're dealing with a business, you have to understand their business well enough to know their incentives. (More here.)
5. They have a way of seeking out "legitimate surprise" (not mere confusion - can also be accomplished with dopamine hacking, i.e. meth.) Example, hypothesis testing in science. (This may be the hardest of these to do consistently due to inherent contradictions within any information-seeking entity.)
6. They communicate clearly, and they do not hold up incomprehensibility as a positive. (See: descriptions of John von Neumann, the first of Asher's Seven Sins of Medicine.) Insistence of formal or especially foreign or arcane language is one pernicious form. (See: modern legal language, use of Latin in Church, legal French in late Medieval England.)
7. Their claims to authority are limited in scope. Henry Ford had some great industral ideas but also thought people should listen to his hang-ups about cows and horses. Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel but recognizing that his domain of expertise did not extend to politics he said no.

Seeking good authorities, and preparing to reject one you may have liked when you realize they are just a viceroy, is uncomfortable - it's "software" imposed on the factory settings of humans as we operated in small groups for millennia. People who are constitutionally high in the moral dimensions of loyalty and authority will always find this difficult - the idea of checking their proposed authority runs counter to their nature.


For further reading: more formal syntheses of Quinean and Bayesian models here and here. A useful discussion of a possible conflict here, which the resolution that Bayesian reasoning can be a satisfactory way to contruct a Quinean web without arguing that Bayes is necessarily optimal.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Retrodiction sometimes upsets Popperians, but hypothesis-testing is about making a prediction, based on your hypothesis, about something that the predictor does not yet know, even if it already happened. It is always about the state of knowledge of the claimant when the hypothesis is formulated; it's irrelevant if the events already happened, just that they are not yet known.

[2] The ELO rating used in sports not formally an example of a belief web but it is analogous to one, and in this case behaves similar to one. Just as a single peer-reviewed homeopathy study should not make us throw away the rest of science, a great team somehow losing to a bad one should not make us think the great team is now worse than the bad one.

[3] It is a testament to the success of science that viceroys, especially religious ones in the U.S., increasingly co-opt its language. It is very rare to see this happening in the opposite direction.

Rhetoric Check: Nuclear Disarmament Then and Now

The following reads like a "dark" science fiction scenario, as it might be written by a social conservative author:

In September 2011, the Obama administration decided to deactivate the Minuteman II ICBMs. Over the next few years the missiles were removed from the silos and placed in storage for use in launching satellites. In order to assure the Chinese that the silos were being deactivated according to the SALT III treaty each silo was first stripped of useful equipment and then the top 25 feet of the silo was blown apart using 2,800 pounds of explosives. After being left exposed for several months so the Chinese satellites could verify the destruction the remains were filled in and covered to look as much like the surrounding area as possible. Only one silo escaped destruction to become the Minuteman Missile Museum.

Submission to the Reds! Revelation of the President's true Marxist plan! His desire to destroy America! Right?

Hold on: this is the sign at the preserved nuclear missile silo south of Tucson.



When you can get rid of nuclear weapons in your national interest, that's a very good thing to do.

How We Filter Arguments: Valid, Relevant, and Ridiculous

The Doomsday Argument as put forth by Nick Bostrom (and others) is a form of the self-indication assumption as applied to the continued existence of humans. In short: the Doomsday Argument states that we can reasonably assume we are substantially closer to the end of the existence of the human species than we are to the beginning of it. Hence the sunny name. Bostrom has complained that on hearing this argument, most people dismiss it outright as ridiculous, but do so without a real counterargument, or even an honest attempt therein. That is to say, the argument is not really rejected; it's filtered without being evaluated. Whether or not there is ever a time when this kind of filtering is legitimate or safe to do, we have no choice but to have some criteria for doing so.

I think adherents of the Doomsday Argument would agree that this particular chain of reasoning runs counter to our desires and intuitions, and that the argument's degree of abstraction is one factor that aids rejectors in calling it "ridiculous". To be clear, I'm not implying anything about the validity or lack thereof of Doomsday; but because of these characteristics, this is a good example of an argument that many readers will react similarly to and consider "ridiculous". This raises questions about what what we mean when we call an argument ridiculous, and how and why we filter arguments without actually evaluating them.

There are multiple ways that humans attempt to influence other humans, and outside of force, most of these ways involve language. These attempts to manipulate each other, via valid arguments or otherwise, do not occur in a vacuum. Literate people in industrialized societies are bombarded every waking minute with statements by other agents with their own interests who intend to change our behavior. Most of these statements don't bother with any semblance of logical coherence.

Of the attempts to influence that do at least look like arguments (whether or not they really are coherent and valid), a large portion (no doubt the majority) are invalid, advanced either in earnest by claimants unable to see the faults in their own arguments, or by claimants who are at best indifferent to the validity of their own arguments as long as they create the desired change in the behavior of their audience. The problem is that there are only so many hours in a day, and it takes time and effort to evaluate arguments, and we don't know until we evaluate them which are coherent and valid. Therefore we end up rejecting most arguments without actually evaluating them. This should be no cause for guilt. I strongly suspect that the average blog reader encounters far more arguments per day than Aristotle or Descartes did in their prime. In modernity the possible substrates for arguments are much greater, as are the channels by which we can receive them. This is why instead of evaluating and rejecting arguments, we filter them, i.e. ignore them. Sometimes we do this by calling them "ridiculous".

This might not be so dangerous if we were able to keep accurate labels in our mental catalog, but chances are, if you filtered an argument last month and it comes up again, you won't remember that you provisionally rejected it without actually evaluating it, you'll remember that you thought it was "ridiculous". It would be nice if we at least had a cognitive junk mail pile for those arguments. Therefore, knowing whether you've filtered or legitimately rejected an argument, and what your filtering system is, are very important.

To help us we use heuristics, which are usually a social network-influenced way of approximating truth values. "I don't have time or background to think through argument ABC I just encountered. But this is the first time I'm hearing it, and if such a profound argument were true, I would have heard of it already, or experts would be discussing it prominently in the media." Or, "A moral authority I respect has not heard of this or actively rejects it. Therefore, it is probably wrong." Or even, "I mistrust this person, or this person is trying to get me to buy something/vote for them/sleep with them, therefore this thing they told me is likely false." These are not bad ways to make your argument filtration more accurate, but again we forget which are provisional rejections based on "My brother told me it's hogwash" and which are full critical rejections.

Furthermore, if we use these social weighting methods, then the population dynamics of the spread of an argument become very important, and of course in most cases the spread is related much more to claimed relevance than it is to the merits of that argument. Some of these heuristics do seem to improve our chances of "buying" valid arguments: whether the source is secure enough to welcome critical approaches to the argument; the other positions the source holds, especially if they are normally hostile to the position to which the argument leads; and being repeatedly exposed to the argument. That is, "Everyone's talking about it, so it must be meaningful or useful, and besides I don't want to look stupid by not having considered it."

Talk is cheap, and arguments are vulnerable to a cheap-signaling-type exploitation, namely the argument's superficial relevance to the argument-hearer. If we want our arguments heard, we don't work on the logic, we work on the apparent relevance. (In most circles. Most humans are not graduate students in philosophy.) You're not very likely to spend your finite efforts parsing arguments that don't relate with high probability to anything in your current or future experience. But when someone tells you, a twenty-first century technology user, that "cell phone use causes brain cancer", it might be a good idea to actively pursue that line of reasoning to be sure it's false. But we muddy the waters because we all put relevant premises or conclusions in our arguments to get attention for them. Absent any source-weighting, and as long as the argument isn't "ridiculous" (more on what this means later), you're inclined to listen.

This is all to say: we want to spend as large a fraction of our attention as possible evaluating arguments in Category-B, but until we spend the time we don't know if those arguments actually belong to A (and most probably will). We don't care enough about arguments in C or D to decide on their validity because they don't seem to relate to anything that makes a difference to us, so we throw them into the argument spam folder. That is, even if we can't tell without deliberation whether arguments are valid (right column), we can usually tell at first glance whether they're relevant (upper row),

A "ridiculous" argument is therefore one which a) claims to be relevant, b) makes an argument which, if accepted, would require the audience to substantially update their model of the world, and c) which the audience therefore rejects without evaluating. An argument that is irrelevant can't be ridiculous: you might hear an airtight, clearly communicated argument that Genghis Khan was ambidextrous, and though it sounds reasonable, you probably don't care enough to worry about it or actively call it "ridiculous" unless you're a historian of medieval Asia. Of course we do save a lot of time here, because the majority of arguments making demands on our attention by claiming relevance are neither relevant nor valid.

So what properties make us likely to call an argument ridiculous, i.e. subject to dismissal despite claimed relevance and despite not being evaluated for validity? For now I'll stick to reasons that rejectors of ridiculous would themselves report.

Extreme implications - any argument involving a conclusion that an object can exist, or an event can occur, of a magnitude or quality unobserved in the hearer's life or the hearer's account of history. This is especially true for outcomes that are very pleasant, very unpleasant (as with the Doomsday Argument), or very strange.

Novel or strange relationships - arguments that entities in what seem to the audience to be completely separate categories are in fact related.

Arguments that require a substantial change in behavior - unsurprisingly.

Contradiction of immediately perceivable reality - also unsurprisingly.

Contradiction of currently held beliefs - perhaps most unsurprisingly.

Note that argument structure or source are not on this list. Once we deem an argument ridiculous we may resort to picking on the structure or source for further validation, but this isn't critical thinking, and these characteristics do not trigger the initial labeling of ridiculous.

Readers may notice the similarity of the relevance vs validity table to the urgent/not urgent, important/unimportant productivity table. We tend to spend too much time doing urgent but unimportant things (in corporatese, "putting out fires"), and not enough doing not-urgent but important things. The equivalent mistakes in argument filtering are that we spend too much time thinking about A-arguments (relevant/invalid) so we overcompensate by throwing out any argument which would make a dent in our belief network (some of which are certainly true!), and there are likely D arguments (not clearly relevant, valid) which actually might affect us. These are the rhetoric-parsing consequences of our limits in correlating beliefs, as well the human tendency to epistemological homeostasis, our strong tendency to preserve the status quo in our worldview and avoid updating our beliefs.


* * *

Language allows us to adopt beliefs about phenomena and relationships that we have not directly observed. As there are more humans communicating with each other through more channels, the amount of propositions we are exposed to will increase, but our cognitive bandwidth will not. The need for some argument filtration is unavoidable. Consequently, we use shortcuts to avoid fully evaluating every argument we hear: without evaluating them for coherence and validity, we reject arguments that are not relevant and we reject arguments that conflict with what we believe we know to be true (these we call "ridiculous"). However, the danger is that in both cases we do not cognitively categorize these beliefs as provisionally rejected, feeling that in fact the beliefs were positively refuted.