#bad cognition

[mentalisttraceur]

Honestly the social media aspect of this site is harmful for me.

If I was perfectly able to

approach this as a place to share my perspective and then

spend a reasonable budget of my time and energy to reply to good engagement, but

not feel compelled to sink time and energy into correcting or mitigating bad cognition or replying to bad engagement,

then I could have a healthy relationship with the social media aspects of a blogging site.

But as-is, often when I come here I feel compelled to check notes on what I posted previously, and then I feel compelled to reply to those notes or to something on the blogs of the people who left those notes.

I end up rewarding bad engagement with attention, and also spending a lot of time on random spur-of-the-moment things.

Even this post is an example of this problem. I didn't come here with a plan or vision for a post like this. This does not fit into my bigger-picture goals. I came here for something that could've been taken care of in five seconds, and the thoughts of this post and the desire to post it are just a reaction to how I ended up spending a substantial chunk of my time here.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Remember: The burning sensation is part of the process.

[pixierainbows]

Pixie have good bad day, both.

went to plant store today with guardian Librarian ! Pixie really happy get time with guardian Librarian ! and ! also really like go to plant store

Pixie get pretty pretty flower plants !!! and a very happy tomato plant !!!

and ! Pixie look very carefully for to get good plants for guardian Wizard too , who could not go plant store because guardian Wizard have work hard

too late for pictures today but will get pictures later

but also . stranger person just walk right up to Sunshine and petted Sunshine and make Pixie sick …

but is good example of Pixies disabled brain , how Pixie brain move much much too slow to stop people and not can just TELL people afterwards either , Pixie nonverbal, not can speak at all .

guardian Librarian stop other stranger person from doing same .

Pixie very grateful when guardians protect Pixie and Sunshine

and but ... happy new baby plants for play with !!!

[mentalisttraceur]

You're wrong and I don't like that! But seriously though:

TL;DR heuristic: give every wrongness a presumption of more harmfulness than you can see.

I fully agree with OP as practical on-the-ground advice. This perspective will help you be effective. It also, I suspect, correlates strongly to better mental health.

But the problem I have is that you are severely under-valuing how reliably stochastically harmful being wrong can be, and how much preventative/corrective impact a general opposition to wrongness can have if correctly directed. Though full disclosure, I do err too much the other way, so take the severity/emphaticness of my words with a grain of salt.

You cannot isolate objective errors of facts and reasoning to the point that they stop having significant probability of real harmful consequences.

Sound logic and true beliefs are profoundly interlocking. When you have enough of those two things, you are so thoroughly, game-changingly empowered to make your life better, that the mere absence of that is a serious harm (both to the wrong person, which is already bad enough life damage to be worth fighting for if you care about them, but also to anyone they have sufficiently strong influence on, especially any children who are still taking authoritatively presented statements as True and Right and carving their first moral intuitions with emotional reactions to how others react to them and treat them).

Every confidently held error can only exist by either being isolated to the point of not affecting behavior and externally consequential thought, or by warping your system of beliefs and reasoning to accommodate it (I like to call the generalization of this idea "logic bending", a more neutral term since technically it goes both ways: introducing more true beliefs and sound conclusions, or other psychological rewards for valid reasoning, can bend a warped sense of logic into closer alignment with sound logic).

Meanwhile, the life-improving and empowering benefits of being systematically righter only really start to snowball when your system of beliefs and reasoning has grown very comprehensive, allowing you to start getting those efficiency gains where many seemingly disparate things start to fold into elegantly unifying principles which in turn enables you to cover more ground in more problem spaces with less thought, less special-cases habitualized into the wetware of your brain, and less bits of knowledge... Such systems would struggle to fit much error without losing too much of the unifyingly-simplifying-yet-still-reliably-correct shape they need to stay as effective.

Also, errors are subject to memetic and cognetic evolution. Some errors are best thought of as literal parasites, evolved to virally spread themselves and co-opt their host humans into spreading them (in symbiosis with other errors, because errors cannot avoid noticable contradiction with the real-world without cancelling out their effects in the most obvious cases - which crucially is not the same thing as the most ethically important cases).

Anyway, if your criteria is just "observably ok results", you're necessarily going to underestimate the harm potential, because you'll be limited to just the concrete harms within your ability to see or within the ability of people around you to explain in a way that's compelling to you. When you treat every error as what it is - a reproducing landmine which will blow up into real harm when given the right circumstances - your estimate of harm probability distribution over possibilities in the absence of full comprehensive observation and analysis is going to be more accurate.

P.S. I spent most of my conscious life being able to observe the not-ok results of various ways people were wrong in their heads, but it would take literally 15-20 years for me to gain the ability to translate that shape of wrongness, hurt/harm, and causal relationship between them into words that others reliably understood and which I could at least in principle defend against most dismissals/rationalizations/etc. (Moving countries as a kid probably added a couple years to that 15-20; having access to the internet, English, and the results of modern psychology probably shaved off a decade or four.) At the latest by my mid teens, I even had an intuitive grasp of "cognetic opening" as an abstraction of the commonality between a lot of little wrongs in the mind with material ethical consequences that basically everyone infuriatingly blindly thought harmless. I struggled to put it into words for at least a decade to get anyone else to see it, even though I thought with it fluently. And it is overwhelmingly the pattern in my life that when I react to some cognition as bad, I can't think of a concrete example that the person finds compelling, but inevitably they or someone else eventually has something go worse because of it.

Hmm. Right, ok, so, there's two grounds on which you can evaluate an "ideology".

One ground is like, its abstract correctness. Are its factual claims right? Are its ethical claims agreeable to you?

This is how you should evaluate your own belief system. Being correct is very useful, so it's in your interest to try to be correct.

The other way you can evaluate an ideology is like... does it produce generally ok policies? What are its effects?

This is a lower bar. An ideology which is factually and ethically correct (by your standards) will necessarily produce ok effects (by your standards) when you believe it. Uh actually this probably isn't strictly true but it's true enough.

Anyway, it's the second criterion that you should use to evaluate other people's belief systems, I contend, unless you know them really well and know them to be amenable to certain kinds of rational debate.

Why?

Because asking that everyone be actually correct is far too much. That will never happen. It's a pipe dream. You're going to have to get used to living in a world full of people you think are wrong about shit. On the other hand, asking that everyone (or most people, or everyone in power, or whatever) believe stuff that leads to not-too-heinous consequences is a more reasonable goal. It's something I can get behind.

"This ideology produces observably ok results, but it's Wrong" is not a complaint I find very sympathetic. Ok, it's Wrong. So don't believe it and move on.

I think this follows from my "leave other people be unless you really have to" moral intuition. A guy believing a wrong thing is not enough to make your frustration at him sympathetic to me. I mean in a serious context, not just in terms of shooting the shit and complaining online. It's not enough. The guy needs to actually be doing something problematic. Otherwise "he's wrong and I don't like that" doesn't compel me.

[youaskedfurret]

The lack of media literacy in the baldurs gate fandom is astounding. There's a good ending for Astarion and a bad ending for him and people keep picking the bad ending for him and being shocked when he's mean to them LMAO.

[simcardiac-arrested]

you were anything but.

[columboscreens]

[jewreallythinkthat]

The insanity of what I've just read in the antisemitism tag. People talking about how the one Jewish state, Israel, must be destroyed and is evil, but also "antisemitism is evil" in the same sentence is mind-blowing.

I mean, I guess if they're tagging it as hastag antisemitism, they are self aware right? Right??

[pickingupmymercedes]

There's some underlying tone to all these Toto's interviews that are making my head hot but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Because riddle me why in the past week we've had two very different moments where his own words are contradictory to what he is saying himself (and I'm not talking years back I'm talking things he's also saying in those same interviews)

'shelf life' - is that how you publicly talk about a so called friend? and even if the friend card was pr, how does that make him, and the brand he represents, look with him summing up losing their 6x champion to worries on his 'cognitive sharpness', when the said driver has the second best reaction time on the grid and was third in the last wdc, behind only the two cars that won 22/23 races in the season.

Lewis being 'in a ok place' after 21' (when people close to him have stated otherwise, Lewis himself has stated otherwise) and how Toto has heard those things being said and still stands by his perception (he could easily just say he might've thought Lewis was ok back then but learned latter on it wasn't the case)

Leaving Lewis to shoulder criticism on his craft by himself (even when he was their testing guine pig) but still agrees that he's almost happy Lewis comes and shoulders responsibility publicly because it takes the pressure off the team. The team with the 'no blame culture'. The team that can't get this regs right 3 years into when they were introduced (mind you, the only team, openly and proudly, stating they're using the last 6 races 'to test for the next season')

[mentalisttraceur]

Mutually Assured Blocking

I've decided I will just counter-block by default now. I'm done giving blockers exactly the consideration and kindness they didn't give me.

If you're someone who has a history with me, especially if you are positive towards me or "on my side" and I remember that, I am likely to make an exception. Or if I feel very compassionate about it, I might make an exception.

But otherwise, if I notice that you've blocked me, I will probably immediately block you back.

Of course, you should block me if you want! Make your online experience better for you. I'll even take it on board as genuine criticism of my behavior or personality if I find out!

But you don't get the option to talk to me if I cannot talk back. You don't get to use my posts as soapboxes if I don't get to use yours. Blocking is an asymmetric act and I'm done altruistically gifting you that asymmetry. If being blocked by you offends me or evidences bad cognition, I'm going to make my online experience better for me.

[likeabxrdinflight]

tired of early 20-somethings acting like harry potter was never good or had no value in its day like shut the fuck up half of you weren't even there when it peaked

[memedreamm]

the amount of zionists that are into dropout content is funny but not surprising bc i feel like the dropout audience is rlly attractive to weird tumblr liberal zionists. its just very funny to see them get angry in the dropout tag that this company does not support them. lmao.

[mxtxfanatic]

Ngl, I’m actually pretty uncomfortable reading my old posts defending the goodness of the common people and their right to defend themselves—as persecuted groups or as individuals—from hierarchical tyranny, given how easily in this current irl moment a not-insignificant amount of people have fallen into supporting an active genocide, because I cannot separate this from how much pushback I got (and still sometimes get) for being consistent in my politics

[stuckinapril]

Shadowed a very pissed off neurologist today. It was so hot

[pixierainbows]

what's your favorite part of animal crossing?

Everybody like Pixie and want is friends with Pixie ! is very very not-like in-person people who mostly not like pixie .

And ! Pixie can play with no help ! most other games get too complicated for Pixie to play alone …

[moonshynecybin]

the BEST thing about the marc/pecco/vale toxic triangle of psychodrama, public relations, and gentlemen's sporting rivalry is that pecco could and should just text valentino to stop it. but he absolutely never ever will under any circumstances