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Mental Models

How do we see the world around us?



It's easy to give in to the illusion that we see the world as it actually is. However, even rudimentary knowledge of neuroscience and behavioral psychology would tell you that it's a lie.

For one thing, our sensory inputs are limited. There are animals that can see ultraviolet radiation. You can't.

Apart from your literal sensory inputs, what you read, what you watch, who you interact with, influence your worldview. These subjective experiences make us unique, but also make us vulnerable to biases.

There are two obvious ways we perceive the world in an inaccurate (but still somewhat useful) way.

"The filter" is the part of the world even makes an impression on your brain. Just like you don't see your nose all the time, even though it's literally in front of you 24/7, we filter out enormous amount of information before us. This is a necessity. Our brains are amazing, but the world is too vast. Our sensory inputs are noisy. If you could see "the matrix", it would be simply incomprehensible.

Even the information that makes past your filter needs to be somehow fit into "the story" of your life. Two people can get the same exact information and still conclude differently. This is where confirmation bias, post hoc rationalization, political outlook, etc. tend to creep in. You see this every day on news channels. "The market dipped because of event X," etc. The truth is that it's very difficult to tease out causations in a world where almost everything is correlated. But we still need a story to anchor us, provide us a scaffold to hold new strands of knowledge.

The world is noisy and unpredictable. Let's stay honest about the limitations of our knowledge.

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