Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quotes from "The Social Leap"

These are the lines from William von Hippel in his book “The Social Leap” that I found to be incisive and insightful. “The ability to kill at a distance is the single most important invention in the history of warfare, because weaker individuals can attack stronger individuals from a position of superior numbers and relative safety.” “As if division of labor were not enough, Homo erectus then sealed the deal with the single most important innovation in human history: the control of fire.” “Long before the invention of writing (which is only about five thousand years old), human culture had become cumulative by virtue of our oral storytelling traditions .” “When we weigh up the costs and benefits, we see that farming afforded our ancestors some assurances against starvation, but at the cost of various new illnesses, reduced stature and longevity, excruciating halitosis, and often a far longer working day. The end result was that early farmers worked harder to achieve a worse life than ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Upside of Disaster

In the previous post , I talked about the tactics rational optimists use to deal with uncertainty: explore and exploit. There are situations where an utter disaster and the resulting uncertainty can change the history for the better. An amazing example is the story of human evolution from chimp-like apes. Here's a brief review of the story told by William von Hippel in “ The Social Leap .” These apes lived in the rainforests of eastern Africa, around 6 million years ago. They ruled the canopy. But then disaster struck. Eastern Africa was tearing away from the rest of the continent, due to plate tectonics. The climate changed. The rainforests disappeared. These apes had to adjust to living in the savannah, at the mercy of great predators. Humans reacted to this disaster by innovating and inventing. Human distinctions — from bipedalism, persistence hunting, to the use of language and tools and our social structure — ultimately are the results of that disaster. They learned to be grea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pessimists and Optimists

I discussed before a role of dopamine for motivation and reward-seeking. I want to highlight a paper by  Colin G. DeYoung that tries to establish "a  unifying theory of the role of dopamine in personality."  One of the interesting point that Dr. DeYoung highlights is that " what is uncertain or unpredicted is unique as a class of stimuli in being simultaneously threatening and promising ." The promising nature of uncertainty explains why people like gambling so much. So what do people do when faced with uncertainty, what do people do? They do what every organism is hardwired to do: “… the organism should have two competing innate responses to an unpredicted event— caution and exploration …” I think this is where pessimists (caution) distinguish themselves from optimists (exploration). Pessimists routinely lack the skill to be lucky . Here's DeYoung's overarching theory: “the general function of dopamine is to promote exploration , by facilitating engage...
Post a Comment
Read more