Original Paper: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/16/3/190
How facts backfire - Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
"In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/...
The extreme cases can be found in cults where followers cling tighter to their beliefs once exposed.
A great example are the followers of Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who predicted the end of the world a few years ago, and kept re-predicting when it never came.
People's belief systems about the relative threats of terrorism and pedophiles is thus distorted by the media because the amount of time they spend watching terrorist attacks or episodes of "To Catch A Predator" is massively disproportionate to the actual level of risk posed by those kinds of things, and so especially is the emotional impact of that media.
For me, this quote was the most powerful. I strongly and immediately agreed, yet I hadn't consciously considered the idea before. I now ask myself the question, "Which ones were the important books?" Some seem obvious, but I may have a deeply rooted worldview established a long time ago that needs to be reevaluated. I may have read books that added support to that worldview, and have since forgotten from where that support came.
I'm not very well read yet, but I have a question for those of you who are. What are some methods you utilize to remember which books are the important ones?
Edit: The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753656 contains a great idea. I agree that taking notes and writing a journal can be great solutions, but I don't often read the notes and entries I've written. A personal wiki that is searchable and contains references seems very interesting.
When I look back, I find that most of the things I've learned that I enjoyed the most, am the most proud of, or have been most helpful, have in fact been accidental, and not a result of planning. I found so-and-so article then downloaded so-and-so package, experimented with it and realized it could benefit a certain project I was working on. Sorta like going down a Wikipedia hyperlink rabbit hole -- very in the moment, just chasing your will and not questioning yourself, doing simply what feels right.
Look back at your bookshelf and pick what feels right. If you start reading it and it feels wrong, then put it back. Being told what to read is annoying, so why would you do that to yourself? Do what you're doing when you playing music improvisationally, but with your life instead.
I'm not certain if this question was meant for me directly. If it was rhetorical, I apologize for misunderstanding and answering.
I prefer not to define "important" in this context to avoid excluding any definitions subjective to those who may respond to my question. That way, I may learn both what makes a book important to someone and tips on remembering which were important.
Edit: Now that I know the question was intended for me, I'll provide a little more depth to my answer.
The first thought I had when considering what makes a book important is how strongly it resonated within me, and the intensity of my emotions when reflecting upon what I've learned or how my perspective changed shortly after reading it. I know those stronger emotions may derive from a bias I had at one point in my life, and may no longer have.
Therefore, I can't help but think my definition is wrong because it's relative to the period in my life which I read the book. So some books that were important before may not be now. That's why I was curious to learn others' definitions of "important" books, and how to identify them for rereading.
The longer it has been since you checked, the further off the number will be.
The need to reread and reconsider books, ideas, etc. is not to check if the facts have changed, but to make sure you didn't miss a point because of lack of knowledge or bias.
For example (on a very basic level), I find that if I reread a book on a programming language after using it for some time I notice things which I missed on a previous reading or wasn't able to appreciate due to lack of familiarity with the language. The same can apply to history - or any other study - where one only appreciates certain details after understanding the larger picture and surrounding events.
For this reason there lies an advantage in both rereading the same book (immediately or after some time) by itself and reading after studying more on the topic from other sources.
And then, when you finally accept that you don't grasp it and start calculating with a formal growth rate, the growth rate suddenly changes.
[1] Nobody does. Some people know they don't, some are completely naive, the others lie to themselves. The first group have a chance of dealing correctly with it.
Edit: parent comment was saying it's so much easier to with work with inexperienced people, and that an experienced "corporate" dev couldn't make Facebook if all the screens were given to them.
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...
My explanation is linked because I don't want to spoil the episode. (Also spoils 15 Million Merits.) http://paste.lisp.org/display/144706
I think that the efficiency of technology shown in TV shows and movies shouldn't be assumed to imply something about the world therein, unless it's explicitly called out in the work itself. The writers are much more likely to have gone with something because it sounded cool than because there was a sound technological reason for it. The bit in the matrix where someone refers to someone else as "copper-top" is an example, I think.
This is what the episode all the more disturbing to me. This would be the far-west's answer to a demand for less retribution-oriented prison designs, like a virus becoming less deadly so that it can infect more people. (How many on Hacker News would tout the virtues of free services as "you only have to watch ads, you're not forced to buy anything"?) You have "free choice", but it is only within a heavily curated model of illusory flavors; yet the vast majority of prisoners in this system are content, even euphoric, within it.
As Eddie Izzard put it:
> I know a lot of people who'd love to be under house arrest! They bring you your food... "Just stay here? Oh, all right. (laconically) Have you got any videos?" You know, you just sit there all day...
It's possible that the bikes are used to generate electricity, but that would be very inefficient and, also, not a very creative interpretation. Maybe they're part of a fitness experiment - the participants have an exercise regiment that they keep and are being monitored for the effects the excercise has on them. In return, they are provided with lodgings and food. After all, people have been paid for weirder things in modern times. I can think of a few more scenarios where the bikes are a part of some data gathering/social experiment thing.
Overall, I think, Black Mirror has a trait that distinguishes good fiction from bad - it manages in each episode to create a world that is abstract and unfamiliar enough to play by its own rules, but at the same time, allows parrallels to be drawn between the fictional world and our reality.
Ted Chiang is always worth reading. I think he captures the nuances of the impact of technology better than any other writer I've read.
I have, on a few occasions, found myself relating some 'fact' or 'story' and realized immediately that it was likely an urban legend. Both times, the detector was right, and a quick search cleared it up.
I wonder if there is a good way to intentionally 'paw through' your repository on purposes, and apply your life experience to them on purpose.
The best people adapt to new information, no matter their age.
But only if you truly realise that you are not infallible, can you learn new things, and continue to grow.
Also, quotes are a good way of appearing wise.
"The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me. … It is no secret that the past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority. I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity." Janet Yellen
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/i-dont-want...
The method of loci, for building/encoding hierarchical "memory palaces", works well for remembering key ideas or facts and building upon them to compose your models. Also, using software like "The Brain" [1] and other mind mapping tools are useful aids for organizing information so you can easily go back to remember.
It seems as if becoming proficient at something indeed involves moving more knowledge into intuition, same as how you had to purposely look at the rear view mirror and watch cars closely as you learned to drive but now it becomes something of intuition. You had to pay special care to syntax and to grammar initially, but now all of that is habit and you can concentrate on the 'design' of a program, or the 'characters' and 'themes' in a piece of literature.
What if these 'logical arguments' we make for things are simply retrofitted justifications on top of our feelings? Pro-choice 'feels right,' but of course that won't fly in court and so I'll make up some argument for it, becoming disingenuous thus not just to others but even to myself, distancing myself from who I am and causing some amount of strife within. I hope to think I am a perfect rational thinker, but am I really? I am driven by drives, by passions. Maybe I should become aware of this and proceed, acknowledge the person inside me rather than attempt to destroy it with reason. Maybe I should just stop and listen and stop trying to rationalize, both to others and to myself, stop thinking, open my eyes and see life in HD.
"Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide.
Why?
Simply because the decidable questions are already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked, and by the choice of rules of how to connect what we call "the question" with what we may take for an "answer." In some cases it may go fast, in others it may take a long, long time, but ultimately we will arrive, after a sequence of compelling logical steps, at an irrefutable answer: a definite Yes, or a definite No.
But we are under no compulsion, not even under that of logic, when we decide upon in principle undecidable questions. There is no external necessity that forces us to answer such questions one way or another. We are free! The complement to necessity is not chance, it is choice! We can choose who we wish to become when we have decided on in principle undecidable questions.
This is the good news, American journalists would say. Now comes the bad news.
With this freedom of choice we are now responsible for whatever we choose! For some this freedom of choice is a gift from heaven. For others such responsibility is an unbearable burden: How can one escape it? How can one avoid it? How can one pass it on to somebody else?"
The main problem with this approach (I'll call it the Cartesian approach because it was most famously used by Descartes) is that human beings are less than 100% reliable at logical reasoning. If you make an error anywhere in your chain of reasoning, your conclusions are going to be off and there's not going to be any way to check them. It's just like writing 10,000 lines of code without ever actually compiling it, let alone testing it. You also develop a sort of foolish confidence about the correctness of your own beliefs, which makes it even easier to be wrong. If you make enough wrong turns, you become Ayn Rand.
That's why empiricism is so good. It's not that empiricists don't make mistakes too, but when they do, they find that they are surprised by concrete facts that they observe, and know when to go back and reevaluate.
Another helpful trick is to understand that there are degrees between 0% and 100% confidence. I can entertain an proposition as being possible or likely rather than simply true or false based on the recognition that I have incomplete information. If you tried to take this approach you couldn't derive anything logically because you would just have a multitude of possibilities in front of you. Formal logic only works with statements that are 100% true. Otherwise you're stuck with Bayesian reasoning, which is even more mentally taxing to derive information from.
(Or, as an alternative response)
Please derive for me, from "first principles", why it is imperative to build one's mental model from first principles.
That sounds... time consuming.
> "Philosophizing in midstream"
Since you're picking axioms/first principles, isn't it all philosophizing in midstream to one degree or another?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_t...
This is such a common occurrence in board gaming that it's frequently abbreviated as just "AP".
(Spoiler alert don't read till the 26th)
Do you believe in Santa? I believe in Santa. Oh how nice you also believe in Santa. Aren't we all happy members of our club? It would be so antisocial for someone to say Santa doesn't exist, because then how would we tell who is in our club? This is the best club ever. Santa? Who's that? We just talk about him to pledge allegiance to each other, we don't actually care about fat dudes in red suits.
Of course, it's one of the earliest results in psychology that social conformity has an influence on people's beliefs, even on readily accessible questions like whether line A is longer or shorter than line B. To me, if somebody professes a belief, acts on that belief, and works to convince others of that belief, then they effectively hold that belief.
Making an erroneous assumption or a mistake can mean that a particular sentiment is expressed "incorrectly", but that doesn't mean it's existence is useless. It may prove to be very useful eventually.
The idea that mental models can be incorrect by being compared to other mental models is a strange concept to me. It requires assumptions that can not be proven in their entirety.
Even if accidentally.
Not only disconnect: What I've read of psychological studies indicate the mind amplifies those facts that support it's current model of the world and actively ignores those that do not.
Which goes a long way to explain why it's nearly pointless to argue with fanatics of one kind or another.
There are always areas where we do forget the provenance. In my case I stood up amoung friends in my thirties and announced that Ice cream was made from seaweed. After a few blank stares I remembered my father explaining to a much younger self on the beach that I did not want an ice cream - because they were made from that horrible floppy green muck. And he did not have to make a half mile trek back up the beach. Yet that "fact" and it's provenance stayed at the back of my brain for twenty years.
But even so the provenance was quickly recovered. I am not convinced we easily lose our source code. We can usually point to the module or package even if the line numbers are hazy.
But trauma does rewire us, and quickly, and is not to be discounted - I just think it is not the normal course of events.
Many times we tune out feedback that isn't congruent with our worldview and get locked in. That's why it's good to follow Paul's lead on rereading and revisiting. Sometimes it's hard to remember the anecdote or story that steers us, but finding it again allows us to question it. There was a specific retelling of a Vonnegut (of all authors) story that got me interesting in technology. Rereading the story in it's original form 20+ years later allowed me to understand the first better.
A benefit to a digital mental model is that it could be updated based on new data independent of the owner which has all kinds of (possibly disturbing) implications.
"Your program says I should now believe that it's morally acceptable to kill infants. I don't agree with its reasoning."
I think that perhaps very squishy subjects like politics are particularly vulnerable to this sort of disconnect, where a complex viewpoint is formed based on the hot topic of the day, and this viewpoint persists for years or decades even if the basis for its formation is completely forgotten.