The Backfire Effect

You think your beliefs are informed by facts. Yet, research is demonstrating facts couldn't matter less...

Science and fiction once imagined the future in which you now live. Books and films and graphic novels of yore featured cyberpunks surfing data streams and personal communicators joining a chorus of beeps and tones all around you. Short stories and late-night pocket-protected gabfests portended a time when the combined knowledge and artistic output of your entire species would be instantly available at your command, and billions of human lives would be connected and visible to all who wished to be seen.
So, here you are, in the future surrounded by computers which can deliver to you just about every fact humans know, the instructions for any task, the steps to any skill, the explanation for every single thing your species has figured out so far. This once imaginary place is now your daily life.
So, if the future we were promised is now here, why isn’t it the ultimate triumph of science and reason? Why don’t you live in a social and political technotopia, an empirical nirvana, an Asgard of analytical thought minus the jumpsuits and neon headbands where the truth is known to all?
Among the many biases and delusions in between you and your microprocessor-rich, skinny-jeaned Arcadia is a great big psychological beast called the backfire effect. It’s always been there, meddling with the way you and your ancestors understood the world, but the Internet unchained its potential, elevated its expression, and you’ve been none the wiser for years.
...
The backfire effect is constantly shaping your beliefs and memory, keeping you consistently leaning one way or the other through a process psychologists call biased assimilation. Decades of research into a variety of cognitive biases shows you tend to see the world through thick, horn-rimmed glasses forged of belief and smudged with attitudes and ideologies. When scientists had people watch Bob Dole debate Bill Clinton in 1996, they found supporters before the debate tended to believe their preferred candidate won. In 2000, when psychologists studied Clinton lovers and haters throughout the Lewinsky scandal, they found Clinton lovers tended to see Lewinsky as an untrustworthy homewrecker and found it difficult to believe Clinton lied under oath. The haters, of course, felt quite the opposite. Flash forward to 2011, and you have Fox News and MSNBC battling for cable journalism territory, both promising a viewpoint which will never challenge the beliefs of a certain portion of the audience. Biased assimilation guaranteed.

The Backfire Effect

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

Confident Idiots

From PSMag: 

"To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
...
An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq). As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.)

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Superstition and Myth: A Bias of Narrative

Go Ahead. Try To Explain This. 

While setting up the Survivorship Bias post, I got to thinking about all of the biases that play into such ubiquitous curiosities like superstition, astrology, etc.

Unfortunately, though these subjects fall square in the middle of Modern Mythology's subject-matter, they also deserve ample time and attention. An entire book could be written on the subject of the cognitive biases at play in the 23 Enigma, Astrology, or the sense one may have of being cursed or attacked by magicians. These things refer to actual events, but our need for narrative and the cognitive biases produced drive us to go a little crazy in trying to explain away those events. These narratives that we build become re-enforced as they are shared by others, and further re-enforced in ourselves, as these little narratives turn into full-blown myths.

We might call these mythic reflexes mythic biases, to contrast them to the more commonly known cognitive bias. The two share much in common, and may have some amount of overlap.

A few of these biases:

• Friendly (or Hostile) World Mythic Bias
• Whatever You Look For Is Everywhere Mythic Bias
• Happy Endings Mythic Bias
• If It Happened Once... Mythic Bias (A form of Confirmation Bias)

In fact, all myths can present a sort of bias, if we integrate them enough with our lives that we expect to see them elsewhere. 

I hope to deal with this in more detail. So we will focus on this subject a bit more in coming posts.

First, it'd be worthwhile to refresh ourselves on the narrative tendency that was implied in the most popular page on this site, "What Is A Modern Myth?"

We will be looking at our need for Happy Endings on Tuesday. After that I hope to continue to look at some of the others.

In the interim, check out the You're Not So Smart blog, dedicated to the various cognitive and narrative/mythic biases at play in our understanding of the world.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Serious Wonder Interview

A rather peculiar 2 part interview I had with the popular if offbeat Serious Wonder podcast. Black holes, the myths of science, the shadow people, aliens, death, transhumanism, and the future.

Episode 37

Note: the site was experiencing server outage. It seems to be back online again.

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Magical thinking: mythologizing our daily lives

(This is a follow up to my post on Magical Thinking.) 

The meaning-attribution process is primarily automatic or subconscious, but also not entirely outside our influence. Meaning isn't attributed consciously. Yet, at some point, on some level, we have to choose what the pieces of our personal history mean. There are many ways that this plays into our lives. In cases of clinical depression, for instance, there is some evidence that the thought processes that produce depression are habitual. It is likely, if not absolutely certain, that at some point the "pathways" were conscious, or at least they lay closer to the surface, like young roots that have yet to fully embed themselves in anything other than topsoil.

Musing on Psychedelics

DRUGS.

Just trying to get your attention.

While many people extol the virtues of psychedelics in many of the circles I've run in, mostly in opposition to the parroted rhetoric of the mainstream culture, I think it's simply meaningless to propose that a substance is inherently good or bad. The statement doesn't even make sense. Psychotropic chemicals have a variety of effects, most of which are not really understood, on a nervous system and consciousness that also exists more in the shadows than the light. The question of their use is whether exploring these uncharted waters is worth more than the risk. What could be a more American pursuit than blindly using a little of that Manifest Destiny machismo and plunging forward?

(Of course, that's a myth of America that's mostly been replaced by another one. The modern one has more to do with various overreactions to fear.)

Oh well. On my way home from the farmer's market today I found myself mulling over this, and thinking back on the discussion about this topic the Gen Hex authors had at Alex Grey's CoSM (recording here if you want to check it out). And as my thought process leapfrogged around, as it does... it occurred to me that the actual lesson provided by these chemicals seems to be relatively simple. It's the same basic lesson you see in the Bardo-- let go. Oh, hey look, the wall is bleeding. Let go. I'm 50 and my life is a wreck. Let go. That hawk-headed God has giant tits and it's starting to unnerve me. If you hold on, it can become a demon, but if you let go, it becomes bliss.

And once you really get that, you simply don't need them anymore. Though you can get to the same place by doing yoga all day. Sure, you'll lose it all the time and get caught up in God-knows-what-thing that won't matter in 100 years anyway. You'll do that because you're human and that's part of the experience of being alive. But in the back of your mind now, you have that spot you can fall back to, that place where you learned you can fall back from anything and observe a sensation from the outside. And if you think that sounds like a defense mechanism we all (maybe) heard about in Psych 101, that's because it probably is. Like all defense mechanisms, dissociation is only pathological when it is out of control. Otherwise, it's one of many tools.

Chew on it and let me know what you're left with. I'm going to make some tea.

(By the way- For a modern adaptation of some of the ideas in the Bardo, I suggest Jacob's Ladder. Spoiler alert: the whole movie is the process of him dying, it's all internal mythology.)

Scientists perfect memory-erasing

US researchers said they are able to selectively erase memories from mice in a laboratory, raising hopes human memory afflictions like post-traumatic stress syndrome can one day be cured.

"Targeted memory erasure is no longer limited to the realm of science fiction," the research team headed by Joe Tsien, from the Brain and Behaviour Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, said in the new issue of Cell Press magazine.

(News.com.au story.)

Great. One more things for schizophrenics to freak out about. I'm totally investing in aluminum foil.

Immanence of Myth, early sample (PDF)

"The following are in-progress chapters for an upcoming work The Immanence of Myth, which picks up and expands on some of the ideas first presented in "Living The Myth" in Generation Hex. This will be an exploration of myth in its function as intermediary between human and world (represented as language, music, sculpture, or any other form of expression), and how the myth-making process underlies all of the beliefs that we hold about the world, no matter how logically consistent they are. Though it is my general preference to simply know this, and explore the creation of myths in different media, I've been feeling lately that an expression of those underpinnings may be insightful, even useful for others. The book will be co-authored with Rowan Tepper, M.A. though the following was written by myself. Please forgive typos, structural inconsistencies and the like, as this book is still in production."

PDF now available.

Sneak Peek: Immanence of Myth

A peek under the hood as I dive into my first full-length non-fiction work. (The book will be co-authored with Rowan Tepper, M.A. though the present first drafts on Key64 were written by myself.)

Though it's explained in this passage, this will be an exploration of myth in its function as intermediary between human and world (represented as language, music, sculpture, or any other form of expression), and how the myth-making process underlies all of the beliefs that we hold about the world, no matter how logically consistent they are. Though it is my general preference to simply know this, and explore the creation of myths in different media, I've been feeling lately that an expression of those underpinnings may be insightful, even useful for others.

Further discussion of myth and culture would be useless or even misleading without an exploration of the various elements that build up this "mythic tapestry," through a philosophical rather than historical exploration of these elements. It is worth noting that many works already exist which provide a systematic philosophical analysis of the ideological history and function of myth.1 (F.N. 1 Included prominently in this list are Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Joseph Campbell's Masks of God I-IV, Theodore Adorno and Max Herkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment, Eliade's many works especially Myth and Reality and Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. This is not to say that the postulates or conclusions provided in these works are congruent with one another, or with our own thesis; nevertheless all of them contributed to bringing myth out of the realm of fanciful poetic naturalism.) Though in various ways we are indebted to these works, our ultimate mission is not to explore what myth has been, except inasmuch as that can shed light on what its function is at present, nor is it to merely further the thesis of these works. Rather, it is our aim to continue a movement already well underway, namely, the re-legitimization of myth and myth-making as one of the principle, if not the principle, form of human representation.

We are nowhere with this word "myth" until we can determine what its personal and cultural function is, in total, and where the points overlap between these various elements. In other words, we need to build a map of a cognitive terrain that is not necessarily a “where” or a “when,” and so the rest of this work is dedicated towards exploring what one might call the ideological topology of myth.

Read first draft excerpts on Key64.net.