The Attention Span. “Racehorses and Psychopaths.”

Perhaps the simplest and best definition of wisdom I’ve heard is “knowing what information is important.” This kind of knowing is not solely done in the intellect. Data is constantly being fed into your unconscious, then cross referenced against your experience.

from Karen Stenner:"All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference - the hallmarks of liberal democracy - are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and... See more

This is the difference between dissonance and resonance. When head and body are aligned or conflicted. As in the famous example of George Soros and his back pain, bodily sensation is a key indicator of unconscious dissonance; of when your intellect is missing something important from the outside world. His back hurt when his portfolio was positione... See more

Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds.

As the author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, puts it: “you could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

Galef’s Scout Mindset sets out to remove information to provide a clearer view of the territory. Soldier Mindset just adds more confirmations to make the map more elaborate, regardless of its accuracy.

Consciousness exists on a spectrum from pure abstraction (map) to pure engagement (territory).

The synthesis of these ideas may merely prove to be confirmation bias, but they are deeply resonant with me. And that’s the crux of the filtering process. That resonance hints at an internal alignment around values. You can intuitively detect it when you read it, when you hear it, and when you speak it. Shepherd wonders if what we hear as “eloquenc... See more

The really, really dark side here is that the stronger an abstraction, often an outright lie, the more motivating it can be for tribal behavior. The soldier metaphor is doubly-appropriate. Taken to its most horrifying extreme, war and genocide is facilitated by abstraction.