The Attention Span. “Racehorses and Psychopaths.”

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.”

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.

confirmation bias is often the difference between sounding smart and being right. And sometimes something much, much worse.

The value of information is determined by what’s discarded in the process of creating it.

How do you achieve resonance?  [Resonant quotes] or places your attention is drawn to and “sticky ideas” that you just can’t let go of are key indicators of your values. Nietzsche put it beautifully :

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.

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

Once you know exactly where you are on the map, you still need to orient yourself and move in the territory. And this is the key insight I learned from writing this piece. If you rebuild your new model based on abstractions it’s no more likely to be correct than the old one. So, you need to rebuild it in harmony with the world around you. The Taois... See more

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.