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In a controversial speech by Lee Kuan Yew who served as the Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 – 1990, he has a really great line about conviction:
“I ignore polling as a method of government. I think that shows a certain weakness of mind, an inability to chart a course. Whichever way the wind blows. Whichever way the media encourages the pe... See more
It seems to me that egos emerge in order to take care of our needs in contexts where we don’t trust the strategy of surrendering to the We. The paradox is that the presence of ego is often one of the main things in the way of the We being able to take care of our needs.
“Once the mind has accepted a plausible explanation for something, it becomes a framework for all the information that is perceived after it. We’re drawn, subconsciously, to fit and contort all the subsequent knowledge we receive into our framework, whether it fits or not. Psychologists call this “cognitive rigidity”. The facts that built an origin... See more
Attention Required! | Cloudflare
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.
thekcpgroup.com • The Attention Span. “Racehorses and Psychopaths.”
Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
Jonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Numerous psychological studies have found that we seek out information that supports our pre-existing views – and avoid information that might contradict them.
This cognitive bias can push people into more extreme ideological positions | BPS
“The Hedgehog and the Fox” by Isaiah Berlin divides the world into two types of people: hedgehogs, who are absorbed by one big idea, and foxes, who dance between many.
Democracy is inevitably messy, in part because the availability and affect heuristics that guide citizens’ beliefs and attitudes are inevitably biased, even if they generally point in the right direction. Psychology should inform the design of risk policies that combine the experts’ knowledge with the public’s emotions and intuitions.