Philosopher, University of Sussex. Tweets in personal capacity. Interested in: Philosophy, Psychology, Society. Writes at: conspicuouscognition.com/
Brighton England
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Watching the Charlie Kirk memorial, I'm struck by how extremely culturally distant I feel from this world. Everything about it feels alien - the aesthetics, symbolism, music, rituals, mythology, gurus, ideas, and norms. It feels like being exposed to the cultural and symbolic universe of a distant tribe. If I reflect on this, it occurs to me that this feeling must be symmetrical - that they must view the kind of cultural universe I inhabit as similarly alien. And in a strange way, despite opposing almost everything about this political project, this reflection makes me feel more empathy for what that project must feel like from the inside.
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Lots of academia is just people doing things that are technically impressive because it's easier to evaluate whether work is technically impressive than whether it actually contributes to our understanding of the world.
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I *hate* videos like this, designed to mock ordinary people & make them look stupid. The most obvious point is that the interviews are cherry picked from a much bigger sample but made to look as if they're representative of people’s responses. But setting that aside…(1/5)
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New essay: I argue that misinformation is often better viewed as a symptom of deep societal problems rather than their cause. When that’s true, interventions like debunking and censorship are unlikely to help – and might make things worse. (1/15)
iai.tv/articles/misinformati…
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"Everything is political" is a classic deepity. On one reading, it's true but trivial. On another, it's interesting but obviously false. These different interpretations create a misleading sense of profundity. It's Deepak Chopra but for people with PhDs in the humanities.
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Imagine a conservativism associated with traditional virtues of personal responsibility, dignity, civility, temperance, thoughtfulness, maturity, decency, and seriousness – rather than this utterly pathetic, attention-seeking 4chan Toddlerism.
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One reason for being sceptical that social psychologists can establish a reliable science of "misinformation" is that few parts of society have been associated with more influential misinformation in recent decades than social psychology.
The stereotype threat effect, once a darling of social psychology, goes down the drain in another large, pre-registered replication project. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qc… Stereotype threat refers to the fear of being judged based on negative stereotypes about the performance of a certain group one identifies with. Stereotype threat is widely studied and discussed in the psychological literature, covered in many introductory psychology textbooks, and featured in prominent court cases on the fairness of selection into academic institutions. This registered replication report describes the result of eight direct replications (total N = 1502) of a representative stereotype-threat study by Johns et al. (2005), who found that threatened women (but not men) underperform when they are confronted with a mathematics test that is presented to measure gender differences, and that this effect can be alleviated by altering test instructions.The seminal study by Johns et al. (2005) paper has been widely cited (855 times on Google Scholar and 283 times on Web of Science, as of April 25th 2024). With this registered replication report, we hope to demonstrate the value of large-scale stereotype-threat experiments. We were unable to replicate a stereotype-threat effect, neither as the interaction between the stereotype-threat conditions and gender, nor as a simple main effect among women. The average effect size we found among women was virtually null, and, thus, substantially smaller than the originally reported effect size. The current results fail to replicate the stereotype-threat effect by Johns et al. (2005), hence casting doubt on the generalizability of the effect of stereotype threat on women’s mathematics performance. Our null results are in line with the recent findings in preregistered (replication) studies. Though there are theoretical explanations imaginable, these results seems to be in line with previous notion that effects of stereotype threat as described in the published literature might have been inflated due to publication bias.
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There's some misremembering on this point, so: The lab leak hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from a lab absolutely was widely labelled "misinformation" and was widely censored.
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I wrote a short piece on why the recent panic surrounding misinformation is misguided and how the concept of rationalisation markets is superior for understanding many forms of epistemic dysfunction in political and cultural media (1/17). blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci…
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New open access paper: "The Marketplace of Rationalizations". The basic idea: Motivated reasoning is subject to a rationalization constraint: people can only convince themselves of beliefs for which they can find appropriate rationalizations. (1/16)
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
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In general, people are highly rational, intelligent, and knowledgeable *about those aspects of reality that matter to them*. Using trick questions about pointless matters of fact doesn’t illustrate their stupidity; it just shows the ignorance of people laughing at them. (5/5)
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It's tough putting together a 10-week philosophy of science course. I wanted to give a balance of traditional philosophy of science with more contemporary issues and debates, and also connect it to my own research interests. Here are the topics I landed on:
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Much of social psychology seems to be premised on the bizarre assumption that what people really care about is not real-world outcomes but the state of their own mind: self-esteem, a positive self-image, dissonance reduction, feelings of control, reducing uncertainty, etc.
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I'm teaching my philosophy of science course again this term 👇. Some brief thoughts on why Stephen Hawking was wrong about philosophy, five book recommendations for those interested in getting into philosophy of science, and the readings for my course:
conspicuouscognition.com/p/h…
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“Continental philosophy” often strikes me as a religious project based on the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts and a guru-based epistemology in which knowledge is advanced not by distributed, institutionally-scaffolded cognition but by decoding the profundities of sages.
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First, being informed about pointless abstract facts about the world is a status symbol among highly-educated exam takers that constitute society’s elite. Most people don’t care, and have way more important things going on in their lives to bother acquiring this knowledge. (2/5)
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Second, if you ask someone “Where is the Queen of England from?”, they will *reasonably* assume the interviewer is not mean-spirited & trying to trick them & make them look bad. So they probably assume (*reasonably*) that the answer can’t simply be in the question itself. (4/5)
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In complex, modern societies, ignorance and misperceptions are unsurprising. The puzzle - the fact that demands a deep explanation - is that some people hold accurate beliefs. Some thoughts: conspicuouscognition.com/p/w…
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"Conservatives are incapable of producing good art because they lack empathy". 🙃
Conservatives are incapable of producing good art because they lack empathy, which means they are incapable of creating anything which communicates to a larger audience. When they try to produce art, they only end up producing clumsy in-group signaling.
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"Meaning" is often just a euphemism for status. Your life feels meaningful when you feel liked, respected, admired, and deferred to.
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Rosa Luxemburg's insightful observation that "those who do not move do not notice their chains" applies to belief systems as well: it's only when your thoughts diverge from a dominant ideology that you notice the extreme social pressures with which it's held in place.
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New essay: To avoid the charge that the post-2016 alarmism about misinformation has been a moral panic, researchers increasingly define misinformation to include content that is true but nevertheless misleading. I argue against this move: conspicuouscognition.com/p/m… 1/16
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What explains popular delusions and the madness of crowds? In this new essay I explore one important answer: Beliefs often function as *social signals* - and people care more about projecting a positive social image than about truth. conspicuouscognition.com/p/p… Thread: (1/13)
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This week, a group of prominent misinformation researchers published a commentary in Nature 👇on misinformation and misinformation research. I disagree with their analysis and explain why here: conspicuouscognition.com/p/m…
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The bill has nothing to do with whether someone is poor or socially inconvenient. It is about whether the state should force citizens living through terrible terminal illnesses to stay alive when they don't want to. If you think it should, fine, but don't make stuff up.
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Is misinformation a dangerous virus? Are we living through an infodemic? Is there a vaccine for misinformation? In this review of Sander van der Linden's (@Sander_vdLinden) new book 'Foolproof', I argue that the answer to these questions is "no". A thread:
bostonreview.net/articles/th…
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Re-reading Appiah's review of "The Dawn of Everything". It really is one of the most devastating and beautifully written book reviews in recent years. nybooks.com/articles/2021/12…
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Cool result. It seems like lots of research in psychology is converging on a simple but important finding: people are generally persuaded by rational arguments. I've updated my own views on this matter over the past year or two. My previous work was too pessimistic.
🚨WP🚨
Conspiracy beliefs famously resist correction, right?
WRONG: We show brief convos w GPT4 reduce conspiracy beliefs by ~20pp (d~1)!
🡆Tailored AI evidence rebut specific arguments offered by believers
🡆Effect lasts 2+mo
🡆Works on entrenched beliefs
osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/xc…
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Most psychological work on human irrationality and self-deception is based on the "you can't handle the truth" model, which is greatly inferior to the "truth is often disadvantageous in social games involving persuasion, reputation management, and social signalling" model.
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There’s a tension between believing both that (a) right-wing authoritarians and neo-fascists are rising in power throughout the world and (b) it is essential to create laws that give states expansive powers to censor "disinformation".
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If you took those mocking such people and made them live their lives, they would crash and burn quickly because of how much local knowledge & understanding they lack. The mockers would seem like absolute idiots in spite of their high scores on “General Knowledge” tests. (3/5)
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The UK has experienced its worst riots in over a decade. In a new article👇, I analyse the role of online misinformation. While many blame social media and call for increased regulation and censorship, this narrative is simplistic. I make five points: 1/11
conspicuouscognition.com/p/d…
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New piece: *Misinformation is not a virus, and you cannot be vaccinated againt it*. I explain why it's misleading to conceptualise misinformation as a contagious virus, and why there isn't good evidence that can people can be "inoculated" against it. (1/5)
danwilliamsphilosophy.com/20…
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Brilliant essay on misinformation by @mnvrsngh.
- Humans are not gullible
- Beliefs are extremely complicated. People often sincerely and passionately endorse highly compartmentalised beliefs.
- Misinformation is often a symptom of deeper social problems.
newyorker.com/magazine/2024/…
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In a new article, I document how claims about a sinister "censorship industrial complex" involve preposterous exaggerations reliant on misrepresentations, omissions, low-quality reporting, smear campaigns, and conspiracy theorising. conspicuouscognition.com/p/t… (1/8)
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My 'Socially Adaptive Belief' is now online. It explores the way in which bias, irrationality, ignorance, stupidity, etc., are often winning strategies in the strange social environments we confront as intelligent status-seeking coalitional primates. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
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No single article or book is ever that great. You learn by reading lots of books from diverse perspectives and building on knowledge incrementally over time. Assigning life-changing effects to single books often reflects a religious impulse at odds with a sensible epistemology.
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There's an unfortunate tendency to think the truth is so self-evident that anyone who appears to disagree with you must really agree with you deep down and therefore be lying. Lots of talk about "disinformation" emerges from this tendency.
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New essay 👇 exploring the evolutionary roots of human kindness and why the subtle incentives of reputation management explain why human altruism is both sincere and strategic. Our moral psychology is more Machiavellian than we like to admit. 🧵
conspicuouscognition.com/p/s…
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As I wrote about last year, people *do* change their minds when presented with good arguments
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Why do groups often embrace beliefs that strike outsiders as absurd? In a new paper (forthcoming in Mind and Language), I explore the increasingly influential idea that the absurdity of such beliefs makes them credible signals of ingroup commitment:
researchgate.net/publication…
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I suspect many within the expert class simply dislike democracy but can't admit this (even to themselves), so they develop this whole technocratic language - "misinformation", "disinformation", etc. - to frame undesirable outcomes of democracy as threats to it.
"Democracy is threatened unless we're allowed to control the flow of information on social media" is among the worst ideas in the discourse from being naive about how persuasion works to kind of lowkey authoritarian.
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A recent article in Time Magazine cites me as an example of someone “cultivated” by authoritarian leaders like Trump to “defend the authoritarian agenda.” Why? Because I’ve criticised some research into misinformation and disinformation. I’m a bit annoyed by this. 1/2
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It is strange, but LLMs pose a concrete challenge to his entire life's intellectual work (in linguistics and cognitive science, at least), so it's not that surprising, even if it is quite childish.
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Orwell's reflections from a preface to Animal Farm on how informal censorship works in ostensibly free societies:
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Going grey in my 20s and it is 100% - 100% - because I attempted to write a paper on the free energy principle.
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New preprint, 'Is the Brain an Organ for Prediction Error Minimizaton?' The conclusion: Maybe, but the free energy principle provides no reason for thinking that it is. More generally, it provides no support for any substantive theory of brain function. researchgate.net/publication…
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Ultimately the only legitimate philosophical methodology is whichever one is implicit in the work I do.
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"AI has taught us that human minds are hugely richer, and more subtle, than psychologists previously imagined. Indeed, that is *the* main lesson to be learned from AI." That seems right.
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Some thoughts on four epistemic challenges for open societies: complexity, invisibility, rational ignorance, and politically motivated cognition. conspicuouscognition.com/p/a…
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Nussbaum is so profoundly misinformed on so many different levels all at once it is difficult to even know where to begin here.
Martha Nussbaum and @shadihamid debate whether human overpopulation 👨👩👧👦or underpopulation 🚶♂️ will be the most important challenge of the future. Listen to the whole thing here 👉 wisdomofcrowds.live/p/martha…
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Here's the background and syllabus (including 'core readings') for a seven-week module I'm teaching this term on 'Politics, truth, and ideology':
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New paper. I argue that there is no interpretation of the free energy principle on which it establishes both a first principles account of self-organisation and an interesting constraint on theorising in neuroscience. link.springer.com/article/10…
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The level of bad faith exhibited in most popular criticisms of effective altruism has made me more sympathetic to effective altruism.
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'Misinformation' and 'disinformation' are back at the top spot for the biggest global risk over the next two years in the World Economic Forum's 'Global Risk Report'. As I've argued before, this risk assessment is either wrong or not even wrong (1/2)
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Lots of scientific and popular articles on misinformation feature some variation on "misinformation is a growing problem" or "we are living through a misinformation age" and yet do not provide any evidence or even arguments in defence of these claims.
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New post 👇. I argue: (1) The media rarely makes things up. (2) Media bias is nevertheless widespread. (3) Media bias is identified by biased individuals with beliefs acquired via biased media. (4) Misinformation is therefore hard to study objectively.
conspicuouscognition.com/p/t…
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“Why is this even philosophy?!” asks person whose ideal of Real Philosophy is making narrow conceptual points within whatever extremely path-dependent conversation high-status members of the profession happen to be having in elite philosophy journals.
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I frequently encounter a mixture of incredulity/hostility for just calmly stating my view that markets - and more generally capitalism - are on net good.
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Should we trust misinformation experts to decide what counts as misinformation? In this new essay I give some reasons for scepticism: conspicuouscognition.com/p/s…. Thread: (1/15)
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“Analytic philosophy” often strikes me as a pseudo-scientific project based on imitating the superficial appearance of science (precision, clarity, mathematics) without including the thing that actually makes science powerful: its empirical engagement with the world.
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Happy Darwin Day. Evolution by natural selection is the most important discovery in the history of our species - and yet most research in psychology and social science still proceeds as if the discovery had never been made. Sad.
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There are many people who are more outraged by a well-meaning but conceptually confused Ted Talk than about the fact that Trump - someone Ramaswamy endorsed - literally tried to overturn an election result based on completely made-up, self-serving conspiracy theories.
NPR’s new CEO: “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground & getting things done.”
This gets to the heart of the cultural divide in the modern West: whether you believe truth is a priority or a hindrance
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Human behaviour is profoundly shaped by status competition but people often strive to maintain a narrative in which what really drives them is not status but high ideals (Justice, Truth, Art, etc.) - precisely because such narratives reflect better on them and so promote status.
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Not unique to election results, obviously, but the phenomenon of people with no ability to predict events before they occur pontificating with certainty about the causes of such events after they happen is remarkable.
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On the issue of whether people change their minds in response to new information or “logical arguments”: You have to understand that people don’t approach an issue or conversation as blank slates.
They have a vast, interconnected web of beliefs, assumptions, expectations, values, and concepts, much of which they would find difficult to articulate explicitly and has emerged over many years, shaping how they interpret and respond to new information and integrate it into their worldview.
It would be highly irrational to throw away that worldview at the first encounter with contrary evidence or arguments. But this is often precisely what those who complain about human irrationality expect people to do. And when this expectation is violated, they conclude that humans are too irrational to be persuaded by new information.
In reality, what looks like a failure to respond to new information is often simply a failure of observers to understand what it’s like to have a radically different perspective on reality.
That doesn’t mean that rational argument or persuasion is futile. It just normally takes time, happens gradually, and can be emotionally and socially uncomfortable, which is why good-faith, persuasive arguments are under-supplied.
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Up until May 2021, FB was removing any claims to the effect that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. It then quite abruptly abandoned this policy 👇:
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I've designed an undergraduate course, 'Science and Reason'. It will explore the scope and limits of science; how science relates to and differs from other modes of inquiry; and whether a scientific worldview threatens our commonsense understanding of reality and ourselves.
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Hypothesis: People instinctively search for opportunities to transform their preferences into social norms. This is an adaptive heuristic because people's preferences typically correlate with their inclusive fitness but it drives people to moralise preferences across the board.
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Epistemic selfishness: biased reasoning that promotes one’s own interests but imposes costs on others. E.g., someone who adopts an inaccurate worldview for its emotional or reputational benefits, and then inflicts this worldview on others through activism.
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Self-deception is often a team project. It involves complex forms of social scaffolding and epistemic teamwork that generate collective delusions—bespoke realities—individuals could not achieve independently. New post 👇
conspicuouscognition.com/p/t…
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The ideas you dislike - whether “wokeism”, conspiracy theories, misinformation, or religion - aren't “mind viruses” and don't spread via contagion. This framing rests on a stick-figure depiction of human psychology and communication that functions to demonise, not understand.
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Probably nobody in the world has done more damage to the reputation of the pro-free speech/anti-censorship movement (which I support) than Elon Musk, someone who has used these values as cover for spewing a torrent of absurd, self-serving lies and propaganda.
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My PhD thesis, 'The Mind as a Predictive Modelling Engine: Generative Models, Structural Similarity, and Mental Representation', can be downloaded here: researchgate.net/publication…
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The recent "people in the humanities attacking economics" discourse reminds me of a recent article I published on my blog 👇
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I think publicly humiliating ordinary Trump voters by tricking them into revealing features of political psychology (partisanship, post hoc rationalisation, etc.) that are just as common among the liberal audience mocking & feeling superior to them is bad.
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First lecture of the new academic year! An introduction to the history of AI, core concepts (computing machines, intelligence), the difference between good old-fashioned AI and artificial neural networks, Turing, and the Turing test.
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Simply disgusting behaviour from Trump and Vance. There's no other word for it.
Absolutely mental clip, Trump and Vance are horrible people and just not credible partners in defending the West’s interests
He back Churchill’s bust, meanwhile Zelenskyy is the closest thing we have to a modern day Churchill and he treats him like crap
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The epistemic challenges of open societies, Part 2: Why the "marketplace of ideas" often functions like a marketplace of rationalisations designed to justify the favoured narratives of society's competing political and cultural tribes. conspicuouscognition.com/p/t…
Some thoughts on four epistemic challenges for open societies: complexity, invisibility, rational ignorance, and politically motivated cognition. conspicuouscognition.com/p/a…
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Much of the humanities is like this. "Everything is socially constructed", "The medium is the message", "Power is everywhere", etc. Good essay on deepities by @DavidPinsof here: everythingisbullshit.blog/p/…
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Can't stand stuff like this. Sanctimoniously mocking other people for the harmless status markers within their social milieu - driven by the absurd assumption that the mocker's own accent and self-presentation weren't shaped by exactly the same kinds of forces.
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This article by Nikhil Krishnan, pointing out various fallacies and philosophical mistakes in constructionist theories of emotion, is *so good*.
newyorker.com/magazine/2022/… via @NewYorker
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It's a good thing that no scientific field - such as, say, social psychology - has ever selected for sexy attention-grabbing results instead of accuracy.
Reminder than social media doesn't select for accuracy, but rather content that grabs your attention.
So be mindful that the content you see trending on here is often a poor reflection of reality.
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A dilemma for misinformation research: define misinformation narrowly (e.g., as demonstrably false content) and it's rare; define it broadly (e.g., as misleading content) and it’s so pervasive that the concept is useless as a way of understanding information ecosystems.
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Some reading recommendations on the topic of misinformation in case of interest 👇
conspicuouscognition.com/p/t…
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In this new post I highlight my five favourite academic articles from last year, which range over topics like political ideology, religion, misinformation, reputation management, and intellectual humility: conspicuouscognition.com/p/m…. Thread: 1/6
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So much disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, motivated reasoning, bias, distortive ideology, groupthink, overconfidence, and irrationality in the world. Good thing I’ve emerged completely unscathed.
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Walter Lippmann over one hundred years ago: There are no fingerprints of misinformation, and problems of belief formation in large-scale societies ultimately boil down to issues of trust and distrust. Succinct and correct 👍
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When progressives dominated this platform pre-Musk, spending time on it made me dislike progressivism. Now that the platform seems dominated by the right, spending time on it makes me dislike the right. I suspect I'm not alone in these reactions.
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I wrote a short piece on the social incentives that drive irrational beliefs. The basic idea: We are unconsciously biased towards beliefs that we benefit from propagating to others, and that signal our attractive traits and allegiances. (1/4)
blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/openford… via @CAPDproj
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I'm going to be writing here 👇 ≈weekly this year. In this first post I introduce the blog, explain its title 'Conspicuous Cognition', and outline why the pursuit of social approval drives the evolutionary weirdness of human behaviour and thought. 1/7
conspicuouscognition.com/p/c…
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A lot of the energy and ingenuity left-wing intellectuals invest into explaining why people don't share their views ("ideology”, “manufactured consent”, “active ignorance”, "hegemony", etc) would be better spent simply trying to persuade people that those views are in fact true.
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I've heard lots of people say of 'Adolescence': "It's a work of fiction, not a documentary." That's true, but it can't be stressed enough that documentaries are also a terrible way of learning about the world.
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"Contrary to conventional wisdom, human brilliance emerges not from our innate brainpower or raw computational capacities, but from the sharing of information in communities and networks over generations." A false dichotomy.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
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People tend to be absurdly overconfident in their political beliefs.
This is not just misguided - it's harmful.
So what explains it? Here I explore some possible explanations: conspicuouscognition.com/p/i…
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I'm putting together a module for 3rd-year philosophy undergraduates on the general theme of "Politics, truth, and ideology". What would people include on the reading list? I'm interested in classic and modern works, as well as scientific in addition to philosophical ones.
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Yes, this is very plausible.
A median voter theory of right-wing populism marginalrevolution.com/margi…
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A couple of years ago, I read Walter Lippmann's "Public Opinion" (1922) and it changed how I think about politics.
In this essay, I explore and evaluate Lippmann's radical critique of democracy.
conspicuouscognition.com/p/c…
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