The world outside and the pictures in our heads
Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and the fundamental question of political epistemology: Can anybody understand modern society?| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and the fundamental question of political epistemology: Can anybody understand modern society?| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Democracy, technocracy, Marx, ideology, critical theory, identity politics, standpoint theory, free speech, cancel culture, truth, populism, and post-truth| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Your political worldview is inevitably simplistic, selective, and distorted.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Misinformation research aims to transcend politics in favour of objective scientific analysis. The broader its definition of the term “misinformation”, the less realistic that ambition is.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
The survival of the suspicious| www.conspicuouscognition.com
There was never a golden age of objectivity, and today’s epistemological problems result from competing visions of reality, not a conflict over the value of truth.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
What role do bias and irrationality play in shaping people's political opinions?| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Polarization, populism, and perspective| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Ignorance and misperceptions are not puzzling. The challenge is to explain why some people see reality accurately.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
A deep dive into four factors that prevent members of open societies from understanding political reality: complexity, invisibility, incentives, and politically motivated cognition.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
In 'Why Not Socialism?', G.A. Cohen mistakes our self-deceptive fairytales about cooperation for the real motives that underlie it.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Nice Nazis, friendly factory farmers, and the evolution of sincere but selective moral instincts| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Witches, conspiracies, threats, burdens, rivals, enemies, and weirdos.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Fake news, media bias, and the misinformation wars.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
On why the free exchange of ideas is a complex breeding ground for truth, appealing falsehoods, and self-serving rationalisations.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
People are "naive realists" about politics, treating their beliefs as objective, unbiased, and unmediated interpretations of self-evident facts. I explore the roots of this harmful delusion.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
In "Public Opinion" (1922), Walter Lippmann argued that the vastness, complexity, and invisibility of the modern world make democracy impossible. He got a lot right.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Are we living through an unprecedented informational crisis, disinformation age, or post-truth era? Drawing on a wide range of evidence and arguments, I give some reasons for scepticism.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Have we evolved to love our ingroup? Did our ancestors go through an evolutionary process of self-domestication? Is the occasional genocide just an unfortunate by-product of how friendly we are?| www.conspicuouscognition.com
This is often bad and we should develop stronger norms against it.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
Why I started this blog, why I called it "conspicuous cognition", and why the desire for social approval drives the evolutionary weirdness of our species.| www.conspicuouscognition.com
