[HN Gopher] The Psychology of not wanting to know (2017) [pdf]
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Psychology of not wanting to know (2017) [pdf]
        
       Author : amitmina
       Score  : 118 points
       Date   : 2022-06-21 11:14 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.apa.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.apa.org)
        
       | tpoacher wrote:
       | This pdf is a masterpiece in the art of kerning. I had a lot of
       | fun poking my eyes out trying to decipher the characters.
        
       | zerop wrote:
       | Sometime it's good to if you don't know the details, it helps to
       | analyze the problem at high level and might result in creative
       | solutions because you don't get caught into details since you
       | don't know it. But it's not good always.
        
       | yotamoron wrote:
       | Am I the only one who can't understand how Cassandra could
       | foresee the future - but somehow failed to see that Apollo is
       | about to curse her?!
       | 
       | I mean - WTF?!
       | 
       | The damn god is about to turn her life into living hell, she's
       | more then capable of actually knowing it in advance and do
       | something about it, and she's like "Nah, I'll just go shoppin'
       | for a new tunic"?!
       | 
       | I'm telling you - those subtle inconsistencies make me doubt this
       | whole greek mythology thing...
        
         | adrianN wrote:
         | Maybe her actions prevented even greater catastrophe.
        
           | jrumbut wrote:
           | She must have read _The Aeneid_
        
           | yotamoron wrote:
           | I disagree.
           | 
           | She failed - miserably - as mount Olympus' VP of future
           | foreseeing, and that's totally unacceptable.
           | 
           | Where's HR in all this? the recruiting manager!? Anyone??
           | 
           | Are those the kind of unrealistically supernatural powers
           | baring individuals we want to have in our company?
           | 
           | I don't think so...
        
         | NetBeck wrote:
         | Apollo was rejected by a mortal after giving her powers. As a
         | god of prophecy, he should have seen that coming.
        
       | oblib wrote:
       | I can't say there are many things I do not want to know, but
       | there are things I do not want to see like videos/photos of
       | deadly car crashes, war battles, murders, etc.
       | 
       | So I also never watch "slasher" movies/TV, or read books that
       | depict graphic violence/gore.
       | 
       | I'm not squeamish, I have raised, slaughtered, and dressed
       | livestock since I was a teen. That's never been a source of "fun"
       | for me though. It has a real life purpose and the end result has
       | always been a much improved source of food for my family and I.
       | 
       | I seldom watch anything on TV that has any violence at all and to
       | be honest I'm a bit leery of those who go out of their way, like
       | to a movie theater, to see it. I'm 62 and this something I've
       | done since a was a teen.
       | 
       | I just don't want those images in my memory. I've never looked
       | into it but my gut feeling is they desensitize us. Looking at the
       | current state of the obsession with owning arms designed
       | specifically to murder humans compared to when I was growing up,
       | I think there is ample proof of that.
        
         | daenz wrote:
         | A different take: videos of horrible things show rare insights
         | into behaviors that are only visible before the horrible thing.
         | For example, how a robbery goes bad and ends up as a multiple
         | murder. Or how someone will hide and wait to kill someone. Of
         | course I'd rather not see that stuff in general, but more than
         | that, I'd rather have a basic understanding of how those things
         | play out.
        
         | kubanczyk wrote:
         | I avoid even comparatively mild stuff, e.g. Godfather or Dark
         | Knight (peeking at IMDB's top movies), and have done so for
         | decades. It's a conscious decision, one I made in my twenties
         | and not in any way related to aesthetics, anxiety, being
         | childish, or mental issues.
         | 
         | I'm not really advocating it. I don't claim it gives
         | superpowers or big benefits (and if anyone claims them, I'd ask
         | for hard scientific evidence), but I can just say that any life
         | decisions differentiate a person, even if by tiny bit. Looking
         | at the whole population, life decisions make people diverse and
         | drive them to bump against each other, which is mostly fun, no?
        
         | LocalPCGuy wrote:
         | > I've never looked into it but my gut feeling is they
         | desensitize us. Looking at the current state of the obsession
         | with owning arms designed specifically to murder humans
         | 
         | There have been studies on this and my recollection is that
         | despite the "gut feelings" people have about this, it doesn't
         | hold up to the level of being able to prove causation. At best,
         | there is a level of correlation (not strong). Most I've read
         | show that people are able to differentiate between reality and
         | "entertainment".
         | 
         | I'd recommend looking into the studies that have been done (and
         | be warned, there are also some really bad studies in this area,
         | paid for, low sample size, etc.) Also, I fully recognize that
         | this is an area we need more study because it's been stymied
         | for years by various laws that prevent investment in
         | researching anything that is in this area.
         | 
         | Note - I also want to clarify that I am not a gun nut or 2A
         | absolutist or anything of that nature and not trying to dive
         | down that rabbit hole - so not trying to defend their misplaced
         | importance and/or misuse in any way. And I'm also not saying we
         | should wait to try things for studies to be done. But I think
         | it's important to know the real underlying issues so we work
         | toward fixing the problem correctly.
        
         | havblue wrote:
         | Have you considered spoiling the book/movie/television show
         | after you realize it's making you anxious? If you skip parts in
         | the middle or read the ending, your brain won't be waiting for
         | the other shoe to drop; it'll be working on figuring out why
         | the shoe will inevitably drop in the third act.
        
           | kubanczyk wrote:
           | Parent didn't imply any anxiety issues, but you just did, and
           | it doesn't look like a coincidence to be honest. If I calmly
           | assume that I've seen enough of the piece of art based on a
           | meaningful sample, it's kinda hard to maintain my interest.
        
       | amitmina wrote:
       | "Technological progress steadily shifts the line between the
       | knowable and the unknowable in the direction of Cassandra's
       | powers. Advances in genomic analyses and biomarker research will
       | put more and more people into situations where they have to
       | decide whether they want to know future health issues." Gerd
       | Gigerrenzer
        
       | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
       | Fascinating study although not exactly what I expected ( I
       | thought it would be about brain deliberately ignoring information
       | and not allowing it to pass for conscious consideration ).
       | Naturally, this is a little different.
       | 
       | What is more interesting is that based on the study only tiny
       | fraction of population wants to know regardless.
        
         | worker_person wrote:
         | For deeper learning, get a delusional spouse that ignores any
         | reality other than the one they like.
         | 
         | You'll wish you ignored this line of reasoning.
        
       | dmfdmf wrote:
       | Ayn Rand called not wanting to know the "blank-out" and
       | identified _evasion_ as the root of all evil.
       | 
       | http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/evasion.html
        
         | amitmina wrote:
         | powerful words! this encapsulates it even better
        
       | slickrick216 wrote:
       | This can sometimes be intentional and driven by situational
       | circumstance. I've seen this in an incident response setting
       | where people at all levels didn't want to know as they'd be
       | obliged to deal with it then. Peoples ethics extended so far as
       | if they didn't have actual evidence of a thing then it wasn't a
       | thing. This was driven by the finder being the one that had to
       | fix it. So especially likely to occur to talented people and
       | those with initiative as they'd be the ones that have to deal
       | with it.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | kromem wrote:
         | You see a lot of the "see no data, hear no data" in the pharma
         | industry.
         | 
         | Mandatory reporting and investigation for adverse event reports
         | means all sorts of loopholes are jumped through to avoid
         | finding out about them.
         | 
         | It's messed up.
        
           | tunap wrote:
           | Corporate is rife with pre-meditated liability avoidance
           | loopholes. Plausible deniability reigns supreme.
        
             | slickrick216 wrote:
             | Exactly mix the plausible deniability with discovery
             | processes and you get to the point where people couldn't do
             | the right thing even if they wanted to as they don't know
             | about it.
        
         | oblib wrote:
         | That is so spot on.
         | 
         | When I was in my early teens I started working for a few small
         | businesses that made mods to vans for people in wheelchairs to
         | drive. I built and installed those as instructed without
         | question.
         | 
         | By the time I was in my late teens I realized there were some
         | dangerous flaws in some of the things we were doing and began
         | pointing them out. For the most part when I did that the design
         | was modified to address the flaw, but one time involved more
         | than just a tweak and would've been costly and I was told
         | "You're not qualified to evaluate this", and that was true in
         | as much as I had no degree in engineering.
         | 
         | What I did have by then was years of experience with how things
         | break and fail.
         | 
         | One example is a company I subcontracted work for had a design
         | for a device that moved the driver's seat in a van backwards
         | about two feet on a set of rails so a paraplegic could slide
         | from the wheelchair to the drivers seat, and then move the seat
         | forward towards the driver's controls. They wanted me to build
         | and install them.
         | 
         | They used a rack gear and power window motor for a car to do
         | this. The rack gear was made of steel, but the power window
         | motor gear was made of plastic and cheap cast aluminum, and
         | that plastic gear was all that was holding the driver's seat in
         | place.
         | 
         | They had no kind of latch at all to hold the seat in the
         | driver's position so it was obvious that in a rear end
         | collision the window motor gear and housing would break and the
         | driver would be slammed backwards about 2.5 ft and then again
         | forwards again with great force.
         | 
         | They really did not want to know that, and refused to make any
         | changes to the design. So I told the State inspector about it a
         | few weeks later when he came to inspect a van that was finished
         | for a client. Even though it was very simple he had no idea of
         | how that device even worked, and told me so. So he went to the
         | CEO of the company and told them about what I'd told him and I
         | was fired.
         | 
         | They went broke less than a year later so as far as I know
         | there were never many of those shipped.
        
         | derbOac wrote:
         | I can see some of it driven by situations where nothing could
         | be done to prevent a negative outcome as well: if a death is
         | unpreventable, what's the point in knowing it's coming? I think
         | that's implicit in many of the events in the paper's studies
         | (or explicit? I didnt read it carefully), this idea that
         | they're unavoidable.
         | 
         | Maybe that's consistent with what you're saying, in the sense
         | that something unavoidable has infinitely high amounts of cost
         | associated with it in terms of rectification or prevention.
        
           | slickrick216 wrote:
           | Yeah I can see that in some scenarios there's a no win for
           | the business or the team. Especially information spillage
           | where the cleanup is usually non effective messy and long.
           | Combine that with them not being interesting to work people
           | actively avoid them.
           | 
           | There is an I counter example as well. Where there's no
           | perceived benefit however there actually is one you just
           | didn't realise it. Some sort of FOMO with out the fear and
           | you do miss out.
        
       | UIUC_06 wrote:
       | There's a very, very good reason for not wanting to know, and
       | undercover organizations (legal or otherwise) have always
       | exploited it:
       | 
       | You can't spill what you don't know. If you're an illegal or
       | espionage group, your members can't be threatened or tortured
       | into giving up information they don't have. Similarly, they can't
       | give it to WikiLeaks.
        
       | agnos wrote:
       | Is knowing the same thing as believing? Maybe I'm missing
       | something, but a lot of this seems to hinge on an assumption that
       | knowing something with absolute certainty is possible, and a
       | meaningful hypothetical scenario in our human cognition.
       | 
       | Predictions (knowing) and their ensuing actions in a non-
       | deterministic world are not necessarily isolated from the
       | eventual outcome. I'm curious how much of the "willful ignorance"
       | is actually avoidance of some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
        
       | cryptica wrote:
       | This is a huge problem nowadays. I think pretty much everyone has
       | been in such situation... This makes me cynical about WTF must be
       | going on at the top to require so many people to 'not want to
       | know.'
       | 
       | We have a hierarchy made up of layers upon layers of "I don't
       | want to know" and people rise to a level proportional to what
       | they are comfortable knowing (and keeping secret).
        
         | dirtybirdnj wrote:
         | People willfully keeping things secret when it's not even
         | necessary has been a huge problem in my career. I get
         | disrespect when I want to understand why things are happening.
         | It's not reasonable to expect the people who create software to
         | solve problems to just blindly write code and not understand
         | why things are done in a certain way. It's their JOB to figure
         | things out and optimize. Asking them not to look for
         | improvement gains is like asking a fish to stop respirating in
         | water and move just as fast on land in air.
        
       | gcau wrote:
       | I've pondered: if you were given an envelope, written inside it
       | is the deepest and darkest secret of the universe/humanity, would
       | you want to read it? It could say that we're just in a
       | simulation, it could say all politicians are aliens, it could say
       | we're totally alone in the universe because any sufficiently
       | advanced planet destroys itself from the inside, it could say all
       | your family and friends are just Synths and You're in a Truman
       | show scenario. Or something worse we can't imagine. If you read
       | it and found out something like this you'd go crazy.
        
         | Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
         | I think I would like to know most of those. Except my family
         | being fake, I guess.
         | 
         | If the letter told me the exact date and time of my own death,
         | I might go crazy, though.
        
           | bqmjjx0kac wrote:
           | That's a superpower! You can be as risky as you want if you
           | know the fixed date of your death.
        
             | adrianN wrote:
             | How you react to knowing the date of your death influences
             | the date of your death in the universe where you learn the
             | date.
        
               | Dudeman112 wrote:
               | The mechanism behind it should be able to calculate the
               | new date in advance though
               | 
               | It's already taking into account billions of variables
               | (if the date is sufficiently far away), billions + 1
               | should be easy
        
               | bombcar wrote:
               | Now I'm imagining a tablet that continually updates with
               | the date and time of your death. Could be an interesting
               | short story.
        
               | corrral wrote:
               | Rick and Morty did something similar in the episode "Edge
               | of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat". Morty got ahold of a
               | crystal that showed him what his final moments would look
               | like, and the vision updated as his actions changed his
               | future.
        
         | pawelmurias wrote:
         | All the situations you mentioned I would want to know about.
        
           | deebosong wrote:
           | Same. Those scenarios point to more of a "meaning of life"
           | and "reason behind it all" types of scenarios, assuming that
           | the message-deliverer is trustworthy/ accurate. Knowing such
           | weighty matters might heavily shift the way you live, the
           | choices you make, and the things you invest your energy and
           | time into.
        
           | jrumbut wrote:
           | The universe's deepest darkest secret just sounds interesting
           | and I must already be living with the consequences of it in
           | some way.
           | 
           | I think a more localized version (your spouse or family's
           | darkest secret) might be a more difficult decision.
        
         | laszlokorte wrote:
         | How would you know that what it says is actually true?
        
           | b3morales wrote:
           | That seems to be stipulated as part of the thought
           | experiment.
           | 
           | Otherwise, it's a different thought experiment. ;)
        
         | lr4444lr wrote:
         | Nah. Even assuming it's true, I'd still be motivated by the
         | mystery of who wrote it and why he gave it to me.
        
         | msmenardi wrote:
         | As soon as we know any of those truths, we can get started on
         | the actual work of doing something about it.
        
           | timst4 wrote:
           | Unfortunately we know exactly what's happening: the climate
           | is warming at a non-linear rate, chemical pollution is at or
           | near extinction levels, fresh water supplies are becoming
           | more scarce and privatized, the few own the majority, and war
           | is on the horizon. What exactly are we doing about this?
           | 
           | The real problem is hyper-normalization. Humans will one day
           | soon normalize their own extinction.
        
           | mistermann wrote:
           | How many of them would be able to get by the "That's a
           | conspiracy theory [and therefore false]!" (or newer versions
           | like "Russian propaganda") subconscious heuristic filters
           | that seems to have "somehow" been installed into so many
           | minds?
        
       | bertil wrote:
       | I'm really confused why the authors barely mention *agency*:
       | knowing is fine and useful if you _can do_ something about it.
       | Cassandra's curse was not to know but that she wouldn't be
       | believed. Every circumstances that I can think of regretting
       | knowing something (friends who were going to separate, systemic
       | racism in algorithm that my team implemented, global warming),
       | how certain I am is far less important than whether I can do
       | something about it.
        
         | nonrandomstring wrote:
         | Good point. But there are Knowledge Hazards that stand alone.
         | Such as traumatic images you cannot unsee. A lot of people who
         | work in digital forensics would love a zero knowledge proof
         | that a folder is full of CP without having to look at it.
         | That's pretty much the idea of the CSAM algorithm Apple wanted
         | to push, which makes it a pretty great idea minus the digitally
         | rapey _forcing it on people without their consent_ bit.
         | 
         | > "Only 1% of participants consistently wanted to know"
         | 
         | Wow! I sometimes feel "better not to know" but for the most-
         | part I am scientific/rationalist and will take all the intel I
         | can get even if it may be challenging.
         | 
         | There's one exception: I often deliberately don't google people
         | I am going to meet. I want the relationship to evolve
         | organically. If it's an interview I might check a bit on their
         | professional background, and the orgs they've worked with, but
         | even given the opportunity to see a much deeper dox I'll pass
         | on it. I feel it's degrading. Also that it may give me a false
         | impression that excludes opportunities. I would only break that
         | "polite ignorance" if I needed to assess the risk of someone or
         | suspected a problem.
        
           | bombcar wrote:
           | That last part is quite important; we've lost the ability to
           | lose things to time, and it can be brought back up quite
           | easily.
           | 
           | Part of it has been loss in trust of the people in society
           | setup as gatekeepers, but the "cure" of everyone doing it
           | themselves may be worse than the disease.
        
             | nonrandomstring wrote:
             | That theme, of whether the age of 'benevolent elites' has
             | given way to a hyper-liberal vigilantism (and whether
             | that's worse) is explored quite nicely by Adam Curtis in
             | some of his more recent films.
        
           | bertil wrote:
           | In the case of CSAM, I think you are conflating not wanting
           | to see, which I appreciate, and wanting, needing really, to
           | know to make decision.
           | 
           | Knowing gives agency, the ability ot fight a crime in that
           | case. People who are exposed to it suffer less from being
           | exposed to it and more from the inability to see the flow
           | stop.
        
             | nonrandomstring wrote:
             | Yes I agree. We've come full circle back to Cassandra. The
             | thing with cybersecurity that infuriates me with
             | frustration is telling people the things they don't want to
             | know yet knowing I am powerless to stop them harming
             | themselves and others with stubbornly bad choices. I'm sure
             | healthcare professionals get the same. It's why I wrote in
             | Digital Vegan quite a lot about drug addiction and
             | technology.
        
         | yccs27 wrote:
         | I see two distinct motivations for not wanting to know:
         | 
         | - You have no agency, so the information would just be
         | depressing without enabling you to do something about it.
         | 
         | - You have agency, and indeed you'd have to do something if you
         | knew (for moral, legal or general responsibility reasons) - but
         | you don't _want_ to do anything.
        
           | bombcar wrote:
           | The second is common, especially when dealing with a
           | bureaucracy that isn't fully aligned with what should be
           | done. As long as you maintain plausible deniability, things
           | continue to work.
           | 
           | Hence things like "work to rule"
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
        
         | photochemsyn wrote:
         | Agency can be a burden: knowing about something and also
         | knowing that you can do something about it, but that there is a
         | cost to doing something about it, can expose serious
         | deficiencies in human beings (gross cowardice in particular).
         | 
         | Churches with serial molesters as priests are a rather grim
         | example: apparently quite a few people knew what was going on
         | in many (most?) of these cases, but the cost of taking action
         | was viewed as being too detrimental to the image of the church,
         | so, they let it continue. This kind of behavior was also seen
         | with those FBI agents and internal executives who were informed
         | about the USA Gymnast's serial child predator by some of the
         | victims (the FBI is now facing a $1 billion lawsuit for
         | negligence, a case worth watching):
         | 
         | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wait-happened-larry-nassar-co...
         | 
         | This is why higher-ups in organizations often don't want to get
         | memos from middle managers about problems lower down, because
         | then they lose the 'plausible deniability' defense when it
         | comes to a criminal prosecution or a civil court case.
        
       | narag wrote:
       | One more motive, archivable under "plot twist" meme: what seems
       | like relevant information is actually a lie, amplified by the
       | echo chamber.
       | 
       | Maybe you can spot some buzzword that has been discussed in HN
       | for years and later diluted into irrelevance. Sometimes the next
       | big thing, sometimes the moral panic, sometimes the impending
       | doom. The bigger the sense of urgency, the more suspect.
        
       | kelseyfrog wrote:
       | The paper mentions Kruglanski & Webster[1] which is good, but
       | somehow misses their 1994 paper "Individual differences in need
       | for cognitive closure."[2] The latter develops the Need For
       | Closure Scale(NFCS) which is available online[3]. The NFCS
       | exemplifies some of the aspects of the needs for cognitive
       | closure.
       | 
       | > 21(d) In most social conflicts, I can easily see which side is
       | right and which is wrong.
       | 
       | > 30(d) I dislike it when a person's statement could mean many
       | different things.
       | 
       | > 32(a) I find that establishing a consistent routine enables me
       | to enjoy life more.
       | 
       | I'd even go so far to say that by not assessing the paper's
       | subjects using NFCS the authors made a massive oversight.
       | 
       | If the subject interests you, I recommend reading the sources.
       | They aren't too hard to follow, but if you're someone who is
       | unfamiliar with the limitations of developing a psychological
       | assessment instrument, you might have to put aside your need for
       | cognitive closure for a bit while reading them.
       | 
       | 1. Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated closing
       | of the mind: "Seizing" and "freezing." Psychological Review, 103,
       | 263-283. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.103.2.263
       | 
       | 2. Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual
       | differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality
       | and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049-1062.
       | 
       | 3.
       | https://www.kruglanskiarie.com/_files/ugd/1b977d_8ef6f17f4f8...
        
         | jimsmart wrote:
         | > but somehow misses their 1994 paper
         | 
         | Link to PDF of article for [2]
         | 
         | -- Rather ironically, you seem to have missed it, and I needed
         | the closure!
         | 
         | http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/i...
        
       | ifokiedoke wrote:
       | An interesting consideration here that I don't see mentioned in
       | the comments is the difference between the destination and the
       | _journey_.
       | 
       | The paper asks, "would you want to know during the wedding
       | ceremony whether your marriage is going to end in divorce?" There
       | are 4 reasons offered for not wanting to know ("to avoid the
       | negative emotions, to maintain the positive emotions of surprise,
       | to gain a strategic advantage, to implement fairness") but my
       | reason would be this: there is a difference between knowing the
       | outcome, and knowing _why_. And there is a difference between
       | being able to express _why_, and truly feeling it and accepting
       | it. And I don't think there is any way to get there other than
       | through living it.
       | 
       | The human mind and our capacity to learn/grow is incredible, but
       | we only learn and accept things when we are ready to. Sometimes
       | you learn a little too late (e.g. after your divorce) what it
       | means to be a present partner, but that doesn't mean you didn't
       | learn it as _soon as you could_. And no knowing the future can
       | change that. I mean, how many of us have been told over and over
       | that we should be grateful for something (e.g. our parents, our
       | partners, our jobs) but only truly learned the lesson once we
       | lost it?
       | 
       | Sometimes I think we have too myopic a view of what "knowing"
       | really means.
        
       | nobody0 wrote:
       | ignorance is a bliss
        
       | gw67 wrote:
       | This is very relevant during this large crypto correction.
       | 
       | Nobody wants to know that BTC will reach $3,000 within 1-2 years.
        
       | locallost wrote:
       | Sorry for not reading past the first page, so maybe their
       | conclusion is the same, but: in the case of the HIV test, it's
       | pretty clear that people avoid it because the mere thought forces
       | you to confront the possibility, and that is tough. At least that
       | was my experience, even though I rationally knew that it was
       | better to know, boy was it tempting to not pick up the result.
       | 
       | Another interesting tangent on it is that I got my results the
       | same day, but there are places where they make you wait for a
       | week, just so you think about it.
        
         | ksd482 wrote:
         | That's a very good point. I also went through this dilemma a
         | few years ago and it was very difficult for me.
         | 
         | Given my personality, I always strive to do what's right
         | regardless of how difficult or uncomfortable it is. I can say I
         | have ALWAYS succeeded in doing that. But a few years ago when I
         | was in a situation where I needed to get an HIV test, I was
         | very scared and nervous. I was sweating every now and then
         | thinking about it. I couldn't focus on work and I couldn't have
         | any fun. The only thing that helped me a little bit was to
         | rationally predict my outcome based on statistics and past
         | behavior.
         | 
         | But all in all, I trusted in the process and got myself to go
         | through with it step by step.
        
         | CodeBeater wrote:
         | This is so prevalent all around the world, that there's even a
         | saying in my native Brazil: "You're only sick if you get
         | tested"
        
           | formerkrogemp wrote:
           | I wonder how well that expression was taken in the context of
           | COVID.
        
       | neosystem wrote:
       | Timely article -- I can't help but to relate it to my
       | investing/stock account lol. I'm mostly invested in big tech and
       | not so much growth -- so things probably aren't so bad -- still,
       | I haven't checked that account in a couple months. I have it set
       | up to make recurring purchases in things like Apple, so I'm just
       | waiting it out and hoping that the old adage "time in the market
       | beats timing the market" holds true.
        
       | photochemsyn wrote:
       | Interesting discussion here:
       | 
       | https://www.mpg.de/16834860/interview-deliberate-ignorance
       | 
       | For example:
       | 
       | > "We distinguish between at least six functions of deliberate
       | ignorance. One important function is regulating emotions. Not
       | knowing certain facts can help us avoid negative emotions. For
       | example, some people consciously make the decision not to view
       | their "Stasi" (State Security Service of the GDR) files because
       | they fear they might contain information that would make them
       | extremely upset or sad. Such as a friend or a relative may have
       | collaborated with the Stasi. Another function is to preserve
       | suspense and surprise: When we read a detective story, we
       | typically do not want to know in advance how the story ends."
       | 
       | They also discuss how blind auditions for orchestras result in a
       | much broader group of people being hired as musicians (basically
       | it's anti-discriminatory wrt non-relevant factors), and also, the
       | Twitter effect:
       | 
       | > "In 2018, an investigation found that false information spreads
       | more quickly and more widely on Twitter than genuine facts.
       | Scientists suspect that the reason for this is that false
       | information appeals to our emotions and often surprises us and
       | defies our expectations. And initially, everything that's
       | contrary to our expectations is interesting to us. We need to
       | know this! That's where deliberate ignorance can help us to build
       | up a cognitive defence to protect us against being inundated with
       | false information."
        
         | endominus wrote:
         | The blind auditions may be a bad example - or at least, may not
         | have helped get more women hired into orchestras. The original
         | study that posited that blind auditions greatly help women does
         | not show strong data to support its claims and what data it
         | does show either contradicts the claim (when confounded) or has
         | no significant result and large error values (when
         | unconfounded). See
         | https://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/ for more
         | details.
         | 
         | There are also a lot of... let's call them self-styled anti-
         | racists who want to end blind auditions because they don't
         | result in enough minority hires (see [0], [1], [2]) which is an
         | interesting way to define discrimination, I suppose.
         | 
         | [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-
         | audition...
         | 
         | [1]: https://www.amren.com/news/2020/07/to-make-orchestras-
         | more-d...
         | 
         | [2]: https://www.quora.com/Considering-that-blind-auditions-
         | incre...
        
         | amitmina wrote:
         | Deliberate ignorance is a way to optimize for out emotions.
         | Most of us are still rooted in our limbic brain no matter how
         | rational we think we are.
        
       | amitmina wrote:
       | In a paper called "Cassandra;s regret - a paper in the journal of
       | psychology review" written by Gerd Gigerrenzer he mentions the
       | prevalence of People ignoring mostly to maintain a potential
       | upside due to surprise and also the negative emotions associated
       | with knowing something they didn't want to know. People prefer to
       | be in a state of active ignorance even when information is freely
       | available. 85-95% of people don't want to know about potential
       | upcoming negative events. Deliberate ignorance to maintain
       | positive emotions is more prevalent than earlier expected.
        
         | ahmadmijot wrote:
         | It's the same paper in the title
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-06-21 23:02 UTC)