[HN Gopher] Doubt explanations
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Doubt explanations
Author : marban
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-09-20 10:16 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sive.rs)
(TXT) w3m dump (sive.rs)
| groby_b wrote:
| That is... meaningless drivel, at best.
|
| The author is likely looking at the Sperry/Gazzaniga experiments,
| and... getting them wrong. The insight was that the left brain
| _fills gaps in information_ , and yes, it is confabulating. If
| your right and your left brain lobe happen to be severed.
|
| Our reasoning is far from unknowable in a non-severed brain. Yes,
| people are sometimes lying, and yes, "actions speak louder than
| words", but that doesn't mean you should blanket-dismiss
| explanations.
| ryanklee wrote:
| I think calling it meaningless drivel is a bit much, but you
| are right that we should be careful drawing inferences.
|
| It's "at the very least" worth considering: What does it mean
| that under specific circumstances we can be so sure of
| ourselves about such basic stuff and so totally wrong at the
| same time?
|
| It might not be a strong inference from split-brain phenomena,
| but it'd be a shame to /not/ wonder about whether and how much
| such confabulatory mechanisms are at play in normal functioning
| brains, then
| dang wrote:
| " _When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
| calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be
| shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3._"
|
| Your comment would be fine without the first bit.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| partdavid wrote:
| It seems like I've seen an increased number of these low-effort
| blog posts, with short, pithy, unsupported and almost-content-
| free "advice."
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| As commonly as "advice" is a form of nostalgia ("Don't make
| the same mistake _I_ did. ") it can still be useful if read
| from that perspective. This person isn't giving advice but
| rather explaining a mistake they made. Any calls to action in
| the article are just behavioral changes learned by the author
| after noticing their mistake.
| maxbond wrote:
| I'd say the statements at the end were a bit stronger than was
| warranted, and I'd say something like, "be skeptical of
| explanations" or "be cautious of explanations." I don't think
| they said that our brains are _like_ people with lobotomies,
| but that this was an illustrative example.
|
| I've definitely experienced people's stated beliefs continually
| disagreeing with their actions, and their producing a font of
| rationalizations when I asked them about it, until I was forced
| to conclude they were lying to me only because they'd first
| lied to themselves. Or confabulated, if you prefer.
|
| And I think it's important to understand that this can happen &
| that one's self can do it too. Which is, yanno, a meaning.
| chicob wrote:
| It is meaningless drivel.
|
| Some people confabulate, memory is not perfect, people with
| severe brain injuries visibly confabulate, so _all_ explanatory
| power is meaningless and we should never trust it.
|
| Never mind that some specific lesions to the brain actually
| provide _explanations_ for how we create narratives and
| confabulate. Those explanations are equally illusory...
| pessimizer wrote:
| We do the same thing when we're not split brained, but just
| damaged.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect
|
| When we have brain damage that causes us to neglect one side,
| we don't notice that we're neglecting one side. If it's pointed
| out, we unintentionally give specious reasoning as to why it
| happened.
|
| This is common knowledge, not based on a particular study, but
| many of them.
|
| edit:
|
| > Our reasoning is far from unknowable in a non-severed brain.
|
| Are you saying this based on something, or is it just a
| personal belief? If there's anything we know about
| introspection, it's that it is untrustworthy.
| maxbond wrote:
| I suppose it's an example of the age old adage, all models
| are wrong but some models are useful. Our models of
| ourselves, derived from from introspection and observations
| others make, are wrong, but if we're honest with ourselves,
| they'll be a useful reflection of reality.
| chicob wrote:
| I am really convinced by this explanation on how... wait
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| > your subconscious invents an explanation that you think is a
| fact.
|
| That may be the case for some people, but it isn't the typical
| case for me. Quite the opposite. My subconscious drives the show
| and _after the fact_ if someone asks me about something or if I
| 'm forced to confront why I did things in the _very unlikely_ way
| I did them my _conscious mind_ tries to create an explanation for
| the unconscious actions I 've already taken.
| rojobuffalo wrote:
| I agree. I heard a researcher put it like "we often think of
| the conscious mind as being the guy in the driver's seat,
| making decisions, and guiding behavior; but really all of our
| decision making and behavior is guided by subconscious
| processes and the conscious mind is more like the PR person who
| comes up with stories that justify our behavior."
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Well, I don't agree with that fully either.
|
| For me, if there is a moral quandary or a _highly_ analytical
| situation where the subconscious can 't quite estimate it
| then it gets kicked up to the conscious layer for a real,
| expensive (computationally speaking) decision.
|
| Something like "do I really want to flirt with this woman,
| given that I'm married" or "wait a second the abstraction
| here is leaking across domains which may ruin the
| architecture of this program in the long run" get kicked up
| to the upper layer. But for most of my programming, I
| honestly just keep it at the subconscious layer and so long
| as there is music that the conscious mind can check out on
| we're good.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| If anyone is able to discover the referenced "study", please let
| me know. Or was this just something confabulated by the author?
| ryanklee wrote:
| Sivers is referencing well-known/-docomented neurological
| phenomenon and behaviors related to split-brain conditions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7305066/
| groby_b wrote:
| You likely want to follow that Wikipedia article with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-brain_interpreter
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I am so glad for this word "confabulate"! I have found myself
| doing this many times so it's nice to have something to call it.
| manmal wrote:
| I thought the correct term is ,,rationalize", but that would
| only be the (probably flawed) translation from German.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| That's not a bad word, either, FWIW. I'd say it's both, with
| confabulating being the particular method of rationalization.
| maxbond wrote:
| Rationalize would work too. Confabulate communicates some
| interesting nuances, at least for me, about how this is a
| creative or synthetic process, whereas when I think of
| someone rationalizing something, it feels more deliberate and
| mechanical to me.
| manmal wrote:
| AFAIK rationalization is basically the bridging of
| cognitive dissonance. From that perspective it doesn't seem
| to be deliberate.
| maxbond wrote:
| Maybe deliberate is too strong a word, or maybe I'm using
| a loose definition of rationalization. I've observed
| rationalizations that I think were a choice, but not
| necessarily a conscious or considered choice. When I find
| myself rationalizing I feel like it often bubbles up and
| then I choose to push it back down (at least, until I'm
| ready to admit to myself this is happening, and face the
| consequences).
|
| There's two people from my past who I think of. One was a
| conspiracy theorist who moved fluidly and rapidly from
| one idea to the next, and these ideas were often
| contradictory. It was a live, synthetic process; they
| were connecting the dots of different conspiracy theories
| on the fly. If you pointed out a contradiction to them,
| they'd spin a new yarn to resolve it on the spot. This is
| what confabulation reminds me of. There was no
| destination; it was a dance through fanciful ideas.
| That's what feels less deliberate to me, it wasn't so
| much providing a justification or bridging a cognitive
| dissonance as much as storytelling. (They once told me
| their epistemology was basically founded in the emotional
| impact of a story; they believed they had a sort of
| "truthiness sense" and that what moved them was what was
| true.) If it were a science fiction story it would have
| been riveting, but as an epistemology it really limited
| their ability to understand the world and have
| relationships.
|
| Another is a friend who I had some difficult
| conversations with about their behavior, and after some
| heated discussion I finally got through to them, at least
| in part. But then the very next day they told me a brand
| new reason for why they thought their behavior was okay
| (it wasn't). And that felt like a choice to me. They
| wanted to do something, and they found a frame of
| thinking where it was permissible. They definitely
| bridged a cognitive dissonance, and I don't think they
| set out to do what they did, but I feel at some level
| they made a choice.
|
| That being said, I think when I rationalize it's often
| something along the lines of, "what I'm doing is hurting
| me, but I can't stop because someone is counting on me to
| do it," and that's only a choice by the strictest
| definition. And I can see how my friend might've seen
| things that way too.
| pgayed wrote:
| To paraphrase Charlie Munger, the bees buzz.
|
| To draw on Robin Hanson, the less you understand why you did
| something, the better you project to others you did it for the
| right reasons.
| vajrabum wrote:
| I'm a little doubtful about applying a story about the behavior
| of people whose brains have been surgically split in half to the
| rest of us who still have a corpus callosum. It's probably
| stretching my point but you could even say that's a confabulation
| which in the context of the article seems to be a made up
| plausible story with no demonstrated basis in reality or even
| consensus reality.
| psysharp wrote:
| Since we are explaining ourselves, the best confabulation is
| all we can strive to achieve.
| raldi wrote:
| I don't know about these study conclusions; the secret directions
| seem more like advertisements to me: Someone whispers "Please
| walk" and my brain (consciously or otherwise) thinks about it and
| realizes I'd like a drink, just like if I drive past a McDonald's
| billboard and think, "Hmm, french fries would hit the spot right
| now." Someone flashes "close the window" and it draws attention
| to the fact that actually, I am kind of chilly and _would_ like
| the window to be closed. It doesn 't mean the desire was made up,
| just not considered until it got the spotlight.
| jstanley wrote:
| Is only one side of the brain able to speak? Is the side of the
| brain that read the text internally screaming about the wrong
| explanation coming out of the mouth? How did both sides of the
| body operate the limbs to close the window if only one side of
| the body knew it should close the window? I'd love to learn more
| about this.
| barumrho wrote:
| Search "split brain experiments".
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