🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 🧠 Cognitive dissonance is portrayed as a superpower, and the video aims to enhance understanding of its definition, usefulness, evolution, and societal role. 01:09 🔄 Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort arising from conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes, prompting a motivational drive to resolve inconsistencies. 02:05 🌐 Cognitive dissonance is an adaptive function, evolved to drive humans to create better models of reality, contributing to survival and playing a crucial role in social progress. 03:12 🧬 The evolution of cognitive dissonance is observed in various species, especially great apes, indicating its presence before humans. It serves as a survival advantage by promoting belief updates for accurate models of reality. 05:02 🚦 Cognitive dissonance functions as the brain's error detection signal, de-pathologized as a natural instinct, and is linked to the capacity for abstract thought and conceptual understanding. 07:30 🧠 The neuroscience perspective reveals our brain's ability to hold and manage multiple beliefs, compare and contrast them, and articulate the collision between beliefs during the reconciliation process. 09:28 🤔 Philosophically, the emergence model of reality is discussed, suggesting that humans can achieve some level of objectivity in their thoughts despite biological constraints and subjective experiences. 11:29 🔍 Situated awareness emphasizes the subjectivity of individual experiences, acknowledging contextual embedding and the impact of emotions on perception. 13:20 🔄 Self-correction is presented as a systematic approach to move closer to an accurate model of reality, acknowledging the impact of external factors on subjective beliefs. 14:32 ➕ Formal logic and mathematical representations are discussed as tools for identifying and resolving cognitive dissonance, raising questions about the fundamental nature of human brains compared to artificial intelligence. 17:56 🌐 From a societal perspective, cognitive dissonance drives conflicts, intellectual movements, and societal progress, especially evident in the era of the internet, influencing power structures and democratizing knowledge. 19:32 ⚖️ Three reaction spectrums to cognitive dissonance are presented: Attack vs. Retreat, Internal vs. External, and Reconciliation vs. Rejection, highlighting cultural influences on these reactions. 23:29 🤷♂️ The video emphasizes the importance of a balanced approach to cognitive dissonance, involving both attack and retreat, internal and external responses, as well as the need for critical scrutiny of opinions for societal progress. 23:55 🤔 Truth is redefined as a sensation, existing as the absence or alleviation of cognitive dissonance. It's subjective and evolved, not an absolute construct. 25:32 🌐 Truth is culturally contextual, learned through culture, family, and politics. It's the absence of belief collisions, requiring cognitive tools and mental resources for recognition and reconciliation. 26:30 ⚖️ Potentiality is the constant shift from harmony to disharmony. Internal reflection and external factors like news can trigger shifts. People often have systematic reactions to self-soothe when faced with cognitive dissonance. Made with HARPA AI
How did I not know this channel existed until now?! I was just about to type a thing on the last video of yours I watched about how similar a lot of the 'problems' with the ways LLMs think are pretty akin to the 'problems' with the ways neuroatypical people think, and then youtube robot was like "you know he has a channel about that." And here I am! Anyway, preemptively subscribed, looks like I get a backlog to catch up on. :-D
Absolutely eating up this content, thanks David! The functional cognitive side of human memory is incredibly fascinating. I've been researching human memory in an attempt to give LLMs similar capabilities, and the analogies hold when brought into the context of your video. Beyond the base "remembrance agent" functionality of the Exocortex (long-term memory clustering and summarization into short-term memories), it may benefit from simulating passive cognitive dissonance for increasing internal consistency. An agent can always "remember" one of multiple conflicting views, and we could use a second agent with a shared memory stream to help resolve internal inconsistencies during or outside of recall. I was hoping this would manifest with carefully weighted recall consolidation alone, but even if it does, this may be a big step up. We can even draw from neuroscience and weight the types of reactions done by the AI. Just an idea, so much to research, so much work to do. What a time to be alive!
Returning to this video after a while and I want to listen and think about how cognitive dissonance can relate to “noise” in machine learning. I recently thought about how noise is how models discover than data is not important vs. is. The idea being, if some feature shows up in EVERY training sample, it’s probably important. (Overfitting) But if it is there sometimes and at other times is not, it is ignored by the learning process. In the same way, cognitive dissonance is a sign that we have previously been overfit and need to undo a feature we once thought was relevant, but it has been revealed that it needs to be relaxed in order to allow our model to fit better in a generalized way.
Living in a world with trash flying around everywhere, we better constantly upgrade our mentalizing capabilities. It seems that you are a great help to keep our thoughts on the right track.
I posted a paper I wrote in Gradiate school, and I am sure that people misunderstood it, and also assumed it was like a primary social message, no it was one enough many things to speak on... I knew I was leaving out details, just wondering of others would assume blindly as they usually do...
I would like to know how to address the inconsistencies in society's various systems? Especially when it causes cognitive dissonance. It almost appears as if society on a mass level is under the guise of CD which is paralyzing
There might be a fourth common strategy based on what people think they "should" do. This lets people avoid thinking about a thing by instead assigning it a moral, karmic, or personal value, and letting that decide their beliefs. Motivated reasoning and selective attention seem to be two common ways this manifests.
@Neurospicy.David.Shapiro hmmm... I would love to hear a counter explanation of it. As a theory it works to explain and predict patterns. Does it have utility?
@Neurospicy.David.Shapiro I sincerely hope you are right. The analysis of information goes back FIVE centuries. The reasoning seems sound. I would love to hear you deconstruct and debunk it. If anyone can do that it's you. Thanks David
Hmm... Not sure you are right on this one. I don't think error correction and cognitive dissonance are synonyms. Pretty sure you also need an element of social in there too. That is, it's when two identities or groups require conflicting things from you. The struggle for you to meet a group's needs is what actually causes the emotion. I'd argue that needing to refine the shape of your arrow head only causes dissonance when you're identy is a part of that- IE when you feel like your worth to a group or culture rests on you having better/perfect arrows. Or when one group asks you to kill, and the other requires you to turn the other cheak. Not sure there's an actual error there. Just a contradiction, requiring a solution.
@@Systems.Thinking Thanks for the reply. Hope you are doing well. Seems to be a minor mismatch. Didn't say it wasn't a super power. Just that the definition needed shifting.
This is called vanity by any other means...or self righteousness. And it's just ironic that it's a 🍚 person teaching that if you tell yourself you're not something even if you are then you get to dictate to yourself what you are and believe it. And how does that work out even if it's not true?
David, this is very very enlightebing and fascinating. But 1 question, something doesn't add up for me: let's imagine I am an atheist and one day I'm exposed to some kind of extreme christian fundamentalist content through the internet. In my mind I will either quickly laugh it off as "crazy" or find it threatening and upsetting to see this group of people inside the same country as you who share an almost alien view of reality. Our tribal instinct, sadly, is to feel suspicioun and mistrust toward those. In either case there is no competition of two previously accepted (or internalized perhaps) beliefs. This does not sound like cognitive dissonance to me.
It is cognitive dissonance if you don't understand where they are coming from and categorically reject their worldview. If you accept "I don't get it, they must be absolute lunatics" then you have resolved your cognitive dissonance by retreat/rejection.
“In Japan, They don’t say someone is shy they say someone is thoughtful”. I live in Japan and this does not strike my as accurate. They have separate words for both and they are not related to each other. Japanese don’t say thoughtful to replace shy. I will give you that Japanese people are more prone to internal and reconciliation though. Just that comment you made seems incorrect I believe.
So the solution to cognitive dissonance is to get everyone on the same page and have a shared understanding. I feel that super intelligence will play a major role in assisting humanity to reaching that state via at some point genetically re-engineering all humans to look the same and psychologically re-engineering humans to think the same. Humans are far too disorganised to achieve this on their own I feel.
@@Systems.Thinking I agree it’s extremely dystopian but it’s important to ask why we feel this way. I think it’s because we are attached to aspects of our physical bodies, personality, beliefs, etc. that are unique to us. E.g. I identify as a Buddhist man because I have a male body and believe in Buddhism. But is that really who I am? Or is that just the illusory aspect of me. I believe it’s because of diversity across all areas of life that we have so much conflict throughout our species. I thought the idea is to solve this conflict. I thought solving cognitive dissonance (the problem) is the end goal. It seems like you’re saying that resolving cognitive dissonance is a process that never ends but I’m not sure.
Some neurobiologists, psychologists, psychiatrists use the term 'window of tolerance' to describe a persons capacity to handle emotional loads. It's like physical flexibility, you need to slowly and steadily stretch yourself to improve it. Like physical flexibility it can change over time and you might be flexible in some ways while inflexible in others. It may be that helicopter parenting, extreme safety measures (due to fear of being sued?), fear of being pierceved as privileged, intolerance to discrimination, and a bunch of other well-intended ideas and policies have an unintended consequence of limiting the mental stretching exercises of children and teenagers so much that their windows of tolerance are too small to handle dissonance adaptively, in some contexts. When we cannot tolerate the emotions cognitive dissonance cause within us, we become inflexible, our conscious minds snap, then we no longer rationally consider our response. Then we either react with rigidity (shut down, close our eyes, put our hands on our ears and go 'la, la, la') or chaos (flipping the lid, outrage and tantrums). So, I think for a while we have been leaning towards over-protecting each other from legitimately overwhelming experiences (bullying, racism, gender-discrimination, among others), and the average window of tolerance has shrunk, so people are now more likely to 'feel overwhelmed' by any dissonant thoughts (offensive ideas) and want to either shut down the conversation or blow it up in protest.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:00 🧠 Cognitive dissonance is portrayed as a superpower, and the video aims to enhance understanding of its definition, usefulness, evolution, and societal role.
01:09 🔄 Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort arising from conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes, prompting a motivational drive to resolve inconsistencies.
02:05 🌐 Cognitive dissonance is an adaptive function, evolved to drive humans to create better models of reality, contributing to survival and playing a crucial role in social progress.
03:12 🧬 The evolution of cognitive dissonance is observed in various species, especially great apes, indicating its presence before humans. It serves as a survival advantage by promoting belief updates for accurate models of reality.
05:02 🚦 Cognitive dissonance functions as the brain's error detection signal, de-pathologized as a natural instinct, and is linked to the capacity for abstract thought and conceptual understanding.
07:30 🧠 The neuroscience perspective reveals our brain's ability to hold and manage multiple beliefs, compare and contrast them, and articulate the collision between beliefs during the reconciliation process.
09:28 🤔 Philosophically, the emergence model of reality is discussed, suggesting that humans can achieve some level of objectivity in their thoughts despite biological constraints and subjective experiences.
11:29 🔍 Situated awareness emphasizes the subjectivity of individual experiences, acknowledging contextual embedding and the impact of emotions on perception.
13:20 🔄 Self-correction is presented as a systematic approach to move closer to an accurate model of reality, acknowledging the impact of external factors on subjective beliefs.
14:32 ➕ Formal logic and mathematical representations are discussed as tools for identifying and resolving cognitive dissonance, raising questions about the fundamental nature of human brains compared to artificial intelligence.
17:56 🌐 From a societal perspective, cognitive dissonance drives conflicts, intellectual movements, and societal progress, especially evident in the era of the internet, influencing power structures and democratizing knowledge.
19:32 ⚖️ Three reaction spectrums to cognitive dissonance are presented: Attack vs. Retreat, Internal vs. External, and Reconciliation vs. Rejection, highlighting cultural influences on these reactions.
23:29 🤷♂️ The video emphasizes the importance of a balanced approach to cognitive dissonance, involving both attack and retreat, internal and external responses, as well as the need for critical scrutiny of opinions for societal progress.
23:55 🤔 Truth is redefined as a sensation, existing as the absence or alleviation of cognitive dissonance. It's subjective and evolved, not an absolute construct.
25:32 🌐 Truth is culturally contextual, learned through culture, family, and politics. It's the absence of belief collisions, requiring cognitive tools and mental resources for recognition and reconciliation.
26:30 ⚖️ Potentiality is the constant shift from harmony to disharmony. Internal reflection and external factors like news can trigger shifts. People often have systematic reactions to self-soothe when faced with cognitive dissonance.
Made with HARPA AI
How did I not know this channel existed until now?!
I was just about to type a thing on the last video of yours I watched about how similar a lot of the 'problems' with the ways LLMs think are pretty akin to the 'problems' with the ways neuroatypical people think, and then youtube robot was like "you know he has a channel about that." And here I am! Anyway, preemptively subscribed, looks like I get a backlog to catch up on. :-D
Absolutely eating up this content, thanks David! The functional cognitive side of human memory is incredibly fascinating. I've been researching human memory in an attempt to give LLMs similar capabilities, and the analogies hold when brought into the context of your video. Beyond the base "remembrance agent" functionality of the Exocortex (long-term memory clustering and summarization into short-term memories), it may benefit from simulating passive cognitive dissonance for increasing internal consistency. An agent can always "remember" one of multiple conflicting views, and we could use a second agent with a shared memory stream to help resolve internal inconsistencies during or outside of recall. I was hoping this would manifest with carefully weighted recall consolidation alone, but even if it does, this may be a big step up. We can even draw from neuroscience and weight the types of reactions done by the AI. Just an idea, so much to research, so much work to do. What a time to be alive!
Returning to this video after a while and I want to listen and think about how cognitive dissonance can relate to “noise” in machine learning.
I recently thought about how noise is how models discover than data is not important vs. is.
The idea being, if some feature shows up in EVERY training sample, it’s probably important. (Overfitting)
But if it is there sometimes and at other times is not, it is ignored by the learning process.
In the same way, cognitive dissonance is a sign that we have previously been overfit and need to undo a feature we once thought was relevant, but it has been revealed that it needs to be relaxed in order to allow our model to fit better in a generalized way.
Living in a world with trash flying around everywhere, we better constantly upgrade our mentalizing capabilities.
It seems that you are a great help to keep our thoughts on the right track.
Thank you David for this content. You inspire me to think rigorously.
I posted a paper I wrote in Gradiate school, and I am sure that people misunderstood it, and also assumed it was like a primary social message, no it was one enough many things to speak on... I knew I was leaving out details, just wondering of others would assume blindly as they usually do...
Love the new channel! Somehow I just found it
Amazing overview!
I would like to know how to address the inconsistencies in society's various systems? Especially when it causes cognitive dissonance. It almost appears as if society on a mass level is under the guise of CD which is paralyzing
There might be a fourth common strategy based on what people think they "should" do. This lets people avoid thinking about a thing by instead assigning it a moral, karmic, or personal value, and letting that decide their beliefs. Motivated reasoning and selective attention seem to be two common ways this manifests.
I watch everyone of your videos. Would love to hear your thoughts about The Fourth Turning.
My honest opinion: It's a grossly oversimplified attempt to characterize intergenerational patterns and it's rooted in pseudo-mystical nonsense.
@Neurospicy.David.Shapiro hmmm... I would love to hear a counter explanation of it. As a theory it works to explain and predict patterns. Does it have utility?
No, it has no utility. It is a post-facto justification of the last century.
@Neurospicy.David.Shapiro I sincerely hope you are right. The analysis of information goes back FIVE centuries. The reasoning seems sound. I would love to hear you deconstruct and debunk it. If anyone can do that it's you.
Thanks David
The thing is that you have to squint really hard and over simplify history to justify the fourth turning patterns. I don't think it's worth my time.
Hmm... Not sure you are right on this one. I don't think error correction and cognitive dissonance are synonyms.
Pretty sure you also need an element of social in there too. That is, it's when two identities or groups require conflicting things from you. The struggle for you to meet a group's needs is what actually causes the emotion.
I'd argue that needing to refine the shape of your arrow head only causes dissonance when you're identy is a part of that- IE when you feel like your worth to a group or culture rests on you having better/perfect arrows.
Or when one group asks you to kill, and the other requires you to turn the other cheak. Not sure there's an actual error there. Just a contradiction, requiring a solution.
Have to disagree. Cognitive dissonance is absolutely a super power. We just mistakenly pathologize it.
@@Systems.Thinking Thanks for the reply. Hope you are doing well.
Seems to be a minor mismatch. Didn't say it wasn't a super power. Just that the definition needed shifting.
I just discovered you got another channel by luck of the algorithm...
This is called vanity by any other means...or self righteousness. And it's just ironic that it's a 🍚 person teaching that if you tell yourself you're not something even if you are then you get to dictate to yourself what you are and believe it. And how does that work out even if it's not true?
Dude when do sleep ? , I said this line to only other guy that is electric viking
Maybe Life (as a regressive entropy system) is the universe’s attempt of re-establishing the once- primordial supersymmetry (lowest entropy point)? 😂
I love it
David, this is very very enlightebing and fascinating. But 1 question, something doesn't add up for me: let's imagine I am an atheist and one day I'm exposed to some kind of extreme christian fundamentalist content through the internet. In my mind I will either quickly laugh it off as "crazy" or find it threatening and upsetting to see this group of people inside the same country as you who share an almost alien view of reality. Our tribal instinct, sadly, is to feel suspicioun and mistrust toward those. In either case there is no competition of two previously accepted (or internalized perhaps) beliefs. This does not sound like cognitive dissonance to me.
It is cognitive dissonance if you don't understand where they are coming from and categorically reject their worldview. If you accept "I don't get it, they must be absolute lunatics" then you have resolved your cognitive dissonance by retreat/rejection.
“In Japan, They don’t say someone is shy they say someone is thoughtful”.
I live in Japan and this does not strike my as accurate. They have separate words for both and they are not related to each other. Japanese don’t say thoughtful to replace shy.
I will give you that Japanese people are more prone to internal and reconciliation though. Just that comment you made seems incorrect I believe.
So the solution to cognitive dissonance is to get everyone on the same page and have a shared understanding. I feel that super intelligence will play a major role in assisting humanity to reaching that state via at some point genetically re-engineering all humans to look the same and psychologically re-engineering humans to think the same. Humans are far too disorganised to achieve this on their own I feel.
That's super dystopian. Resolving cognitive dissonance is a process, not an end goal
@@Systems.Thinking I agree it’s extremely dystopian but it’s important to ask why we feel this way. I think it’s because we are attached to aspects of our physical bodies, personality, beliefs, etc. that are unique to us. E.g. I identify as a Buddhist man because I have a male body and believe in Buddhism. But is that really who I am? Or is that just the illusory aspect of me.
I believe it’s because of diversity across all areas of life that we have so much conflict throughout our species. I thought the idea is to solve this conflict.
I thought solving cognitive dissonance (the problem) is the end goal.
It seems like you’re saying that resolving cognitive dissonance is a process that never ends but I’m not sure.
Yo. Is this the reason noone is allowed to "insult" (tell the truth), because it activates the super power?
Sounds legit.
Sort of. It's mostly a cultural more due to zeitgeist
Some neurobiologists, psychologists, psychiatrists use the term 'window of tolerance' to describe a persons capacity to handle emotional loads. It's like physical flexibility, you need to slowly and steadily stretch yourself to improve it. Like physical flexibility it can change over time and you might be flexible in some ways while inflexible in others.
It may be that helicopter parenting, extreme safety measures (due to fear of being sued?), fear of being pierceved as privileged, intolerance to discrimination, and a bunch of other well-intended ideas and policies have an unintended consequence of limiting the mental stretching exercises of children and teenagers so much that their windows of tolerance are too small to handle dissonance adaptively, in some contexts.
When we cannot tolerate the emotions cognitive dissonance cause within us, we become inflexible, our conscious minds snap, then we no longer rationally consider our response. Then we either react with rigidity (shut down, close our eyes, put our hands on our ears and go 'la, la, la') or chaos (flipping the lid, outrage and tantrums).
So, I think for a while we have been leaning towards over-protecting each other from legitimately overwhelming experiences (bullying, racism, gender-discrimination, among others), and the average window of tolerance has shrunk, so people are now more likely to 'feel overwhelmed' by any dissonant thoughts (offensive ideas) and want to either shut down the conversation or blow it up in protest.
Don't let (insert gender) hear this