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On Frameworks

Confirmation bias: people want to believe what they already know. This is the danger of learning an absolute thing. If our model of the world is wrong, then we don't want to change our minds. We get stuck on scaffolding intended for another building. When cigarette companies tell you to pick their brand, and they put it in a song, the lie is that you need to make a choice at all. If you make that choice, the bigger choice has been made for you.

So, when learning new things, we should seek to incorporate those new things into our minds in a way that, even if they turn out to be wrong, they won't damage our ability to function in a new way. This is a broad area of strategies, and they are analyzed for their ability to survive (perhaps societal, personal, or structural) change.

In life, we are often presented with new frameworks. New ways of thinking about things. They have many names: taxonomies (here are the categories of things), dichotomies (two things), flowcharts, models, and more. Oftentimes, these are presented as truth, but these are only useful tools to think about the world. No taxonomy should be taken seriously. I've lost the exact quote, but it goes: "taxonomy is the lowest form of science." Another related idea is the lottery hypothesis.

Example

Imagine: one group of people have idea or framework A, and another group of people have a competing idea or framework B. We can also imagine B is the better idea in some way. We could also switch which one is better, and it would still be the same situation.

For sake of an example, we can pick out an example situation:

Note also that a racecar driver might be a beggar or a chooser. None of the categories presented in the first framework (A) are exactly or by combination forming the categories in the second framework (B).

Alright, now imagine you are wondering around randomly, and you don't have a very strong conception of people, and there is a chance you hear A first or there is a chance you hear B first. Again, you would like to know and understand B because it is in some sense the better idea. Let's consider the cases.

Hearing A first

If you hear A first, and you incorporate it directly, and because of confirmation bias, upon hearing B, dismiss it as misunderstanding the power structures at play that matter, you end up still thinking A. This is the "bad" situation.

Hearing B first

If you instead hear B first, and you incorporate it directly, because of confirmation bias, even without having the expertise that B is better, then due to confirmation bias, you would dismiss A for it doesn't matter how, if you can race, you race. This is the "good" situation.

Example Conclusion

We don't have control of what we will hear first or what our teachers will say first. Incorporating an idea directly, a process which takes work, can lead to a situation where you champion the wrong idea due to the by-and-far unconscious effect of confirmation bias. The very structure of your thoughts predispose you to think about things in a certain way, and in order to avoid this problem, recognize these categories as fictitious when you hear them. Don't hear "it's us vs the system." Hear "one way to think about the world is that it's us vs the system."