groups without groupthink

descent into dissent is strength, not weakness.

the human sensorium does not work anything like the way that most people think it does. it’s a discursive process, a sloppy one, a large-scale near-instant extrapolation and error correction system that can easily miss things because focus is elsewhere and inputs are incomplete.

this evolved to make messy perceptive montages into functional consciousness.

it works really well. except when it doesn’t.

selective attention tests are wild and the notion of “too crazy to see” is a topic i have discussed before. (some of you have seen this video before, please don’t spoil it for those who have not)

past a point, the novel and the dissonant just sort of slide off or past perception. it’s just not there for you.

what we see in the world is far more often what we expect rather than what is.

it manifests in what we hear as well.

try this: (focus on one word in text, then the other while listening to the speaker)

basically everything is expectation.

you are told what something will be and it becomes that thing.

there is a wonderful sub-theme in the movie “dope” (great film, definitely worth watching if you have not seen it) about this. a maker of counterfeit designer bags hands two purses to a character and asks him: “which is real and which is fake?” in the end, the answer comes down to “it does not matter, you’ll make your decision about that based upon whose arm it’s on” which, honestly, seems like the truest answer. on the arm of a fancy lady on rodeo drive, it’s real. held by a hillbilly hairdresser, it’s fake.

the reality does not matter.

it’s all context.

this plays out in astonishing ways in real life.

watch this:

perhaps the really fun question is: if no one had ever said anything, would all these buyers have been happy with their purchases in a true victory for veblen? could this flat out have just been a brand?

i would wager yes and yes.

i would argue that it happens all the time. drop some junk vodka is a spiffy bottle and serve it in soho and call me a liar.

it’s the story of the emperor’s new clothes played out over and over again in unending cultural concatenation.

expectations are set and met without much regard to what is actually going on.

it’s the great trap of humanity: groupthink and misperception are the base state of the speech evolved hominid and are devilishly difficult to extricate oneself from or remain above.

we all do it.

we must.

there is simply too much in the world to take in de novo every time you see it. to remain sane, we feel a need to stay within the perceptive norms of our tribes and neighbors and stepping outside them is at once alienating and deracinating. it’s a path for madmen, visionaries and shamans that few would ever choose to walk apart from occasional forays into dionysian excess and vision quests.

to live permanently outside the fences of the tidy gardens and ordered meaning of cultured and cultivated perception is more than a mind can bear.

this is part of what makes modern discourse so difficult and modern opinion so dangerously fungible and fluid. we have so many “experiences” that are not experiences at all but rather hearsay memesplatter rapid fired at us past any possible speed of meaningful apprehension much less discernment. it’s just people we have never met speaking about things we have never seen in places we have never been washed through a lossy and presumptive sensorium and turned into “thoughts” about “the world” that may or may not find consonance with anything at all that is remotely real.

even the pictures and videos now tell lies.

the entire input system and firmament of reality becomes a meme of a meme of a meme misinterpreted through bias and rage farmed and frequency biased into calls to action that seem desperately needful of heed when in fact they may well constitute naught but full-blown hallucination.

the modern mediasphere IS hallucination.

it’s lossy perception unfaithfully copied, transmitted, and received by minds evolved to hunt mammoths and eat berries in a cave.

is this next image real? i have no idea. could be. might be photoshop. but the message it carries is very real. the perceptive links it drives, the “snap” of pieces fitting together like a macro are very real.

it’s funny, even poignant. the informational density and subtle nose thumbing rise to the level of actual art.

perhaps like fake fendi bags, “real” does not actually matter in a case like this, the meaning is the message and the message is the meaning.

poe’s law has become some sort of universal constant. you cannot tell what is sincere and what is parody without context and this no longer needs to be extreme.

this is why things like the scientific method and adversarial review were created. their purpose is to mitigate these problems, isolate variables, apply rigor, establish and test controls and null hypotheses.

it’s critical to stop the descent into groupthink and misapprehension as lifestyle and keep it at manageable levels.

i have had folks ask “why do you leave comments open and allow people who say things like X or Y or Z here?”

that’s why. i do it because sometimes they have a point, and sometimes we all need some extra perspective and some fact checking.

just the other day, certain internet felines were using jasmine crockett and her inappropriate home purchases as an example of how those who rail against DOGE are often the ones with things to hide.

some commenters pointed out that these claims looked likely to lack factual foundation and (embarrassingly enough) it made me realize that i had not substantiated them. i tried and could not. even GROK knew this.

but my base perception of “has campaign finance fraud accusations and took big money from super shady sammy bankman fraud” colored both my perception and my rigor.

it’s not the bag we see, it’s the arm that carries it.

i suspect i was in error or, at least, got out ahead of the facts in evidence.

for clarity, this seems to be a good encapsulation of the facts.

that’s real review for you.

it’s the power of the internet and open media. every problem is shallow to someone and many eyes make for fewer mistakes.

and this is why we all need red-team challenge and viewpoint diversity.

watching bernie bros on X defend his flying on private jets because “what’s he supposed to do, fly united?” with zero hint of irony or need for doctrinaire consistency because, “obviously, all animals are equal but some are more equal than others,” and “he’s ‘our animal’ so it’s all good” is a strong set of perceptive bias. fortunately, we have memes like this:

it’s really kind of amazing all of the things that people who get most of their information online and lack meaningful comparison and experience can come to believe and how obviously untrue they are to anyone outside of their frame.

it becomes so intractable because you’re not even really arguing with people, you’re arguing with perceptive bias carefully grown and cultured by societal, political, and media sorting engines and rarified into unassailable confidence in tenets that are sheltered from any dissenting information.

i know many get upset about “this politician needs to get onside” or “i cannot like this nominee because one of the 10 things they stand for is bad even if i like the other 9” and that the view of “we need to unite and not disagree so we can fight against the other side who are united and are far worse!” is seductive, but i really must disagree.

it’s a trap.

having “our tribe” (inasmuch as it is one) constitute a big, rambunctious, unruly family full of confrontation, dispute, and variance is a great gift. it’s self-governance and sanity and the constant checking and rechecking that prevents too great a departure from the objective.

it’s worth remembering that that’s the goal and that no one can lay claim to full objectivity. it’s an aspiration approached (at best) asymptotically.

“team reality” needs to keep touch with reality and the only way to do that is constant dispute and checking of facts, deduction, and assumption.

those able to hold useful, even friendly discourse with those with whom they disagree are those who can learn.

those who cannot have abandoned the pursuit of knowledge in order to defend doctrine.

internal dissent is not a weakness, it’s a strength. it’s the only trustworthy underpinning of a worldview.

challenge is not a foolproof path to knowing, but its absence is the path of a fool, proof from growing wiser.

it’s a tool to keep perception from going too far astray and as walking meatbags governed by 3 pounds of cholesterol wrapped fats and proteins sitting behind imperfect eyes and ears that fill it with lossy and assumptive perception, we could really use all the help we can get.

truth is found by fostering debate, cults are formed by suppressing it.

i struggle to see this as much of a choice.

choose well.