Bob on Trump

Today
12:02pm
Rob Michaels
well that page is from my favorite series....I really think its an amazing series and I'm always
trying to get people to read it...in fact I gave you a copy a long time ago and you might still have
it...do you remember when I challenged you and Steve to open up to my comments and
randomly pick one and he opened it and read "like a cancer on a young girl"? Same series...if you
ever have time to some extra reading I think you should read it...its amazing! First book in the
Prince of Nothing series is "The Darkness that comes Before". You may have it as I gave you a
copy a long time time ago. As for my comments on facebook I've found that having discussions
on facebook has realy heightened my critical thinking, analytical and writing abilities (and
they've reached a point which is far beyond the cababilities of most people)...I feel an intrinsic
need to use logic and reason to find the truth....unfortunately this is extremely draining to do this
all the time since it requires vigilance and accuracy...I can't seem to relax and have fun...it also
makes it so that its difficult for me to relate to most people since I'm operating on an abstract
level far above the concrete concerns of most "regular" people...I"ve accumulated layers upon
layers of knowledge and analyzed how those elements of knowledge relate to each other....I feel
like an analysis machine lately, something that almost isn't human...in a way so much interacting
with my computer and the internet has made me a cyborg...maybe I'm not connected physically
with the machine (this will happen in the future most likely) but in terms of how my mind is
enhanced by the machine, in term of how it presents the information I need, my mind functions
jointly with the machine to gather information and analyze it.

12:15pm
Rob Michaels
As for the role of technology in political discourse it absolutely can enhance the exchanges that
take place and the dissemination of information. The problem isn't with the technology, its with
the people. Our minds are limited, even someone who is very smart. We have many
psychological tendencies to distort the truth and when we use technology that reality does not
change. Human beings haven't really evolved to seek the truth, if anything they have evolved to
obscure the truth. Our mental models are not up to the task of understanding our environment
and world, which is many magnititudes more complex than we can understand. So we try to
shrink things down, to simplify things so our brains don't have to do so much work and analysis
all the time (which is what I do, but my abilities are much stronger than most people). We have
evolved to make decisions quickly in order to preserve ourselves in a potentially violent unsafe
environment. We also behave differently when in groups and have a tendency to shut down our
critical thinking processes once we commit to a group ( for instance, not believing in evolution
for a Christian, despite evidence to the contrary)...from an evolutionary perspective it doesn't
matter what the group believes, what matters that the person who joins the group receives the

protection of the group. So human beings have evolved not to pursue the truth but to go along
with the group despite the fact that there is usually copious evidence that what the group believes
is wrong. For instance, many Republicans I know are great people, smart and have good values.
Obviously Trump is an unethical scumbag who is clearly unfit to lead the country, but once a
person believes himself to be a part of the Republican group its very hard for that person to break
free of the groups dogma, because he has surrounded himself with people who have similar
views.

12:18pm
Rob Michaels
As for a more specific discussion about the role of technology in poltical discourse I'll come
back to this some time soon and talk about that some more but for now I'd like to take a break.
Also I will discuss the idea of cognitive dissonance which is something you might wish to
investigate on wikipedia , if you're not familiar with the subject, but is highly relevant to the
issues you wish to discuss.

3:15pm
Rob Michaels
so we create mental geographies, landmarks so that we can orient our beliefs within our
environment...when information is presented that challenges our belief system or would require
us to change our perspective, we have two choices basically: 1) re do our belief system or 2)
disregard the information as false, wrong, or not relevant. Doing the first thing is very disruptive
to our internal mental state and so we will avoid this at all cost, and are almost guaranteed to do
the second thing, which does not require a fundamental reorientation of our existence. Therefore
truth has a low priority in our mental schemes. A small minority of us defer to evidence, reason
and logical but vast majority of people do not care about these things.

3:29pm
Rob Michaels
As for the technology, well it speeds up communication and allows access to a vast trove of
information. Unfortunately the cognitive biases that we have are still in place, so we use the
technology to support our own belief systems and cognitive structures. Technology makes it
easy to track down information or opinions that support our belief structure ( "look other people
agree with me"), or ("see look at all the evidence that supports my position") and we will still
have the tendency to disregard evidence to the contrary. In terms of something like facebook it
makes it very easy to identify and connect with other people who share similar beliefs.Aft4er all

if you're a Republican you're probably far more likely to have other Republicans as your friends,
or join groups that reinforcement your beliefs. Its true that having a network of friends means
that you are likely to have a limited amount of friends with opposing views, but they will
typically be a minority. We use the technologies available to essentially create and apply filters
so that the information that is presented to us reinforces our belief system, and turns away the
information that would be disruptive to us mentally. Why would we seek out or allow
information in that challenges our beliefs? It just would create stress and tension for us. So
fundamentally, the technology we use becomes an extension of ourselves...since its an extension
of our mind is not able to overcome our fundamental cognitive biases...the technology operates
as a part of us instead of being something objective that brings truth and logic and reason to our
perspective. Its accelerates our natural tendency toward gathering biased information.

3:43pm
Rob Michaels
As for information, well, if you ask someone why they believe something then typically will
give you a annoyed look like they want you to go away. It comes down to one thing...is the
person using logic and reason as the basis for their political beliefs, or not? I'd say 97% do not
use logic or reason for the basis of their positions. If they are religious, they are religious
because their environment encouraged them to be this way, likely their family has held this
position. So many people have political views, they hate bank and corporation if their liberal but
there really is no reason for this. People have such strong political views but do they know
anything about political history or theory, or economic policies. Most people do not know much
of anything reallly...the world is basically a giant tub of memes that float around and propogate
themselves within the minds of human beings but have no objective truth to them. People make
fundamental assumptions about reality (God exists and is affecting things) or (the world operates
under newtonian assumptions) without examining the basis for these beliefs. That's what
philosophers do. I'd say 99% of what we believe is speculation and evidence does not exist to
support it. It reminds me of Freuds view that religion is fake and the "opiate of the masses". I
would extend this idea beyond religion, and argue that most of what we believe is fake or that
insufficient evidence to support our conclusions...yet we need to believe something otherwise we
are lost and adrift in the middle of the ocean , frightened and unable to see the shore.

4:11pm
Rob Michaels
Also its true that we usually dont take into account that we only have partial information. For
instance, let us say that a very advanced alien civilization might exist. How would it view the
world and see it differently if it had a million times the knowledge that we collectively have as a
species, so that human beings were like ants to it...It would probalby be able to do things like
time travel, teleportation and other such things. We humans have a tendency to assume that the
information avallable to us is complete. However, I consider it far likely the the universe

functions in ways that we have no understanding of...we probaly only have a tiny fraction of the
complete set of information, and the rest of that information that we dont have probably
supercedes or invalidates whatever we believe to be true. I have been speaking in very broad
terms here to illustrate my point, but the same thing applies true to us as individuals and groups.
We have some evidence that supports our positions typically but people aren't open minded to
new information nor do they like the fact that they are probably wrong. I've come to the
conclusion that I can't really make any valid assumptions about the nature of our reality, and its
quite uncomfortable for me but I'm willing to endure this for the sake of truth. I understand that
I can theorize about things but my information is massively incomplete and I'm probably wrong
about most things 99% of time...this is the way of truth, evidence, and doubt. But most people
aren't reasonable to begin with and aren't interested in gathering a complete a set of evidence as
is possible before coming to conclusions, they will dismiss evidence that doesn't support their
views. Do you remember when I came up with the idea that the world is just "text"? This is what
I was talking about, to some extent. Ideas are constantly floating around all the time, but they
aren't really connected in a causal way...in our existences we gather up pieces of information and
construct a story out of it, the way a writer puts together a story...the reality that we experience
isn't connected causally, its a creation of our minds...an interpretation. One of the reasons that I
came to understand this is because I studied history ...a historian gathers evidence to support a
hypothesis...but in the end we have no way of knowing its true. Its just an interpretation. What
really happened we don't know....in a war, the victor writes the history they say. Our brains and
minds are limited, and we similarly construct a story of our own life and those around us, but our
analysis is lacking and insufficient and its difficult to understand this or endure the strain of
uncertainty. When I say "everything is just text" I'm referring to the way that we process and
analyze things, and trying to show that the elements that we believe to be "real" are just
interpretations and not necessarily connected in the way that we believe...we project our own
minds onto our physical and mental surroundings...just because we perceive things a certain way
and believe them to be true, does NOT make them true. We are fundamentally limited beings
and a true, complete understanding of our reality is completely impossible and we can't even get
close, especially with the cognitive biases we have that impede an accurate assesment of our
environment.
Just to clarify the "all there is is text comment" a bit more....when we read a written text its
meaning isn't clear, we must interpret it and construct a narrative from an ambiguous situation.
Our very existence is the same way...the meaning of our external reality and our place in it isn't
clear, we must interpret it and construct a narrative from the limited information we have
available...our whole world is basically a living text...author unknown.