Some of the most intelligent, knowledgeable, respected-in-their-field distant family members of mine are like that. I've spent decade trying to figure it out, because selfishly it's terrifying and I don't want it happening to me.
One thing that seems to be common and is my working hypothesis, is that they're so smart and so respected in their field (or, in subset of cases, arrogant), that they simply trust themselves more than anybody else. There is nobody in their family and friends who can truly "slap some sense into them"; provide perspective, course-correct, nudge into objective reality or mainstream story, whatever we call it. I've actually asked a couple of them point blank - and they admitted, nope, there's nobody that they trust more than themselves. Couple of them even said - if you don't have trust and faith in yourself, you're weak.
So I'm hoping I'm somewhat inoculated against going off the deep end by having at least 3 people in my life (wife, sister, and one good friend) who can, and have, slapped some sense into me when I was going off the rails.
I was reading a book on cognitive biases recently and the part that really stuck for me was: The smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall prey to the Narrative Bias/Fallacy.
Super smart people are so good at constructing plausible narratives that they can convince themselves of almost anything. You have to actively look for ways to disprove your own narratives. This is hard because they sound so plausible.
So smart people don't know when they're wrong because they're smart enough to convince themselves that they're right, and dumb people don't know when they're wrong, because they're too dumb to see how dumb they're being. We can't win.
Yes, I think the lesson to take away is that you want not only to be smart, but also wise and humble. Wise enough to realize you need to poke holes in your ideas, humble enough to fix your hypothesis when facts change.
>wise and humble...you need to poke holes in your ideas...
But where does critical thinking come in? Seens there should be a heuristic or generalized approach for deciding what to believe. Epistemology, I suppose.
And this should all preface the formation of our ideas in the first place.
I'd argue that there is no nobody you should trust more than yourself. This does not mean disregarding expertise or imagining that you know, or can know, everything. But the moment that you grant final primacy over your own thoughts to somebody other than yourself is the moment that that person can make you believe, and consequently act, in nearly any way. And, at scale, that's quite a disconcerting thought.
When people trust themselves above all it means we'll never have a utopia because we all can't help but believing some pretty stupid stuff at times. But at the same time we'll never have an absolute dystopia, because the diversity of thought ensures we'll never all fall off the deep end, or be pushed off it, together.
It's not binary; it's not like I'm promoting being in a cult and surrendering your rights to thoughts and opinions :->
On a daily and regular basis, I trust myself, my thought process, experience, rationale, etc. I spent decades consciously honing my analytical and logical skills and I will spend lifetime continuing to do so. And it serves me well.
But, I believe, there needs to be a "safety valve". A "who watches the watchmen", somebody to provide a sanity check on your own rationale and story and narrative and thought process, which left alone can take you from first principle to lala-land, one seemingly logical step at the time, over years if needed. There needs to be an external influence/person who can, if situation calls for it, help you see things from an external yet trustworthy perspective, when your internal narrative, the "personal story of your life", starts strongly diverging from objective consensus reality.
(on a deeply personal note, I'll freely admit my sister did that for me ~15 years ago - after for a year or so I spun an increasingly personal internal narrative about something in my life, with a short but incisive comment, she momentarily enabled me to see myself through her eyes, and not love what I saw, and get that instant split-vision of my narrative and external narrative of what and why and how and whence I am where and how I am. Anybody else, I would've discarded or been defensive or otherwise ignored it. And I see many people around who desperately need a "grounding" or "reality check" or "slapping sense into" or "righting the boat" or whatever we choose to call it, but don't have anybody that can reach them. )
This is kinda a weird take to me, because I don't see "trust someone else more than yourself" as equivalent to "grant final primacy over your own thoughts to someone else".
I trust myself very little when it comes to many topics, because I have next to zero expertise in them, and I know that "common sense" often does not lead us to good decisions on topics where we have little understanding. That doesn't mean I'm going to outsource decision-making to others who are experts on those topics, but I am probably going to most often do what they say, after applying their information to my own situation and determining what seems reasonable and doable.
As an example, I will most likely get the Omicron-tuned COVID vaccine when it becomes available, assuming the relevant experts I trust say that it's a good idea. I have no idea if I really need it, but the non-zero threat of long COVID, coupled with the fact that we still know fairly little about the long-term effects of having contracted COVID, means I would rather face the very low risk of vaccine complications than increase my risk of getting COVID, with the attendant risk of it being something that causes lingering health problems for some significant part of my life. I won't be outsourcing my decision-making to a third party, but I recognize that I do not trust my expertise in this field (since I do not have any), and will allow those with expertise to heavily inform my decision.
You shouldn't need someone you trust more than yourself to slap sense into you. You should view someone whom you trust strongly (but less strongly than your own thoughts) arguing hard as an indicator, even if you disagree with them. You should be able to ask "Why do we disagree", and trace that back to (hopefully) some simple but core value difference, like "I like hotdogs and they like hamburgers".
Your trust in someone also doesn't need to apply equally on all topics. I'm much likelier to trust a virologist over myself about virology than about the best way to cook pasta.
I've had discussion with a guy in lab of a top university and they believed 911 was an inside job. steel beams and all that.
It doesn't seem to correlate to technical ability, there are something in psychology that draws a certain type of people towards conspiracy and in which they go into a mental state where normal explanations are removed from their logic and they go seek outlandish explanations or slightly hard to explain things and turn a twist into it. I don't understand why but I think a pretty decent amount of people subscribe to this kind of thinking.
Neurology researchers here, please give us answers.
> they believed 911 was an inside job. steel beams and all that.
911 is definietly a conspiracy. A bunch of telecom engineers acting in unison with dispatchers and first responders. There is no other explanation how else police/emt/fire brigade shows up when you dial that number and tell them about an emergency. But what it has to do with steel beams I don’t know. \s
Joking aside: I have noticed that sometimes when I preceive that everyone around me thinks X i feel an urge to think the opposite of it. I only had mild and inconsequential cases of this (opinion about shows, products, etc), but I can imagine that this type of contraryness in edge cases can convince people that everyone is wrong about some important historical event. And it seems once they convinced themselves their belief is stable enough to make them stick with it.
Obviously hating Game of Thrones when everyone was raving about it feels very different from subscribing to conspiracy theories, but maybe the phenomena is similar, just one latches on to a different subject?
Funny that that's the conspiracy you reach for to make the joke. Not the one where people planned in secret to send people to the United States to learn how to fly airplanes so that they could hijack commercial airlines and commit suicide attacks.
Good thing you mention or I fell for it (that you meant it seriously, not that I believed in the conspiracy). Poe's law in effect.
But that's the thing. People who believe in conspiracies are susceptible to them. For example, they could've lost their trust in society, or smoke a lot of pot, or have a friend or two who are into it. Very much like a cult.
And I am saying that as person who was into conspiracies, who lost faith in society, who used drugs (psychedelics, mostly), and had a severe psychosis (not at all related to the previously mentioned though but stress from another factor).
Was their argument rigorous or obviously irrational? On the spectrum of plausibility from lizard people to JFK, 9/11 doesn't strike me as especially delusional. I believe we sometimes don't differentiate well enough between abnormally suspicious people that act rationally from the clearly deranged. Non-consensus views could be a sign of either but a failure mode a different set of smart people have is to write off anything non-consensus merely because it's low status.
Indeed. As someone with experience of extreme manic psychosis, it is the pattern recognition/dot connection algorithm kicked into absolute overdrive. Spurious correlation abounds when afflicted with such a condition.
Thankfully my experience was acute and triggered by drugs, so a few years of anti-psychotics and refraining from anything other than cannabis and alcohol in moderation have let me stop taking the anti-psychotics and at worst I experience cyclothymia, which I've decided to just live with and not medicate.
They're very prone, in my experience, to believing that their explanations are ultra-rational, though, reality be damned. And to falling for arguments with the trappings of rationality, but deeply flawed premises or early steps slyly skipped so the castle's built on sand but looks like a perfect castle with all these crazy-tall minarets reaching for the sky (ahem, like a certain popular-online political & economic philosophy) and then treating everyone who doesn't agree that the castle's beautiful as irrational, probably-emotion-driven morons.
> They're very prone, in my experience, to believing that their explanations are ultra-rational, though, reality be damned.
Like for example, their analyses of "conspiracy theorists" (when what they are actually analyzing is their own incredibly flawed semi-conscious representation of conspiracy theorists). It's quite funny that the world is this way if you think about it deeply, because it could be otherwise.
But many people are not rational in any part of their lives, so irrational arguments are not surprising from them. Some people don't actually know what a rational argument is - it's something that you learn in school, not something that is intuitive. They think that argumentation is when you make the other person shut up, rather than when you make a step by step case to get to a point from a set of agreed upon (at least provisionally) premises. You can recognize these people because they have a tell of repeating the same sentence over and over again to drown out the other person speaking. They're not trying to lay out a convincing case, they're trying to survive. If they trusted you, you could absolutely teach them argumentation and reason.
Engineers do know how to argue rationally, because they have to remember why things work to a pretty intense depth. The question is how people can wall off that ability instead of applying it to other things that are important to them.
Being "human" isn't an explanation, though. That's just saying that humans are frail, and this is a failure, therefore it should be expected from humans.
There's nothing special about engineers that makes them less prone to human weaknesses. I had a (software) engineer colleague who believed in overunity energy, and was so into it they traveled to paid conferences.
