Voyheuristics
You read the title right.
I like to say you can tell how much capacity I have have by how long my hair is. Is my head freshly shaven like Kratos or do I look like Grampa McVicar carrying a plate of custard cremes through to the guests in the front room? Shaving my head is always the first to go if I start feeling a wee bit drained.
This is also the point at which I withdraw and become more contemplative. It’s an oddly visceral feeling of hidden constraints inhibiting my ability to think freely.
I do this because I’m smart enough to know that if I’m lacking cognitive capacity, the last thing I want to be doing is talking on the internet. Here’s why:
The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem
This documentary was a compelling watch. It begins with the origin of 4chan and ends with revelations as to the identity of Q(remember them) and Anonymous. It’s exceptionally good.
Around the same time as I watched it, I had relaxed my stringent follow/follower rules on the last surviving social media platform an inhabit. It didn’t take long for me to post this:
What I beheld in my less-curated feed was a great deal of what must seem to the people re-posting them as in alignment with their guiding principles, but are in fact bereft of context and designed to prime automatic processing - basically setting you up to use a cognitive shortcut because what you see “makes sense” then reposting it for other people to be caught out and repost. Essentially, spreading bullshit like a virus.
The post in question was a traffic stop of a what appeared to be a driver, the caption called them a ‘liberal university student’ - for which there was no evidence - and when they started crying and talking about having anxiety / trauma, the officer did their best to deal with them with as much empathy as possible. The comments however, did not.
Several conclusions jumped to, then a set of beliefs reinforced by a sub-sixty second long video about “the state of universities” and “the state of Gen Z” and “the state of today’s culture”.
The only thing you could say for sure about the videos was the people commenting and sharing it hadn’t stopped to examine what they were watching. BUT WHY?
Shortcuts Suck, But Are Unavoidable
During a few days of deeply enjoyable discourse with a very dear friend, the topic of leveraging heuristics for the sake of discussion came up. The brain uses heuristics (thinks fast*) as an energy saving mechanism. Their position was such that it was a convenient way to ensure there was more to talk about over time. Less energy used means more conversation(s) to be had in a lifetime. My position was the opposite stance - you’d waste loads of time backtracking and dealing with assumptions that materialise somewhere along the way, and end up wasting double the energy saved by shortcuts because the conclusions are straight up erroneous.
Here’s an example - an instagram reel that probably won’t display:
So this lassie is on some red carpet affair, probably took ages getting ready, knows she has to represent herself well and is ready to network. Some dickhead comes along with a “simple question” she wasn’t expecting, so heuristics kick in for her answer. Said dickhead posts the reel online making her look daft.
Is she daft? Of course not. She’s running on reduced capacity because she’s at some event and isn’t expecting someone to chuck this sort of bullshit at her.
IOD: Internet of Dumbasses
So then, back to my post about the ‘cognitively ill-equipped’. If we think now about the kind of people that typically get suckered by conspiracy theories and political rhetoric, it doesn’t take us long to figure out they might be operating on a thimble full of capacity and thereby: reduced cognition.
Money worries, fear of the enormous ongoing culture war (that doesn’t exist), of losing their job to AI, of their political opposition getting into power and crucifying them, poor quality nutrition (fasting, veganism for “health reasons”), poor sleep, overtraining, counterproductive coping mechanisms (passive coping, alcohol, caffeine, drug use) to prop them up, the list goes on and makes idiots of us all.
They’re just people lacking the capacity (think low energy availability) to set themselves up to engage deliberative processing when thinking about things.
Which City Has More People
Detroit or Milwaukee? If you’re American, there’s a chance you probably said Milwaukee, thinking this was some kind of catch-you-out test (it isn’t). If you’re not American, you probably said Detroit because you know it exists and might not even be sure Milwaukee is a city. Is it? I should check - I haven’t bothered to.
Statistically, non-Americans are more likely to get this correct than Americans, because they use recognition heuristics to choose an answer. Americans will second-guess themselves unless they have some expertise in place about these two cities.
So - automatic processing isn’t all bad if it’s backed by a form of expertise. Unfortunately for us, people on social media are rarely experts in the content or the tech they interact with, propagating what appears on the surface to be ardent stupidity.
Rage Against The Machine
It’s a difficult spot to be in. There are loads of levers to pull and buttons to press to course-correct the system we’re in but I think the most important is to find ways to increase our capacity. If we create an environment for ourselves that assists us in having more energy to spare a lot of the issues we see materialising may just vanish.
Building Capacity for More Betterer Cognition
Ultimately, it comes down to this: our cognitive capacity is finite. When we’re running on empty due to stress, trash nutrition, lack of sleep, or any other battery depleting state, we default to heuristics and automatic processing of what we see and do. This can lead us to make poor decisions, fall for misinformation, and propagate nonsense.
What To Do?
Prioritise our metaphysiological topography (mental landscape) to ensure we have the capacity to engage in deliberative processing:
R & R: Getting enough sleep and downtime.
Balanced Nutrition: Eat FFS.
Mindful Consumption: Take a knee before reposting something that might seem fair / feel foul.
Diverse Continuous Learning: Keep challenging our mind tank with new and diverse information and perspectives.
Collaborate: Discuss things with loved homies / fam. It’s nourishing.
By doing these things, we can ensure that we’re not just reacting to a world around us, but actively engaging with it in a meaningful way. Let’s strive to be more than just passengers on a crashing train; let’s be thoughtful, informed adventurers contributing to the ecology of an empathic and reasonable landscape.
/EOF
Lore for Today
This was a bit long, hope you’ve had your porridge.
*There’s a bunch going on in this. As much as I hate dichotomies, the two types modes of cognition I discussed are introduced in Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He approaches it from a cognitive / behavioural science perspective but erroneously conflates intuition with assumption and uses them interchangeably, which I find disagreeable. It’s a good primer though. Under-complexified as usual with books.
I used the neuroscience terms for the two modes of thinking instead of system 1 and 2 because that in itself it a low energy way to look at it.
Gerd Gigerenzer has some great stuff on heuristics. He also has a rad name.