Follow-up to: The Intelligent Social Web

The human mind evolved under pressure to solve two kinds of problems:

How to physically move
What to do about other people

I don’t mean that list to be exhaustive. It doesn’t include maintaining homeostasis, for instance. But in practice I think it hits everything we might want to call “thinking”.

…which means we can think of the mind as having two types of reasoning: mechanical and social.

Mechanical reasoning is where our intuitions about “truth” ground out. You throw a ball in the air, your brain makes a prediction about how it’ll move and how to catch it, and either you catch it as expected or you don’t. We can imagine how to build an engine, and then build it, and then we can find out whether it works. You can try a handstand, notice how it fails, and try again… and after a while you’ll probably figure it out. It means something for our brains’ predictions to be right or wrong (or somewhere in between).

I recommend this TED Talk for a great overview of this point.

The fact that we can plan movements lets us do abstract truth-based reasoning. The book Where Mathematics Comes From digs into this in math. But for just one example, notice how set theory almost always uses container metaphors. E.g., we say elements are in sets like pebbles are in buckets. That physical intuition lets us use things like Venn diagrams to reason about sets and logic.

…well, at least until our intuitions are wrong. Then we get surprised. And then, like in learning to catch a ball, we change our anticipations. We update.

Mechanical reasoning seems to already obey Bayes’ Theorem for updating. This seems plausible from my read of Scott’s review of Surfing Uncertainty, and in the TED Talk I mentioned earlier Daniel Wolpert claims this is measured. And it makes sense: evolution would have put a lot of pressure on our ancestors to get movement right.

Why, then, is there systematic bias? Why do the Sequences help at all with thinking?

Sometimes, occasionally, it’s because of something structural — like how we systematically feel someone’s blow as harder than they felt they had hit us. It just falls out of how our brains make physical predictions. If we know about this, we can try to correct for it when it matters.

But the rest of the time?

It’s because we predict it’s socially helpful to be biased that way.

When it comes to surviving and finding mates, having ...

Social Reality