this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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To add, our brains are lazy (or "efficient") and it's literally more work to rearrange knowledge (accommodation) than to just adjust new knowledge to fit current schemas (assimilation). It's likely a product of evolution since wasted energy gets us killed, thus we kind of have to force it into cognitive thought to overcome it.
Apt this comes from social psych, given that discipline practically emerges from post WW2 "why would people follow Nazis?" questioning.
There's the aspect of rearranging knowledge but also the distress that lies in dealing with difficult aspects of reality. Right now many people deny human caused climate change because if they didn't they'd see themselves confronted with a bunch of uncomfortable changes and difficult problems.
It's not just "oh, this thing I believed to be true is actually untrue" but also "ahhh now I have to deal with a bunch of overwhelming issues and the stress that comes with that"
Personally, I would love to know how they have no trouble ignoring reality like that. I would go mad cause deep down I know better.
Yup, and that's cognitive dissonance. Now we've covered an entire lecture, lol.
That's a big part of my theory as well. Until the social or economic consequences of the tribe rise above the concern for energy demand, neurons aren't going rearrange or build, because that takes too much energy.
I agree. But the cool thing about it is that you can change it (on an individual level) if you pay attention. It's just kind of hard. But I guess it is not something to expect on a broad scale, given the course of humanity
If I was smarter and younger I'd probably go into neuroscience to study this very thing, but I'm curious how much you can plant a seed of change, even if the front-facing conscious mind resists. Most people won't admit fault or yield in conversation, but does that mean you didn't sway them subconsciously in some way that they later come to appreciate by way of neural rewiring that happens under the hood anyway?
I don't have a great scientific answer. But if you follow the advice from the guy in your profile picture, training your own mind and acting skillfully would on average have the best chance to inspire others to do the same