The War On Sensemaking (pt 1) in Sensemaking

What can we trust?
A lot of us are aware that most of what we see as information is actually propaganda. It is narrative warfare for some agencies and is often not a good source for sensemaking. So where is the high-signal low-noise information? We don’t know. The news is narrative warfare. Science and academia are not even too reliable, we don’t know if they’re presenting all the data or just cherry-picked data. So who can we offload the cognitive complexities of the world to? We don’t know that either because the ecology of information is broken.

We are making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sensemaking to inform those choices. We need to recognize that the cognitive complexities of the world are too much for one person. This requires collective intelligence and collective sensemaking. We can’t just offload these complexities to authorities that are doing shitty sensemaking. What is the application of that context? Are there distortions in that context? These are the questions we have to ask ourselves when we receive information. Preferably, we have to find someone who understands what causes these failures in sensemaking and develop relationships to help remove the distortion basis.

Don’t dumb it down
“Make things as simple as possible but not simpler”. We can make it more clear but if we make it simpler then it is wrong, it’s not accurate anymore. Media is pressured to explain everything in soundbites and make it at an 8th-grade level to spoon feed to dumb people. The complexities of the world have never been done in tweets before while we are all radically distracted. It was never done in a dumb-down process. To see what it takes to explain something complex you need only look at the references of a book. You’ll see what it all took to put it all together.

Everybody wants to be buff but they don’t want to lift any weights. Sensemaking is not intrinsic, it is developable. We have to train our attention. It’s an adaptive system that we can stress to increase its capacity. We have to put in input so it knows to get better. We need to develop the ability to hold multiple partial views in working memory. We don’t want people to just defer authority to someone who might be doing shitty sensemaking, they have to develop the ability to grow their own quality. This is how to increase our sovereignty:
-Grow our depth of care
-Grow our depth of earnestness
-Grow our self-reflectiveness
-Pay attention to our sloppiness
-Become aware of our own biases
-Become aware of our own skills and abilities
-Develop the clarity of our logic
-Develop their clarity of our intuition
-Develop the ability to determine how our intuition and logic relate to each other

Our broken ecology of information
Our ecology of information is broken. The ecosystem of information such as marketing, news, government, social media, networking is all examples of what we use to make sense of the world to make our choices. We hope the information is true and representative of reality to make our choices effective but that’s not always the case.

We need to know the difference between true and truthful. Truthful maps to what you believe. True maps to independently verifiable reality. Someone truthful just lies honestly. We have to look for distortions in both true and truthful because honest liars are mapping to what they believe is true but the interpretation is misleading because it doesn’t represent the entire context. A bunch of true information can be misleading. Science is supposed to be the earnestness of truth but it can be biased. That is usually because of capitalism. Capitalism is about optimizing your bias, you withhold information or just focus on certain info. The goal is obvious, to get you to purchase their product.

Strategic signalling
Why distort information? Marketing dynamics, everything is mostly rivalry. They want to be involved in your choice making so they want to do the sensemaking for you. They’re not interested in your sovereignty or quality of life they are just interested in maximizing their profitability. Everything is designed to make you addicted to it because that is the most profitable strategy. They only want you to believe that their information is true so they can affect your choices in their interests.

Attention hijack
News Channels want to maximize your attention on them. They do that by appealing to your cognitive biases, your identity biases and emotional biases. They do that by inflammatory. Projecting hyper normal stimuli. They are competing for attention because your attention is monetized.
-We have to factor in the intention of news stations.
-We have to remove the artifact from the information they are presenting and infer what the true information is.
-Ask who is seeking more grant funding.
-Factor in potential bias.
-Factor in that the signals we get everywhere are mostly strategic.
-Ask why anything is sharing what they’re sharing.

Truthful
It’s about gain theory. It’s a zero-sum game. One win equals someone else’s loss. There is always an incentive to lie to you. It’s even in nature for animals to evolve to disinform. They camouflage because of rival risk. Withholding the information for competitive advantage fucks up the ecology of information so much. We need to make relationships with others who value truth and that doesn’t pollute the information ecology. We have to pay attention to epistemology, how do we know the stuff? Be aware of the rival risk dynamics, how we get ahead by harming people. Being conscious that they just want your attention.

Most people go into the climate change narrative warfare without looking at the data deeply. They proxied their sensemaking to people they believe. They’ve heard it repeatedly and it has become true to them, no different than a fundamentally religious idea. Almost no one with reverent ideas has a good epistemic basis for the level of certainty that they hold. People have increased their speed of choice making and decreased their speed of sensemaking.

I’ve broken the rule about not making things simpler. This is all from a dense series by Daniel Schmachtenberger on Rebel Wisdom. It adds a lot of value to me as I am trying to make sense of the world, this matrix that we live in. Anyway, there are 4 other parts to this series, it took me all year to finally get through the first one. Here are the other topics from the first part of the series that I will eventually get around to talking about.

How Bad Ideas Defend Themselves
Giving Up On Sensemaking
What Can We Do?
Examine Your Own Sensemaking

Last updated November 27, 2020