Everyone, every last one of us, does this every single day, all day, and only occasionally do we deviate to check ourselves, and often then it's to save face.
A Nobel prize was given for related research to Daniel Kahneman.
If you think it doesn't apply to you, you're definitely wrong.
Your decisions shape your preferences just as much as your preferences shape your decisions and you're not even aware of it. Yes, everybody regularly confabulates plausible sounding things that they themselves genuinely believe to be the 'real reason'. You're not immune or special.
I will check the article with more attention as soon as I will have the time, but: putting aside a question on how would a similar investigation prove that all people would function in the same way,
that does not seem to counter that some people «check their hypotheses» - as duly. Some people do exercise critical thinking. It is an intentional process.
You ask A "Why did you choose that?" > He answers "I like the color blue"
This makes sense. This is what everyone thinks and believes is the actual sequence of such events.
But often, this is the actual sequence
"Let's go with this" > "Now i like the color blue"
'A' didn't lie to you or try to trick you. He didn't consciously rationalize liking blue after the fact. He's not stupid or "prone to bad thinking". Altering your perceptions of events without your conscious awareness is just simply something that your brain does fairly regularly.
Make no mistake. A genuinely likes blue now - the only difference is that he genuinely believes he made the choice because he liked blue instead of the brain having the tendency to make you favor your choices and giving him the like of blue so it sits better.
This is not something you "check your hypotheses" out of. And it's something every human deals with everyday, including you.
I get what you are pointing at: you are focusing with some strictness on the post from Stavros, which states that "people pseudo-rationalize with plausible explanatory theories their not-at-the-time-rational behaviour".
But I was instead focusing at the general problem in the root post from Foundry27, and to a loose interpretation of the post from Stavros: the opposition between the faculty of generating convincing fantasies vs the faculty of critical thinking. (Such focus being there because more general and pressing in current AI than the contextual problem of "explanation", which is sort of a "perversion" when compared to the same in classical AI, where the steps are recorded procedurally owing to transparency, instead of the paradox of asking an obscure unreliable engine "what it did".)
What I meant is that a general scheme of bullshitting to oneself and pseudo-rationalizing it is not the only way. Please see the other sub-branch in which we talked about mathematics. In important cases, the fantasies are then consciously checked as thoroughly as constraints allow.
So I stated «/Some/ people bullshit themselves stating the plausible; others check their hypotheses ... Some people will output a pre-given answer; some people check» - as a crucial discriminator in the natural and artificial. Please note that the trend in the past two years has generated a believe in some that the at most preliminary part is all that there is.
Also note that Katskul wrote «only occasionally do we deviate to check ourselves» - so the reply is "No: the more one is educated and intellectually trained, the more one's thoughts are vetted - the thought process is disciplined to check its objects".
But I see re-checking the branch that the post from Stavros was strongly specific towards the "smaller" area of "pseudo-rationalizing", so I see why my posts may have looked odd-fitting.
I'm surprised you've not heard of the author (Sean Baxter). He's pretty well known among people who are interested in c++ standards proposals.
He single handedly wrote his own C++ front-end and then proceeded to implement a butt load of extensions which other members of the committees poo-pood as being to hard to implement in the compiler.
Every couple of weeks he implements something new. He's a real joy to follow.
I'm familiar with C++ and used to use it a fair bit, but I'm way out of date with it. Python has been my primary language almost since I picked it up, nearly 20 years ago.
> The weather was unusually mild for the season, and Kelly thought he might even have time to “bag” a second Munro,
I really hate when people use very uncommon terms without defining them. (or sometimes even people's names)
It's not that I couldn't make a guess based on context, but it's distracting, and I feel like my eyes must have skipped over something and I often keep going back over the text to see what I must have missed reading.
I imagine this is sometimes caused by sloppy editing, especially when they refer to a last name of a person who has yet to be introduced in the article, but I think sometimes it's a deliberate choice and I object.
Honest question, what was the most confusing part for you? I am guessing bag as that one might be more obscure but even then in the context I think its guessable but maybe a struggle for non-native english speakers. Munro seems difficult but since your selective quote makes it worse imo.
"...a second Munro, as the Scottish mountains above 3,000 feet are known."
The opening paragraph describes him climbing/hiking a mountain in Scotland. "His plan was to climb Creise, a 1,100-meter-high peak overlooking Glen Etive...". Which then leads into him trying to "bag" a second one.
Just a counterpoint that it does not feel like sloppy editing at all. I struggle to see what would be difficult here for native speakers.
> Who bags a mountain? A tortured metaphor if I’ve ever heard one. And 90% of English speakers don’t know what a Munro is. I’ve been to Scotland and never heard the word.
Peak bagging is common in that community but "to bag" something is quite common in native english or at least enough so that its in the Oxford dictionary. Hard for me to see a native speaker struggle with this, the connection can be made just from the prior paragraph.
They define what a Munro is in the same sentence. Are you here to just argue? I had to go back and add your post as a quote as I am not sure how someone can miss the literal definition within the sentence. "Munro, as the Scottish mountains above 3,000 feet are known". Is that difficult for you to read and understand?
Peak bagging is a very common term in the outdoor sports world. This complaint is like a non-tech person reading a Wired article that mentions JSON and complaining that there's no explainer.
Do you have any source for your disagreement. Last time I checked the phrasing as it applies to a game bag goes quite far back which would hint at its usage in later examples that you provided.
"Many figurative senses, such as the verb meaning "to kill game" (1814) and its colloquial extension to "catch, seize, steal" (1818) are from the notion of the game bag (late 15c.) into which the product of the hunt was placed. This also probably explains modern slang in the bag "assured, certain" (1922, American English). To be left holding the bag (and presumably nothing else), "cheated, swindled" is attested by 1793."
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=bag
You’re both right in a way, in that you’re able to reason about the word from usage and context but it’s a separate meaning entirely, #5 below
From Oxford Dictionary of English
verb (bags, bagging, bagged) [with object]
1 put (something) in a bag: customers bagged their own groceries | we bagged up the apples | once you've raked the leaves, bag them up right away so that they don't get wet.
2 succeed in killing or catching (an animal): Mike bagged nineteen cod.
• succeed in securing (something): we've bagged three awards for excellence | get there early to bag a seat in the front row.
3 [no object] (of clothes, especially trousers) form loose bulges due to wear: these trousers never bag at the knee.
4 North American English informal fit (a patient) with an oxygen mask or other respiratory aid.
5 (bags or bags I) British English informal a child's expression used to make a claim to something: bags his jacket.
6 North American English informal abandon or give up on: she ought to just bag this marriage and get on with her life.
7 informal, mainly Australian and New Zealand
English criticize: the fans should be backing him not bagging him.
Number 5, bagsying, is subtly different. It's a claim to something, like dibs in the US.
No, both the GP and I are referring to number two, gaining something and literally or figuratively putting it in a bag. It applies equally to game and SaaS revenue and everything in between.
They introduce Charlie Kelly the previous paragraph, explain what a Munro is right after that and use quotes around “bag”. What else could you expect? “Bag” is extremely common in many industries and they defined both other different terms.
You just ripped on an editor for absolutely no reason.
The word to "bag" may be more common in this context but it's not exclusive to it nor very uncommon, at least in North America. You might say "they bagged a record in the 4x400m relay" or "we bagged the contract" or another form like "that objective is in the bag." I think it's etymologically derived from hunting (literally putting game in a bag) but at this point it's just a word.
I wonder if cheapish EVTOL travel might make a difference here. I.e. if CEOs effective travel time is reduced, does that affect headquarter location selection.
Yes. Sometimes I will think to myself one word at a time. Sometimes I will think to myself in the abstract (wordless). I don't know how to control it. I do know that once I realize I'm thinking wordlessly, I collapse to wordfull for a bit. There is never anything close to a voice associated w/ these thoughts though.
I read at about double the pace of the average reader iirc. I do phrase-based / sight reading, which is what speed readers typically practice doing. An interesting aspect of this is that I often never learn character names in books, since I just recognize the shape of the name. A friend of mine with a similar reading style also has this experience.
Have you considered explicitly using weed or shrooms as an on-ramp to exercising this ability? You could devote some time and slowly build up your ability.
Just as you can learn to wiggle your toes independently, or play the piano, or learn a new language, which require wiring new pathways, it's possible to learn to wire new pathways to non-motor areas of your brain. But it likely requires the same amount of effort.
I believe that developing the ability to mentally visualize more vividly is the explicit goal of some certain kinds of meditation. If you're interested you might look into "fire kasina".
But how would we know though right? I mean without having an A/B comparison.
Sure it didn't stop the destruction, but I don't think that was ever in the cards. But it might have helped by some amount even if small. 1%? 2%? 6%?
If it reduced destruction by 2%, would that have made the campaign worth it?
I think there's a chance it did do some good in that it was in enough awareness to end up somewhere on a foreign policy agenda higher than it might have otherwise been, and thus policies might have been negotiated in trade agreements, treaties, company due diligence source tracing, etc.
Not sure why we think normal evolution wouldn't just route around such problems.