Thread by @add_hawk

"The Seductions of Clarity" is now officially out!

It's about how to fake clarity - how to manipulate the *feeling* of understanding to manipulate beliefs. With two core case studies: conspiracy theories and bureaucratic language.

Thread:
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

The main idea: we are cognitively limited beings, that need to guesstimate what's worth investigating, and what's not. We need a *heuristic for terminating thought*. Because we don't have the time to investigate everything.

Proposal: many of us use the *feeling of clarity* as a heuristic for terminating thought. We use the feeling of confusion as a signal to investigate something, and the feeling of clarity as a signal that we're done.

So a hostile manipulator could imbue a system of thought with the *feeling* of clarity. They could get people to stop investigating, to look elsewhere. It's like a stage-magician's trick - of signaling boredom with the active hand, to get you to look somewhere else.

How do you simulate the feeling of clarity and understanding? Philosophers have given us a model of what understanding is. To understand is to grasp a model and a systematic pattern, and to be able to apply it, and communicate it. So we'd just need to fake that.

To simulate the feeling of understanding, you'd want to create a system with the *feeling* of grasping a model, and the *feeling* that you can apply and communicate it. And if you didn't have to make it true, you could do all you could finely engineer it to amp up that feeling.

Two examples: conspiracy theories and standardized bureaucratic language, all of which simulate the feeling of being able to comprehend, synthesize, and communicate. They create the feeling of clarity, even when they aren't true. But if the feeling gets us to stop thinking...

Finally, this is a study in what I'm now calling "hostile epistemology". Hostile epistemology look at environmental features and strategies that take advantage of our cognitive vulnerabilities. As opposed to, say, "vice epistemology" - which focuses on our cognitive failings.

And, if you don't have institutional access to the official version, here's my unofficial pre-print of "The Seductions of Clarity", available for free:

philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUTS…

Interesting that @heresathought went here. I've been using the same analogy: that it's easy to make *delicious* food if you give up on its *nutritious*, and the same is true: it's easy to make seductively clear ideas if you don't care about truth.

https://twitter.com/heresathought/status/1398123395129110532?s=20