Results for “Christer Sturmark”

The politics of identity has gone very wrong in many cases. Politicians often forget that people are much more complex, and are a mix of many identities – and each of these identities can be of differing importance to the individual. A Muslim man from Somalia, who is a chess player, may have his chess-playing as his main source of identity, for example.

Magical thinking is a bi-product of cognitive process that were useful in our evolutionary survival. We're so good at pattern matching that we see patterns everywhere, even when they don't exist. It's better to believe the movement in the dark is a tiger, rather than the wind blowing thru a bush. Its better to be wrong on that, than the other way around.

We have to be aware of our cognitive fallacies to build some immunity to our cognitive traps. One simple thing we can all do is work on our own confirmation bias from time to time. I try to read things by people I disagree with for example, because I want to hear their best arguments and see whether my beliefs and values stand-up to them.

We are a product of evolution, and the mechanism of evolution is natural selection. Evolution is selecting for survival, and the qualities we have are evolved to help us survive as well as possible. Our cognitive capability to reason has not evolved to find truth, it evolved to help us survive and that means that we sometimes find it easier to stay with a group rather than believe the correct thing.

Truth is a quality of reality. It has nothing to do with what I believe. Truth, when it comes to empirical issues, is an objective thing. Whether something is true or not is independent of whether I think it is true or not, and a lot of people confuse this. People say that we cannot trust science because once-upon-a-time scientists held it true that the earth was flat; that's not correct. It was never true that the earth was flat, even if people believed it.

Politicians often forget that people are much more complex, and are a mix of many identities – and each of these identities can be of differing importance to the individual.

Magical thinking is a bi-product of cognitive process that were useful in our evolutionary survival. We're so good at seeing patterns that we see patterns everywhere, even when they don't exist.

We have to be aware of our cognitive fallacies to build some immunity to our cognitive traps. We can never get rid of our bias, but we can be more aware of it.

Our cognitive capability to reason has not evolved to find truth, it evolved to help us survive and that means that we sometimes find it easier to stay with a group rather than believe the correct thing.

Truth is a quality of reality. It has nothing to do with what I believe. Truth, when it comes to empirical issues, is an objective thing. Whether something is true or not is independent of whether I think it is true or not, and a lot of people confuse this.