Please Don’t Make Me Think

Thinking is hard. It’s much easier to just let someone tell you a story and when you hear the same old story over and over again, then it will probably begin to ring true.

This is neither a new insight nor is it rocket science — it’s something a scientist from a long time ago documented and to this day we recognize his contribution to the science of psychology (and in particular the so-called cognitive science [and / or engineering] of “conditioning” relationships between stimulus and response) with the term “Pavlovian”.

Such principles about how the natural evolution of brains has given us the brains we have are generally considered to be completely due to the workings of nature, natural selection and stuff like that.

And yet, at the same time science is also evolving. There are now vast areas of science, classified as “social sciences”, which perhaps even just a century ago might have been considered to be ridiculous farces, hoaxes and maybe even conspiracy theories.

And there’s even more: there are now large portions of industry devoted to building Pavlovian machinery. What is particularly weird about this development is the degree to which our focus seems to be less and less on “nature” and more and more on “social” phenomena.

I recently started a new blog called “Compelling News” to consider how humans seem compelled to think a certain way … and to make more or less educated guesses as to what might be compelling them to think that way (see e.g. “Compelled People — What is Compelling Them?” [ https://compelling.news.blog/2023/09/12/compelled-people-what-is-compelling-them ]). The above simple example about “storytelling” is something I am considering, as also far more complex issues regarding stuff like “The Social Construction of Reality” (see also “Human Brain Conditioner“).

You might even say I’m sort of tangled up in it … and this is little more than a quick manner of keeping y’all updated about what I’m up to (to date 😉 ), up in or whatever.