Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture

by Ryan A. Bush

As we develop cognitively, we continually reassess our beliefs, sharpen our distinctions, and accumulate more refined and less pixelated concepts. But concepts and models, even the most sophisticated, are always inherently pixelated, and our beliefs are always incomplete.

But beliefs can also be wrong. And often when they are, they are the product of a systematic mental cause. Cognitive algorithms are sometimes known as inferences.

These bad algorithms are generally called biases, or systematic flaws in our thinking. Biases are reflexive inferences which invalidly flow from premises without our conscious awareness

We don’t often hear such formal arguments in ordinary life, but anyone who follows politics or media is guaranteed to encounter informal fallacies regularly. These arguments often succeed in distracting the listener from the relevant aspects of an argument. An ad hominem fallacy, for example, attacks the character or authority of the person making an argument rather than the argument itself. An appeal to consequences distracts from the validity of an argument and focuses on whether the implications of that argument are desirable or not.

And an appeal to emotion may use persuasive rhetoric and anecdotes to stir up fear, indignation, or sympathy in the listeners - glossing over bad logic or insufficient evidence.

slippery slope argument claims that a small step will inevitably lead to a whole chain of undesirable consequences, such as parents arguing that if they let their daughter learn a card trick, there will be no stopping her from pursuing a career as an illusionist.

A false dichotomy claims that if one extreme is rejected (capitalism has no flaws), another extreme must be the only alternative (communism it is).

And the post hoc fallacy causes us to assume that correlation equates to causation, such as the belief that the sun rising ac...

Have you ever looked back at your emails or social media posts from years ago and found it hard to believe that was you? Consistency bias causes us to conform our views of our past actions and attitudes to those of our present.

Far too many wars and atrocities have been committed because powerful people were overly confident in the oversimplified narrative systems to which they subscribed, whether in the form of a political system, a prejudice, or a religion.10

The most concerning aspect of these biases is that they can chain together, and their effects can be compounded. Beliefs don’t exist in isolation. They are entangled with one another, so changing one belief may threaten a large portion of the full map.

Belief systems are essentially complex chains of cognitive algorithms, and when those algorithms are heavily biased, they make up massively warped worldviews.

Bias blind spot refers to the tendency to believe one is immune to the same biases which plague others.

The question you may be wondering now is, how can we program out our faulty cognitive algorithms? Removing biases is not a simple task, but there are a few leverage points which allow us to intercept and reprogram these algorithms.

Correcting a bias will typically require an awareness that a bias-triggering situation has arisen in your life. You need to build the habit of noticing these situations, which is largely a function of metacognitive awareness. Mindfulness has been found to decrease cognitive bias by bringing deliberate attention to otherwise habitual cognitive patterns.

Under normal circumstances, the planning fallacy would be activated: You would consult your intuitions and output the conclusion “one week from now.” We’ll call this mode of reasoning the “inside view.” But if you have sufficient metacognitive awareness and familiarity with this bias, you will have the opportunity to step in, design a counter-algorithm, and rewire the bias, which we call cognitive revision.

With Bayes’ Rule in your thinking toolkit, you can replace this type of algorithm with a more accurate one. To make use of Bayesian revision, or updating, you would assign a likelihood to an existing hypothesis or belief and probabilities to reflect those likelihoods. When you come across new evidence, you try to determine how much this new information should alter your confidence.

In each case, you must be aware of the relevant faulty bias, pause and notice that you are in a bias-triggering scenario, and design and implement a better alternative algorithm. You need to make it so the same type of input will trigger a different algorithm in the future.

Learning critical thinking skills is no more likely to cause someone to think critically than it is to provide them with ammunition for arguing against whatever ideas they don’t want to accept. The tools of rationality are identical to the tools of rationalization.

If you wish to program out your biased algorithms, you must understand their deeper underlying principles. Many of our biases, including some mentioned above, seem to be artifacts of the simple truth that our minds were not built to understand, remember, and predict complex, modern phenomena with perfect accuracy. These goals are all biologically beside the point. But some of our biases can be linked directly to biological pressures, meaning it was in some way advantageous to our genes for us to systematically misperceive reality.

The most pernicious biases have this in common: they stem from desire. I refer to these as motivated biases.

Many of our desires, or drives, relate to the world and how we view it. We desire for the world to make sense to us, so we strip it down and make our decisions based on our simplified simulations which may bear little resemblance to reality (attribute substitution).23 We desire for the world to be fair and just, so we assume victims of injustice must have deserved their fate (just-world hypothesis).

And we desire a positive future, so we allow wishful thinking to determine our predictions (optimism bias), sometimes going to the extent of completely ignoring the negative (ostrich effect).

The bandwagon effect refers to our tendency to come to conclusions and make decisions based on what is popular, though we often find ways to rationalize these decisions to ourselves.

As a human being, you are embedded in the collective mesh of society. You are not wired to develop impeccably clear views, rational insights, and wisdom. You are built to inherit your views, values, and judgment from your tribe - to flow with the wave of your culture.

Our desires to be special and to maintain a positive view of ourselves result in the over-inflation of our own positive traits. The fundamental attribution error and self-serving bias cause us to attribute our own positive behaviors and successes, as well as the failure of others, to individual character. Correspondingly, we blame our negative behaviors and failures, and the successes of others, on luck and circumstance.

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Confirmation bias is responsible for the fact that we tend to look only for information that confirms our existing theories, beliefs, and worldview at the expense of those that conflict with them.

We get so attached to these views that even when conflicting evidence is forced upon us, it often only makes us defensive, strengthening our original belief (backfire effect). This tendency ultimately results in groups on two sides of an issue slowly moving further and further apart, known as attitude polarization.

Worse, the modern world reinforces biases by structuring incentives so as to confirm our beliefs. Search engines, entertainment platforms, and social media websites are rewarded for getting clicks and views, so it is in their interest to pander to the desires of their readers rather than to determine the truth. The digital algorithms distributing information further distort our cognitive algorithms by funneling us into reality tunnels and echo chambers.

Disinformation Campaigns

The second, deeper layer of cognitive psychitecture is motivational. Motivated biases are not little bugs in the system. They are the system functioning as intended. I am not just talking to conspiracy theorists or religious fanatics or political ideologues here. Everyone has cherished beliefs. And we can’t simply will these beliefs away. We have to unplug the desires that perpetuate them. In order to do this, you need the habit of not only noticing the triggers for common biases, but of taking stock of your desires to hold certain beliefs, and the intensity of these desires. Notice which ideas you are attached to and which ones you resist. The areas you tend to turn your curiosity away from - that make you defensive when they are called into question.

A related approach to wrangling desires is called counteraction. This tactic entails attempting to cultivate an equal and opposite desire to balance the first one. When you have an equal desire for two opposing possibilities, you will be able to evaluate them objectively according to evidence because either possibility will suit you just fine.

As technology becomes exponentially more powerful, the consequences for faulty thinking and dogmatism will rise exponentially along with it. Nuclear weapons, bioengineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence are all quickly advancing.

In this mindset, we see the essence of the psychitect. Most people strive to preserve their beliefs at all costs - to protect them from the constant threats that seek to undermine them. But if you are a psychitect, all beliefs are really just temporary experiments. Every day is a mental beta test - an opportunity to iterate, expand, and upgrade your cognitive software. To uncover and question assumptions, test new conceptual models, and throw the obsolete ones out. No belief is safe.

If your happiness is dependent on false beliefs, it means you have become reliant on coping structures which have been built on a bad foundation, and as soon as storms come in and reality crashes against your shoddy models of it, you’ll be hit with pain and confusion.

The algorithms which most often lead people astray in life are not simply distortions of memory, prediction, or pattern recognition in the external world, but distortions of introspection

Daniel Gilbert, a leading psychologist studying affective forecasting, discovered that humans share an algorithm he called impact bias, which causes us to poorly forecast how we will feel about a certain event or decision, how intense that feeling will be, and how long it will last. In other words, our internal emotion-simulator is just as flawed as our life-simulator.

The principle of realism is “the belief that things are in reality as they appear to be in the mind.” Our brains constantly weave their biases and fabrications into reality, filling in the gaps so quickly and seamlessly that we don’t even notice anything is off.

The principle he calls presentism is “the tendency for current experience to influence one's views of the past and the future.”

Rationalization is “the act of causing something to be or to seem reasonable.”

We experience anxiety and dread around adversity and loss, believing they will cause us to feel worse and for longer than they actually will. Our emotional predictions don’t account for the psychological defenses that allow us to reason away inescapable circumstances. Gilbert

Much like rationality, introspection can be problematic when done incorrectly. Yet failing to do it simply is not an option. You cannot live a coherent life without investigating your own internal variables and factoring them into your decisions.

So like rationality, we must learn to use the tool of introspection properly. We must apply the same methods and principles that helped us overcome bias in the previous chapter to introspection.

The best way to stunt your personal growth is to decide that you have made it - that your beliefs about yourself are correct now, and you don’t need to upgrade them anymore. This decision will disconnect you from the continual cycle of trial and error, learning and adaptation, that initiates your own personal evolution.

Your self-limiting beliefs might just be the single largest factor separating the best and worst versions of you.

There is one area of our minds which we must understand deeply in order to live great lives - or even to know what that means. One of the great psychitectural guides, Abraham Maslow, thought each person had a biologically inscribed inner core in his mind, guiding him in the same way an acorn is guided toward becoming an oak tree. This inner core was partially unique to the individual and partially shared among all humans. And the inner core was the key to achieving deep satisfaction and the state he called self-actualization.

I will use the term value intuitions to refer to the evaluative impulses which cause us attribute “goodness” or “badness” to certain actions and outcomes.

And getting deeply in touch with our felt sense of these intuitions will play a key role in the better alternative to the default approach to life. When we identify patterns in our value intuitions and arrange them into labeled concepts like “honesty,” “compassion,” or “discipline,” they become values, or ideals. And the sum of these values is our value system, a full conceptual map of what matters to us.

If you have never engaged in deliberate introspection, self-examination, or philosophical inquiry, it can be said that none of the values with which you identify are actually your own. You initially inherited your moral framework and direction in life from those around you. Humans learn by imitation through childhood, and they do not develop the cognitive capacity to truly question what they have been taught until adolescence.

To truly be able to claim that your values belong to you, you must go through an extensive process of uprooting the relics of your early indoctrination and examining them with critical rigor.

Ruiz

You must ask yourself which historical atrocities you are contributing to today. Which of your actions have you been lulled into believing are benign? What has popular opinion or your own convoluted arguments convinced you is acceptable, or even positive? By popular opinion, I don’t mean popular on the other side, I mean popular within your circles. What are the socially acceptable “concentration camps” of the modern day? Factory farms? Fracking sites? Immigration bans? Prisons? Fraternities? Abortion clinics?