Comment by csense

This accurately describes how my brain works. My thought process is like a bunch of graph nodes, and when new information doesn't "fit", it puts tensions on the links, and I want to resolve that tension. I can...feel it happening inside my mind when I think, more or less? -- It's hard to describe

Resolving that tension may occur in several ways, in order of increasing significance:

- Rejecting the new information

- Refining the graph (splitting a node representing a concept into multiple sub-nodes representing sub-concepts with their own relationships)

- Making local modifications to the graph

- Making sweeping architectural changes to the graph as a whole

The author seems to imply that cognitive biases are an inherent qualitative problem that is fundamentally forced to arise from this graph structure. I personally respectfully disagree. In my view, cognitive biases are a quantitative problem, incorrectly setting the threshold at which a large reorganization should occur. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is qualitatively a sound epistemological principle -- but to correctly apply it, you must quantitatively set a reasonable threshold for "extraordinary."

I feel like we need to get better at understanding the graph structure of people we disagree with. The best example I can think of is the abortion debate [1]: If you accept the premise "Life begins at conception" [2], the pro-life camp has an enormously strong case; the rest of the graph between that premise and "Abortion should be illegal" is very strong (it's mostly tremendously well-reinforced nodes in near-universal moral foundations, like "Do unto others" or "Murder should be illegal").

Arguments against abortion are frequently just bad when looked at from the graph point of view: They often don't directly confront the premise "Life begins at conception," nor do they attack the graph between the premise and conclusion. [3]

[1] I'm personally in the pro-choice camp; I do not accept the premise that a human fetus has the same moral status as a fully grown human.

[2] "Life" here is not in the technical biological sense, but something more akin to "The ethical standing of human-equivalent sentience." (Bacteria and protozoa and so on are biologically alive, but nobody moralizes about killing them en masse by, e.g., cooking your food.)

[3] If you're curious about my own views on this specific subject, I've talked about them here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255493#36270990