I follow a guy on twitter, Gurwinder, who is inspirational. He tweets about politics , philiosophy and religion.
His twitter handle is @G_S_Bhogal – https://twitter.com/G_S_Bhogal
He compiled and published a mega thread theories, future predictions, cognitive biases and paradoxes. If you find these interesting, consider following him.
I think these are great conversation starters for those students who like deep and meaningful conversations and those who are fascinated by metacognition.
Warning: Psychological biases exist for a reason and learning to understand the world and why humans think the way they do can cause depressive tendencies.
SORITES PARADOX
If you have a heap of grain, and you remove grains from it one by one, at what point is it no longer a heap? At what moment does a fetus become alive? No clear answers to these questions exist because language is too low-resolution to accurately describe reality.
SAYRE’S LAW
The lower the stakes, the more vicious the politics. When there’s much to gain or lose, people are careful of what they say & do. When there’s little to gain or lose, such as in Twitter culture wars, people become savage, safe in the knowledge it won’t really matter.
THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL
As societies decentralise and people gain security through tech, governments will lose their function, and have little to offer their subjects. To survive, they’ll be forced to compete for our allegiance. They’ll become businesses, and we their customers.
MINIMAL GROUP PARADIGM
If you group people by a trivial category, e.g. favorite ice cream flavor, the groups will become tribal, display in-group favoritism, and discriminate against other groups. So even if you end racism & sexism, people will find other reasons to discriminate.
ROGERIAN RHETORIC
Enter a discussion not with the intent of proving your position right, but with the intent of stating your interlocutor’s position fairly & accurately, and showing that you understand its strengths. A good way to have productive & non-toxic conversations.
NEURODIVERSITY CASE FOR FREE SPEECH
Canceling people for what they say disproportionately hurts those with conditions like autism, as they have the most difficulty following social codes. And by silencing them we deprive ourselves of their unique perspectives.
COMPASSION FADE
“The death of one person is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” Paradoxically, our empathy toward victims decreases as the number of victims increases. We’re easily moved by a single death, but feel less when the scale of tragedy is greater.
AGENDA-SETTING THEORY
What’s important doesn’t become the news; the news becomes what’s important. The press spark public discussions about certain topics, creating the impression that such topics matter most, when in reality the topics are merely what the press chose to report
GENDER-EQUALITY PARADOX
Sex differences in social outcomes (e.g. occupational choices) are greater in more gender-equal countries, suggesting that such differences cannot be simply blamed on misogyny or patriarchy (as academics and the mainstream media often claim).
NAVAL’S COMPASS
If you can’t decide between two choices, take the path that’s more difficult/painful in the short term. This is because the brain tends to exaggerate the impact of short term pain while downplaying that of long term pain.
KEYNESIAN BEAUTY CONTEST
The market incentivizes us to predict others’ behavior. Thus the value of something is often determined not by the value we think it has, or even by the value we think others think it has, but by the value we think others think it has to others.
IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY
All organizations of people, no matter how democratic & egalitarian, will eventually become oligarchies, since if everyone has power, then no one has power, and if someone has more power, then that power will be used to gain more power.
BONHOEFFER’S THEORY OF STUPIDITY
Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world’s few evil people have little power without the help of the world’s many stupid people. As a result, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.
UNIVARIATE FALLACY
Comparing 2 datasets along 1 variable and using the overlap to claim the 2 sets are the same, even though the overlap vanishes if you consider the proper number of variables. This fallacy is often committed when claiming sex is a spectrum.
RECIPROCAL RADICALIZATION
A big cause of polarization. Hate begets hate, so the excesses of one tribe fuel the excesses of its enemy, causing their rhetoric to escalate in a feedback loop of mutual amplification, like a mise en abyme—two mirrors infinitely reflecting each other.
HOSTILE MEDIA EFFECT In 1982, pro-Israel & pro-Palestine students were shown news stories. The pro-Israel students thought the stories were pro-Palestine, the pro-Palestine students thought the stories were pro-Israel. People tend to view the news as biased against their side.
DEEP TIME
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the creation of Twitter than to the creation of the Great Pyramid. The T. Rex lived closer in time to us than to the Stegosaurus. These facts (and evolution) are counterintuitive, since our puny minds cannot grasp the vastness of time.
SELF-PERCEPTION THEORY
Attitudes don’t determine behavior, behavior determines attitudes. We never truly understand why we do what we do, so our rational mind guesses our motives after we act (in the same way we speculate on others’ motives). We become a story we tell ourselves.
SHALLOWING HYPOTHESIS
Social media is making us dumb. We spend so long staring at shallow information on our screens that we don’t spend much time reflecting on ourselves or the world. The result is that our brains become optimized to do little but read tweets and watch clips.
LOOK-ELSEWHERE EFFECT
There is now so much information in the world that almost every possible pattern you can imagine exists somewhere, often due to a purely accidental arrangement. As such, by looking in the right place, you can find evidence for almost anything you desire.
MEDUSA EFFECT
We view people as less human when we see them as images on a screen versus in the flesh. And since we are increasingly socializing through image, from profile pics to video chats, we run the risk of losing our sense of decency and compassion toward each other.
BONUS: GURWINDER’S PACEMAKER
A partial remedy for the Medusa effect, and something we must periodically remind ourselves of whenever we find ourselves without a heart.
If you find yourself losing patience with someone, remember that they are an ape adrift in an alien world, born into a struggle they did not choose, bullied by impulses they cannot control, searching for answers they will not find, and condemned to a fate they do not deserve.