While everything in reality exists to the degree it really does, we can’t process it in its raw form.
Instead, we make an accurate-enough copy of reality by filling in information from a variety of sources:
- Our senses, such as sight and sounds
- Memories of our senses we’ve stored our brains
- Things we understand other people have sensed, and aggregates of those things (e.g., statistics)
- What we trust and believe from others, extending across groups we identify with and ideas we hold
This copy is stunningly accurate, for the most part. It allows us to relive the experience as many times as we want, and we are able to combine two or more experiences to fabricate a third, relatively accurate impression (e.g., someone who understands operating an automobile and has ridden in a boat can imagine operating a boat).
While we trust this image, it’s not reality. Time, for example, doesn’t exist the way we think it does. We perceive “now”, but the past and present don’t technically exist. The past is nothing but our memories (former versions of “now”) and our connections of cause-and-effect to craft a story that ends in “now”. The future is our predictions about what will happen in future instances of “now”.
Everything we perceive will have relative and absolute components to it. Often, our conflicts are over relative things we think are absolute, often from our culture and upbringing.
One complicated part of our perception comes in how things assemble together. In reality, the larger thing is precisely the same as the individual components combined together, but our values make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Intelligence is the ability to draw connections across perceived details. The more intelligence, the more details, and we usually tend to specialize our focus into our preferences:
- Sensation – the feeling something evokes.
- Composition – the components, parts, and elements a thing is made of.
- Usage – how to operate or work with that thing.
- Limits – the capacity for when that thing stops being useful, relevant, or functional.
- Role – how people perceive that thing compared to other things.
- Implication – what that thing alludes toward or against.
- Value – the worth that other people perceive that thing is to them.
- Inspiration – the symbolic associations to other things.
Since some of the connection-building skill is innate and some of it’s trainable, it’s difficult to measure.
Barring low-functioning autism or specific traumatic events, we can’t easily hold all this information at once in our minds. To condense it and make the values more clear, we build stories out of it with the most important information, then throw out the rest, sometimes with the source information.
We build these story-images rapidly in the subconscious, so we’re not fact-checking everything we’ve built. Also, since we’re pulling from other stories encoded in our memories, this entire system is extremely faulty. We don’t notice, though, because we automatically correct errors as soon as we re-perceive things. People usually only re-examine, however, when they aren’t sure what they saw or when they train themselves to have more scientific rigor.
Bias
We create a bias from our preconceived images. More images (i.e., experiences) means more bias layered onto our perspectives.
It’s humanly impossible to not have a bias, mostly from how all our experiences pipe through feelings before they even reach our ability to perceive them. With humility, we will readily add more images and offset the bias with other bias, but it never goes away.
We have a highly centered view of the universe, where we impose our purpose, problems, and values upon our environment as if they existed outside our minds. Even when we gather copious amounts of data, we’re just creating an anecdote built around aggregation.
Our bias is made of a few “angles”:
- Cultural – borrowing from our family and values we identify with
- Social – the power dynamics around our status in a group.
- Personal – subconscious actions from our past experiences and decisions, especially the things we identify with.
- Spiritual – far-reaching beliefs about social trends and the continuation of ourselves.
We tend to add others’ views to ours, proportional to our belief that we don’t understand something ourselves. It requires a herculean feat of humility to accept we don’t understand things far enough to accept that all other perspectives have some value.
More often than not, when we find we’re wrong, we will believe a part of what we saw was correct and will adapt other beliefs to fit it. Slowly, we become more certain of ourselves as some of those things never change over time.
Very often, two people can have very different images while perceiving a similar thing. It often comes from our background, but the way we process language has a profound impact on what we remember.
Deception
We’re constantly at risk of lying to ourselves. Sometimes we don’t understand and think we do, other times our purposes are nearly evil. With creativity or intelligence, we can maintain multiple conflicting opinions in our minds at the same time.
When someone can find other people who share their type of deception, they’ll often form a group from it. This emboldens everyone in the group to believe those thoughts even more.
Authenticity is the skill of communicating things that go beyond anyone’s image, while wisdom is the ability to perceive it. However, some people preoccupy themselves so much with reality that they forget how they look, so authenticity and wisdom don’t always go together.
One of the easiest deceptions involves our use of time. We can see a minority of the instances of something and will draw a conclusion that the rest of that time was mathematically the same:
- How often an employee is working, versus what they’re doing when the boss is absent.
- How late or early someone arrives to an event.
- What someone usually wears, compared to that first image of seeing them.
- How someone usually says things, versus what they said in response to the observer.
Novelty
Upon birth, everything was new to us, since we hadn’t seen it before. Eventually, some things became more familiar and we fixate exclusively on the unfamiliar things.
Without love for others, we draw huge comparisons that imply different types of value systems are irreconcilably different when, in practice, they link together on many elements.
Young people value novelty far more than older people because they believe a brand-new thing will give more amusement and answer their questions. Older people don’t only because they’ve found out that everything carries similar patterns.
Underneath the new image, the mechanism behind most things are mostly the same. There’s more in common between one automobile to another, or one person to another, or one book to another than different. However, we presume those similarities and focus so heavily on the differences that most large-scale conflicts revolve around that differentiating 0.00005%.
Nothing is completely new. If you disassemble everything, all ideas and creations have existed before. Most of the time, people who wrote historical records forgot to communicate the trend and it’s started again from a different basis.
The only truly “new” things are simply remixes, and there’s a near-limitless mix-and-match of things that haven’t been invented yet. Because a creator’s quality often comes through constraints that later creations don’t have (e.g., technological limitations, it’s already been proven to work), original works are often inherently better.
Reputation
A person’s reputation is the composite of everyone else’s image of that person. It’s extremely fickle and chaotic because it’s what other people feel about someone, which changes constantly.
All reputation is nothing but sentiments about past events. Those sentiments, however, are also extremely powerful.
Because reputation is built around feelings, it’s rarely rational. At its farthest extreme, a celebrity will make one social media remark that generates 1,500 comments, with each person feeling their single comment will make a difference.
Reputations prove beforehand to others about what they should expect. It usually indicates what someone has legitimately done and implies how much they understand. While a reputation is always interpersonal, a sufficiently advanced society will create a set of data-generated reputations in different domains (e.g., credit score, insurance score).
The limit of power from a reputation is what that entire group can provide, so most people pursue at least some reputation with others.
To communicate a reputational image is highly contextual, and will bestow honor or shame on a person depending on the situation. Most of the value people feel from their honor and shame comes through a third-party observing it, which is why group leaders have more power to bestow honor and shame than members.
Discrimination
When we interpret favor or shame immediately as part of our bias, we’re discriminating. These values can include favoring race, age, gender, or implied social class. Unless we analyze what people say and ignore their reputation, we’re always unfairly biased.
We discriminate all the time for many reasons:
- What we imagine others may think
- Past pain that may not have present implications
- What we perceive others may be able to do, often defined by their aptitude, status in specific groups, or our understanding of their maturity
- Physical attractiveness, distinguishing features like clothing, and hygiene
- Even when we’ve tried to remove bias, we often discriminate on ideas alone as theories without any consideration for history
A stereotype is habitual and unfair discrimination. Because we’re not conscious of it, we make silly over-generalizations that lose any sense of logic. People can often address it with humor, but when people have suffered pain from the stereotype (or others can benefit from it) they’ll miss the joke.
Stereotypes are inherently amoral because we’re not aware of them when we build them. However, if we persist with them after we’re made aware, we risk committing evil.
Sneaky
Because of how much power a reputation can give, people will work hard to distort and tweak their image. Most people do it a little (which is essentially lying), but some people are experts at claiming honor and redirecting shame.
When people are skillful enough with others or familiar enough with someone, it’s impossible to hide reality from them. Since most of our actions are made of habits, and feelings flavor our habits, any alteration to hide reality from someone who knows what to expect will betray their ulterior motive.
Application
Never trust your first impression of anything.
Over time, as we age, our environment becomes increasingly more familiar. Since we understand life as a series of stories, aging creates fewer interesting stories, and we interpret the passage of time as moving faster. The only cure to this is to find uncomfortable experiences that are new to us, though we’re often afraid to do so and wiser at avoiding them.
Since we can’t avoid bias, the only way to successfully discover the truth is to gather as many biases as possible, from every possible angle, then find consistent patterns across all of them.
To live sincerely, our inner lives must reflect our outer lives, including our conflicts.
Since intelligent and creative people can adapt image more than most people, they’re at the highest risk of completely forgetting about reality.
If everyone in a group declares something as true, it shows more about the group than whatever they’re saying. Closely examine truth compared to a group’s statements to find the inherent bias of a culture.
We pay attention heavily to novelty, so we tend to forget the familiar. Awareness of ourselves and our environment can help us understand simple things we may have forgotten, and it feeds heavily into our creativity.
Many younger people have trouble understanding how nothing is new (especially in specializations like computer technology), and we’ve seen everything before. If someone calls something “new”, look for what it’s similar to across the lens of history.
Older things are usually disregarded by the youth, even when they’re better. It’s part of why the classics are often overlooked in every media.
Reputation affects much of what we do because we care about it so much:
- Many times, we will shun unpopular trends until they’re popular.
- We often subconsciously identify with things based on what other people think of them.
- Our choice of friends and groups is often defined by what other people think of them.
- We pursue job titles, club roles, memberships in groups, good grades in school, and achievements/badges in games and social media strictly for the sake of reputation.
While reputation beyond a certain point isn’t necessary to coexist well in society or attain the good life, we do need at least some of it to gain our purposes. The rest, however, is a waste of time, and we’d do better to just do what we prefer.
Generally, you can detect bias by how much people respond with feelings, especially with shock and anger. While their reaction won’t indicate if they’re right or not, it’ll show how clearly they’re thinking. Since reality often has gradations, their feelings may allude to how much they understand, but it isn’t a clear indicator.
Bias isn’t necessarily bad. Common sense is a set of good prejudices, for example. Professional specializations allow people to judge quality immediately without further investigation. Most life experience is literally defining prejudices to quickly and accurately predict reality.
Lies tend to accumulate like debts, and managing image becomes increasingly difficult as we continue trying to adapt away from whatever represents reality the most accurately. However, unlike most debt collectors, a liar often has to remit payment immediately before they lose their power.
People who make a living in maintaining image (e.g., marketers, politicians, PR representatives) have to work so hard at their role that they tend not to create anything else tangible. However, an expert influencer can change the sentiments of an entire crowd, some of whom are very influential in creating new solutions.
On the other end of the spectrum, people who concern themselves with reality (e.g., engineers, accountants, trade workers) are so preoccupied with reality that they forget how difficult, geeky, nerdy, or obtuse they look. Many of them could stand to learn basic people skills, and often sabotage their long-term influence through the limits of their medium.
It’s hard to accept views that don’t match your own, which is why no culture is ever completely open-minded.
While discrimination usually implies shame, we can discriminate more favor toward things than others may deserve. The clearest indication of this is when we judge creations by who their creator is instead of the quality of the piece itself.
Seeking honor is perfectly fine until it compromises virtue, especially when redirecting shame. It’s why people respect power structures and honor leaders.
Everyone is horrifically flawed. However, they often look good. This is very intentional and often done long-term through a wide variety of people who pass on that person’s reputation.