Guest Post by Scott Adams
I have been saying since Trump’s election that the world has split into two realities – or as I prefer to say, two movies on one screen – and most of us don’t realize it. We’re all looking at the same events and interpreting them wildly differently. That’s how cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias work. They work together to create a spontaneous hallucination that gets reinforced over time. That hallucination becomes your reality until something changes.
This phenomenon has nothing to do with natural intelligence. We like to think that the people on the other side of the political debate are dumb, under-informed, or just plain evil. That’s not the case. We’re actually experiencing different realities. I mean that literally.
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I know, I know. When you read something like that, you probably shake your head and think I’m either being new-agey or speaking metaphorically. I am being neither. This is well-understood cognitive science.
And here comes the fun part.
I’m about to show you some mind-blowing evidence of the two-movie effect. Figuratively speaking, I’ll hold an apple in my hand and show it to the audience. Half of you will see an apple. The other half will see a gun. That’s how dramatic this two-movie illusion is. I can be watching a comedy movie while you’re in the same theater, sitting next to me, watching a drama. On the same screen. At the same time.
Watch this.
Here’s a screenshot from a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. The bullet points purport to show the “crazy” things President Trump said this past week. Focus on the first bullet point, just to keep things simple. The point I’ll make applies to all of them, but we can simplify by looking at the first one. It says, “So-called judge.”
The bullet point refers to the recent court reversal of Trump’s executive order to ban immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.
If you are a Trump supporter, all you see is an example of Trump talking the way Trump always does. He bluntly criticizes everything he doesn’t like. That’s one of the things his supporters like about him. Mmm, that’s a delicious apple.
Oh, and Trump is also directionally accurate in his criticism. Even Alan Dershowitz, who is no fan of the president, says Trump would probably win in the Supreme Court on the narrow question of whether the President has the right to order the seven-country immigration ban.
And Trump is sticking to the law and preparing a legal response to the court’s action. All normal stuff. Nothing here but some normal (for him) Trump words.
But if you are an anti-Trumper, and his unexpected election sent you into cognitive dissonance, you see “So-called judge” as exactly what Hitler might say before he lined them all up and shot them. Where his supporters see a delicious apple in Trump’s hand, his critics see a gun.
But here’s the freaky part: Both of our movies are intact. In my movie, Trump took a bite out of a juicy apple. In your movie, he cocked his gun and is ready to fire. But none of these movie scenes touches either one of us, at least not yet. We are observers. I can still drink my coffee and you can still brush your teeth. At this very moment, it makes no difference to our lives that I see an apple and you see a gun – except that you live in terror and I’m having a good laugh (literally) while watching my movie.
In order for our two-movie situation to merge back into a single movie, one of us needs to see our expectations violated in ways that even cognitive dissonance can’t explain away. As long as the movie with the apple and the movie with the gun both “work” in terms of their scripts, they will keep playing at the same time. You might see confirmation bias that tells you it really was a gun. I might see confirmation bias that it was a delicious apple.
You have just explained the legal doctrine of “alternative facts”: the same set of facts can be used to come to different conclusions, so when Kelly Ann Conway used the term (she being a lawyer) it’s a shame no one could be bothered to explain the doctrine instead of the public shaming she took.
Went to the doctor last week and told him my hallucinations were eliminated. The Red Pill worked – I had stopped listening to NPR and watching CNN, MSNBC,ABC, CBS, NBC.
Unfortunately, way too many people are still watching and welcoming them. Their delusion will become our destruction.
I’ve been dwelling on the intellectual angle of our current social rift lately. How can someone who has a good job, runs a household, raise pleasant children, engage in a pleasant conversation and in all other ways resemble a fully functioning member of society not see reality right before their very eyes?
A part of it is information based- if no one told you that eating seafood is harmful to a growing fetus due to the presence of heavy metals in 90% of commercially harvested fish, how could you possibly know? Unless you have a lab set up in your home and you test all foods prior to consumption, you would assume that since the FDA approved the sale of that fish and the local grocery store has a permit to sell seafood posted in a frame next to the counter and based on what you do know about fish being good for you, you’d be completely floored by the realization that you were risking all kinds of long term health issues for your unborn child by consuming fish a couple of times a week. You must do the research first and most people simply haven’t the time.
The other part has got to be the faith-based aspect of living in a society. Every single day people climb into a two-ton hunk of metal and drive down the road at 65 mph with nothing between them and the other guy, coming from the opposite direction in the same kind of vehicle, except a line painted on the ground. If it weren’t for the expectation that everyone is on the same sheet of music and the pure blind trust we have in one another to respect that imaginary barrier, no one in their right mind would attempt it unless it were a life and death situation. People believe in the unspoken system of honoring certain customs and mores in order to function.
So what causes two different people of roughly the same level of intelligence, living in the same time and place and under a shared socio-political system to perceive the world in such a fundamentally different way?
I am having a very hard time squaring this circle.
Let’s see if I can offer you an explanation based on many years of experience all over the world.
Robert Palmer: a coke fiend (RIP) who dressed like a banker but apparently was in his soul anything but.
” People believe in the unspoken system of honoring certain customs and mores in order to function.”
Just so, or so it was once upon a time. As you no doubt know, in many aspects of life this covenant is no longer honored. The time-honored ways are being abandoned, the customs and mores being cast aside in favor of a public (not necessarily private) and in-your-face libertinism utterly alien to the customs and mores of the founding fathers and their descendants in the USA and other nations of European (perhaps NW European) descent. This must be checked if there is to be any hope of a better future for our own descendants.
The late Mr. Palmer appears to have realized this as his career took off, but sadly in appearance only.
Let’s look at an early Robert Palmer video:
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We’re all looking for clues, bro’, and my take is that we find them in the abandonment of Christian ethic and morals (this from an atheist, mind) in favor of the foolish dream of a secular utopia and an excess of self-indulgence and florid sentimentality with respect to the unfortunates whose own values have never permitted them to develop cultures and a civilization unequal to that developed by ancestors who should be revered rather than rejected.
Monte: “…we find them in the abandonment of Christian ethic and morals (this from an atheist, mind)…” Right you are. Our Founders knew this and warned future generations of abandoning the Judeo-Christian fundamentals. And, this from an Agnostic., mind you.
In reference to understanding and processing realities as presented by Mr. Adams, one of his previous articles left me somewhat baffled, in trying to understand the dynamics of never being able to fully prove a position on climate change. But here, the example of a two movie perception and the given example, unfortunately, makes perfect sense to me. Unfortunate, because it indicates the polarization of the soon to be manifest civil war, with no hope of reconciliation. Sorry days ahead.
It’s not that liberals aren’t intelligent, it just that they are crayon consuming insane. As admin noted in his first New Jackson Era post. we have “descended into democracy..”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZ-RUufHgI
Everyone sees reality through their own eyes and no two people see the same reality.
We form into group associations that have different, and often opposing, views of reality because we tend to associate with those who profess seeing a reality that is closest and most compatible to the one we see.
Conflicts, irreconcilable ones, arise when one group decides, by right or by strength, to force its reality on those who don’t see that reality as real and won’t accept it.
This is where we are today, neither side can accept the others view of reality as valid and accept it and are now engaged in a mortal struggle from which only one will emerge.
A total clash of irreconcilable realities.
One will win and one will lose, with the possibility of a Hegelian synthesis emerging to destroy both with something entirely new emerging to replace them.
These are interesting time to be living in, interesting indeed.
2 different realities contrasted here in an article from the Gatestone Institute.Comparing the speech of a Muslim who condemns slavery in America but excuses it by Muslims,and who says non consecual sex between master/slave is ok,to the canceled Milo speech in Berkeley.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9943/free-speech-yiannopoulos
Trump should use that “so-called” thing more often. It’s hilarious.
Another version of different realities-a list of companies that are bowing to pressure to not sell Ivanka Trump’s merchandise.
Do these people really believe that it will hurt Trump to knock her merchandise line?
Let’s pass this list around so we’ll know where NOT to shop.
https://www.yahoo.com/style/ivanka-trump-products-disappear-from-burlington-website-163918096.html
What is becoming more and more apparent with ‘studies’ is that you get what you pay for.
The sponsors generally want a desired outcome – if that outcome is not realized, future work for that research company and its associates/friends will be curtailed.
Greetings,
I am of the opinion that this dual universe problem is by design and I’ll use Lefty “research” to prove it.
Lefties love to point out that the 1913 movie Birth of a Nation created the modern KKK. The costumes, cross burnings and general guidelines of how the Klan should operate were 100% Hollywood creations. These facts are pointed out to show racism but the real fact that comes to light is the incredible power of a silent moving picture.
The NAZI State is another favorite of the Left because of the treasure trove of State sponsored propaganda that can be pointed to. You’ll run out of breath long before you can run out of posters, radio announcements and public rallies to use as examples. In a nutshell, the Left will point out how these racist placards convinced the Germans to throw their friends and neighbors into ovens.
Now, if a single black & white silent movie can create the KKK and posters and radio broadcasts can get you to throw your neighbors into ovens (an over simplification) then what kind of power does our modern media have?
I’ll tell you. Modern media has the power to create alternative universes. It also has the power to take an entire race of people and pretty much turn them into imbeciles.
Boy did you hit that one square on the head! It is most likely the greatest reason that we will not come out of this war, and make no mistake, we are at war NOW, in one piece. We cannot live with them.
The reason that there are two different views is that half of the population can think independently and come to the same rational conclusions, and the other half are easily brainwashed by the educational system and the media.