Rene Descartes (1596–1650) thought that when we're told a proposition, we would first comprehend what it meant, then consider it, and finally accept or reject it.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) disagreed: he thought that we first passively accept a proposition in the course of comprehending it, and only afterward actively disbelieve it if upon consideration we reject it.

Descartes' suggestion sounded more logical and intuitive, so that's what most philosophers have assumed true, but as of the 21st century the evidence is in: Spinoza was right.

Gilbert, Tafarodi, Malone paper: You Can't Not Believe Everything You Read. See www.greaterwrong.com/posts/TiDGXt3WrQwtCdDj3/do-we-believe-everything-we-re-told?hide-nav-bars=true

A takeaway: you may believe something outrageous if you're told it while distracted with some other cognitive work, so that your normal filters never apply.

• Here is a point in favor of decoupling over contextualizing (Communication cultures): reserve the mental space for your filters to actually do their job, so that you don't let pass an insane sub-proposition.
• Be more careful when you expose yourself to unreliable information, especially if doing something else at the time. Don't glance at that newspaper in the supermarket…

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• Terminal values ≠ instrumental values
  • Expected utility vs. utility (see EY)
• "Snow" vs. snow
• Belief-in-belief vs. belief itself

• ~900 Black powder
• 1440 Printing press
• ~1460 Firearms
• Cristoforo Colombo finds the West Indies
• 1543 Heliocentric model re-proposed
• 1604 Kepler realizes that planets orbit in elliptical routes
• Newton
• 1698 First commercial steam engine
• 1775-83 American Revolution
• 1789-99 French Revolution
• 1796 Edward Jenner discovers the vaccine
• 1839 First Opium War
• ~1840 Electrical telegraphs supersede semaphores
• 1842 General anaesthesia
• 1847 Semmelweis discovers the benefit of hygiene
• 1859 Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species
• 1861-65 USA civil war
• 1868 Edo Period ends
• 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev creates modern periodic table of elements
• 1882 Start of electrically lighting streets and homes
• 1903 Radiation discovered
• 1905 Einstein publishes relativity theory
• 1910 Russell's Principia Mathematicia
• 1913 Bohr model of atoms
• ~1914 Last use of metal breastplates
• 1917 October Revolution
• 1919 Eddington confirms that light bends, thus the relativity theory
• 1919 Treaty of Versailles
• 1920 Commercial radio
• 1927 Heisenberg uncertainty principle
• 1927 Fifth Solvay Conference (quantum physics widely recognized around now)
• 1927-49 Chinese Civil War
• 1930 Karl Landsteiner discovers blood types, allowing safe blood transfusion
• ~1930 wider use of null-hypothesis significance testing
• 1931 Gödel's incompleteness theorems
• 1957 Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation
• 1958 European Communities
• 1960 McCarthy discovers Lisp
• 1968 Quarks found
• 1969 ARPANET created
• Transition from teletypes to storage-tube monitors
• 1974 Kahneman & Tversky publishes Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
• 1980 First clinically useful MRI image
• 1990 Markov chain Monte Carlo
• 1991 Kahle & Berners-Lee create WWW
• 1991 Soviet Union dismantled
• 1993 European Union
• 1993 Eternal September

Subjects were shown four lines, roughly like this, and asked to judge which of A,B,C are the same size as X.

X ----

A ---------
B ----
C ------

The kicker is that subjects were seated in a group of fellow subjects – actually confederates of Asch – who each gave the answer C, until the real subject, seated next-to-last, was called to give their answer.

As you can guess, the ratio of people who answered C in conformity with the others was too damn high.

Some notes on interpreting this experiment.

1. The subjects could have been optimizing for the social aspect of "not sticking out".
2. Even if there was no social aspect, we can't clear-cut say that the subjects responded incorrectly. After all, they believed their fellow subjects were being honest, and they shouldn't put so much higher a confidence on their own ability to judge visual sizes, over others' ability to judge visual sizes. Others' judgments do constitute evidence, though it must have felt terribly confusing.
   • (If you find yourself in a similar position: the feeling of confusion is your hint to completely re-evaluate the circumstances. Think outside the box and you may realize that your fellow subjects' answers make perfect sense if they're not fellow subjects!)
   • Sans time to think, it may make sense to assign >50% probability to the majority vote. It's not the same as saying you actually visually assess C as longer, it's merely saying "well, B still looks right to me, but I have no reason to believe that my assessment is better than yours." It can be a honest attempt to give the correct answer.

To hash out how much the above factors were involved, scientists did replications, variations and meta-analyses. They found:

1. The conformity effect increases strongly up to 3 confederates, but doesn't increase further up to 10-15 confederates (more was not tried).
   • If you were using the others' judgments as evidence, this is strictly irrational. The weight of 15 confederates' judgments should influence your judgment more than the weight of 3.
2. Adding a single dissenter, sharply reduces conformity. No matter if the dissenter says A or B, the subject feels much more free to break with the consensus on C. This effect is present regardless of whether the others number 3 or 15.
   • If you were using the others' judgments as evidence, this is strictly irrational. When there are 15 confederates, it should take 5 dissenters for the same effect as when there's 1 dissenter among 3, yet it seems 1 is all that's needed regardless.
     • Here's a lever by which an individual – you – can influence masses of people. Simply be the first dissenter, freeing up others to also break consensus.