To understand such delusions, it helps to understand the many layers that make up the human mind.

Does it? For example, I can trace my father’s belief that the Black Panthers are going to take over society in a civil war to the primate layer: “Primates can thus be deluded about who supports which coalition, and how strong are coalitions.” But how does that help me understand it?

Get your titillating, unsafe-for-work linkage after the jump…….

For example, where would this fit in the taxonomy: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/07/the-just-world-fallacy/

Animal: “Animals usually act as if things not directly in view don’t exist. Embedded in brain architecture, these mistakes are hard to correct.” This is an odd comment as applied to human psychology. We are constantly, routinely aware of the existence of things not currently visible.

Socialite: “Social mammals use a standard stress response for social stress; being disliked hurts health as if others had psychic powers.” I suppose the cognitive error in this is actual belief in the psychic powers of other people. This has been widely overcome in the civilized world. Of course, you are claiming only that overcoming it was *hard*, not that it was *impossible*. The vagueness of your claim makes it hard to evaluate.

Primate: “Primates can thus be deluded about who supports which coalition, and how strong are coalitions.” We are also prey to many other sorts of overconfidence. But some people are chronic self-doubters; where do they fit your scheme?

Talker: “We . . . are often deluded to think reality divides neatly according to our word categories. . . . We . . . are deluded to think we reason more to find truth than to win arguments, and to think reality constrain[]s shared beliefs more than it does.” These seem like philosophical errors, of little practical importance.

Interesting stuff, even if not wholly convincing.

“Personal styles as preference, discernment, vs. show wealth, autonomy, loyal, tough, skills.”

“Personal styles as [noun], [noun], vs. [verb phrase], [noun], [adjective], [adjective], [noun].”

So painful to read!

“Industry has devised hyper-stimulating food, art, stories, sport, games, drugs, etc.,”

In short superstimuli weld gobsmacking power over the human mind.

“…which rich low-self-control folks eagerly consume, at the expense of work, kids, and work-like-hobbies.”

And that’s just human created superstimuli. Imagine what superstimuli a transhuman could create. Actually we probably couldn’t imagine. Suffice it say the prols could be easily controlled, without any actual coercion or even without people realizing they are under control.

The propoganda techniques first discovered accidently by Nazi Germany actually had their origins in the arts – Hilter was a failed artist and Goebbels was an arts aficionado. Arts are based on the principles of superstimuli. Consider that the ability to weld superstimuli effectively literally did enable these evil folks to conquer half of Europe.

The amount of consumption of superstimuli and the power they weild seems to be massive and out of all proportion ( sports, drugs and pop culture are only the beginning, consider again political propganda, and the example given above)…

Consider the sales figures of two different books…

E.T. Jaynes’ “Probability Theory: The Logic of Science” (a few thousand copies)

J.K.Rowling “Harry Potter” series (400 million copies)

Something is going on here that even the Hansons and Bostroms have missed, no?.

Considering the power of superstimuli and its association with arts and the cognitive skill of categorization should give Bayesian fan-boys very serious pause as to whether theirs is the ultimate cognitive power. Black swan warning sirens are wailing somewhere in the distance. Think it through folks.

Putting the word “know” in quotation marks suggests you don’t intend it to be taken seriously, i.e. we think we know, we say we know, but maybe we don’t really. Is that what you meant? Quotation marks tend to de-emphasize a word.