https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opinion/brain-mind-cognition.html

I am a big fan of the idea of cohort-sensemaking. Evolutionarily, humans almost always sought answers and made sense of things »in groups rather than in isolates. However, some forms of ‘social’ sensemaking are neither social nor make sense: social media, for example, is largely a catastrophe of nonsense-making because of how it is structured and the purposes for which it is implemented.

I don’t usually post articles from the mainstream press, but this one has some crucial features that agree with my own understanding, experience… and research.

“One last resource for augmenting our minds can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context'” — that is, a nonsocial one. Vigorous debates, engaged with an open mind, are the solution. “When people who disagree but have a common interest in finding the truth or the solution to a problem exchange arguments with each other, the best idea tends to win,” they write, citing evidence from studies of students, forecasters and jury members.”