Dan Williams @danwilliamsphil Twitter profile

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Dan Williams

1 month

In complex, modern societies, ignorance and misperceptions are unsurprising. The puzzle - the fact that demands a deep explanation - is that some people hold accurate beliefs. Some thoughts:

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

3 years

Lots of academia is just people doing things that are technically impressive because it's easier to evaluate whether work is technically impressive than whether it actually contributes to our understanding of the world.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

I *hate* videos like this, designed to mock ordinary people & make them look stupid. The most obvious point is that the interviews are cherry picked from a much bigger sample but made to look as if they're representative of people’s responses. But setting that aside…(1/5)

Rick Bomstein

@BomsteinRick

2 years

Good lord

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

9 months

New essay: I argue that misinformation is often better viewed as a symptom of deep societal problems rather than their cause. When that’s true, interventions like debunking and censorship are unlikely to help – and might make things worse. (1/15)

Misinformation is the symptom, not the disease

We are more conscious than ever of the harms of misinformation for the common good. This concern is driven by a widespread understanding of misinformation as a public disease in need of an urgent...

iai.tv

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

21 days

"Everything is political" is a classic deepity. On one reading, it's true but trivial. On another, it's interesting but obviously false. These different interpretations create a misleading sense of profundity. It's Deepak Chopra but for people with PhDs in the humanities.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

7 months

There's some misremembering on this point, so: The lab leak hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from a lab absolutely was widely labelled "misinformation" and was widely censored.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

I wrote a short piece on why the recent panic surrounding misinformation is misguided and how the concept of rationalisation markets is superior for understanding many forms of epistemic dysfunction in political and cultural media (1/17).

The focus on misinformation leads to a profound misunderstanding of why people believe and act on...

Misinformation has been a prominent paradigm in the explanation of social, political, and more recently epidemiological phenomena since the middle of the last decade. However, Daniel Williams argue…

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

3 years

New open access paper: "The Marketplace of Rationalizations". The basic idea: Motivated reasoning is subject to a rationalization constraint: people can only convince themselves of beliefs for which they can find appropriate rationalizations. (1/16)

The marketplace of rationalizations | Economics & Philosophy | Cambridge Core

The marketplace of rationalizations - Volume 39 Issue 1

www.cambridge.org

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

In general, people are highly rational, intelligent, and knowledgeable *about those aspects of reality that matter to them*. Using trick questions about pointless matters of fact doesn’t illustrate their stupidity; it just shows the ignorance of people laughing at them. (5/5)

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

It's tough putting together a 10-week philosophy of science course. I wanted to give a balance of traditional philosophy of science with more contemporary issues and debates, and also connect it to my own research interests. Here are the topics I landed on:

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

Much of social psychology seems to be premised on the bizarre assumption that what people really care about is not real-world outcomes but the state of their own mind: self-esteem, a positive self-image, dissonance reduction, feelings of control, reducing uncertainty, etc.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

7 months

I'm teaching my philosophy of science course again this term 👇. Some brief thoughts on why Stephen Hawking was wrong about philosophy, five book recommendations for those interested in getting into philosophy of science, and the readings for my course:

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

First, being informed about pointless abstract facts about the world is a status symbol among highly-educated exam takers that constitute society’s elite. Most people don’t care, and have way more important things going on in their lives to bother acquiring this knowledge. (2/5)

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

Second, if you ask someone “Where is the Queen of England from?”, they will *reasonably* assume the interviewer is not mean-spirited & trying to trick them & make them look bad. So they probably assume (*reasonably*) that the answer can’t simply be in the question itself. (4/5)

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

“Continental philosophy” often strikes me as a religious project based on the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts and a guru-based epistemology in which knowledge is advanced not by distributed, institutionally-scaffolded cognition but by decoding the profundities of sages.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

10 months

"Conservatives are incapable of producing good art because they lack empathy". 🙃

Daniel Baryon

@AnarkYouTube

10 months

Conservatives are incapable of producing good art because they lack empathy, which means they are incapable of creating anything which communicates to a larger audience. When they try to produce art, they only end up producing clumsy in-group signaling.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

"Meaning" is often just a euphemism for status. Your life feels meaningful when you feel liked, respected, admired, and deferred to.

Rolf Degen

@DegenRolf

2 years

Good-looking people report higher meaning in life.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

Rosa Luxemburg's insightful observation that "those who do not move do not notice their chains" applies to belief systems as well: it's only when your thoughts diverge from a dominant ideology that you notice the extreme social pressures with which it's held in place.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

8 months

New essay: To avoid the charge that the post-2016 alarmism about misinformation has been a moral panic, researchers increasingly define misinformation to include content that is true but nevertheless misleading. I argue against this move: 1/16

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

7 months

What explains popular delusions and the madness of crowds? In this new essay I explore one important answer: Beliefs often function as *social signals* - and people care more about projecting a positive social image than about truth. Thread: (1/13)

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

3 months

This week, a group of prominent misinformation researchers published a commentary in Nature 👇on misinformation and misinformation research. I disagree with their analysis and explain why here:

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

1 year

Is misinformation a dangerous virus? Are we living through an infodemic? Is there a vaccine for misinformation? In this review of Sander van der Linden's ( @Sander_vdLinden ) new book 'Foolproof', I argue that the answer to these questions is "no". A thread:

The Fake News about Fake News - Boston Review

In Foolproof, psychologist Sander van der Linden compares misinformation to viral infection—and claims to have a vaccine.

www.bostonreview.net

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

Cool result. It seems like lots of research in psychology is converging on a simple but important finding: people are generally persuaded by rational arguments. I've updated my own views on this matter over the past year or two. My previous work was too pessimistic.

David G. Rand

@DG_Rand

5 months

🚨WP🚨 Conspiracy beliefs famously resist correction, right? WRONG: We show brief convos w GPT4 reduce conspiracy beliefs by ~20pp (d~1)! 🡆Tailored AI evidence rebut specific arguments offered by believers 🡆Effect lasts 2+mo 🡆Works on entrenched beliefs

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

4 months

Re-reading Appiah's review of "The Dawn of Everything". It really is one of the most devastating and beautifully written book reviews in recent years.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

8 months

Most psychological work on human irrationality and self-deception is based on the "you can't handle the truth" model, which is greatly inferior to the "truth is often disadvantageous in social games involving persuasion, reputation management, and social signalling" model.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

If you took those mocking such people and made them live their lives, they would crash and burn quickly because of how much local knowledge & understanding they lack. The mockers would seem like absolute idiots in spite of their high scores on “General Knowledge” tests. (3/5)

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

26 days

The UK has experienced its worst riots in over a decade. In a new article👇, I analyse the role of online misinformation. While many blame social media and call for increased regulation and censorship, this narrative is simplistic. I make five points: 1/11

Did online misinformation fuel the UK riots?

On the importance of thinking carefully about complex problems

www.conspicuouscognition.com

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

Brilliant essay on misinformation by @mnvrsngh . - Humans are not gullible - Beliefs are extremely complicated. People often sincerely and passionately endorse highly compartmentalised beliefs. - Misinformation is often a symptom of deeper social problems.

Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation

People may fervently espouse symbolic beliefs, cognitive scientists say, but they don’t treat them the same as factual beliefs. It’s worth keeping track of the difference.

www.newyorker.com

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

9 months

New piece: *Misinformation is not a virus, and you cannot be vaccinated againt it*. I explain why it's misleading to conceptualise misinformation as a contagious virus, and why there isn't good evidence that can people can be "inoculated" against it. (1/5)

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

4 years

My 'Socially Adaptive Belief' is now online. It explores the way in which bias, irrationality, ignorance, stupidity, etc., are often winning strategies in the strange social environments we confront as intelligent status-seeking coalitional primates.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

1 year

No single article or book is ever that great. You learn by reading lots of books from diverse perspectives and building on knowledge incrementally over time. Assigning life-changing effects to single books often reflects a religious impulse at odds with a sensible epistemology.

Nigel Warburton 🇺🇦 #FreeUkraine

@philosophybites

1 year

Which philosophy book changed your life?

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

25 days

There's an unfortunate tendency to think the truth is so self-evident that anyone who appears to disagree with you must really agree with you deep down and therefore be lying. Lots of talk about "disinformation" emerges from this tendency.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

4 months

New essay 👇 exploring the evolutionary roots of human kindness and why the subtle incentives of reputation management explain why human altruism is both sincere and strategic. Our moral psychology is more Machiavellian than we like to admit. 🧵

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

3 years

Why do groups often embrace beliefs that strike outsiders as absurd? In a new paper (forthcoming in Mind and Language), I explore the increasingly influential idea that the absurdity of such beliefs makes them credible signals of ingroup commitment:

(PDF) Signalling, Commitment, and Strategic Absurdities

PDF | Why do well-functioning psychological systems sometimes give rise to absurd beliefs that are radically misaligned with reality? Drawing on... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on...

www.researchgate.net

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

10 months

@ArthurCDent It is strange, but LLMs pose a concrete challenge to his entire life's intellectual work (in linguistics and cognitive science, at least), so it's not that surprising, even if it is quite childish.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

11 months

Orwell's reflections from a preface to Animal Farm on how informal censorship works in ostensibly free societies:

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

3 years

Going grey in my 20s and it is 100% - 100% - because I attempted to write a paper on the free energy principle.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

14 days

Lots of scary mind viruses spreading on this platform (ideas I disagree with).

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

4 months

Nussbaum is so profoundly misinformed on so many different levels all at once it is difficult to even know where to begin here.

Wisdom of Crowds

@WCrowdsLive

4 months

Martha Nussbaum and @shadihamid debate whether human overpopulation 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦or underpopulation 🚶‍♂️ will be the most important challenge of the future. Listen to the whole thing here 👉

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

"AI has taught us that human minds are hugely richer, and more subtle, than psychologists previously imagined. Indeed, that is *the* main lesson to be learned from AI." That seems right.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

4 years

New preprint, 'Is the Brain an Organ for Prediction Error Minimizaton?' The conclusion: Maybe, but the free energy principle provides no reason for thinking that it is. More generally, it provides no support for any substantive theory of brain function.

(PDF) Is the Brain an Organ for Prediction Error Minimization?

PDF | An influential body of research in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind asserts that the brain is an organ for prediction error minimization. I... | Find, read and cite all the research you...

www.researchgate.net

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 months

Some thoughts on four epistemic challenges for open societies: complexity, invisibility, rational ignorance, and politically motivated cognition.

Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?

A deep dive into four factors that prevent members of open societies from understanding political reality: complexity, invisibility, incentives, and politically motivated cognition.

www.conspicuouscognition.com

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

3 years

New paper. I argue that there is no interpretation of the free energy principle on which it establishes both a first principles account of self-organisation and an interesting constraint on theorising in neuroscience.

Is the brain an organ for free energy minimisation?

Philosophical Studies - Two striking claims are advanced on behalf of the free energy principle (FEP) in cognitive science and philosophy: (i) that it identifies a condition of the possibility of...

link.springer.com

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

The level of bad faith exhibited in most popular criticisms of effective altruism has made me more sympathetic to effective altruism.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

4 months

Lots of scientific and popular articles on misinformation feature some variation on "misinformation is a growing problem" or "we are living through a misinformation age" and yet do not provide any evidence or even arguments in defence of these claims.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

New post 👇. I argue: (1) The media rarely makes things up. (2) Media bias is nevertheless widespread. (3) Media bias is identified by biased individuals with beliefs acquired via biased media. (4) Misinformation is therefore hard to study objectively.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

8 months

“Why is this even philosophy?!” asks person whose ideal of Real Philosophy is making narrow conceptual points within whatever extremely path-dependent conversation high-status members of the profession happen to be having in elite philosophy journals.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 months

@dioscuri I frequently encounter a mixture of incredulity/hostility for just calmly stating my view that markets - and more generally capitalism - are on net good.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

7 months

Should we trust misinformation experts to decide what counts as misinformation? In this new essay I give some reasons for scepticism: . Thread: (1/15)

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

Ultimately the only legitimate philosophical methodology is whichever one is implicit in the work I do.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

7 months

Happy Darwin Day. Evolution by natural selection is the most important discovery in the history of our species - and yet most research in psychology and social science still proceeds as if the discovery had never been made. Sad.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

There are many people who are more outraged by a well-meaning but conceptually confused Ted Talk than about the fact that Trump - someone Ramaswamy endorsed - literally tried to overturn an election result based on completely made-up, self-serving conspiracy theories.

Vivek Ramaswamy

@VivekGRamaswamy

5 months

NPR’s new CEO: “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground & getting things done.” This gets to the heart of the cultural divide in the modern West: whether you believe truth is a priority or a hindrance

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

Human behaviour is profoundly shaped by status competition but people often strive to maintain a narrative in which what really drives them is not status but high ideals (Justice, Truth, Art, etc.) - precisely because such narratives reflect better on them and so promote status.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

7 months

Up until May 2021, FB was removing any claims to the effect that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. It then quite abruptly abandoned this policy 👇:

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

1 year

I've designed an undergraduate course, 'Science and Reason'. It will explore the scope and limits of science; how science relates to and differs from other modes of inquiry; and whether a scientific worldview threatens our commonsense understanding of reality and ourselves.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

20 days

Self-deception is often a team project. It involves complex forms of social scaffolding and epistemic teamwork that generate collective delusions—bespoke realities—individuals could not achieve independently. New post 👇

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

Epistemic selfishness: biased reasoning that promotes one’s own interests but imposes costs on others. E.g., someone who adopts an inaccurate worldview for its emotional or reputational benefits, and then inflicts this worldview on others through activism.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

“Analytic philosophy” often strikes me as a pseudo-scientific project based on imitating the superficial appearance of science (precision, clarity, mathematics) without including the thing that actually makes science powerful: its empirical engagement with the world.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 months

The ideas you dislike - whether “wokeism”, conspiracy theories, misinformation, or religion - aren't “mind viruses” and don't spread via contagion. This framing rests on a stick-figure depiction of human psychology and communication that functions to demonise, not understand.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 years

My PhD thesis, 'The Mind as a Predictive Modelling Engine: Generative Models, Structural Similarity, and Mental Representation', can be downloaded here:

(PDF) The Mind as a Predictive Modelling Engine: Generative Models, Structural Similarity, and...

PDF | I outline and defend a theory of mental representation based on three ideas that I extract from the work of the mid-twentieth century philosopher,... | Find, read and cite all the research you...

www.researchgate.net

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

6 months

I think publicly humiliating ordinary Trump voters by tricking them into revealing features of political psychology (partisanship, post hoc rationalisation, etc.) that are just as common among the liberal audience mocking & feeling superior to them is bad.

Blue Georgia

@BlueATLGeorgia

7 months

Jimmy Kimmel Pranking Trumpers in South Carolina.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

11 months

First lecture of the new academic year! An introduction to the history of AI, core concepts (computing machines, intelligence), the difference between good old-fashioned AI and artificial neural networks, Turing, and the Turing test.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 months

The epistemic challenges of open societies, Part 2: Why the "marketplace of ideas" often functions like a marketplace of rationalisations designed to justify the favoured narratives of society's competing political and cultural tribes.

Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 months

Some thoughts on four epistemic challenges for open societies: complexity, invisibility, rational ignorance, and politically motivated cognition.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

This article by Nikhil Krishnan, pointing out various fallacies and philosophical mistakes in constructionist theories of emotion, is *so good*. via @NewYorker

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

21 days

Much of the humanities is like this. "Everything is socially constructed", "The medium is the message", "Power is everywhere", etc. Good essay on deepities by @DavidPinsof here:

"Deep" Bullshit

Some ideas are truly deep.

www.everythingisbullshit.blog

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

1 year

Can't stand stuff like this. Sanctimoniously mocking other people for the harmless status markers within their social milieu - driven by the absurd assumption that the mocker's own accent and self-presentation weren't shaped by exactly the same kinds of forces.

Tansu Yegen

@TansuYegen

1 year

Her accent😊

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

It's a good thing that no scientific field - such as, say, social psychology - has ever selected for sexy attention-grabbing results instead of accuracy.

Jay Van Bavel, PhD

@jayvanbavel

2 years

Reminder than social media doesn't select for accuracy, but rather content that grabs your attention. So be mindful that the content you see trending on here is often a poor reflection of reality.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

4 months

Some reading recommendations on the topic of misinformation in case of interest 👇

The misinformation wars - a reading list

Important readings that challenge conventional wisdom about the nature, novelty, prevalence, and impact of misinformation.

www.conspicuouscognition.com

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

A dilemma for misinformation research: define misinformation narrowly (e.g., as demonstrably false content) and it's rare; define it broadly (e.g., as misleading content) and it’s so pervasive that the concept is useless as a way of understanding information ecosystems.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

7 months

In this new post I highlight my five favourite academic articles from last year, which range over topics like political ideology, religion, misinformation, reputation management, and intellectual humility: . Thread: 1/6

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

8 months

Walter Lippmann over one hundred years ago: There are no fingerprints of misinformation, and problems of belief formation in large-scale societies ultimately boil down to issues of trust and distrust. Succinct and correct 👍

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

I wrote a short piece on the social incentives that drive irrational beliefs. The basic idea: We are unconsciously biased towards beliefs that we benefit from propagating to others, and that signal our attractive traits and allegiances. (1/4) via @CAPDproj

The Social Roots of Irrationality

Many animals navigate their environments with the use of internal models. It is tempting to think of human beliefs as just a highly complex example of this strategy. On this view, our beliefs are –…

blogs.cardiff.ac.uk

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

8 months

I'm going to be writing here 👇 ≈weekly this year. In this first post I introduce the blog, explain its title 'Conspicuous Cognition', and outline why the pursuit of social approval drives the evolutionary weirdness of human behaviour and thought. 1/7

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

9 months

A lot of the energy and ingenuity left-wing intellectuals invest into explaining why people don't share their views ("ideology”, “manufactured consent”, “active ignorance”, "hegemony", etc) would be better spent simply trying to persuade people that those views are in fact true.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

1 year

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, human brilliance emerges not from our innate brainpower or raw computational capacities, but from the sharing of information in communities and networks over generations." A false dichotomy.

What Makes Us Smart?

Human creativity does not solely rely on our individual cognitive abilities, but instead emerges from the recombination of ideas, practices, and approaches that result from social interactions and...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

6 months

People tend to be absurdly overconfident in their political beliefs. This is not just misguided - it's harmful. So what explains it? Here I explore some possible explanations:

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

12 days

I'm putting together a module for 3rd-year philosophy undergraduates on the general theme of "Politics, truth, and ideology". What would people include on the reading list? I'm interested in classic and modern works, as well as scientific in addition to philosophical ones.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

6 months

A couple of years ago, I read Walter Lippmann's "Public Opinion" (1922) and it changed how I think about politics. In this essay, I explore and evaluate Lippmann's radical critique of democracy.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

Classifying Unherd as "disinformation" is wrong and indicative of how modern disinformation research often functions as a thinly veiled partisan project that simply reflects the personal views and preferences of researchers and organisations.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

11 months

There should be stronger norms discouraging people from adopting 100% confidence in trendy activist stances on complex issues about which they are manifestly uninformed.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

1 year

It's 2023 and people still talk as if they have privileged access to their motives. It would be better to admit that when we explain the reasons for our behaviour we are telling a story, and we typically have no greater access to whether that story is true than anyone else does.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

I'm not much persuaded by Haidt's analysis, and I retweeted the Nature review. However, on reflection, the review is very uncharitable and unpersuasive. It doesn't engage with Haidt's arguments, and its identification of "real causes" is very implausible and overconfident.

Jonathan Haidt

@JonHaidt

5 months

A review in Nature, by @candice_odgers , asserts that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” Both of these assertions are untrue.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

6 months

Have we evolved to love our ingroup? Did our ancestors go through an evolutionary process of self-domestication? Is the occasional genocide just an unfortunate by-product of how damn friendly we are? New essay 👇and thread: 1/15

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

9 months

If so, what might help? First, rather than investing so much into preventing the gullible masses from being brainwashed into holding bad ideas, it is far more important to win trust in institutions, including by *making them more trustworthy*. (11/15)

How Effective Are Interventions Against Misinformation?

Efforts to combat misinformation have intensified in recent years. In parallel, our scientific understanding of misinformation and of our information ecosystem has improved. Here, I propose ways to...

osf.io

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

What are the best things you've read about the replication crisis? I'd be especially interested in something that would be appropriate for undergraduates to read as part of a course in the philosophy of science, but I'm interested in anything good on the topic.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

3 months

Socialists like G.A. Cohen criticise capitalism for achieving social cooperation as a byproduct of self-interest. However, this is true of all complex cooperation. Capitalism is only unusual in making the role of self-interest undeniable. New post: 1/9

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

Interesting article. People don't reduce their demand for biased news even when they know it is biased - as long as the bias aligns with their own political views.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

6 years

I’m a doctor! Well, not one of the useful ones but still! 🍻

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

1 year

"The biggest red flag for me is when something evokes an emotion in you. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s misinformation, but it signals that somebody’s trying to manipulate your emotions." No it doesn't.

How to Slow Misinformation in the 2024 Election - Georgetown University

An election misinformation expert and Georgetown professor explains how to respond to misleading information online in the 2024 elections.

www.georgetown.edu

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

9 months

The central intuition driving the modern misinformation panic is that people – specifically *other* people 👇 – are gullible and hence easily brainwashed into holding false beliefs. This idea is wrong. (2/15)

People believe misinformation is a threat because they assume others are gullible - Sacha Altay,...

Alarmist narratives about the flow of misinformation and its negative consequences have gained traction in recent years. If these fears are to some extent warra...

journals.sagepub.com

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

3 years

When preferences for similar beliefs are widespread, this constraint gives rise to *rationalization markets* in which agents compete to produce justifications of widely desired beliefs in exchange for money and social rewards such as attention and status. (2/16)

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 years

New paper in which I try to answer the following question: How can you learn anything new from your imagination if you're the one deciding what to imagine?

Imaginative Constraints and Generative Models

How can imagination generate knowledge when its contents are voluntarily determined? Several philosophers have recently answered this question by pointing to the constraints that underpin imaginati...

www.tandfonline.com

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

4 years

Classic - and excellent - paper. "Beliefs are objects which provide values to their owners. The bases for these values have little to do with the probable truth of the beliefs. This is a crucial fact both psychologically and sociopolitically....

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

9 months

New draft: Scaffolding Motivated Cognition. The basic idea: In convincing ourselves of what we want to believe, we don't just rely on cognitive biases. As with most of cognition, we often make use of rich and complex forms of social scaffolding.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

2 years

As with many culture wars topics, what masquerades as a controversy over a specific factual question - the origins of Covid - is really a dispute over the relative status and influence that should be awarded to different constituencies in society.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

1 year

Scott Alexander is right about this 👇 It's an indictment of much of modern social science that this kind of view is now reflexively dismissed as a form of postmodernism when it's just what a scientifically informed approach to human psychology and epistemology implies.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

24 days

The good thing about blogging is there's no editor to tell you to reduce the word count. You can write posts as long as you want and with the exception of losing 99% of your potential audience there's no downside.

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

1 year

People are systematically wrong about the world. This isn't primarily because they've been infected by “misinformation” but because of how human psychology interacts with the tendency of mainstream media to report a highly nonrandom sample of everything bad happening in the world

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

8 months

Last week the World Economic Forum published its 'Global Risk Report' identifying misinformation and disinformation as the *top global threats over the next two years*. In this essay I argue its ranking is either wrong or so confused it's not even wrong:

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Dan Williams

@danwilliamsphil

5 months

People are often motivated to attack, dominate, and eliminate others. To get away with this, they must recruit social support and maintain a reputation as moral and decent. Demonizing narratives often emerge to solve these problems. New essay👇

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