Why is the ability to endure ambiguity suddenly getting so much attention?
Because the world is drifting in increasingly unpredictable directions and uncertainty is growing. In COVID-19: The Great Reset, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, points out that when people are tormented by anxiety and worry in an uncertain world, in the end
humans become trapped by a need for cognitive closure in order to erase ambiguity.
Need for cognitive closure is a concept proposed by social psychologist Arie W. Kruglanski: the psychological drive to avoid ambiguity in some question or problem and to seek a firm, definitive answer. People with a strong drive decide quickly based on intuition, and once they judge the answer they have arrived at to reduce uncertainty, they refuse to reconsider it - even if it is not correct.
They become certain of their own decision, do not sufficiently share related information with those around them, and are not open to the opinions of others. In short, the chance of making a foolish, premature decision grows.
In the end, the need for cognitive closure very naturally leads to confirmation bias at the individual level or out-group homogeneity bias at the group level.
- TMI, or a private theory of mine that probably slips into overgeneralization
When you step slightly to the side, bias is a keyword that shows the very framing of human nature is good vs. human nature is evil is not quite appropriate. Put simply, humans are beings of anxiety. How we overcome that anxiety differs with the environment and background we grew up in. Sometimes we react in wicked ways, sometimes in virtuous ways - because it reflects era-level, group-level, and individual-level factors all at once (variables that go beyond three dimensions), so there will always be back-and-forth debate.
Whatever the answer, these are all just theories that surface on the outside. The ultimate cause of these diverse phenomena (not only good-nature vs. evil-nature but also the many psychological terms including various biases) is anxiety. And that cause has to do with the traits of human biology itself.
I really hope people come to understand, through a grasp of vision, that our senses are not automatic - they cost energy, and we actively spend that energy. (Choi Nak-eon)
- Twisted, flipped, overlapped, and inverted on arrival
The simplest evidence that vision is not what the eye detects as is is that an image passing through a lens arrives inverted. (from the book Senses, Illusions, Hallucinations)
Sensing - including vision - ultimately happens inside a hard, dark box (and flipped at that), interpreted by each individual (similar but never identical). The information humans acquire is ultimately understood through the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, which Descartes pursued in the past and the philosopher Hilary Putnam updated in modern times. In a way, it is surprisingly similar to how the metaverse is structured.
This physiological structure then introduces a certain delay in how we perceive external objects and environment. But if we kept up a compulsive state of perception every single moment, the brain energy use and fatigue would spike too high, so the brain allows a certain level of forgetting.
In AI, this kind of structure has offered a lot of insight - the brain-in-a-vat part into ANN, DNN, CNN, RNN concepts, and the allowance of forgetting into short/long-term memory networks (LSTM layers) and the Transformer model.
... just noting it down.
