The Uncertainty of Reality

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In moments of uncertainty people fall back on what they know the regularities of experience. Throughout human history this has served us well as long as we shared our priors even if those priors were wrong. Social media and other technological innovations have accelerated and exacerbated this but this is something that brains have done since there have been brains. Thanks to the socks and crocs experiment we may now know how all this happens we may understand it at a fundamental level Pascal and Michael call all this surf pad substantial uncertainty combined with ramified or forked priors or assumptions yields disagreement you go after it.

When facing a novel and uncertain situation, the brain secretly disambiguates the ambiguous without letting you know it was ever uncertain in the first place, leading people who disambiguate differently to seem iNsAnE.

This episode is about why we so often don't understand why we disagree, which leads us to disagree even more, and we explore that through the science behind The Dress. We look into why some people see it as black and blue, others see it as white and gold, and how the scientific investigation of why that is led to the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs, and how the scientific investigation of socks and Crocs may be, as one researcher explains, the nuclear bomb of cognitive neuroscience.

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