The Variability of Beliefs

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The world is super big and you're forming beliefs about the big wide world, necessarily on a very sparse sample. Even two people that were physically in the same spaces all of the time should be taking slightly different samples from the world. I would not expect we have exactly the same concepts as a result of that. We know that the way in which people sample from the world follows from the samples that they've accumulated previously.

Is a hotdog a sandwich?

Well, that depends on your definition of a sandwich (and a hotdog), and according to the most recent research in cognitive science, the odds that your concept of a sandwich is the same as another person's concept are shockingly low.

In this episode we explore how understanding why that question became a world-spanning argument in the mid 2010s helps us understand some of the world-spanning arguments vexing us today.

Our guest is psychologist Celeste Kidd who studies how we acquire and conceptualize information, form beliefs around those concepts, and, in general, make sense of the torrent of information blasting our brains each and every second. Her most recent paper examines how conceptual misalignment can lead to semantic disagreements, which can lead us to talk past each other (and get into arguments about things like whether hotdogs are sandwiches).

• Celeste Kidd's Website: https://www.kiddlab.com

• Celeste Kidd's Twitter: https://twitter.com/celestekidd

• How Minds Change: www.davidmcraney.com/howmindschangehome

• David McRaney’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidmcraney

• YANSS Twitter: https://twitter.com/notsmartblog

• Show Notes: www.youarenotsosmart.com

• Newsletter: https://davidmcraney.substack.com

• Latent Diversity in Human Concepts: https://tinyurl.com/25544m3v