‫Conservatism, this is the bias towards keeping your existing beliefs and being very hesitant to change
‫them even when you're provided with new evidence.
‫So I've talked about this on my Facebook page videos several times.
‫Thomas Koon.
‫His theory of paradigm shifts in science where existing scientists tend to stick to their old beliefs
‫even when confronted with new evidence.
‫And those people tend not to be ever convinced.
‫So the way science makes progress is that those people eventually retire.
‫And all the younger people buy into the new paradigm.
‫And that's how science moves forward.
‫So.
‫Even the most critically thinking, scientifically thinking scientists in academia fall prey to this
‫bias.
‫So it's obviously a very powerful bias and.
‫What's missing in most people's understanding of this is that this, like many of these biases, go
‫back to the power of the ego and how reasoning.
‫Is motivated, and some of those motives are conscious, like seeking the truth.
‫Some are unconscious, seeking things that inflate your ego, make you feel good.
‫Make make you not feel bad.
‫If you start questioning beliefs that undergird your whole way of thinking about your profession or
‫your world or religion or world view or political stance.
‫It's going to that if you start calling those foundational things into question.
‫And you start changing your entire you know, all those friends you've made.
‫All those things you've committed to, all those Facebook posts, everything you know, you start to
‫not look consistent.
‫Your waffling, you're they're sort of negative perceptions in many societies about that of not remaining
‫consistent and.
‫You start to think, wow, I wasted all that time, you feel guilt.
‫There's people that have told me that.
‫Well, one guy took it to another level, he said you should think about making a course of how to get
‫over the guilt of learning so inefficiently for so many years.
‫And he was talking about my accelerated learning system and how it's such a huge difference from the
‫traditional model of learning where you basically pump and dump you pump a bunch of stuff in your brain,
‫you pass a test, you dump it, you move on to the next thing.
‫There's no long term retention.
‫So there's all these unconscious biases or unconscious processes and motivations going on that affect
‫you in so many different ways, in so many different biases.
‫At their root level, a big piece of it is just the the bias towards the self, but also understanding
‫that an on at an unconscious level, your reasoning may be biased and is biased and motivated in terms
‫of your own self-esteem, maintaining your own self esteem.
‫And that's something that in many ways is evolutionarily motivated.
‫People that are that maintain a good self-esteem are going to be confident, are going to do better
‫socially, whereas people that are constantly knocking themselves and their self-esteem are going to
‫be anxious, are going to be depressed.
‫So this kind of thing does have a protective function.
‫And one of the courses I'm thinking about doing is on basically coping mechanisms.
‫Cognitive distortions, these are sort of by it human bias looked at from more of the lens of psychology
‫and therapy.
‫But it's instructive because even though it's talking about some of the similar things it goes into
‫at a systematic level, why do we have some of these biases?
‫How are they adaptive?
‫How do they in many ways serve your best interest?
‫And once you at a deep level understand not just that these biases exist, but why they exist at a deep
‫psychological level, it makes a lot more sense how you can de bias yourself and understand when somebody
‫else is biased, you're trying to persuade them or communicate with them.
‫You really need to factor in that.
‫There's this unconscious stuff going on in and you're playing.
‫Sometimes a simple argument about something.
‫You're really playing around with deep seated beliefs that if they were to admit that you're right,
‫would would in a certain sense really knock down a mate, potentially a major pillar of their belief
‫system.
‫And that's incredibly scary for people and threatening for people.
‫It's the equivalent of, you know, knocking down, you know, taking out one of the tires in their
‫car as they're going down the highway.
‫It's just it has many major psychological ramifications.
‫And so understanding that the seed or the roots of a lot of this stuff is at that level will give you
‫more empathy for people when they just seem to not budge.
‫But also a deeper understanding of yourself and why you may have a tendency and why you need to really
‫be ready to handle that kind of disruption in your mental models to effectively device yourself sometimes.
‫And that's not an easy thing to do.
‫So, again, we went on a little bit of a tangent, but that's conservatism.
‫That's the tendency to not want to revise your beliefs and to stick with your existing beliefs.