Hacking Comprehension: Overcoming Limitations to Better Understand the World and Each Other

Presented at A New HOPE (2022), July 24, 2022, 3 p.m. (50 minutes)

We see the world differently - literally. Our brains hallucinate reality before our "eyes" and certain cognitive biases can coerce certain realities to be conjured over others. No wonder we can't agree on what color the dress or these crocs are. But it gets more complex: humans are subjected to hundreds of cognitive biases and logical reasoning errors, plus we have decades of built-up priors, limitations on time and attention, and we're not all operating from the same sets of information. So what would we have to do in order to, at the very least, "get on the same page" on high-impact political and social issues? How can we hack comprehension to enable more free, informed, and less biased decisions? The Society Library is a nonprofit organization working to map all points of view on complex social and political issues, but once they have all this information, the trick becomes: how do you get people to understand it all? This talk is about the design challenges and ethical conundrums of compressing complex knowledge and making it comprehendible across various dimensions.


Presenters:

  • Jamie Joyce
    **Jamie Joyce (@JustJamieJoyce)** is the founding executive director of The Society Library, a non-profit collective intelligence organization dedicated to empowering humanity to make more free and informed choices through knowledge products and cognitive aids. Their works include building databases that articulate the collective reasoning from all points of view on complex issues, teaching students how to critically deconstruct media, bringing "context-checking" to fact-checkers, and building decision-making models for local government. Their methods have been applied to deconstructing and producing legislation, and overall they are dedicated to future generations: working to give them better tools so that more informed, inclusive, and less biased decisions in personal and political matters are possible. Jamie is also an award-winning artist, former social engineer for fun, and maker of plasma poppers and particle accelerator Lichtenberg figures.

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