The Experience of Obliviousness

How unreflected beliefs cause us to durably miss obvious things.

In "What universal human experiences are you missing without realising it?", Scott Alexander talks about a couple of experiences that people may lack and not realise they lack even though they are universal.

The first one he mentions is the ability to mentally visualise objects with shapes and colours:

Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.

And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.

He also talks about people who did not realise that they were missing having food preferences, having no sense of smell, being colour blind and being asexual.

It's a fascinating type of horror. I guess we could call it Epistemic Horror? We may all be wrong about some very basic fact of reality that we completely take for granted.

Horror can be fun. Scott's article is fun. People love watching horror films. And people enjoy reading Lovecraftian horror and SCP stuff.

But I find real-life horror less fun. I am more interested in eradicating its real-life manifestations. I would much rather not miss out on a key human experience. If I am missing something, I would like to at least realise that I am missing it.

So here are some musings about what it feels like to be oblivious, in the hope of helping myself and others be less so.

Not Taking People Seriously

A common thread across the experiences Scott mentions is to believe that something only has social or metaphorical meaning.

For instance, many of those who cannot visually imagine objects do not realise it until they are tested. Up until their tests, they assumed that just about everyone else means that "imagination" is metaphorical.

They simply did not consider that people meant it literally.

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This is not only about sensory perception.

I have witnessed a similar phenomenon when talking about faith with atheists. They were telling me that religious faith is no big deal, that obviously everyone means "God" and "Heavens" metaphorically.

And I was stuck trying to explain to them that no, many mean their words literally.

Many people of religion do believe that there is a metaphysical realm that we cannot witness through any of our tools. That when we die, our soul keeps experiencing and we go to this realm. That God is literally here and everywhere taking care of things.

Some believe in angels helping people. In demons possessing people. In the devil sometimes directly talking to them in their mind to tempt them.

But for someone who doesn't feel religious faith, it's hard to understand, and easy to dismiss.

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Nowadays, I tend to take people literally when they talk about seeing things, perceiving things, feeling things, etc. I expect there is something there.

For example, I believe that many people mean it literally when they say that they can feel people's "energies", "waves", or "aura".

I believe that they are trying to accurately report to me what they think is true.

I am not saying that I am taking it at their word. I do not believe they have discovered a new type of physics.

I am not saying all of them are honest, and that none of them are hyping it up or trying to get people's attention.

But I do mean that I believe there is a feeling that many people have, that feels like an aura around people, and energy or waves that people, and that this feeling keeps track of something in the real world. (Namely, people's emotional states.)

When they say that there is an energy "in a room" or "in a space", as opposed to in someone's mind, I do believe that it keeps track of something real. (Namely, that people subconsciously attune themselves to their social environment. If everyone is sad around them, one doesn't act happy and jumpy.)

Dunning Kruger

A very easy way to not take people seriously is to feel superior to them.

This tweet has made the rounds. It is about some important guy who believes he has gotten pretty close to interesting breakthroughs in quantum physics by talking to ChatGPT and Grok.

I don't know how Real that particular tweet is, I haven't checked. But I know that many people sent us their theories of how they single-handedly solved AI alignment. (And many more since ChatGPT has been out.)

And beyond these individuals, I know many who are missing a lot of relevant information, do not realise it, yet keep expressing very confident judgements. Communists on economics, utilitarians on anything that is not population ethics, crackpots, conspiracy theorists, revolutionaries (whether they are rightist libertarians or authoritarian leftists), teenagers, and more.

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When I'm facing people who act that way, I feel like Rohit:

I get why this happens, I even get how it makes you feel like this, but I don't get how you don't step back and go "man this model must be gaslighting me, I'm not *that* smart in physics".

Rohit expresses some confusion, but I think it's pretty clear. His reaction contains the explanation.

People get trapped in these thought patterns exactly whenever they do not have the thought "Hey! I am not *that* smart in physics".

More generally, they get trapped in these thought patterns whenever they do not have the thought "Hey! Even if I feel like I am right, I'm still very likely to be wrong!"

There are many different life trajectories that may get someone to develop a mental attitude that misses this.

People with too little experience to know about the basic ways of the world; because they are too young, too stupid, too uneducated, or too isolated.

People who are too attached to their experience to realise that it is not representative of the whole world; because they are too old, have put too much effort in their narrow domain of expertise, or have suffered too much.

People who once won big by betting on their genius and against others. They may have earned riches, authority or status, and now believe that any idea turns to gold when they are the one thinking it.

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To be fair, I don't even think we need need an explanation in the first place. Not having the mental reflex of “I feel right, but I may be missing something” is the baseline. There are just too many places where we can be thoroughly wrong for us to consider it every time.

Perceiving the complexity of the world is hard. It requires paying attention to it, being smart enough to understand it, as well being equipped for it. By default, it doesn't happen.

When one doesn't have a microscope, it's easy to confidently express that the world is made of 4 or 5 elements. When one is badly attuned to social situations, it's easy to confidently express that everyone is socially blind and that "energies" mean nothing.

In a real way: the Dunning-Kruger effect is the default state of things. We just confidently make shit up all the time. We confabulate. We hallucinate. We absentmindedly lie. We forget.

We may transcend this state of affairs and build Proper Knowledge only through careful philosophy ("I know that I know nothing"), systematic science, or a long process of attunement to a narrow domain (where one molds their very neurons into the shape of that domain, developing a mundane extra-ordinary intuition).

Unreflected Beliefs

I believe there is a more general pitfall, and that Not Taking People Seriously, as well as Dunning-Kruger, are just two instances of it.

I call this pitfall "unreflected beliefs". There's no standard name for them, but I heard them referred to as "subconscious beliefs", "implicit beliefs" and "revealed beliefs" (inspired by revealed preferences).

They are beliefs that if asked about, one may state, but which do not result from a proper reflection.

Unreflected beliefs are treacherous.

When they conflict with our observations, they do not lead to cognitive dissonance. They do not feel wrong.

As a result, unreflected beliefs don't tend to naturally correct themselves.

This is one of the core insights beneath "Noticing Confusion" from my point of view, much more than any of the Bayes stuff.

This is why prediction markets and Metaculus are so great. They explicitly surface belief and make people reflect about them, which in turns lets them experience cognitive dissonance and change their mind.

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Many of the atheists held their unreflected beliefs about how religious people experienced faith because they were unreflected. If these beliefs were raised to salience and they paid attention to religious people or asked them, they would have realised quite quickly that they were wrong.

Many people who lack visualisation do realise that they lack it after being tested and reflecting on it only once. Scott reports a similar anecdote for lacking smell in his post (and so I have witnessed a person discovering they lacked smell after being tested once too).

To me, this is the big one, this is the experience of obliviousness.

Obliviousness is having wrong unreflected beliefs about something big. And the beliefs are not salient enough to be corrected over time.

Conclusion

Paying attention to minor stuff often pays off.

It often reveals things that we were very wrong about.

On this, cheers, and have a nice day :)