Mar 17 JDN 2460388

One of the most difficult things in life to learn is how to treat your own feelings and perceptions as feelings and perceptions—rather than simply as the way the world is.

A great many errors people make can be traced to this.

When we disagree with someone (whether it is as trivial as pineapple on pizza or as important as international law), we feel like they must be speaking in bad faith, they must be lying—because, to us, they are denying the way the world is. If the subject is important enough, we may become convinced that they are evil—for only someone truly evil could deny such important truths. (Ultimately, even holy wars may come from this perception.)

When we are overconfident, we not only can’t see that; we can scarcely even consider that it could be true. Because we don’t simply feel confident; we are sure we will succeed. And thus if we do fail, as we often do, the result is devastating; it feels as if the world itself has changed in order to make our wishes not come true.

Conversely, when we succumb to Impostor Syndrome, we feel inadequate, and so become convinced that we are inadequate, and thus that anyone who says they believe we are competent must either be lying or else somehow deceived. And then we fear to tell anyone, because we know that our jobs and our status depend upon other people seeing us as competent—and we are sure that if they knew the truth, they’d no longer see us that way.

When people see their beliefs as reality, they don’t even bother to check whether their beliefs are accurate.

Why would you need to check whether the way things are is the way things are?

This is how common misconceptions persist—the information needed to refute them is widely available, but people simply don’t realize they needed to be looking for that information.

For lots of things, misconceptions aren’t very consequential. But some common misconceptions do have large consequences.

For instance, most Americans think that crime is increasing and worse now than it was 30 or 50 years ago. (I tested this on my mother this morning; she thought so too.) It is in fact much, much better—violent crimes are about half as common in the US today as they were in the 1970s. Republicans are more likely to get this wrong than Democrats—but an awful lot of Democrats still get it wrong.

It’s not hard to see how that kind of misconception could drive voters into supporting “tough on crime” candidates who will enact needlessly harsh punishments and waste money on excessive police and incarceration. Indeed, when you look at our world-leading spending on police and incarceration (highest in absolute terms, third-highest as a portion of GDP), it’s pretty clear this is exactly what’s happening.

And it would be so easy—just look it up, right here, or here, or here—to correct that misconception. But people don’t even think to bother; they just know that their perception must be the truth. It never even occurs to them that they could be wrong, and so they don’t even bother to look.

This is not because people are stupid or lazy. (I mean, compared to what?) It’s because perceptions feel like the truth, and it’s shockingly difficult to see them as anything other than the truth.

It takes a very dedicated effort, and no small amount of training, to learn to see your own perceptions as how you see things rather than simply how things are.

I think part of what makes this so difficult is the existential terror that results when you realize that anything you believe—even anything you perceive—could potentially be wrong. Basically the entire field of epistemology is dedicated to understanding what we can and can’t be certain of—and the “can’t” is a much, much bigger set than the “can”.

In a sense, you can be certain of what you feel and perceive—you can be certain that you feel and perceive them. But you can’t be certain whether those feelings and perceptions correspond to your external reality.

When you are sad, you know that you are sad. You can be certain of that. But you don’t know whether you should be sad—whether you have a reason to be sad. Often, perhaps even usually, you do. But sometimes, the sadness comes from within you, or from misperceiving the world.

Once you learn to recognize your perceptions as perceptions, you can question them, doubt them, challenge them. Training your mind to do this is an important part of mindfulness meditation, and also of cognitive behavioral therapy.

But even after years of training, it’s still shockingly hard to do this, especially in the throes of a strong emotion. Simply seeing that what you’re feeling—about yourself, or your situation, or the world—is not an entirely accurate perception can take an incredible mental effort.

We really seem to be wired to see our perceptions as reality.

This makes a certain amount of sense, in evolutionary terms. In an ancestral environment where death was around every corner, we really didn’t have time to stop and thinking carefully about whether our perceptions were accurate.

Two ancient hominids hear a sound that might be a tiger. One immediately perceives it as a tiger, and runs away. The other stops to think, and then begins carefully examining his surroundings, looking for more conclusive evidence to determine whether it is in fact a tiger.

The latter is going to have more accurate beliefs—right up until the point where it is a tiger and he gets eaten.

But in our world today, it may be more dangerous to hold onto false beliefs than to analyze and challenge our beliefs. We may harm ourselves—and others—more by trusting our perceptions too much rather than by taking the time to analyze them.