Cognitive Closed Loop Broken
Some people are easily influenced by ideas in their minds, while others are less sensitive. For example, when thinking of a starving child in Russia, some people immediately feel a vivid, almost tangible sense of that child’s plight, whereas others, because the event is so far away, feel nothing at all. Between these two extremes lies a spectrum of feeling, ranging from low to high intensity. Additionally, some people are insensitive to facts and are only moved by ideas. Yet sometimes, even when emotions have been stirred by an idea, we cannot satisfy those emotions through immediate action. For instance, a hungry Russian child may inspire us to want to give food, but the person who has that thought cannot actually place food in front of the child; they can only donate money to a cold, impersonal fundraising organization, or hand it over to the personified embodiment of that organization—Mr. Hoover (胡佛先生). The money does not go directly to the child; it is pooled with other donations and then used to feed many children in similar situations. Thus, just as the idea of donating is indirectly evoked, the effect of the behavior it prompts is also realized indirectly. The cognition involved is indirect; only the role cognition plays for a person is direct. In the three stages above, the stimulus originates from places we cannot directly access, the results of our reactions also occur in places we cannot directly touch, and only the emotion is wholly generated within ourselves.
Online violence has a similar structure: (incomplete or purely false) information comes from uncontrollable sources, keyboard actions and verbal abuse are carried out in unknown realms, and only the emotion—and the actions driven by that emotion—occur within the perpetrating netizen.
The quoted passage was written in 1922, so the core issue is not the Internet.
The complete cognitive process is a closed‑loop control system: the environment and the person are both present and provide feedback, i.e., the old environmental state (t₁), the generation of emotion and action, and the new environmental state (t₂) form a complete loop.
An open‑loop system retains only the process of generating emotion and action, stops reasoning, and halts cognitive training; in other words, unreliable past memories, experiences, and imaginations replace the latest environmental state as training feedback for the cognitive system, thereby shaping stereotypes. The agent’s behavior pattern becomes further polarized, low‑entropy, and predictable.
The Knowable Limits of Destiny
We do not wait until age 18 to emerge with imaginations of the real world. As George Bernard Shaw said, we are still in the era of Burge and Lubin, which means that as children we must rely on elders to help us connect with the world. Thus, our link to the external world is realized through certain authorities we love. These people are the most primitive bridges between us and the visible world. Moreover, even as we gradually acquire the ability to independently understand a larger external environment, a vast unknown world always remains, and we still depend on authority to grasp that unknown world. In a state of complete ignorance, we easily conflate correct explanations of facts with seemingly reasonable false statements, because they look, sound, and feel very similar. Unless we are in one of the few domains we are exceptionally familiar with, we cannot choose between a true explanation and a false one; we can only choose between a trustworthy explanation and an untrustworthy one.
The more society develops and diversifies, the more specialized it becomes, and the more unknown content there is. “If you don’t study math, physics, and chemistry, life is magic everywhere,” but the practical reality is: (1) natural‑science knowledge is only a small fraction of what we need to know in life; (2) mathematics, physics, and chemistry can be infinitely refined, and the domains in which any one person can achieve deep understanding are inevitably very limited.
Building the Trust Pyramid
When we no longer understand the world, we must choose between trust and distrust. Consequently, “security” is largely built on the quantity and quality of independent, reliable channels. A simple question arises: when you face a great difficulty, who can you turn to for help? “Family,” “the judiciary,” and similar socially constructed systems are common answers, yet the existence of “private relief” and “public relief” concepts means that the more universal the answer, the harder it is to address special difficulties (by definition, the universal and the special are difficult to reconcile).
However, even though choosing an expert is more convenient than choosing truth, we often feel powerless in practice. Honestly, even those regarded as experts in a field often cannot determine who the most authoritative expert actually is. Moreover, even if we settle on an expert, they are often too busy to accept consultations, or simply unreachable. Yet there are people—though not experts—whom we can trust without hesitation: parents, teachers, and capable friends around us.
In any case, we find that we trust certain individuals, and those people become the mediators linking us to unknown domains. Paradoxically, this phenomenon is sometimes criticized as frivolous, arbitrary, or even seen as a manifestation of our animal nature. Yet maintaining pure independence in the universe is impossible. If we cannot treat all things as self‑evident in practice, we should be content to spend our lives in the ordinary. Hermits are the closest to a “purely independent” state, but their sphere of activity is extremely narrow; because a hermit’s activities are centered on the self, their radius of action is limited and their goals simple. If a person can spend a lot of time pondering abstruse philosophical questions, it implies that long before retreating from society they have already sorted out how to keep warm, how to get food, and which great questions are worth contemplating.
Those we trust and regard as bridges between ourselves and the external world seem to be the very operators of the “external world,” even if what they operate is only an inconspicuous fragment of it.
The degree of trust thus becomes a concession of certain privileges or a value exchange.
An optimal‑value strategy might be:
- (0) Allocate more time to mastering foundational knowledge and good judgment criteria (the scientific methods of mainstream schools across disciplines), pursuing clarity of language and thought.
- (1) The most trusted knowledge should stem from hands‑on experience.
- (2) Remain as honest as possible about being “in the unknown” rather than letting erroneous concepts dominate.
- (3) For controversial but unfamiliar fields, gather multiple viewpoints and preliminarily filter low‑quality opinions using techniques such as logical consistency checks, emotional intensity, symbolic strength, incentive structure, interest analysis, and linguistic perplexity.
- (4) The reasons behind a conclusion carry more information than the conclusion itself; “yes” and “no” can each be encoded with a single bit.
- (5) Seek long‑term partners with similar cognition and aligned interests (principles: rapid淘汰; “better none than bad”; intensive contact; judgments worthy of a decade‑scale). Trust information within a given boundary as much as possible.
- (6) Establish clear principles, estimate how long it takes for potential biases in those principles to accumulate, and adjust periodically on the appropriate timescale based on feedback.