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specifics aside, I'm thinking about how this tendency to not update relates to the v binary way many people approach learning; internalizing a new fact is a one-way state transition, bc in their minds social reality perfectly mirrors physical. in fact, they don't even see a diff!
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RT @mattparlmer
The data showing significantly reduced severity in omicron cases vs all previous strains keep replicating everywhere

We are well on the w…
twitter.com/mattparlmer/status

this naive epistemology is much simpler computationally and hence metabolically; facts being a. static and b. binary, means they don't need to run background watchdog processes continuously error-checking their beliefs against new data. lightly-held opinions are more expensive!

for this set of constraints, it's perfectly rational to favor overly stringent precautions over updating their beliefs, as the metabolic cost of the latter most likely outweighs the burden imposed by the former

perhaps med/acceleration can address this

if this is a matter of metabolic tradeoffs, raising the cost of compliance shifts the equilibrium

maybe the only way out of public health authoritarianism is through

@pee_zombie
Yes, checking every possible subset of beliefs for consistency is NP hard, IIRC, when beliefs are sentences in propositional logic

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