Joseph Sommer
Postdoc at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. Interested in cogsci broadly; primarily belief, (bounded) rationality, and JDM
- Reposted by Joseph SommerRather, it's mostly just the weight of facts and evidence that is having such a strong effect on people. But, importantly, when we say "facts and evidence" we mean "ostensible" facts and evidence. In fact, the LLMs are quite good at convincing people to believe conspiracies as well.
- 😍😍😍 (Hardwig, 1985)
- This isn't the physics envy I ordered
- "Beliefs* drive behavior" stocks up big *including ideological, political, identity-central, motivated, etc. beliefs
- Fascinating paper by Hood, McKee & Pittman demonstrating that election deniers were less likely to vote in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff election. If fewer GA Republicans believed the big lie, both GA Senate seats might still be in Republican control. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
- Philosophy friends, what's stopping you from achieving this rate of bee-examples-per-argument? (From Paul Helm's Belief Policies)
- My god, the language available to psychology was impoverished after behaviorism. Here's Heider (1958) - after explaining in detail that physical stimuli alone can't uniquely determine what you perceive/infer - struggling to say: "what you believe depends on your total evidence"
- Well, my New Year's resolution is to read less (seriously). But made it through lots of great books this year, including several from fields I'm less familiar with. Here are 10 books I gave 5 stars to this year along with an excerpt (usually belief-related; I have a type) from each
- Dewey: How We Think Read this early in the year on a lark and was pleasantly surprised by how insightful and relevant (a lot of) it was
- Evans-Pritchard: Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande Kind of the opposite to Dewey - this one was for explicit research, but same result: shockingly relevant to ongoing work and (IMO) belief in general
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View full thread(All the academic books I read this year can be found here: www.goodreads.com/review/list/...)
- Hard to find a bigger chip on a psychologist's shoulder than the Brunswikians'
- Probably the best discussion of the definition of bachelor problem I've ever seen (from Winograd, 1976)
- Reposted by Joseph SommerWe shouldn’t be too quick to see inconsistent beliefs as evidence of irrationality. Cool research by @bayesandbounds.bsky.social & @tanialombrozo.bsky.social suggests inaccessibility of an apparently conflicting belief can lead to (temporary, quickly resolved) inconsistency: buff.ly/QncPtjq
- Nice story with some evidence against Nisbett & Wilson on people not having access to details of judgment processes (Doherty & Reilly, 2001, p. 322 - their other work further supports this finding, which also seems to be gaining strength today).
- Maybe a good time to share my favorite critique of When Prophecy Fails (from 1965!)
- There’s growing evidence that something was going seriously wrong in the classic early work on cognitive dissonance Latest revelation: The story in When Prophecy Fails seems to have been fabricated in the most egregious way But this is not the only one… onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
- Reposted by Joseph SommerIf rationality implies that people’s beliefs must be consistent, the fact that we manifestly deviate from this would require explanation. But @bayesandbounds et al argue inconsistency is the default, and it is *consistency* that requires explanation: buff.ly/9WIcGsp
- Reposted by Joseph Sommer"Explaining belief in the wide variety of supernatural entities across cultures by suggesting they are supported by evidence might seem odd. However, evidence is perfectly capable of supporting false beliefs."
- 100% agree. IMO, there are 2 mutually reinforcing clusters: 1. Everything is unconscious reinforcement learning; no introspective access; the mind is just (an emergent property of) many conditioned neurons; LLMs (therefore) work like people; behavior/metrics are the only important thing...
- 2. Symbolic cognitive processes; some/a lot of access, the mind involves structured computations, not just associations; LLMs don't work like people because they lack compositionality/structure; behavior is *a means of inferring theoretical constructs*
- Reposted by Joseph SommerNew Substack post It's very personal: my story of a 20-year academic career, and the many challenges of theoretical and cross-disciplinary work As I put it in the subtitle: There is a lot of success and a lot of pain here, and no happy ending thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/happy-in-t...
- Reposted by Joseph Sommer"cognitive scientists should *expect* low belief-behavior correlations: after all, beliefs may be maps by which we steer, but steering takes much more than just a map"
- Reposted by Joseph Sommer• Moè: intentions vs. reality • Osman: mis/disinfo impacts @osman • Pierre: consistency puzzles • Sommer & Oktar: expecting low links @keremoktar.bsky.social @bayesandbounds.bsky.social • Westaby et al.: behavioral reasoning
- The Venn diagram of the target demographic for this beer and me might be a circle
- Well, the bar seems clear
- Reposted by Joseph SommerLast new year's, I hung out with my friend Joseph @bayesandbounds.bsky.social to talk about the 100 most influential works in cognitive science. All the big names are here: Turing, Fodor, Marr, Miller, (Joseph's favorite) Herb Simon, and of course - Noam Chomsky! youtu.be/Zu6ZoZsRGG0
- Psychoanalysis has concepts of a plan
- Reposted by Joseph SommerI regularly invite my students to ponder the puzzle of how humans often violate Bayes theorem and yet tiny bumblebee brains are capable of optimal Bayesian foraging. This paper might offer the solution: psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-... @bayesandbounds.bsky.social
- Reposted by Joseph SommerThis was a very interesting summary and commentary on a book I haven’t read yet (Religion as Make-Believe). I think the question “what are beliefs even?” may be one of the most consequential in psychology/philosophy of mind. philpapers.org/rec/SOMRAB
- Reposted by Joseph SommerConsider two beliefs: 1. Believing that the bathroom is down the hall 2. Believing that the Democratic Party is a threat to our whole society It seems like there’s some deep difference between these two beliefs. But what is the difference? Our studies explore that question
- Cosign: "Herbert Simon ftw"
- "An extrapolation of its present rate of growth reveals that in the not too distant future Physical Review will fill bookshelves at a speed exceeding that of light. This is not forbidden by general relativity since no information is being conveyed" (Mermin, 1990)
- Reposted by Joseph Sommer3. @bayesandbounds.bsky.social reported progress on identifying the mechanism(s) of a phenomena reported in [...checks notes...] the 1960s! Further confirmation may involve think-aloud protocols — one of my favorites! 🤓 #Bayes #probability #cogSci #epistemology #xPhi #psychology #logic #history
