stop no stop take a moment think about
your thoughts right now what exactly are
you thinking what do you think I’m going
to say what influenced those thoughts is
it your expectations of these talks the
school were at or my skin color or
gender this is a challenge that I posed
to test my perceptions and it’s it’s
really fun to test our perceptions when
it’s something like puzzles or illusions
right like is that dress black and blue
or is it gold and yellow white whatever
right but we don’t gain the same level
of enjoyment when it is more of our
political perceptions that are being
challenged oftentimes these can raise
stress and emotions that can block our
ability to learn and listen and it’s
tough to be challenged in this way but
without challenge to our beliefs how can
so there’s a nice little poem we are
ships in the sea of beauty and
destination is our truth but passion be
the wind in our sails and reason be the
rudder that guides us let passion
overtake us and truth will evade us
hello everyone my name is Michael groom
and I am here to discuss the dialectic
life but in order to do that I want to
first start by getting some terms out of
the way right so the first is truth what
is truth well truth is essentially
something that is well real it exists in
objective reality beyond
undermines but we as subjective
creatures view the world through
ideological lenses that are tinted and
blurred by our beliefs and our
experiences and that actually leads us
to our inability to actually see truth
or when we’re looking at it we can’t be
sure what that is and that’s what leads
us to belief belief in its most basic
sense is essentially a claim or thought
that we hold to be true and these can
vary in our certainty our evidence in
the complexity or their accuracy for
example two plus two equals four is a
belief the earth is round
Yale is a good school yeah 9/11 was an
inside job or that people find me really
funny right a lot of these are our
beliefs but what really interests me
though is is not the police itself but
actually the interaction between our
beliefs and our behaviors so in order to
do that what I want to do is I want to
actually show you I brought in a nice
wooden block that I made of the letter D
for dialectic okay laughs I okay says if
a guy on my face got something no okay
fine you know what someone’s not
believing you love it let me ask an
opinion can I ask you what what letter
do you see here T as in like Trump I’m
guessing you’re Trump voter so obviously
I can’t trust your opinion
let me ask someone else you you can I
ask you uh what letter do you see here e
as in like elephant oh okay there you go
well you know what I think you guys look
trying to make fun of me or something
like okay this
is obviously the letter D and if you
think otherwise you’re either ignorant
or stupid sorry it’s just my belief
right well let me ask what just happened
right well these are actually
interactions that we kind of almost see
a lot with our beliefs so I’m gonna turn
this a little bit over yeah got a lot
going on so what happens is we have a
belief and when they are challenged
providing even the slightest bit of
doubt what we find is we experience a
sort of psychological stress as our
minds resist this new information and
this psychological stress we call
cognitive dissonance cognitive for mind
but what complicates this is that
oftentimes we define ourselves by our
beliefs and entangling our beliefs with
our personal identities which means that
when our beliefs are challenged we often
take them as personal attacks eliciting
an emotional response along with that
cognitive dissonance and the more
involved we are with those beliefs the
greater that response of cognitive
dissonance and disharmony but what do
you might imagine is that the mind
doesn’t want to be doing disharmony
right it it often wants to take the easy
and low-cost solution in order to
suppress that stress for example
shutting down communication amiss
perceiving it outright rejecting it or
rationalizing it away but as a bandage
on a bullet wound
this method of suppression is
superficial and any future potential
doubt or challenge to that belief can
we trigger that cognitive dissonance and
thus many of us seek shelter amongst
those whom with we agree who can
reassure us of our beliefs and our
biases and challenge anyone who poses a
threat and when we label ourselves in
this sense we actually produce we can
produce eventual ideological factions
that we label and conform to and as our
world becomes more globalized and we
communicate through Internet what is the
result
well it’s cognitive stress each and
every time we experience a new
conflicting ideology or belief and as a
world becomes ever more interconnected
and diverse we increase our chances of
encountering conflicting ideas and
increase our cognitive dissonance as
well and thus many of us seek shelter in
our ideological bubbles and
unfortunately a lot of our colleges have
become microcosms of this world but it
doesn’t have to be this way you see for
centuries and millennia scientists and
philosophers have actually used a method
of discourse to seek criticism with with
competing claims that are proposed that
are challenged and are assessed and
revised and accepted and refuted they
have actually done this in the sole
purpose or the primary purpose of
approaching truth to reform these
beliefs and get a clearer picture of
reality and I would broadly call this
method of discourse a dialectic now a
dialectic in its broadest sense is when
two or more people are having a
conversation
holding opposing views but with the
shared
tent to revise those beliefs and
approach truth and the success of this
method is all around us in our
technology in our law and in our
understanding yet when we get to
politics and public discourse we debate
instead of seeking criticism to approach
truth like scientists we seek to assert
and prove our own like lobbyists often
no offense often relying on on emotional
Appeals and thus instead of exchanging
ideas we exchange emotions eliciting
that cognitive dissonance promoting
passionate responses and promoting more
bias ah now when we look at this world
and all of this debate and and all of
this infighting it may seem like an
issue that is too great for any one of
us to tackle alone but we can apply the
successful strategies of science and
philosophy to the social and political
interactions of our every day in order
to mitigate our fear of cognitive
dissonance reduce our conflict improve
our communication and better our
understanding of ourselves and the world
around us and we do this through what I
like to call the dialectic life as soon
as we release our grip on our beliefs
and allow them and our identities to
change and evolve in light of new
information we actually open ourselves
up to learning and alter our the very
relationship that we have with cognitive
dissonance itself you see when we pursue
learning cognitive dissonance no longer
becomes something to avoid but it
actually becomes something that we use
and embrace as a positive mental signal
that alerts us to potential conflicts in
our thinking it’s kind of like an arrow
in our heads and what’s actually amazing
about this is that by using cognitive
dissonance as a beacon I’ve actually
found myself actively and constantly
seeking out diverse and opposing
viewpoints for the very goal of
challenging and refining my beliefs
because it’s become the case that on
almost unless I leave a conversation by
learning with learning something new I
almost don’t feel satisfied but when I
do learn something new it’s an amazing
feeling and I feel like I’m personally
growing while at the same time I find
myself utterly bored listening and
talking with viewpoints that I already
agree with because it’s as if there’s
little new information left to squeeze
out of it and the truth is when we
approach conversation with others even
those we since severely disagree with
people actually pick up on our eagerness
to learn in our tone and our body
language and actually are often more
receptive to learning themselves I mean
who would you rather listen to someone
who extends an ear in conversation or
someone who points a figure finger and
accusation you’re wrong right oh yeah
okay oh I guess I’m right I guess I’m
wrong but why is this well in reality
it’s because to learn is to be humble
accepting that there is something that
we do not know and that there is more to
potentially learn and if we remember
cognitive dissonance if we remember it
is the discrepancy between what we think
we know and what someone else is saying
that leads to that cognitive dissonance
that shuts down our ability to learn but
when we seek to learn we actually open
up our minds to gaining in more
information and those barriers melt away
and what’s absolutely amazing through
this
through through seeking to learn is what
we can discover is that so many of the
controversies that we hear about today
in the media and in in our daily lives
turn out to be the result of
miscommunication misinterpretation and
misunderstanding I mean so many times if
I heard on the radio people talking
about the viewpoints and beliefs of a
specific group of people from an
entirely different and inaccurate frame
of reference than the people that
they’re actually discussing oh so many
thoughts come to head we can think of
abortion why people are for or against
it or even reasons why people voted for
Donald Trump all suffer from grave Mis
framings of what people actually believe
and value and often rely heavily on
preconceived narratives that could
really be resolved with sincere
dialectic conversation issues of who
ears on climate change
suffer from the issue of semantics how
we define and use words so many times
and including myself have I been in
conversations in which we will talk
right past each other because we failed
to define climate change ourselves and
we each to use different versions
doesn’t really help in that way it does
it and with many of our contemporary
black white race relation issues in
America today like that of Ferguson
seemed to display great and strong
divides in how we individually and
culturally interpret the same event in
front of us and when these issues are
sensitive and perceptual biases can
arise passions can grow and creates a
need for a dialectic like never before
but what this actually does is it makes
me think that maybe I have been using
cognitive dissonance in that first
example wrong in the first place
maybe I
should have embraced it instead of
instead of ran away from him so what did
what did we see you said you saw a tee
right
you saw a tee and then you said you saw
an e I believe and then I said I thought
I saw a D there it is
there’s that D all right what is this
it’s it’s T E and D oh yeah you see what
I did there
right mmm now this object I shouldn’t
put it down right here is known as an
ambigram and an ambigram in this case is
a construction that from each new
perspective provides more information on
what this actually is each side has its
own meaning and until we put all of
these perspectives together do we
actually discover what it is we’re
really looking at and this is important
because each and every one of us in this
room and people listening have our own
unique vantage points in this world and
there’s little more uncharted to a mind
than what is in other minds to all
potential fountains of information to
fuel our growth and our dialectic lives
and today there is no greater resource
potentially throughout history than what
we have within our interconnected world
you [Music]