[yotamarker]

what are your thoughts about the resistance tolerance of learnability ?

for example when someone goes from religious to atheist
or bluepilled to redpilled
or decides to change his field of study or profession
or even decides to expat

basically his resolve regarding how he gets his goals change. but what I am wondering is
regarding this inner conflict, is there some variable slowing the resolve or maybe it would be better
for such decisions to be more instant anyways?

[infurl]

This is actually a really good question. I think the most important thing that you would have to model would be cognitive bias which affects the way an individual classifies new evidence. Evidence which contradicts existing beliefs is more likely to be rejected than evidence which reinforces them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

I expect that you would find some good examples of how to model this in Pei Wang's Non Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS) which is an attempt to create a general purpose artificial intelligence system. The software is available for your own use as OpenNARS.

https://github.com/opennars

[MikeB]

I think calling them "beliefs" is wrong... The strength of each data point can vary depending on how many other things it's connected to.

You can have one thousand very faint data points. If they are all connected, you have strong convictions in them. If just one of them sits on it's own, it can blow away in the wind.

You can't change someone's entire mind and thoughts over for something else it has to fit in with what they already know to be true, even if they have bad data. You should try to find some area that isn't bad data and expand data points around that.. then eventually there will be a conflict in data. The data that succeeds has more provable data points around it that links in with the rest of their own data.

"Because I say it's correct" is the worst approach.

[ruebot]

for example when someone goes from religious to atheist
or bluepilled to redpilled
or decides to change his field of study or profession
or even decides to expat

Each of those were the consequence as a result of a decision made based on the acquirement of new data through observation or experience.

Behaviorism tells us that Operant Conditioning is the underlying mechanism at work. It's just that you're seeing Behaviorism in reverse sequence here.

The normal flow is Stimulus - Response - Consequence. Here you have the only the Consequence listed as a Goal and are wondering about the Response made to a Stimulus that led to the Consequence listed.

Actions that are followed by reinforcement will be strengthened and more likely to occur again in the future.
Actions that result in punishment or undesirable consequences will be weakened and less likely to occur again in the future.

In each of these an undesirable stimulus of some sort generated a negative response that eventually led to the consequence of change. From Religious to Atheist, red pill to blue pill, laborer to lawyer, renounce citizenship in France and become a Russian citizen.

Achieving a Goal is different in that the predetermined Goal is broken down into increasingly harder objectives that when all met achieve the Goal.

[MagnusWootton]

About left vs right politics,   you cannot steer a leftist or a rightist, unless through torture and pain. 

But a robot, because they cant feel pain, will never steer from their motivation.   

[yotamarker]

This is actually a really good question. I think the most important thing that you would have to model would be cognitive bias which affects the way an individual classifies new evidence. Evidence which contradicts existing beliefs is more likely to be rejected than evidence which reinforces them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

I expect that you would find some good examples of how to model this in Pei Wang's Non Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS) which is an attempt to create a general purpose artificial intelligence system. The software is available for your own use as OpenNARS.

https://github.com/opennars

this bias is mental gymnastics in other words. but it may be efficient in some cases

[yotamarker]

https://www.yotamarker.com/t370-chiis-learnability-experiment#1035

[DaltonG]

"what are your thoughts about the resistance tolerance of learnability ?"

From your examples, I assume you are refering to life changing transitions, be they beliefs or goals. In my case (having lived a long time), in hindsight, I discovered that major transitions appeared to have occured every 13 years or so. The changes were always impulsive and no resistance was noticeable. In hindsight, I often find myself looking upon those transitions as having been foolish despite the justifications I made at the time when the transitions occurred. As the result, I have found that Truth is a variable, a moving target, and relative to the context of the moment. It all happens unconsciously and most likely is the result of an accumulation of changes.

The "Grass is greener on the other side of the fence" is an ever present and common phenomenon experienced by most people. It provides a continuous source of temptation that under contented conditions is all but ignored. When sufficient changes have occurred, be they accumulative or a singularly extreme, it disrupts the psychological homeostatic state, biasing and activating frustration which becomes the emotional driving force behind change. It's kind of like being on a diet and getting hungry. You can resist it for a while, but sooner or later, you'll yeild to the temptation to satisfy and appease the anxiety that accompanies frustration. Hunger never stops banging on the door of consciousness and demanding attention. Resistance is logical, hunger is physiological - guess which wins in the end.

Now, how learnability or learning fits into this with respect to resistance, it doesn't. Not in the biological sense anyway. We see this in our attempts to rehabilitate addicts all the time. Knowing the inevitable outcome associated with addiction doesn't stop any of them from engaging in the activity or relapsing after the fact. Neither education nor personal experience makes an difference. The underlying predispositions embedded in the genome are dominant, and recovery awaits genetic modifications that accompany aging where genes turn on and off.

[WriterOfMinds]

From your examples, I assume you are refering to life changing transitions, be they beliefs or goals. In my case (having lived a long time), in hindsight, I discovered that major transitions appeared to have occured every 13 years or so. The changes were always impulsive and no resistance was noticeable. In hindsight, I often find myself looking upon those transitions as having been foolish despite the justifications I made at the time when the transitions occurred. As the result, I have found that Truth is a variable, a moving target, and relative to the context of the moment. It all happens unconsciously and most likely is the result of an accumulation of changes.

Curious. When I look back on my major shifts in opinion, all the ones I can think of were conscious decisions or revelations. I knew why I was changing my mind, and can even trace many of the influences that provided me with reasons to change my mind. And I have yet to regret any of the changes.

In the latter part of your post, you speak as if changing one's opinion or lifestyle is always a bad thing, and resistance is always the logical course. Perhaps this makes sense given your personal experience, but I hardly think it to be a universal. If anything, I suspect most people are over-reluctant to change, and cling to existing opinions or behaviors illogically.

[ruebot]

Now, how learnability or learning fits into this with respect to resistance, it doesn't. Not in the biological sense anyway. We see this in our attempts to rehabilitate addicts all the time. Knowing the inevitable outcome associated with addiction doesn't stop any of them from engaging in the activity or relapsing after the fact. Neither education nor personal experience makes an difference. The underlying predispositions embedded in the genome are dominant, and recovery awaits genetic modifications that accompany aging where genes turn on and off.

Are you a Substance Abuse Councilor? Because I'm wondering where you came up with that idea.

In the latter part of your post, you speak as if changing one's opinion or lifestyle is always a bad thing, and resistance is always the logical course. Perhaps this makes sense given your personal experience, but I hardly think it to be a universal. If anything, I suspect most people are over-reluctant to change, and cling to existing opinions or behaviors illogically.

Let's go with this.

April 2021 made it 25 years since I quit drinking and that was a good thing. It wasn't on impulse or a hasty decision made on my part. There were plenty of painful life lessons in Behavior Modification coming my way before I came to that point.

I started when I was about 19 and drank for 20 years or so. There were a lot of good times in the beginning. As time went on the scales began to tip the other way until 25 years ago stopping drinking looked better than continuing to drink so I quit.

I didn't need any genetic modifications or 12 Step Programming mind manipulation either. (I'm a Programmer and there is a reason it's called a 12 Step Program.)

I learned through personal experience, made the decision to change my behavior based on those experiences. I haven't drank since April 1996 and only wish I had quit sooner.

[MagnusWootton]

In the latter part of your post, you speak as if changing one's opinion or lifestyle is always a bad thing, and resistance is always the logical course. Perhaps this makes sense given your personal experience, but I hardly think it to be a universal. If anything, I suspect most people are over-reluctant to change, and cling to existing opinions or behaviors illogically.

Its actually logical given the experience of the person.    But I guess its illogical if its not absolute I guess,   but even a super computer infinite intelligence will make the same mistake if it hasnt the input yet, or the chance to think about the subject before,  so I think.

[DaltonG]

"Are you a substance abuse councilor?"

No, but I did work for an organization that provided housing and rehabilitation for drug addicts and alcoholics for 10 years. As the result, I was exposed to the programs and efforts made with regard to the educational efforts to help clients.

"In the latter part of your post, you speak as if changing one's opinion or lifestyle is always a bad thing, and resistance is always the logical course. Perhaps this makes sense given your personal experience, but I hardly think it to be a universal. If anything, I suspect most people are over-reluctant to change, and cling to existing opinions or behaviors illogically."

You may be right, "I hardly think it to be a universal," with respect to being a good or bad thing. I confess to my tendency to be nostalgic (old people tend to reflect on the past - a lot). We all have our own internal yard sticks by which we measure and interpret, and its length varies with respect to our experiences. The principle of "Cultural Lag" would seem to support your position.

What we do have in common are unconscious forces that predispose us to respond at times in unexpected ways. Contexts can combine to set the stage and provoke cognitive states that negate resistance by emotionally biasing behavioral pathways with affect intensities that overwhelm innate levels of inhibition. The foundation of resistance to change would be some level of fear which in the face of change could be offset by a higher level of anxiety or frustration. Emotions compete for dominance with the winner determining the ultimate response.

Evidence to support this position includes the behavior of crowds in riots. Ordinary people, God fearing, normally law abiding, empathetic, and at times, generous. Yet, contexts and social contagion can combine to provoke behaviors completely out of the norm per individual.

[ruebot]

What we do have in common are unconscious forces that predispose us to respond at times in unexpected ways. Contexts can combine to set the stage and provoke cognitive states that negate resistance by emotionally biasing behavioral pathways with affect intensities that overwhelm innate levels of inhibition. The foundation of resistance to change would be some level of fear which in the face of change could be offset by a higher level of anxiety or frustration. Emotions compete for dominance with the winner determining the ultimate response.

Evidence to support this position includes the behavior of crowds in riots. Ordinary people, God fearing, normally law abiding, empathetic, and at times, generous. Yet, contexts and social contagion can combine to provoke behaviors completely out of the norm per individual.

Peer pressure and fear of standing out in the crowd as someone different causes them to act out of character and go with the flow.

I see everything as behavior related.

The foundation of resistance to change could instead be some level of comfort which in the face of change could be offset by a higher level of anxiety or frustration. Emotions such as nostalgia and a sense of loss are experienced and they pass with evaluation of the facts involved and Logic determining the ultimate response of change.

[HS]

When people have different takes on a subject, I often think they are referring to separate things, but using synonymous or identical words out of necessity. So it's often definitions, and not actual lived experience, causing disagreement.

An emotion can be referred to as a type of opinion. It is not the result of direct conscious choice. It arises by itself without conscious involvement, though it can be modulated indirectly, through a series of consciously derived actions meant to produce consequences, which will in turn influence this emotional opinion.

However if the conscious effort is stopped, the emotional opinions may revert to baseline. Consciously created opinions are also real, and an entirely different thing, though they can be under the same terminology. I think both naturally arising emotions and consciously derived opinions should get their due.

Checking in with both logic, and emotions, in the process of making big decisions, probably helps to avoid doing a disservice to either part of the mind. This way, irrevocably prioritizing an irrational or unfulfilling variable, over the entire well-being, seems less likely.