{"id":32856,"date":"2018-11-24T12:56:53","date_gmt":"2018-11-24T11:56:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/?p=32856"},"modified":"2020-09-26T21:55:24","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T19:55:24","slug":"the-russel-conjugation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/the-russel-conjugation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Russel Conjugation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"user-select: auto;\">Eric R. Weinstein on The Russel Conjugation:<\/p>\n<p style=\"user-select: auto;\">\u201c<strong style=\"user-select: auto;\">The basic principle of Russell Conjugation is that the human mind is constantly looking ahead well beyond what is true or false to ask \u201cWhat is the social consequence of accepting the facts as they are?\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0 While this line of thinking is obviously self-serving, we are descended from social creatures who could not safely form opinions around pure facts so much as around how those facts are presented to us by those we ape, trust or fear. Thus, as listeners and readers our minds generally mirror the emotional state of the source, while in our roles as authoritative narrators presenting the facts, we maintain an arsenal of language to subliminally instruct our listeners and readers on how we expect them to color their perceptions. Russell discussed this by putting three such presentations of a common underlying fact in the form in which a verb is typically conjugated:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"user-select: auto;\">\n<li style=\"user-select: auto;\">I am firm. [Positive empathy]<\/li>\n<li style=\"user-select: auto;\">You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy]<\/li>\n<li style=\"user-select: auto;\">He\/She\/It is pigheaded.\u00a0 [Very negative empathy]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"user-select: auto;\">In all three cases, Russell was describing people who did not readily change their minds. Yet by putting these descriptions so close together and without further factual information to separate the individual cases, we were forced to confront the fact that most of us feel positively towards the steadfast narrator and negatively towards the pigheaded fool, all without any basis in fact.<\/p>\n<p style=\"user-select: auto;\">\u2026If we accept that Russell Conjugation keeps us from even seeing that we do not hold consistent opinions on facts, we see a possible new answer to a puzzle that dates from the birth of the web: <strong style=\"user-select: auto;\">\u201cIf the internet democratized information, why has its social impact been so much slower than many of us expected?\u201d<\/strong> Assuming that our actions are based not on what we know but upon how we feel about what we know, we see that traditional media has all but lost control of gate-keeping our information, but not yet how it is emotively shaded. In fact, it is relatively simple to write a computer program to crawl factually accurate news stories against a look-up table of Russell conjugates to see the exact bias of every supposedly objective story.<\/p>\n<p style=\"user-select: auto;\">Thus the answer to the puzzle of our inaction it seems may be that <strong style=\"user-select: auto;\">we built an information superhighway for all, but neglected to build an empathy network alongside it to democratize what we feel.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"user-select: auto;\"><a style=\"user-select: auto;\" title=\"https:\/\/www.edge.org\/response-detail\/27181\" href=\"https:\/\/www.edge.org\/response-detail\/27181\">https:\/\/www.edge.org\/response-detail\/27181<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eric R. Weinstein on The Russel Conjugation: \u201cThe basic principle of Russell Conjugation is that the human mind is constantly looking ahead well beyond what is true or false to ask \u201cWhat is the social consequence of accepting the facts as they are?\u201d\u00a0 While this line of thinking is obviously self-serving, we are descended from &#8230; <a title=\"The Russel Conjugation\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/the-russel-conjugation\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about The Russel Conjugation\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,33,34,141,143,7,290,14,42,17,19],"tags":[300,296],"class_list":["post-32856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-computing","category-contemporary-culture","category-decision-making","category-economics","category-language-writing","category-mental-models","category-philosophy","category-psychology","category-science","category-sociology-social-sciences","tag-processed","tag-published"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prY0k-8xW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":16848,"url":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/on-bullshit\/","url_meta":{"origin":32856,"position":0},"title":"On Bullshit","author":"Limbic","date":"November 21, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"[Update: After I posted this I came across a great study -\u00a0 \"On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit\" [PDF] - freshly published in November 2015. Well worth a read.\u00a0I also recently came across this old but great post from Scott Berkun \"How to Detect Bullshit\"] Because I see\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Anthropology&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Anthropology","link":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/category\/science\/anthropology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"on-bullshit2","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/on-bullshit2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6454,"url":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/mesofacts-and-the-lingering-effects-of-propaganda\/","url_meta":{"origin":32856,"position":1},"title":"Mesofacts and the lingering effects of propaganda","author":"Limbic","date":"June 7, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Stop, smell the rose\", Dorcol, Belgrade, 2010 Update November 2016: Two new pieces to add to this article: Agnotology. It\u2019s a term worth knowing, since it is going global. The word was coined by Stanford University professor Robert N. Proctor, who described it as \u201cculturally constructed ignorance, created by special\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Belgrade &amp; Serbia&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Belgrade &amp; Serbia","link":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/category\/miscellaneous\/belgrade\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4040\/4672003951_6f2f080a9c.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":16724,"url":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/obscurantism\/","url_meta":{"origin":32856,"position":2},"title":"Obscurantism","author":"Limbic","date":"June 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Obscurantism (\/\u0275b\u02c8skj\u028a\u0259r\u0259nt\u026asm\/) is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two common historical and intellectual denotations to Obscurantism: (1) deliberately restricting knowledge\u2014opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the public; and, (2) deliberate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophy &amp; Critical Thinking&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy &amp; Critical Thinking","link":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/category\/humanities\/philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5535,"url":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/agnotology-study-of-disinformation-propagation\/","url_meta":{"origin":32856,"position":3},"title":"Agnotology: study of disinformation propagation","author":"Limbic","date":"February 9, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a cracker! Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge Is global warming caused by humans? Is Barack Obama a Christian? Is evolution a well-supported theory? You might think these questions have been incontrovertibly answered in the affirmative, proven by settled facts. But for a lot\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Contemporary Culture&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Contemporary Culture","link":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/category\/humanities\/contemporary-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":17587,"url":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/disclaimers-against-reality-charles-bukowski-on-censorship\/","url_meta":{"origin":32856,"position":4},"title":"Disclaimers Against Reality: Charles Bukowski on Censorship","author":"Limbic","date":"March 28, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"A wonderful letter on censorship from Charles Bukowski that I found on the Farnam Street Blog.\u00a0Bukowski had one of his books removed from a library and this was his response to the person warning him about it. The emphases are mine. It was written in 1985: The thing that I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Anthropology&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Anthropology","link":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/category\/science\/anthropology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":17104,"url":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/the-natives-are-restless\/","url_meta":{"origin":32856,"position":5},"title":"The natives are restless","author":"Limbic","date":"March 5, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"As the political centre distorts under popular pressure from \u00a0left and right-wing populists, it is worth considering at least one factor in this story: The lies and guarded, PC speech of the elites (mostly \"Bullshit\" formal variety) makes political extremists look authoritative for stating obvious facts that mainstream political narratives\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Miscellaneous&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Miscellaneous","link":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/category\/miscellaneous\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.limbicnutrition.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}