Hacking Comprehension: Overcoming Limitations to Better Understand the World

Sunday, July 24, 2022: 3:00 pm (DAC 206): We see the world differently - literally. Our brains hallucinate reality before our "eyes" and certain cognitive biases can coerce certain realities to be conjured over others. No wonder we can't agree on wha...

Sunday, July 24, 2022: 3:00 pm (DAC 206): We see the world differently - literally. Our brains hallucinate reality before our "eyes" and certain cognitive biases can coerce certain realities to be conjured over others. No wonder we can't agree on what color the dress or these crocs are. But it gets more complex: humans are subjected to hundreds of cognitive biases and logical reasoning errors, plus we have decades of built-up priors, limitations on time and attention, and we're not all operating from the same sets of information. So what would we have to do in order to, at the very least, "get on the same page" on high-impact political and social issues? How can we hack comprehension to enable more free, informed, and less biased decisions? The Society Library is a nonprofit organization working to map all points of view on complex social and political issues, but once they have all this information, the trick becomes: how do you get people to understand it all? This talk is about the design challenges and ethical conundrums of compressing complex knowledge and making it comprehendible across various dimensions.

Jamie Joyce