Cognitive Dissonance & Confirmation Bias - Techlore Talks 3

hello everyone and welcome to techlore talks 3 I am Henry and this is Jonah hello and um first off we want to say thank you for leaving feedback I was unsure last week about how structured we wanted things and almost everyone universally preferred the lack of structure and that second tecular talks actually performed better than the first one so we're going to continue on kind of just the more free flow whatever happens happens thing but this one actually doesn't actually have a little bit more structure because we had to get some definitions straight before this

discussion so with that all said we're going to go ahead and kick things off with some definitions before we get into the discussion about cognitive dissonance confirmation bias how this impacts privacy and security dramatically and how we see this on our ends a ton and also how this impacts the world and also what you can do about it I want this to be somewhat actionable by the end of it so that we can actually have takeaways for people you can take one of them and I I can take the latter actually why don't you do

the first one cognitive dissonance yeah all right so cognitive dissonance is the state of having inconsistent thoughts beliefs or attitudes especially as relating to behavioral con decisions and Attitude Change there's many types of cognitive dissonance but today we're going to be focusing on one pertaining to the inability to cope with new information that goes against your preconceived notions I have a quote here sometimes learning new information can lead to feelings of cognitive dissonance for example if you engage in a behavior that you later learn is harmful it can lead to feelings of discomfort people sometimes

deal with this by finding ways to justify their behaviors or finding ways to discredit or ignore new information so we see this type of thing in politics where somebody who's held a certain belief their entire life is given objective factual information that shatters the fabric of their identity so they'll resort to mind trickery to justify in a way to still make sense of everything and ignore the actual facts um we're all victims to this in one way or another in fact a great sign that you're susceptible people to this kind of thing is to think

that you aren't it um required what am I saying yeah I think the notes got cut off there pretty much it just it requires like active effort on your part to make sure like you're reflecting on yourself and making sure you're setting this aside as much as possible right um and I think it's worth mentioning this is something we see constantly in the Privacy Community absolutely yeah and so like a really good example of this is someone I am going to tie this already to our most recent video a lot of people um a lot

of people don't like how we mention Brave in that video because it's based on chromium but then you ask the question well what's wrong with chromium and I think there are valid arguments here but some people were saying well there's V3 manifest coming soon but Braves already said that they're going to support V2 indefinitely so that's not any longer a problem people say it still feeds into the chromium Monopoly and I would still ask and um and I do think there's very valid reasons for that by the way I'm not justifying that that's not a

problem because that is a problem but I think people are completely missing the point of Brave is still ultimately better than Chrome from a privacy perspective and that is ultimately the whole point of the video and so people now have are put in this position where they have to justify why you can't use brave for really silly reasons um when really at the end of the day it's still a very good alternative to Chrome in fact I would to this day argue it is the best alternative to Chrome um I don't think anything is going

to match the usability of chrome and offer the pricing security perks that brave gives people it's definitely like people um what is that phrase now I can't think of the saying how like they're they're ignoring ignoring the good Solutions in favor of the perfect one so I can't I think of uh it's the um we called it the Nirvana fallacy in in the blogs where yes it's the search of like this perfect solution that doesn't actually exist and it's the same people who uh get upset when like proton male hands over a single IP address

they're forced to log an IP address on a user and then it's like okay then what do you recommend and it's like two to note has done the same thing in Germany uh every other email provider will have to do the same thing or else they're going to shut down so you're going to self-host your own email and have to like maintain that is that what you're going to recommend to people and even that has its own issues that might open people up more than something like protonmail would so absolutely yeah it's it's just a

very bizarre position where there's no winning and because there's not actually an honest discussion happening about like the objective information and we can't really have a real discussion about like the actual purpose and the actual problem I hope does that do you think those are good enough examples for people to like kind of understand where this takes place in privacy yeah I think I think people uh I think if people are involved in like the discussions that go on in like the communities and not just uh like reading the information for themselves I think they'll

recognize a lot of that uh with the people that they talk to if that makes sense yeah and it's I also want to mention here that like I'm not perfect we're not perfect we do this too everyone does this it's just a matter of what extent you do it and how aware you are of it um and we'll talk about at the end I think things that we can try and do as a community to be better about this um do you have anything to add about cognitive dissonance before I go into confirmation bias uh

I don't think so so confirmation by so we're going to go through the definition kind of similar similar thing here so confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories there's three types uh at least based on this article and we'll link these down below too um there's three types there's bias attention this is when we selectively focus on information that confirms our views while ignoring or discounting the ones that don't there's biased interpretation this is when we consciously interpret information in a way that confirms our own

beliefs and it's and there's also biased in memory this is when we selectively remember information that supports our views while forgetting or discounting information that doesn't that one hits a little close to home because like I think back at memories I used to have as a kid and maybe just a year ago it's like wow that was such a good experience and now I'm like wait that wasn't that good and I was pretty much almost like gaslighting myself in a way um and I think that is a form of confirmation bias because you want to

tell yourself that it was a good memory and you ignore all the bad that went along with it that's just a personal note there but um I really liked the these examples are from the link uh they may or may not represent my actual thoughts on these topics but I just thought it was funny and they're actually perfect examples which is why I put them in here it is a political example but it makes it very obvious what this is and how it looks like person a let's say Sally is in support of gun control

she seeks out new stories and opinion pieces that reaffirmed a need for limitations on gun ownership when she hears stories about shootings in the media she interprets them in a way that supports her existing beliefs you also have Henry on the other hand who is adamantly opposed to gun control and he seeks out new sources that are aligned with his position when he comes across the same news stories about shootings he interprets them in a way that supports his current point of view so both of these people are reading the same stories and interpreting them

in entirely different ways and we see this all the time in our content because even in that video we just put out people who love Brave ask why why did like how come you even mention bad things about Brave or how come you even mentioned Firefox at all and people who don't like brave are saying that we chill brave but it's the same video and we see this in surveillance report constantly when we cover news stories politically um we try as hard as we can to be neutral on political stories and we try to keep

it as objective as possible and when we deviate from that we like to say personal notes but even though we cover news stories we still generally get two commenters like the two groups on those hot takes I can't believe that you validated the conservatives in any way by trying to understand their point of view and then you have the conservatives who'll come in and be like I can't believe you're spreading this liberal propaganda on this and it's funny because it's the same story and these two people interpreted it entirely different ways and this is confirmation

bias which I actually see more often I think and it's much more easier to spot than cognitive dissonance in the Privacy community what's your experience like with this well it's funny that you brought up that uh biased memory uh because because that's something that definitely I think I haven't thought about a lot before but now that you mention it it's something that is probably affects me quite a bit it's one of the reasons that I really like our communities um because uh sometimes if I think about like different things um I'll remember like uh the

parts that I like about them and then somebody else will chime in with oh well what about these things that I can think like oh yeah it does there are definitely some downsides that I that I don't remember because they don't maybe they don't apply to me or maybe uh there's stuff that I'm willing to put up with but they're still definitely relevant uh to other people you know I don't know where I was going well I think it's still good info and like even the other two though like we again confirmation bias same thing

we can all do this everyone's susceptible to it in fact the best thing to do is to admit to yourself that you are susceptible to this so that we can actively try to like spot it um and same thing with biased attention it's so easy to do this you know like even on my end if I see someone put out a video about a project that I don't like for my own reasons I I have a negative reaction to it right away and I think that's most people's reaction to it because it's something they don't

like it's something that they've told themselves is not good and when someone says something that reaffirms their beliefs it feels great because it's like oh I have a friend they believe the same thing I do um and so I think we all experience it to some degree it's just a matter of like acknowledging it um I really want to tie this more to the Privacy Community though and um I guess some problems that can result from it right away like what because people might ask like okay so what so what would you respond with like

what's the problem with people I guess having this kind of attitude uh specifically in the privacy and security community and um how we we as a collective handle ourselves did you think about how this uh how this topic is kind of directly addressing the people who are going to watch this video specifically yeah and you know that's part of Us opening ourselves up for these talks is people are going to watch this video and be upset bye um let me think of a yeah Tom you can take your time but oh my God but my

memory is just terrible today yeah you're totally right though like this this topic is going to get a lot of hate because people are probably going to interpret this discussion as some kind of like validation for whatever they think is bad um but I think the biggest thing is um it kind of ties into the cognitive dissonance into things where people have like um have like a preconceived threat model of course in in for their own lives like the things that matter to them and they kind of assume going into conversations that the things that

they think about all the time that are very concerning to them because they have some personal impact on their life must be applicable to everyone that they're talking to because because it's so prevalent in their minds that a lot of people don't stop to consider that people are looking for other solutions that aren't always exactly the same ones that the as what people that aren't always the same as what people uh choose for themselves right yeah oh God that's such a good direction to take this I'm really glad you brought that up um we see

this in our communities it's in all communities where someone asks a question this is the best example I could give someone asks a question how do I make Windows more secure or more private that's it that's the question top response use Linux and it's like no like like yes there's there's we're not saying there's no legitimacy or validity to that answer because there is some legitimacy to that but the point is the person who's asking the question is clearly not wanting to move to Linux they specifically asked and clearly they're looking for how to make

Windows more private and that person is completely neglecting the needs of that other individual when they say something like that um another good example here is people like there's so many different priorities you can have like you can balance privacy in your threat model you can balance security you can balance anonymity you can balance just transparency and open source and those are all going to result in different configurations for different people I mean we see this all the time we see people recommend core boot because it's more secure than XYZ and then the other people

on the other side of the room are screaming you can't use core boot because it's proprietary and so there's this whole like yes you have your own beliefs but you need to think about the person in the center of the room and what their needs are and I think this is why when I make videos about myself they're received so poorly by the community when I make a video about why I have a very special unique use case for needing to use a stock Android device people are like oh my God he's not recommending this

anymore to me and it's like no I said in the video like this video is literally about me and I still recommend ROMs to a majority of people that's almost a direct quote in the video I think but somehow that video was taken as Henry doesn't recommend ROMs anymore even though their website and everything else still shows that they support ROMs yeah yeah that's that's such a weird thing there's like there's definitely a subset of people who want who want everybody to be doing the exact same thing like if like if somebody's not doing the

same thing they're doing they're they feel invalidated which is a weird approach to things I think yeah and we get accused of this too by the way and like we're not perfect but I like to think in most of our content we're like for users who need XYZ this is a great option like I like to think most videos are done relatively neutrally and not overwhelming you should never use XYZ you should always use XYZ but and I definitely know we have not had a perfect track record with that by any stretch of the imagination

but when I compare ourselves to other pricing security channels um which it's fine like if people want to have more extreme takes like that's their style but like when I compare ourselves to other pricing security channels they don't do that whatsoever it's just the people who complain to us agree more with those extreme takes of those channels so what we do seems almost more extreme to them even though what we might do is more balanced does that make sense it it doesn't make sense definitely um I feel like this is gonna attract all the wrong

comments as I'm thinking about this I cannot not tie this in my head to like the political space going on right now those channels that you mentioned um uh it's it's very similar to like what we've seen in politics where like there's um in extremist kind of figurehead on one side of things who who people like want to follow because he's very confident in his opinions and very um aggressive about it and people there's there's a certain group of people that are attracted to that kind of thing regarding the whole world right now this is

kind of a global problem and it's a really hard one to deal with because and I think a lot of this ties back to the internet and just the way the internet works especially as things go more and more digital on the internet there's a huge attention economy right and we're part of this attention economy you like on Tech absolutely yeah um where we are forced to we're literally forced in a position where we either have to be extreme to some extent to get clicks or we don't and it isn't that black and white there

is lots of room for middle ground but our toughest job back here and like I spend hours on each of our thumbnails and titles that is not an exaggeration I spend hours on each of them because it is so hard to strike the right balance of like legit bait versus click bait versus being like heavily misleading because there's so many videos that like I know we could have got five times the performance on if we just worded the title a little bit differently but it would have set the wrong expectation and I think the proton

example is perfect that was a really hard video because when the protonmail incident happened this was on a surveillance support upload there was an option of wording it in a way that it was like protonmail is no longer safe and I think that would have been hands down the best way we could have got performance in that video and that actually applies to a lot of our content but I think the way we worded it let me actually find the video because I remember this being a very hard thing for me protonmail surveillance report here

so here's the title of the video protonmail logged IP addresses for the government can you still trust them that's a very different title and a very different branding than just without a question protonmail logged IP addresses for the government because the first one automatically assumes oh my God they screwed up fear it's fear inducing it's we need to click this we need to see what's going on but adding the question is more calming it's more balanced it's more like let's talk about this because it's not necessarily inherently a bad thing for everybody and all threat

models um and so it's a very hard thing on my end but going back to my original point the attention economy is a very real thing on the internet and I think since things have moved more digitally it forces people to have to lean more into these extreme takes where we have to remove Nuance we have to remove all that great stuff that leads to amazing discussions because the person yelling the loudest on the internet gets the most clicks and attention and that's starting to mean more in this world foreign yeah absolutely I mean I

don't I don't know if it's like uh it's it I mean it's definitely not like a you have to be like this to be successful online exactly but being being extreme like that is that's the fast track to being successful online you can kind of you can kind of build a community around like trust and transparency and trying to have a balanced discussion but not as many people are immediately gravitating towards that that's the kind of community that you build up over time whereas um if you're very aggressive about something if you're very clickbaity about

something that's how you get droves of people and all at once and it's not the best solution to follow I don't think but it's definitely an appealing path for a lot of content creators because because you can build that community so quickly um yeah and it works like it just works yeah it just works mate why do you always have to show Apple on these podcasts um I don't know man I just think differently than everyone else oh yeah with your airpods in you can't even hear us right now watch out here it's got airpods

in um well I I think everything so far is already a great discussion to have because uh I really want to tie this into privacy and security but I know if we go that route it's it's not going to go well um because this happens a lot on the pricing security front but I think just keeping those global is probably best to save our asses on this one um but the you're giving me a look of like are you sure you don't want to go into it um are both sides of this bed this is

like the hot Take podcast I don't know why this is that's that's actually what really irritates me is I don't think any of this should be a hot take I think this should be normalcy I don't think that I'm crazy for wanting to have a balanced nuanced discussion about topics I think it's ridiculous that when I try to have nuanced discussions and tell people other perspectives on things they interpret that as an attack on their own identity I don't think I'm the problem here um and I and trust me I am sometimes that problem sometimes

people say things to me and I lash out and I'm like I reflect on it I'm like oh God like I was the problem there because I felt like my identity was insulted in some way but like I feel like I had the ability to see that and change that next time sure I just I think the takeaway is if if there's anything like that's so Central to your identity that if somebody attacks it at all you feel personally offended I think that's something that you should probably self-reflect that any like it's so deeply held

beliefs that like if somebody presented me with and maybe and maybe I do this could be a cognitive thinking of its own I I but I haven't encountered this yet well like if somebody argued with me I would be so personally offended I wouldn't be able to even like talk to them anymore well let's test it out all right you ready oh boy here we go yeah apple is the worst company I've ever seen in my life you know what Henry oh man um now I mean that's a very valid argument the thing is Henry

I don't like Apple I don't like any technology that's my secret so you're just delusional yeah okay um no I think it's a good point and there's nothing wrong with having identities so this is gonna go a little personal two people I really love and this is a podcast that I it's the only podcast I listen to actually it's the growth equation by Brad stahlberg and Steve Magnus fantastic work they talk about so many of these Concepts we're talking about today they talk about the attention economy they talk about um just general personal success and

personal growth they talk about things like cognitive dissonance and all these great Concepts and then what's the last thing um that we you just identity identity they also talk about identity and how important it is it's important to be ident like to identify with multiple things and I think it's the problem isn't identifying with something there's nothing wrong with identifying Brave as your favorite browser or ungooled chromium is your favorite route there's nothing wrong with that it's just you should have identities and other things so that when people say they don't like your browser you

have better things to do than get upset about it yeah you know it can't be that can't be your only identity like do you have a favorite messenger that you can get upset about like that's already two things can we make a third thing how about we get to an identity that's not tied to privacy tools like right and I and this also is something that we need to keep in mind too because we also like I think I have a little bit of confirmation bias here myself because I forget that these people who are

active on the internet complaining all the time are not the norm I see these people and they seem like loud voices to me and so the way I interpret that is oh everyone's like this and that's not true um the truth is most people who aren't like that and frankly I'm going to say it have lives and go outside and do other things than be on the internet all day aren't leaving comments on YouTube about like the most nitpicky crap that just does not matter um and so that's something I need to remind myself a

lot about because it's really hard especially when my identity is directly attached to something like teclar and like I put in like hours of work into something and people are just like are awful um I mean that's why a big reason why Susie was brought on board you know yeah that's that's hard to deal with for sure yeah I see why you don't have uh your own channel yeah I'm not about to start uh youtubing anytime soon Henry I'll leave that to you if you did start a YouTube channel what would it be about that's

a question I like to ask people actually not privacy that's right yeah I don't blame you it's like it's awful I mean like I love the Privacy community but man the vocal people are just too much what would it be Apple I would try to I ca I I don't think I could I don't think I would enjoy um making any kind of content about technology I think I'd have to try something completely different I don't know what it would be though it's probably why I don't have a channel yeah like what would it be

come on you you you're being held at gunpoint and you have to make a YouTube channel tomorrow start a YouTube channel that is that is the ransom um what do you started on what do I start it on because I almost don't believe you I feel like you would start it on privacy or security or something Tech related you don't believe that well maybe that's why maybe I have no other ideas that's why I'm not going to start a chat line yeah maybe you're like those are the things I would make a channel on but

I know I don't want to especially seeing behind the scenes like the amount of stress we have to deal with doing it so maybe maybe that's it could be I don't know I don't know I don't have that YouTube mindset Henry yeah you don't have that Creator growth mindset back here I I really don't it's funny you actually send over some of like the best title ideas though like you're our title man sometimes you come in clutch I think fans of anything will get upset about anything yeah that's that's the overall message of this show

today maybe this is actually segwaying segwaying into the end of this which is like actionable advice for people here and um this is a big problem with YouTubers and I know I'm speed I know I can speak for a lot of YouTubers because I talk with a lot of them behind the scenes a lot of them have their identities wrapped in their YouTube channels um because their face is there a lot of them their names are their channels that is their personal brand so not only are their identities literally attached to it but they're actually

like actually attached to it when people insult a Channel or a video it's insulting the person um and youtubing youtubing if whatever that if that's a verb or anything it takes a lot um I wouldn't say it takes more work at all than a normal job I don't think that's what it is whatsoever but I think it requires you to sacrifice a lot more mental energy then maybe a normal job where you don't have to worry about what millions of people or thousands of people are going to say or think about what you do it's

a lot higher risk in that regard of like your identity is always on the line no matter what you say or do and something that's been so helpful for me is just like when I publish a video like that's it like I did what I needed to do now I'm gonna go for a run I have coaching in an hour like I almost like to schedule videos when I'm doing other things like a lot of our videos are scheduled and I like to do things when the videos are scheduled because then it takes my mind

away from that I leave that identity behind I go do something else that gives me satisfaction and I think that's actually something that's relevant to everybody you know like if you have a job that you care a lot about like you need to have other things that make you happy if you really care about privacy and security which we hope you do and we both do as well we still hope you have lives outside of that because it's still going to enable you to care about this in the long run and not over identify with

it and burn yourself out and do all those other crazy things um I'd also say like you need to be aware of these problems I think just being aware of these two terms cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias and understanding what they are and hopefully this episode at least cleared up a little bit of what that looks like and how all of us have done it at some point and what we can do to prevent it just being aware of it you can catch yourself doing it more often and you can slowly nudge yourself in the

right direction those for me are like the two big takeaways is there anything on your end hopefully I would just say hopefully uh if if this stuff is interesting to you if you hopefully you look into it yourself right uh the audience like don't just take our words for for these times for these uh don't just take our words for it is what I'm trying to say um like uh no you're right and um and on that note I'm Gonna Leave a podcast in the description um it's actually a podcast from uh the growth equation

Brad stallberg Steve Magnus said it's about cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias it's about these two problems and they unpack it for like 45 minutes and that's all they talk about and for them it's more of a global problem but I want everyone if they have the time to go listen to that podcast but think about that with the privacy and security Community um because that's what I did when I was listening to the podcast the whole time I'm like oh my God this is such a rampant problem in this in this community and I'm we

at the time I listened to this I think like several months ago when it came out um I really wanted a place to be able to talk about it um and we didn't have that place so now I'm glad that now we have like techler talks to be able to have discussions like this because these discussions can never happen without it so I think that's cool that's a win on our fronts for like putting us together I think it's like Obama award meme yeah great job Henry yeah thank you for putting this great job Henry

and Jonah we did a great job um is there anything else you want to add I mean it could be a shorter episode because I don't think there's much more I have to say no I think that's all I don't know if there's anything I'd have to add this is all good stuff Henry I'm gonna check out that podcast right after we're finished recording this so okay I'll find a link because it's kind of their site is kind of hard to locate old podcasts but like worst case scenario just dig through every upload in the

last like six months and I'll find it there was there okay there was actually another one that was about internet brain and like the rise in extreme figures which is something we touched on a little bit and the whole time I'm like oh my God this is such a problem in the Privacy Community too of like people just saying the most nonsensical things and getting so much attention for it even though it's like actually wrong um and then we get comments about it like I can't believe you recommend XYZ when they did incorrect XYZ and

it's like they didn't actually do that that's actually really misleading I don't know where you heard that from so um and we make mistakes too but like I think there's a there's a difference between misinformation and disinformation and I like to think we've never landed on the disinformation side of things hopefully because that would be intentional like misleading which is the difference between the two terms yeah I I don't want to start a whole nother podcast episode right now but um do you have any final words before I start kind of kind of ending things

off here I I don't think so I'm interested to see what the uh what the community what you guys have to say about all this in our in our discussion forums yeah let us know let us know in the comments and let us know definitely on our Forum too because I think some people are going to take this talk really well and some people are going to take this talk not so well um and it is what it is because we're gonna publish this anyway so I hope you all if you don't like it you

might as well unsubscribe I don't actually I don't know why you're subscribed if you don't like this talk because I feel like we generally stick pretty well to these values so yeah I think the rest of the channel is probably not for you yeah um again I'm not saying we're perfect we make mistakes you should speak up when we make those mistakes we like that but like I don't think it's the right channel for you um all right well let's go ahead and end things off uh thank you Jonah always for hopping on these calls

and also thank you everyone for sharing all your feedback we didn't know what would happen with these techler talks we kind of got together and we were like hey we kind of want a place to like share more of ourselves be more of ourselves and like showcase that with our community because so much of our content is so scripted and produced and we didn't know what people would think of this and so we're really happy to see people are like overwhelmingly happy about it the people who watch it um and so like thank you all

for watching this and enjoying it and letting us know your feedback um we will catch you next time on Tech Lord talks and see you next time on tackler all right