313 - Fill in the Blanks

Last night during a discussion about countries I was reminded of something I learned from traveling the world, that the best and worst things about any given country that I’ve visited aren’t what those countries are generally known for elsewhere. The things that they’re known for are often trivial and nonsensical by comparison, with a low actual impact on the experience of those living there. There are exceptions to this, places like Russia, China, the US, and Israel, which are best known for their authoritarian regimes, but factors that those exceptions share with some other countries fail to result in the same negatives.

People elsewhere in the world often apply these simplified, trivial, and negatively correlated stereotypes based on extremely sparse data, the product of naivety and poor communication. For example, most people in the US know little or nothing about Vietnam, beyond the scope of the past century’s war, and that the country follows a communist model of governance.

In the absence of any other more meaningful data, this leads many to fill in the blanks (the 99.9% absence of real data) with weak, naive, and often negative correlations. In doing so, the mental image they form is severely warped beyond the point of uselessness.

Even by this point, at the mere mention of the term “Communism”, an emotional and ideological response will be cooking away in the neurotransmitter soup of some portion of those who read this. Remember, politics and religion cause the same neurons in the human brain to fire, and by labeling a group who some identify as the “other” in tribalism terms, humans whose primitive tendencies run unchecked by higher cognitive processes will often set about attacking the ideological “other”.

This is one reason why the absence of data and maximal human naivety in attempting to auto-complete the missing 99.9% of relevant context can easily lead to war.

There are also examples of countries that actively and adversarially manipulate the data about themselves, as well as that of others. Russia and the US have done this both internally and externally against others (adversarially) to great effect, with different goals. China and Israel have focused more on doing this internally, controlling the minds and perceptions of their own populations. All of these countries are far too eager for war, simultaneously favoring nationalism and attempting to expand their national borders as violent aggressors.

The best and worst of most countries aren’t known or necessarily evident from afar, they become evident when you live in them for a time. No one country does everything well, each one specializes, and some specialize to manipulate and attack others.

This dynamic is broadly true of all cases where data may be sparse, and that sparsity isn’t automatically recognized and corrected for. The greater the sparsity, and the less recognized it is, the more cognitive biases drive a given process.