Reading the chapter from Blindspot, I was suddenly … very afraid of myself. While I had an awareness that we often are rather untruthful, it never hit me how this jeopardizes our ability to obtain truth. How can we trust ourselves, or others, or the very information we collect if the people who write them are a mess of subtle biases?
The section on the reliability of surveys hit me the most, as recently I took part in this psychology study thing with some heavy survey questions on my behaviors and sense of self. But now I question, can I really grasp who I even am? I know plenty of people who define themselves in ways I don’t agree with, so then, would other people’s perceptions of me be more accurate? But they have their own jumble of mini shortcuts and stereotyping and things happening too!! Moral of the story, I really gotta be suspicious of everything now …
I had an eerily similar experience after this reading. I feel like I can’t trust my own mind to interpret the world and the people in it impartially and have to question my own judgements.
I get what you’re saying about being afraid of your own mind. It’s kind of hard to wrap your mind around the fact that we really have no control of our own thoughts and actions. Definitely scary, but also pretty cool that the human body has all of these capabilities that I have never thought about.
I agree that its scary learning there are parts of your mind that you cannot control. However, I think it is important to remember there are so many other parts of your mind that you can control, and learning about mindbugs can also make you question your perceptions of the world and why you think the way you do.