Smoke & Mirrors: Unintentional Dangers and Slow Thinking (Because Reasons 8)

Conspiracy Clearinghouse

EPISODE 98 | Smoke & Mirrors: Unintentional Dangers and Slow Thinking (Because Reasons 8)

Guest: Kent Weishaus, licensed clinical social worker, author of Stop Breaking Down: The Secret to Avoiding Overwhelm and Crack-Up

Why are there so many adherents to conspiracy theories these days? What are the mechanisms that encourage people to latch onto a particular narrative?

We are modern creatures with out-dated brains. Clinical social worker (and former TV guy) Kent Weishaus talks about various theories and cognitive biases, and champions slow thinking in an age that seems too fast for our minds to keep pace with.

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SECTIONS

1. 03:48 - Smoke & Mirrors - TV, unreasonable expectations, wraparound for commercials, the hard edge
2. 09:49 - Cognitive Distortions - Daniel Kahneman's Availability Heuristic, it's the system, TV was Gen X's buddy, we love fat (and sugar)
3. 15:37 - Prospect Theory, Loss Aversion, the Endowment Effect, Aaron Beck's thought distortions, overgeneralization, "mind reading", slow thinking, I-know-how-this-will-end, please get raptured, humans crave structure, think about your thinking, Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems (IFS) says we are fragmented beings
4. 26:10 - Towards Accuracy - E-Prime, people are not their diagnosis, slow thinking helps counteract otherization
5. 33:46 - Too Much Information - Fast thinking feels good, apes with car keys, phantom urgency, unintentional dangers, too much sensory input
6. 41:39 - Slow Thinking - Emotions are not uncontrollable, list the systems you're embedded in, nothing goes away in the digital system, Thomas Piketty and late-stage capitalism, the system is out of control

• Music by Fanette Ronjat

More Info

• Kent Weishaus website
• Stop Breaking Down: The Secret to Avoiding Overwhelm and Crack-Up by Kent Weishaus
• Kent Weishaus on IMDb
• Availability Heuristic And Decision Making
• Prospect Theory: What It Is and How It Works, With Examples
• Loss aversion on BehavioralEconomics.com
• The Endowment Effect: Why Perceived Value Increases with Ownership
• Cognitive Distortions: Unhelpful Thinking Habits
• 13 Cognitive Distortions Identified In CBT
• Cognitive Distortions: 22 Examples & Worksheets (& PDF)
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Internal Family Systems (IFS)
• About IFS (Internal Family Systems)
• E-Prime on Wikipedia
• Discovering E-Prime
• E-Prime and Linguistic Revision
• Wandering Gaia: Dispatches from the Anthropocene website for Gaia Vince
• Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• The Nature of the Modern Mind by Pierre Steiner
• Turning the stone: embedding systems thinking in the everyday by Oliver Standing
• Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty

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