> [!tldr] Mental models and prototypes based on experience are "priors", and shape what we believe. Beliefs are shaped by our priors. The prior knowledge we've gathered from our lived experiences. Example - there are no red pixels in this image: ![[Pasted image 20260417222701.png|415]] You can *know* there's no red in that picture, but that doesn't stop you from seeing red. All of your priors suggest that strawberries are red. The blue plate should be white, the strawberries are red. We mentally "white balance" the image and see red where it does not exist. This explains "The Dress" that went viral back in ~2015. People who saw the dress as black and blue had developed an unconscious expectation that the dress was lit with artificial yellow light. Their priors were *used* to artificial light and the yellow-ing it causes. So their brains unconsciously "corrected" for this and mentally photoshop-filtered their perception to remove this yellow-ness, leaving behind a black and blue dress. Meanwhile, people whose priors saw the white and gold dress had developed an unconscious expectation that the dress was lit with natural light. Their priors made them *used* to seeing things in natural light, and their perceptional filter "corrected" for this by removing the blue-ness, leaving behind a white and gold dress. Same physical object. Perceived totally differently. Now, importantly, this isn't only true for visual phenomenon. This is true in [[Echo Chamber]]s. People thing "the election was stolen" cannot fathom a world in which it wasn't. Meanwhile people who say it was not stolen cannot fathom a world in which it was. Their realities are shaped by the information they've received. Frustratingly, there's an argument to be made that both sides are equally "correct" in this front, because the [[Central Executive]] inside our heads is what is the arbiter of "truth" in our internal worlds. In a room with two people who disagree on the subject, it's equally true and not true by that measure. The fact that there *are objective facts* on this does not really matter, because [[Facts have lost their ability to gain consensus.]] [[What have you experienced in your life that I haven't that causes you to believe something different from me?]] is an incredibly prescient question, given the book I read right after it. **** # More ## Source - [[How Minds Change]]