Vishen Lakhiani explains "belief clustering": people adopt bundled sets of beliefs (e.g., political, religious) to satisfy belonging, often accepting irrational positions because they signal group membership. Using U.S. politics and the global warming debate as examples, he argues these clusters polarize thinking into black-and-white choices and urges adopting a nuanced, 'gray' stance that selects ideas from multiple groups.
Chapters
Now another thing we tend to do is called belief clustering. So that is what religion is computationally. It's series of beliefs put around a circle. The big circle is Christianity, then the other circle up there is Islam. The other circle is Hinduism. You can see some of these circles overlap. Right now all of us have a big sense of belonging. So we want to be American, we want to be Democrat, we want to be Republican. What we do not realize is that all of those are circles. They are clusters of beliefs. Now our need for belonging is so evolutionary wired into us that we will take on the official set of beliefs within the circle we want to be part of, even if those beliefs are irrational. So I've often wondered, why is it that in America so many people believe global warming is not real? And it's made up. It's insane. The rest of the world say global warming is real, but in America, a large part of the population believe global warming is an opinion. Now the reason for that is we can blame Al Gore. Al Gore was a politician who in a contestuous fight with George Bush for the presidential elections. Al Gore didn't win, but it kind of divided the nation because they felt the elections were not run well. And then what happened was Al Gore ended up winning the Nobel Prize for his book An Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming. Now, Al Gore's intentions were good and he's a great man. He wanted to awaken us up to global warming. But because he's a politician, all of a sudden global warming got put into a cluster of beliefs called liberal mindset. Democrats and anti global warming got put into a cluster of beliefs called the GOP conservative mindset. So all of a sudden, even though there's irrefutable proof for global warming, if you are gop, it's dangerous to believe it because it's a liberal idea now, a more advanced consciousness. When you step out of the matrix, you decide that you can choose this, you decide that. Look, I like GOP conservative values on taxation and government, but I believe in gay rights, I believe in abortion rights, I believe in global warming. But because people aren't trained in belief clusters, they don't see how these things are warping their decision making ability. So in America it becomes black versus white. But when you step out of the matrix, you can see the areas in between which are gray. You are the person who might vote for an independent candidate. You don't need to be right wing or left wing. You can take the middle ground, you can choose bits from both which matter to you and create your own ideology. You can revolutionize. You can innovate. Almost all great innovators in the world are trained to see gray. Mediocre people get trapped in black or white premium beat.
