Back to episode — Episode 34 - Why Kanye and John Legend Are Watching Different Movies
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Today I'm going to talk about the disagreement between Kanye and John Legend. If you're following the news, you know that Kanye has expressed some love for President Trump as a person. No discussion of policies, just that it's okay for him to like him. John Legend has weighed in publicly on Twitter and said, hey, you know, he's not happy about this because it seems to be validating who he thinks i…
← Previous segment →And let me explain it. Now, the normal world, as you know, it's quite common. In fact, it's universal. It's not just common, it's the universal way that human beings look at things. We have confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, and we imagine that we're rational creatures, but we're not.
Now if you said to both these people, hey, John Legend, have you heard of these concepts, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, I'll bet both of them would say yes, and that they would know essentially what those mean and that they're common things. I think Kanye might be a step ahead in the sense that even if you know what these things are, there's a second trap. And the trap is that you believe that these are the things that happen to other people.
If you understand what they are but you've only gone so far as to believe that this is something that happens to the dumb people, it's certainly not something that happens to you because you would recognize it and you would immediately not do it. If you think that's what these mean, you're not quite understanding them. And I believe Kanye's probably operating at a little bit higher level of comprehension in the sense that I think he would understand that these are universal traits and that you can't tell which of you is wrong.
And I applied this to myself. So in everything I say, I would not know if I'm wrong. I would have no way to know. Now, there's some ways you can check stuff, but you can't ever really know if you're the one who's in the wrong movie.
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But let me run through a couple of different pieces of confirmation bias. And I picked the two most frequently noted ones. There are lots and lots of them. And I think John Legend would be the first one to point this out. It's like, okay, you only mention two things, but look, I've got a long list. What about everything else on the list? In the interests of time, I'm only going to make the point w…
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