thepurpose on Nostr: this hits my memory of dietrich dörners super great read "die logik des misslingens" ...

this hits my memory of dietrich dörners super great read "die logik des misslingens" hard. dörner documents exactly this. the "anchor trap" where first information gets disproportionate weight in decision-making, and subsequent judgments barely deviate from that initial frame. in his microworld experiments (running simulated towns, disaster scenarios), participants would latch onto early hypotheses and filter all new data through them, even when contradictory evidence accumulated. he calls it the "overweight of the actual motive". once you've committed to a mental model, your cognition works to defend it rather than update it.

so when you say "every journey into a subject begins through a doorway someone else built," that doorway IS the anchor. the teacher/ influencer/ LLM sets the coordinate system, and we spend the rest of the conversation adjusting around it instead of questioning why we're in that reference frame at all. dörner found this wasn't stupidity. it was the brain's energy-saving heuristic gone wrong. linear thinking worked in simpler worlds; in interconnected systems it's catastrophic. intellectual honesty means catching yourself mid-anchor and asking: what would force me to abandon my current model entirely?