The Mugwumpery

It seems many humans don’t have world models. They just think what the people around them think.

Some of us – lucky enough to be unusually thoughtful or observant or open-minded or intelligent in some way – do have world models.

We develop these world models over our lives based on observation and theory, and on evaluating the often conflicting claims of others.

Once we build the world model, we use it to determine what we think, and what we should do. Most of these determinations are crystallized as heuristics – for most decisions we don’t directly reason about the situation but use the heuristic. When events diverge from our predictions and we therefore see flaws in our world model, we modify the model and the heuristics.

For most of us by age 50 or so our world model is pretty stable. Few changes need to be made, and many of those are because the world itself has changed – our environment has changed.

By the time we reach our 60s and 70s, most of us appear to lose the ability to modify the world model. We keep using the same model, the same heuristics. We become stuck in our ideas and unable to adapt them to changing realities. Or even to correct old errors in our models. We become ossified.

We keep on using the heuristics we developed when we were younger. To the extent the world hasn’t changed, they still work. To the extent it has changed, they don’t.