When you make a decision, what goes into the process?
Do you consider all the possibilities one at a time, weighing probabilities against one another carefully? Does reason and evidence always guide your search for knowledge?
You wish. So do I.
We’re humans, and our memories are malleable. We can retroactively rewrite our past in notable ways, and we don’t always make the best judges of how important or impactful an event was when it happened. This can lead to unintentional cherry-picking whenever we’re trying to decide whether something is a good idea, but the way your mind can find these little cherries to support its argument is what I want to talk about today.
Our senses record an almost unimaginable amount of data every minute of every day.
Turning even the visual and audio inputs into an incredibly high definition video would require each of us to have our own massive server farm. Each farm would require an absurd amount of energy to run, and each of us would need hundreds of square feet to store this facility. And, that’s only the incessant visual and audio inputs.
Our brains needed a shortcut, so that’s why we have these little cognitive tricks. These shortcuts are amazingly useful at times, making otherwise impossible decisions easy. But they can also lead us astray.
One shortcut we’ve developed is called the availability heuristic. If something happened to you fairly recently, or if it was particularly unexpected or dramatic, you’re likely to have a more vivid memory of the event.
During the 1980s and early 90s, the so-called Satanic Panic swept through America. My friends and I rolled our eyes at this ludicrous phenomenon, but the mainstream media wasn’t so quick to dismiss the sensational stories that sold ads for them.
By the late 70s, the US was ripe for paranoia surrounding the supernatural. Horror movies were now vivid and realistic enough to have a powerful impact on their audiences, and people’s imaginations ran wild with fears of possession by the devil.
Then, in 1980, a book called Michelle Remembers brought these absurd fantasies off the screen and into the real world. During so-called recovered memory sessions, a psychiatrist named Lawrence Pazder induced his patient, Michelle Smith, to remember whatever it was that her mind was keeping her from remembering.
Under Pazder’s care, Smith was able to recall her dark and terrible childhood, where she was brought up in a Satanic cult. She was forced to perform all sorts of dark acts, and she witnessed human sacrifice and rituals.
Unfortunately, none of this was real. It was completely made up. Oh, and also: Dr. Pazder later married Michelle Smith, his patient at the time.
We’re just getting started with the ick.
In 1989, after this terrible paranoia had spread across the nation, Oprah Winfrey had Smith on her show, offering her a platform to tell her story once more to a new audience. At no time during the conversation did Oprah ask whether any of this stuff really happened.
Now, whenever a crime happened, the Satanic Panic was available in the minds of many Americans. The vivid images from films like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby set the stage for Michelle Remembers, and then Oprah had Michelle on years later. All the while, other talk shows and tabloid media sensationalized murders as ritualistic.
I experienced this era through the lens of someone who played Dungeons and Dragons, and this scene was precisely where a lot of this societal unease and paranoia landed the hardest. D&D showcased monsters and demons you could fight, and it gave you the opportunity to play a character—to envision how they would see the world, and to choose how your adventure went.
This role-playing aspect, where kids would sometimes modify their voices so they could act out what their character was saying, certainly amplified this fear. This game had monsters and demons, and the kids would talk in crazy voices like from The Exorcist? Not for my kid, thought most of America.
If you liked heavy metal music, too? Forget about it—you were going to be a target of the Satanic Panic. You might as well embrace the roll of the heel, because that’s exactly how mainstream society is going to view you for the next decade or so.
Of course, metal musicians amplified the Panic by becoming the heel, deliberately mocking the phenomenon by pretending to worship Satan or just by being provocative. I watched these cycles unfold and restart over and over again throughout the 80s and into the early 90s.
Irrational persecution of metalheads and nerds like me wasn’t the only consequence of the availability heuristic and the Satanic Panic. Lives were ruined by false accusations and trials, while actual perpetrators went unpunished.
Christian monoculture dominated, while smaller religious groups like Wiccans and Pagans were conflated with Satanists. Meanwhile, recovered memory therapy was regarded as a bunch of bunk, since Smith’s entire story was completely made up.
This throwing out of the baby with the bathwater is all too common whenever we use the availability heuristic, and we humans use it an awful lot. That’s why we need to aware of this tendency.
That’s why we’re here today.
The Satanic Panic might be over, but the availability heuristic continues to cause poor decision making and mass hysteria. What are some instances you’ve noticed in your own life where this phenomenon comes into play?
Know what else certain people at that time thought was controlled by the Devil? Television animation! Having studied its history I know how absurd that proposition is. But that's the way Christians roll: anything they don't approve of is logically the Devil's work.
"This can lead to unintentional cherry-picking whenever we’re trying to decide whether something is a good idea."
But you haven't addressed a key scenario here: What if the thing I'm trying to decide on is whether I should pick a particular cherry? In that case, wouldn't cherry-picking be the very thing I'd want? Would my attempt to cherry-pick the right set of assumptions about cherry-picking to decide which cherry to pick create a circular logic paradox that would paralyze me into inaction? The jury is out, but all signs point to: Yes!
As for the malleability of memory and the impossibility of storing all video/audio/etc input, I'd like to share a slightly edited comment I left on Suzi Travis's article about human memory a few days ago:
It struck me how much more similar our memory creation/retrieval process is to LLMs than to e.g. file storage software.
Creating new memories is a bit like pre-training an LLM - you're not loading every single piece of information into your brain and storing it in its entirety. Instead, you encode relationships between people, events, smells, etc., much like LLMs encode relationships between tokens.
And when you're retrieving a memory, you're not pulling it out of a file cabinet wholesale, but you're "generating" a plausible version of events based on the encoded connections, much like LLMs generate different but broadly similar responses to the same query.
The same goes for LLM hallucinations and our memory hallucinations, which explains why my wife and I have very different recollections of the events of the day of our first kiss. That, and she's objectively wrong....according to my memory, that is.