Cogsec: Cognitive security refers to the protection of cognitive processes from manipulation, misinformation, and other forms of psychological influence that can affect decision-making and perception.
I’m generally interested in the cognitive sciences. Mechanisms like attention or cognitive biases are extremely complex and we still don’t have a good understanding of them, despite how much they influence the world around us. Those mechanisms developed as consequences of the slow process of evolution, and they are extremely efficient and good at what they do.
For better or worse, technological advancements are working on a completely different time scale to biology, so some of our painstakingly developed instincts and survival mechanisms are completely useless if not detrimental. Humans are not designed to live like we do now, and while we are quick to adapt, our “software” is not. While I’m not the most scale-pilled ML practitioner, I do believe that in the coming years, the amount of information that we will be exposed to will explode in all facets of life, mostly driven by AI.
Since watching this DEF-CON presentation, I’ve been worried that most people aren’t taking adequate precautions to protect their cognition, I suspect mostly because they haven’t ever thought of it. In the same way, I’m careful with every file that enters my computer from the outside, we should be every bit as careful with what we let into our minds. This is not an original concept at all, but for once I refrained from reading what other people have said about this topic since I know it would only dishearten me from writing my own thoughts.
Most of the attacks on your cognition will not be targeting you directly, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. If you don’t spend some time curating the media (news, books, podcasts…) you consume, you will be much more exposed than someone who does. This does have the risk of creating a bubble around yourself, it’s necessary to learn to balance that as well. For example, some people choose to stop watching or reading news since that can make a significant impact on them (especially in situations like the one on Palestine). When I told this to a friend who struggles with this, he was adamant as he felt it was his responsibility to keep up with the conflict. The way I see it there is no reason why he should feel that way, but I might be able to be convinced otherwise since it’s getting difficult for me to articulate why.
Social media to me feels like the worst offender at the moment. Everyone by now knows the power that the TikTok format (short-form videos) has, and it’s a common experience to pass an hour scrolling just to come to your senses at some point and feel bad about how much time you spent. Most of the time you don’t even remember what you saw. As much as that makes me sound like a boomer it feels like a hard drug. To me it’s telling that, everyone I talk to about this knows they have a problem and still choose to do nothing about it. I call this attack dopamine highjacking, and isn’t exclusive to this platform. Much of this damage can be attributed to the capitalist urge to maximize profits (I think most would agree that the incentives aren’t correctly placed in the journalistic field), but the perks are kind of too good for us to do something about it. I don’t know if I can see that changing.
More common attacks on your cognition include publicity, going outside, and the GDPR (one of those is a joke). Much of the time, they attack on a subconscious level, which is annoying since it makes it much more difficult to know you are being sieged. I don’t think we are in a terrible situation right now (with respect to how safe your cognition is) all things considered, but it’s evident to me that it’s going to get much worse over time, and if the speed of change is too fast consequences might be catastrophic. I do attribute some of the guilt for the increased level of mental health care to this, as I touched on in my post Mental illnesses and the Looping Effect. I’m also confident we will adapt and tools like Ublock will be created for many parts of life.
If you take one thing from this post, taking care of your cogsec is important and will increasingly be as time goes by.