Re: Not about Schemas

Nope, a mental framework and an error are not the same thing.

Well, yes and no. They aren't interchangeable, but they are interrelated. The errors being discussed here are formed from biases which result from our schemas.

The schema concept argues that we all have a worldview.

That isn't exactly right. The schema concept argues that we have several templates that form as we grow and that these inform our views. They do not state that this is anything like a complete picture of reality in and of themselves, but that they make up a big part of how our worldview comes to be. In other words, schemas are the framework for a worldview, but what comes to fill the framework is the worldview.

The article is talking about answers which can be reached by doing the homework; and yet most folks won't do the homework, and go with an answer which requires the least work.

Yes, and the reason they don't do the homework is because of a bias which traces back to an intelligence schema:

The New Yorker said: "When people face an uncertain situation, they dont carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts arent a faster way of doing the math; theyre a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort."

Those mental shortcuts are the schemas. Let me quote a book I've quoted often which discusses schemas in-depth--Jeremy Campbell's The Improbable Machine:

"Schemas, Bartlett showed, are structures of connected knowledge, acquired through our special experiences of being in the world, which are used to make sense of information that may be seriously deficient, strange, fragmentary, ambiguous, contradictory, or full of holes. They provide plausible scenarios, into which bits and pieces of data can be made to fit."

and:

"Lippmann saw stereotypes as devices for coping with complexity and making judgments under the real-world constraints of limited space and time. Opinions, he said, are a way of making our minds cover a larger space, and a longer span of time, than they can possibly experience directly. They embrace a larger number of events and people than a single individual could possibly encounter in the course of an entire lifetime. Our opinions cannot be based on exhaustive acquaintance with all the facts about a given topic or about this or that person. They are cognitive devices for making a little experience go a long way, which is exactly what schemas and theories do."

and:

"Curiously, the mind tends to encode in terms of prototypes even classes of things that belong to something as abstract and logical as the system of whole numbers. It turns out that people treat certain numbers, such as 100, as typical examples, the Lord Byrons of the number system and regards others that are close to the prototype, like 97 and 102, as being 'essentially' 100. They do not, on the other hand, think of 100 as being essentially 97 or 102. Prototypes guide thinking, but they are not logical. They may even be at odds with logic. They can lead the mind into a trap."

That last paragraph is particularly relevant because it helps to explain why the problem-solvers would be biased toward $1.00 and 10 cents rather than $1.05 and 5 cents for the bat and ball respectively. All of this adds up to showing that schemas don't not simply apply to philosophical vectors but pretty much to everything in our world. Our minds make quick assessments of a given problem, be it an Islamic man encountered on a bus for the first time or a mathematical problem, and if we do not take the time to deliberately put it into context, we will jump to the biased conclusion our schema has provided for that issue.

We are biased in favor of our worldviews, and we are biased in favor of overconfidence in the correctness of our answers to problems with a specific solution. But the underlying phenomenon are not the same.

Obviously I disagree, and I am not alone in thinking so.