[famouswaffles]

Your decisions shape your preferences just as much as your preferences shape your decisions and you're not even aware of it. Yes, everybody regularly confabulates plausible sounding things that they themselves genuinely believe to be the 'real reason'. You're not immune or special.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3196841/

[mdp2021]

I will check the article with more attention as soon as I will have the time, but: putting aside a question on how would a similar investigation prove that all people would function in the same way,

that does not seem to counter that some people «check their hypotheses» - as duly. Some people do exercise critical thinking. It is an intentional process.

[famouswaffles]

You're not getting it.

You ask A "Why did you choose that?" > He answers "I like the color blue"

This makes sense. This is what everyone thinks and believes is the actual sequence of such events.

But often, this is the actual sequence "Let's go with this" > "Now i like the color blue"

'A' didn't lie to you or try to trick you. He didn't consciously rationalize liking blue after the fact. He's not stupid or "prone to bad thinking". Altering your perceptions of events without your conscious awareness is just simply something that your brain does fairly regularly.

Make no mistake. A genuinely likes blue now - the only difference is that he genuinely believes he made the choice because he liked blue instead of the brain having the tendency to make you favor your choices and giving him the like of blue so it sits better.

This is not something you "check your hypotheses" out of. And it's something every human deals with everyday, including you.

[mdp2021]

I get what you are pointing at: you are focusing with some strictness on the post from Stavros, which states that "people pseudo-rationalize with plausible explanatory theories their not-at-the-time-rational behaviour".

But I was instead focusing at the general problem in the root post from Foundry27, and to a loose interpretation of the post from Stavros: the opposition between the faculty of generating convincing fantasies vs the faculty of critical thinking. (Such focus being there because more general and pressing in current AI than the contextual problem of "explanation", which is sort of a "perversion" when compared to the same in classical AI, where the steps are recorded procedurally owing to transparency, instead of the paradox of asking an obscure unreliable engine "what it did".)

What I meant is that a general scheme of bullshitting to oneself and pseudo-rationalizing it is not the only way. Please see the other sub-branch in which we talked about mathematics. In important cases, the fantasies are then consciously checked as thoroughly as constraints allow.

So I stated «/Some/ people bullshit themselves stating the plausible; others check their hypotheses ... Some people will output a pre-given answer; some people check» - as a crucial discriminator in the natural and artificial. Please note that the trend in the past two years has generated a believe in some that the at most preliminary part is all that there is.

Also note that Katskul wrote «only occasionally do we deviate to check ourselves» - so the reply is "No: the more one is educated and intellectually trained, the more one's thoughts are vetted - the thought process is disciplined to check its objects".

But I see re-checking the branch that the post from Stavros was strongly specific towards the "smaller" area of "pseudo-rationalizing", so I see why my posts may have looked odd-fitting.