Scope

This essay describes the experience of being right, and the way that experience shapes what feels visible, relevant, and admissible. I’m using “paradigm” in the broad sense of shared defaults for noticing, evaluating, and coordinating. When paradigms collide, people can be intelligent and sincere and still fail to make contact.

The experience of being right

Being right has a texture. The world seems ordered. Details sort themselves into importance without effort. Explanations connect with little friction. The mind stops searching because it already knows where to look.

This state rarely arrives as a conscious opinion. It arrives as recognition. It can register as competence. It can register as integrity. It can register as relief.

Many conflicts are not arguments over a single claim. They are contests over what can count as a credible claim at all.

Paradigms as environments

In academic settings, “paradigm” often refers to scientific practice, and Thomas Kuhn remains a useful entry point. His contribution was not that he noticed disagreement, but that he described how stable traditions supply shared standards for what problems matter, what methods are legitimate, and what results qualify as solutions. Inquiry becomes “normal” because a community inherits a common measure.

Outside science, the same architecture appears wherever people must coordinate under constraint. A paradigm supplies defaults that govern what becomes salient, what counts as evidence, what explanations register as serious, and what questions sound coherent. These defaults rarely announce themselves as rules. They show up as obviousness, as decisiveness, or as absence.

A paradigm shapes what is easy to see, easy to say, and easy to treat as real.

Perception generates meaning, environments select meaning

A common assumption about disagreement is that perception is shared and belief diverges. Many contemporary cognitive models suggest a different sequence: perception is already interpretive. The brain generates expectations and updates them in response to discrepancy. In predictive processing models, what registers as “seen” reflects prior expectations and internal models that reduce mismatch between what is expected and what is encountered.

You do not need to commit to any single version of predictive processing to use the implication. If perception is model-guided, then what feels obvious depends in part on what the system is prepared to detect and treat as informative. A paradigm can feel like reality because it operates at the level where reality appears.

A second step matters just as much. Perception generates candidate meanings, but those meanings do not enter shared life on equal footing. In conversation, in institutions, and in relationships, some interpretations become repeatable because they align with established standards. Others are filtered out because they fail credibility tests, relevance tests, or risk thresholds already in force. Paradigm conflict becomes personal here, because the dispute is no longer only about what was noticed. It becomes a dispute about what qualifies.

This helps explain why being right is stabilizing. When a model fits well, attention becomes more efficient. Uncertainty recedes. The person can move through practical life with fewer unresolved possibilities. The reward is orientation.

Digital environments and machine-mediated salience

For most of human history, paradigms were stabilized primarily by families, institutions, professions, and local communities. Online systems add another stabilizer: ranked exposure at scale.

Digital platforms order information through feeds, recommendations, and rankings. That ordering shapes salience by deciding what appears first, what repeats, and what arrives surrounded by social signals. Over time, the resulting cue-set can feel like the world itself.

This matters because ranked exposure is often optimized for outcomes such as engagement, retention, or predictability. Those objectives do not require deception to influence perception, they only require systems that learn which items reliably generate response and then surface similar items more often. Empirical work shows that rank-based delivery shifts exposure and engagement, and that engagement-optimized ranking can amplify moralized or divisive material even when users do not explicitly seek it.

A second shift is increasingly common: machine pre-interpretation. Many people now encounter reality through summaries, captions, clips, and model-generated explanations before they encounter primary sources. Large language models compress and paraphrase in ways that feel like knowledge rather than mediation. When this happens, first contact is already framed.

Research suggests that AI summaries can omit scope limits and overgeneralize findings, and that response style and confidence influence what users accept as plausible. Admissibility can shift at the moment of encounter. The person is not only deciding what to believe. The environment has already shaped the form in which belief becomes available.

Paradigms are no longer reinforced only by social habit and personal history. They are reinforced by external systems that learn which forms of coherence keep attention stable.

How closure forms

Paradigms are often described as things we believe, as if closure were a deliberate act. In practice, closure more often emerges from repeated coordination. It forms as defaults are reinforced until alternatives stop appearing as live options.

Three closures recur:

1. Salience closure. Some cues become reliably noticeable while others recede. Over time, this can register as common sense. It can also produce confusion when someone else does not notice what feels decisive. Online ranking can accelerate this closure by repeatedly elevating certain cues and burying others.

2. Admissibility closure. Standards for what counts as a credible signal narrow. This narrowing is often necessary for governance. Institutions require admissibility rules because they must make decisions under constraint, with accountability and safety requirements. Those rules also determine which experiences enter the record and which remain anecdotal or not actionable.

   A neutral example appears in medicine. Clinical systems often privilege particular evidence types because they need reproducibility and defensible decision paths. The cost is that some forms of suffering are harder to validate when they do not map cleanly onto admissible signal types. This is a structural example, not a claim about any one specialty or condition.

   Online spaces introduce a parallel dynamic. Metrics can function as epistemic signals. Visibility can be misread as credibility. Repetition can be mistaken for consensus. Admissibility shifts without a formal rule change. The environment quietly redefines what looks like evidence.

3. Explanation closure. Over time, certain causal stories become the serious options. Other stories may not register as incorrect so much as off-frame. At that point, disagreement shifts from interpretive difference to incomprehension.

Kuhn used “incommensurability” to describe cases where competing paradigms lack a shared measure. Another way to say this is that the standards of evaluation themselves are in dispute.

When these closures align, rightness stops feeling like a preference. It starts feeling like the stable shape of the world.

Why rightness feels moral

Paradigms do not only organize facts. They organize what counts as responsible perception.

Shared standards make coordination possible. When people agree on what counts as evidence, relevance, and legitimate inference, they can act together without renegotiating reality at every step. Over time, that stability stops reading as merely practical. It starts reading as reliability.

That is the pivot. A paradigm can acquire moral weight because it becomes linked to outcomes people care about: safety, competence, fairness, protection. Defending the paradigm then feels like defending those goods, not defending an idea.

Research on moral conviction helps explain why disagreement intensifies here. Moral conviction is the experience that a stance is grounded in right and wrong rather than preference. When a claim has that status, counterevidence is less likely to register as information. It is more likely to register as pressure to betray what one takes to be true or decent. Disagreement shifts from assessment to judgment.

Sacred value research describes a related boundary. Some commitments are treated as non-negotiable. When disagreement touches them, compromise can feel illegitimate. The conflict is no longer about likelihood but about what must not be conceded.

The digital layer does not invent moralization, but it can accelerate it. Engagement systems often reward certainty, alignment, and recognizable stance. In that environment, moral framing spreads quickly because it reduces complexity into positions others can identify.

Collision and incomprehension

When paradigms collide, the experience is often not disagreement but disbelief: the sense that the other person is failing to see what is obvious. That experience can occur on both sides at once.

Arguments often fail because conclusions are exchanged while admissibility standards remain misaligned. Each party offers evidence that fits its own frame. The other treats that evidence as irrelevant or incoherent. The result is not persuasion but bafflement.

Sensemaking research describes a parallel dynamic. In many settings, people extract cues and build accounts that are sufficient for action under uncertainty. Plausibility can matter more than exhaustive accuracy because coordination is the immediate requirement. Institutions cannot wait for full epistemic convergence, so workable maps become shared reality.

Social psychology adds another constraint. Information processing is shaped by identity and belonging. People tend to credit and dismiss information in ways that preserve standing within their group. This does not require bad faith. It is a predictable feature of coordinated social life.

Digital environments intensify collision by lowering the cost of contact and raising the cost of concession. Paradigm conflict now unfolds in compressed, audience-visible spaces. Even ordinary disagreement can become performative. Under those conditions, preserving standing often takes precedence over shared description.

Seen this way, paradigm conflict becomes easier to describe without contempt. People are defending the conditions that allow their world to remain legible.

Exit costs

Openness is often treated as a simple virtue. Paradigm exit rarely works that cleanly.

A paradigm provides more than an opinion set. It provides orientation, attention filters, and expectations about consequence. Leaving it imposes real costs.

One cost is disorientation. Obviousness disappears. The world offers too many live possibilities, and the criteria for narrowing them are unsettled.

Another cost is identity. Paradigms are often integrated into self-respect and moral reliability. Shifting frames can require revising what kind of person one has been.

A third cost is community. Paradigms define who is trustworthy, which institutions are legitimate, and which people are safe to coordinate with. Exiting can reorganize belonging and trust.

There is also moral risk. A new paradigm can register as exposure to error or irresponsibility, even when the old frame feels incomplete.

Digital life adds additional costs. A person can lose an audience, a reputation, and an archive of past self-presentation. They can also lose visibility as recommender systems learn that the new posture produces less predictable engagement. The cost is not only social. It is infrastructural.

These costs help explain why rigidity is often protective rather than arrogant. What looks like stubbornness from the outside can be an attempt to preserve stability while remaining socially intact.

Practical leverage points

This essay is not a demand for openness. It is an attempt to make a few coordination moves more available when paradigms collide.

• Treat evidence as a standards question before it becomes a facts question. Ask what would count as a credible signal inside the other person’s frame. You are not granting agreement. You are mapping admissibility.

• Ask what certainty is providing. For some people it stabilizes attention. For others it preserves moral clarity or belonging. Naming the function can reduce the tendency to treat disagreement as a character judgment.

• Narrow claims to what can be jointly observed. Paradigm collision escalates when broad narratives replace specific shared reference points.

• Respect time as an integration constraint. Paradigm-level updating rarely completes at conversational speed. Treating lag as bad faith tends to harden resistance.

• Separate epistemic disagreement from governance decisions where possible. When disagreement about reality is forced to decide roles or consequences in the same moment, conflict intensifies.

• If AI is part of the environment, treat its output as a starting point rather than a verdict. Trace summaries back to sources when consequences matter. Treat confidence as a style feature, not a guarantee.

Limits and cautions

This framework cannot tell you which paradigm is correct. It cannot tell you when to tolerate harm or how to resolve power asymmetries where one paradigm is enforced through authority.

It should not be used as a social weapon. “You are in a paradigm” is not a diagnosis. Used that way, it becomes patronizing. Its proper use is self-directed.

Explaining paradigm rigidity does not remove accountability for conduct. People remain responsible for how they treat others while inhabiting a frame.

This is not a claim that algorithms or AI systems control belief. It is a claim about constraints. When environments select what is salient and pre-shape what is legible, certainty becomes easier to obtain and harder to examine.

Closing

Paradigms are often described as theories people defend. In lived life, they behave more like meaning environments people rely on. That reliance can be stabilizing, identity-affirming, morally organizing, and perceptually efficient. It can also make disagreement register as threat and make translation feel impossible.

The experience of being right is rarely trivial. For many people, it functions as shelter. Seeing that does not resolve conflict. It can change what we think conflict is.

References (selected; mix of foundational texts and recent empirical work)

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• Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.

• Germani, F., et al. (2025). Framing effects and systematic bias in large language model judgments. Nature Human Behaviour.

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• Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

• Latzer, M., Hollnbuchner, K., Just, N., & Saurwein, F. (2019). Algorithmic governance: On the measurement of algorithms in everyday life. Information, Communication & Society.

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• Peters, U. (2025). LLM summaries can overgeneralize scientific findings by omitting limiting details. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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• Tetlock, P. E. (2003). Thinking the unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(7), 320–324.

• Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. SAGE Publications.

• Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell.