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Both Parties Ignore the Facts
An anonymous reader writes "Any democrat will tell you the republicans ignore the facts. Any republican will tell you the democrats ignore the facts. Turns out they're right. A new study monitored brain activity of partisans; they shun logic and use emotional processing centers to justify their candidate's contradictory statements. 'With their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix.'"
I think one of the biggest problems facing our society is not being willing to acknowledge when the other group is correct or when we are wrong. Everyone is too convinced that they are correct that they are blind to the other person's point of view and opinions. This is spread all across the spectrum, not just in politics. Acknowledging when someone else is correct is good for you and good for relations. The person that you are discussing with will acknowledge that you are seeing their side and can listen to what they consider to be "reason" and they are more likely to listen to your point of view. Its just like here on Slashdot. Often times I get replies to my comments from people who have a different opinion or just have some smart ass remark. I understand, people have different opinions, and they are just as human as I am.
You can still acknowledge the other side and remain strong.
Enemies are people too.
They allow you to join a club and make club membership more important in decision making than whether or not someone really represents you.
My biggest frustration with many republicans is the fact that they claim to be for small government, and this administration has been anything but small government.
My biggest frustration with democrats is that they claim to be all for civil liberties yet silently let pass things like Clinton's support of the clipper chip or Hilary's closed door meetings with insurance companies to hammer out a health care plan that benefitted them.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Take the Jihad on Smoking, for example.
Actually, I blogged about smoking yesterday. The town my church is in is thinking of banning the SALE of cigarettes at all stores. They'll watch their convenience stores go bankrupt as many of them make a decent profit on cigarettes.
Yet I'd rather see cigarettes banned by stupid towns (people will drive a town over) than banned at the state or federal level. The same is true of cocaine, alcohol, porn, whatever -- if you want to ban it, just do it at the local level and I'll avoid your town if it is a product I support.
History repeatedly shows that the more government tries to get involved, the worse things get.
This really depends. If you are talking about issues on personally morality then you are correct. The alcohol and drug wars are a great example of the government trying to legislate morals. Government can not help a person find inner peace, only the individual can do that.
However, the government is generally succesful when implementing a communities infrastructure. Examples would be TVA and the Highway system. These infrastructures are the foundation of our modern economy. We can thank the government for that.
You should think about this article a little harder. It's not just the parties in power that ignore the facts, but any of us with very strong convictions. That's as true for the revolutionaries as those currently in power.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
People find similar results when studying brain activity of people playing chess - when considering a good move vs. considering a bad move. Does this mean that people ignore reason when playing chess?
We don't understand the brain, we don't understand how people reason and we don't understand how people make decisions. Anyone who claims otherwise is an idiot, a fraud or both. It is an interesting finding that certain particular areas of the brain "light up" when this particular sample of people are shown a particular sort of information in a particular way - but you can conclude nothing from this.
For myself, the part of my brain that handles emotional responses to complete bullshit is lit up like a XMas tree. Am I, as I type, ignoring reason?
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
What about slashdotters who reflexively name groups of people who are considered "irrational"? Aren't you just doing the same thing here?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Government projects are generally extremely wasteful. Anything good the government would do will be done more efficiantly when the people involved are not coerced. And besides, if free individuals won't work together to make their own roads, why should they be forced to?
Corporate projects are also extremely wasteful. If you ever work for a major company you will see that things could be done cheaper with a smaller company. However, the big company always gets chosen for their track record and stability. The Government is similar if one person leaves the government it won't fall apart. Build any roads lately? I bet you use roads on a daily basis.....
Before modding this guy interesting, you might like to consider the fact that the article he links to is full of unjustified assertions, pop pseudo-pyschology and other varieties of what might kindly be termed "crap". For example, take this rather incredible statement, presented as an obvious truth:
When your senses detect a set of stimuli, your brain assembles all the information it has about the source of those stimuli and how to deal with them.
This raises all sorts of difficult issues which the author ignores completely. For example, is it really plausible that the brain assembles all the information relevant to the stimulus and how you might deal with it? That is probably an infinite amount of information. In any given situation, anything whatsoever that you know is potentially useful information. The trick is (we really have no idea how the mind does this) to filter out a tiny fraction of your knowledge using a reasonably fast heurisitic, so that you have a manageable subset of your knowledge to process in any given situation.
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
(ignoring the flamebait)
Be Democrat locally. Be Republican locally. Join communities that accept your views and were you can truly vote with your feet if you disagree -- maybe moving a few miles. When you bring your authoritarian mandates to the federal government, you force your will on people who don't accept your authority.
VOTE!!! If enough people share your views then you will get your libertarian/green/free trade/whatever people into office. There is nothing that stops them from running. The fact is that many of us are happy with the [democrat|republican] party line (I'm the latter). Obviously. Look at the election polls. I will grant you there are many dumb voters. I will grant you that half the nation (roughly) doesn't turn out to vote. If they don't give a f*ck and give up their rights, that sucks but that's their right to do as well. It sucks and I'd love to see 100% turnout. But the fact is when an option presents itself - Pat Buchannan, Ralph Nader, David Cobb, etc - people just don't buy into. Bame marketing, blame not enough money to advertize, blame the fact that "republican" and "democrat" are so engrained in our minds its impossible to think of a third option - OK, whatever, but I'd like to think we are smarter than that. If you really hate the 2 parties, vote for the third option instead of not voting. Its not that hard. I don't see the point in moving everything to the community. What happens when I relocate a few years from now - now I have to re-mold another community into my image. Great. No thanks. This great country is the way it is and there are enough of us who like it. Authoritarian mandates? What authoritarian mandates? If you don't there are other countries with political systems you might enjoy - but I bet you might have to give up a few of the freedoms you enjoy here right now.
It's an economy of scale, too. Something paid for by a few thousand people for the benefit of those people will cost a certain amount. Something paid for by a larger group of people, like a few million, should cost less per person and achieve the same per-person results, sometimes drastically cheaper.
Also remember, the government didn't use to tax in the manner that they do now, or nearly as heavily as they do now. Taxes were predominately put upon imports, and that paid for the government. It wasn't until the 20th Century that an income tax successfully stuck against the populace from the Federal level.
I don't believe that anarchy would work any better than communism worked. Anarchy would require everyone to behave else things would degenerate into violent chaos as individuals who have a desire to achieve more, posess more, or have more status than others would exploit a lack of authority defined from the people to achieve their gains. Government perpetuates law enforcement and thus the possibility for recourse or retribution if an individual seeks gain at the peril of others, and I don't believe that society can ever do without that, as much as it would be utopian if it could be achieved.
Back to your original argument, wouldn't, "...the people involved...work[ing] together to make their own roads..." be a form of Government itself?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The Republicans pay lip service to small government, fiscal responsibility, and strong family, but often act in ways conter to these ideals.
The Democrats pay lip service to civil liberties, social justice, and defending the "little guy", but often act in ways counter to these ideals.
The Libertarians pay lip service to freedom, but work for a society that is essentially a neo-fuedalism: the amont of power and rights you have is based on how much land you own and wealth you have. If you're not born to land, weath, and oppertunity-- well, sucks to be you, because there's no one to protect your freedom from those that have these forms of power.
The Greens pay lip service to enviornmental protection and social justice, but care more about ideological purity than the actual results of their actions. Thus, their actions often have results that are clearly counter to their aims, but because they're right dammit they do them anyway. They care more about being ideologically correct than about making a real difference for good.
Choosing a political party is just a matter of deciding who's lies are prettier and more appealing.
I would love a party that was fiscally responsible, beleived in personal freedom, social justice, enviornmental responsibility, supported small buisiness, supported real family values (i.e. NOT including "hatred" and "intolerance" and "close-mindedness"), was anti-corruption in government and business and supported government that did what was absolutely neccesary for a strong society, but no more than that. I doubt I will ever see such an animal. (well, one may come along that pays lip service to all these things, but more than that? Not bloody likely.)
4. Your brain considers every item that is compatible with the majority of its information in a given subject area to be correct and every item that is contradictory to its information to be incorrect. As a result, the brain has no internal way to know which items of its information are correct representations of the real world and which are not.
Yes, we do have an internal way to know which items are correct representations of the real world. It's an epistomological philosophy called science, and though it is a slow process requiring rigor and mental discipline, it works quite well. In fact, I would say it is the only way to have any certainty in knowledge.
The fruits of science are still fairly limited. We jave a fairly large pool of knowledge concerning chemistry and physics; we know a little less about biology; and we know almost nothing of sociology and psychology (outside of a few biological facts and a few statistics).
How do I know there is a large congruence between science and the real world? The results of that scientific knowledge are everywhere, in airplanes and longer life and jam and computers and interplanetary exploration and jam (more jam, perhaps) and big fuckoff buildings and psychological manipulation by politicians ("spin").
Granted, the fundamental basis of science is that scientific knowledge is subject to subtle or radical change as new evidence surfaces; but, we do have a fundamental tool for objectively gaining knowledge about our universe.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
As ideological mantras go, "leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" seems like a pretty good one to me.
Who is your grandfather, and why should we care what he has written?
As a psychologist, I need to have a name. Citation is more important. His name means nothing to me (I've read a fair bit of psychology-related research, too), so I am going to need some information.
Look, I'm not trying to be rude, but as a sibling poster pointed out, this doesn't exactly jive with what I know to be currently accepted theory about information processing in the human mind.
One thing the human brain does VERY well is pattern matching as pattern discrimination. Consider the idea of facial recognition. This is computationally intensive. Humans do it almost instantly in most cases. It is also capable of discriminating between two similar patterns in a fraction of a second (sorting tasks have demonstrated this quite conclusively).
Very little is actually known about how we process information because we can't get a handle on it all. MRI's are helping, but haven't solved a lot of the problems that we face.
I would therefore appreciate some more information about how these conclusions were reached and what the research supporting them is like.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I live with the reality that exists or has been demonstrated, rather than with fantasy. We've seen what happens without government. Somalia. Afganistan. The Middle East, before Europe attempted to assert itself.
With no government, people attempt to take power. It happens in the form of dictatorships, theocracies, 'councils' of those looking to gain, etc.
Anarchy is great, in theory. Unfortunately as soon as you add people to the mix, then you have disagreements, which leads to fights. On a large enough scale you develop factions, which lead to direct conflict, action, and violence. And, you keep getting stuck with some form of organization, which is government.
I'd rather have a potentially just government that actually has laws to protect me from other individuals and from itself, even if it doesn't do the best job of it, than to have no law.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It's called the confirmation bias, and it happens to everyone. Even me.
Whenever you see information, your brain is hard-wired to interpret that information as best fits your current conclusions, and to forget or ignore parts of that information that don't fit as well.
Once you know the confirmation bias is there, however, you can more easily see yourself doing it, and perhaps mitigate the effects more easily. But it's still there!
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Some Christians, for example, might have a visceral reaction to the presentation of logical or scientific errors in the Bible; but at the same time, a non-believer would have a similar response to a believer's unshakable claim to a real spiritual presence in his or her life. In both cases the believer and non-believer are faced with information that threatens their ideas of the constitution of reality. But they're more than ideas. These beliefs are part of the fabric of each person's world -- they are the frame for experiencing and understanding space and time. Threats to faith (in God's existence or his absence) threaten one's sense of well-being.
Political beliefs, which may or may not be an extension of religious ones, are also a part of one's ideas about the structure of the world. For some, religious belief might tell them how they relate to God and the cosmos and the individuals they know in their lives. Political beliefs, though, tell them how institutions relate to one another and to individuals. Most likely, these political beliefs are an extension of religious ones, but they don't have to be. Threats to political beliefs like threats to political ones mess with people's core concepts of how the world is put together.
But this makes sense. A visceral reaction to contradictory information is a natural and even helpful response most of the time. You can't go around constantly re-evaluating what you believe and then changing your course of action -- that will make you completely ineffectual or crazy.
"Partisan".
Republicans are the only people who use this word, they and newscasters. It's a lovely thing, because they only use it as a term for people who call them liars.
As for the "balanced" folk, the newscasters, the majority of Americans: the truth, reality, the right answers, call it what you will, is not determined by looking at the "left" and the "right" and finding with certitute that reality lies somewhere in the middle, with liars hedged all about it on "both" "sides".
There are two sides in today's reality, the rightists with Bush as their titular head, and everyone else in the world, which the rightists term the "left".
That's why the Democrats are such a mess. They're absolutely everyone else that isn't Bush. They aren't a side, they're the majority of us, the contrarians to Bush's view of reality.
The rightists are monomaniacs, magical thinkers, borderline psychopathic personalities. They can't change their minds; it's not a concept they can understand. They have the truth, and everyone else can go to hell. Evidence, science, exposure, error, nothing can reach them. They lack empathy and think it a strength.
Bush and his co-thinkers have been wrong on the environment, tax cuts, terrorism, civil rights, causus belli, voting machines, the Swift Boat and Murtha smears, privacy, education, regulation, disaster relief, military reform, anti-missle tech, reactivating nuke weapon building, the UN, diplomacy, the powers of the executive, secret prisons, torture flights, torture, kidnapping, lying about same, secret executions, unpersoning American citizens in secret, being wrong about damned near every terrorist arrest and imprisonment, having the JAG's turn against him, the CIA turn against him, finally the military turn against him, the destruction of our preparedness for war, hiding personal military misconduct, wilderness preservation, the FCC, the internet(s), the Clinton's stealing furniture (Bush at least admitted they were wrong aboutthat, but who heard the retraction?, redistricting out of turn, bribery, treason in outing CIA ops for revenge, destroying the budget through tax cuts, borrowing from everywhere, on and on and on. He recognizes no error, no mistakes. At the "Q&A" last Monday, a student asked him why he cut education and student loans. He look confused, and denied he did it. Magical thinking. He can lie and not think it lying. This is the worst kind of madness. He enjoys lying. He thinks it artful. He laughs out loud as he fabricates, badly, on the fly.
There is nothing like this list of crimes against sanity on the "other" side. The truth is not in the middle, and both "partisan" sides are not equal in mendacity. The war in Iraq will cost two trillion at the end.We're broke. He's lying. All the 'pubs, even McCain, are lying even to this minute. The "other side" still thinks that they are playing a gentleman's game, as I watched the Alito hearings. They just don't understand what they are up against.
It's easy to play the fallacy of the false middle. It makes one seem wise, and has the advantage of relieving one of the hard work of making judgements based on actual knowledge. Reporters of the new school use it constantly. Thusly:
"Bush said today that the sky is green. Some Democratic spokesmen have said that the President is not being straight with the American people. Here are three talking heads to tell you why they are wrong."
All reporting thereforward is based on the Green Sky world, with occasional fillips of quotes from "partisans" saying that he might not be right. Entire cable networks dedicate there time to Green Sky stories, and it becomes the truth, inextricable. Later, geniuses talk about how both the Blue Sky and Green Sky "proponents" have not told the truth, and that they are addicted to their positions and their combat.
But the sky is fucking BLUE. It's not blue-green.
Unfortunately many criminals have poor impulse control and critical reasoning... it's doubtful that they would consider something like this when it would mean having to travel somewhere else and delay their crime.
Virtually no criminal expects to be caught, which removes many of the things that rational people would see as deterrants (ie the death penalty).
I'd make a crappy criminal.
Studies show that where politics involve more than 2 sides, people must actually justify their arguments rather than bash and demonize the other side, as there is no simple "other side" to blame for everything wrong.
Ofcourse, this is utterly unimagineable for people living in the US, and I will be flamed into oblivion being named labeled both Neocon, Liberal and what not.
Since I'll probably get bashed however I put this, let me put it this way: There's no politics or democracy in the US, only corrupt government and manipulation of the public. There, I said it. I have karma to burn.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Which is the exact reason gun laws don't work, only the law-abiding obey them. Do you really think that someone that has decided to rob or murder is concerned about breaking a gun law?
Douglas Adams summed this up quite well.
'On [the robot's] world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.'"
'Odd,' said Arthur, 'I thought you said it was a democracy.'
'I did,' said Ford, 'It is.'
'So,' said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, 'why don't the people get rid of the lizards?'
'It honestly doesn't occur to them,' said Ford. 'They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.'
'You mean they actually vote for the lizards?'
'Oh yes,' said Ford with a shrug, 'of course.'
'But,' said Arthur, going for the big one again, 'why?'
'Because if they didn't vote for a lizard,' said Ford, 'the wrong lizard might get in'"