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Why Myths Persist
lottameez recommends an article in the Washington Post about recent research into the persistence of myths. In short: once a myth has been put out there (e.g., "Saddam Hussein plotted the 9/11 attacks"), denying it can paradoxically reinforce its staying power. Ignoring it doesn't work either — a claim that is unchallenged gains the ring of truth. Over time, "negation tags" fall out of memory: "Saddam didn't plan 9/11" becomes "Saddam planned 9/11." From the article: "The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths... The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind works. Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain uses subconscious 'rules of thumb' that can bias it into thinking that false information is true. Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency."
Negation (in natural language) is a tricky business, even if we forget about the psychological part for a minute. Just to give one example:
Presuppositions - I have seen her again. and I haven't seen her again again. both presuppose that I saw her (before) so large parts of what I say persist under negation.
In addition, results from psycho-linguistic research suggest that negation involves some sort of double processing, that is we transform a negative statement in an equivalent positive one before we further process it. That in all this the negated statement stay activated and is thus reinforced is more than plausible.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
In his book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb calls this the "narrative fallacy". Interesting stuff. Especially when you consider it specifically in realms of (seeming) randomness like finance. Who knows why the market fell yesterday? No one. But you can bet the front page of the Wall Street Journal will have a nice little blurb explaining the cause behind the effect. This little 'narrative' is not easily disprovable and our brains love it! It requires conscious thought and force of will to unlink these types of things and approach them with the level of respect that such unpredictability deserves.
What I want to know is, who in the Administration EVER said that Saddam plotted 9/11? I never heard that said. I have heard people who oppose the Bush Administration say that the Bush Administration said it, but I have never heard a quote from the Bush Administration saying (or implying) it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
This article, and the study it references, is more about how to make people believe lies than about why myths persist. Defining your terms is important, and this just cries out to be misconstrued (and based on what I see in this discussion, it already is being used to foster the tedious "science vs. religion" argument.
The phenomenon being studied is more about how to associate two unrelated pieces of information so that people will begin to think they are connected, or how to plant a lie so that people will eventually believe it to be true. This is nothing new: everyone from politicians to writers to artists to horny teenagers have been doing this forever. The current studies are showing more of the details of how it happens.
Dr. Thompson recognized and clearly defined this phenomenon: make your opponent deny that he rapes barnyard animals and you're home free. "I am not a pigfucker", no matter how true a statement, will not get you elected.
2) I really, really wish it was true.
Is there any other argument for religion left behind? Wait, I forgot, there is that grilled cheese sandwich with Virgin Mary in it. Great.
OK, I've been trolled. I can't believe I am about to do this on Slashdot.
Not everyone who professes to be religious believes in a white robed deity sitting on a cloud chucking thunderbolts. To a logical person, the concept of an anthropomorphic divinity is laughable - if you attribute truly "godlike" qualities to the divine (i.e. God is infinite), things like gender really become kinda silly. (However, I will grant that it certainly makes it easier to conceptualize and discuss - a fiction that people use to make lives easier, much like physicists can use algebra based equations (F = ma) rather than the calculus based ones which are more correct).
The problem is, what the hell language do you use to describe such a thing? You can call it "energy", or the "Force", but that gets you lumped in with the crystal wavers that are often more flaky than your traditional religious types. So you say God, knowing full well that 99% of the people who hear you don't have a clue what you really mean.
So I ask you - does someone who believes in an infinite, unifying principle beyond our current understanding sound to you like a cultist or a scientist?
Don't be so quick to dismiss those who profess to be religious. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds of the last thousand years fall into that category.
I think this is more what the GPP was getting at... However, if not, it is still a good, apt quote in my opinion.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Bush's and Clinton's speeches were virtually identical. The only instance of an administration official even relating Iraq and 9/11 happened well after the war had been approved and had begun, I believe it was Rumsfeld.
m s bullshit. He's a lying bastard too. At least he managed get us stuck in a war.
Rumsfeld related Iraq and 9/11 days after it happened when he suggested we should attack Iraq instead of Afghanistan. As far as public statements, they never explicitly said Saddam caused 9/11, they only mentioned the two things constantly within the same sentence. Dick Cheney went so far as to actually imply a causal relationship, saying Mohammad Atta had met with senior Iraqi officials in Prague just months prior to 9/11. And he even started by saying "I'm not saying that Saddam was involved in plotting 9/11 for certain, but..." What's this article about? How even negating a myth can cause it to be reinforced? Well how about just not saying it's specifically true, just here's a bunch of statements that suggest so?
Strange how if they never said it, so many people believed it. Of course the whole point was to create the connection in people's minds, but to do it in such a way that they couldn't technically be accused of lying.
P.S. I don't care that Clinton used some of the same justifications for his make-Congress-happy-take-attention-from-my-proble
The truth is, Hussein had an obligation to prove that he had destroyed his WMDs. He did possess them before, and by the terms of the ceasefire for Desert Storm, he had to prove to weapons inspectors that they had been neutralized. He failed to do this. For more than a decade. That alone was proper justification for the invasion.
Don't use the weapon inspectors as justification for the invasion when the weapon inspectors' opinion was ignored. The statements made by the admin, particularly Rumsfeld when he said that not only did Iraq have weapons as a certainty, we also "know where they are". No, they didn't. And according to the inspectors, Saddam's weapons program was disabled.
The idea that we attacked Iraq for complicity in 9/11 didn't show up until well after the war had begun, after US troops failed to discover any significant caches of NCB arms. Those that opposed the administration found it to be an effective strawman.
Oh, right, it was a strawman invention of Bush's opponents. And those clever bastards somehow forced Dick Cheney to keep repeating it!
No, the "Iraq is part of the war on terror -- remember 9/11" justification is what the administration started to push harder after the "Iraq has WMDs!" justification fell through. It was part of it all along, it was just second fiddle to the WMD claims which were what were truly effective in gaining support from the populace.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong on this. If anyone can dig up a pre-war speech that accused Hussein of plotting 9/11, I'd love to be corrected.
Enjoy. Try searching for "specific allegation" to get to the part where he can't exactly say Iraq caused 9/11, he just has "credible" intelligence that might imply it.
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