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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."
It took 5000 years to come to this conclusion?
Maybe this explains why religion persists in the face of logic, it was here before science.
This is the most amazing thing I've seen since I founded Slashdot.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Wait, you mean Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11? Then why did you guys invade Iraq?
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
Why not extend the slant, which wasn't present in the article, to go both ways? I can't tell you how many people I know who believe Gore won Florida and base it on the idea that major media sources verified it. You can go show them the opposite and they don't care.
What it comes down to is this, people are more inclined to believe stories which correspond to what they already believe to be true, even if the evidence against such a belief is overwhelming. It is all about change and accepting mistakes. There are too many people resistant to change and resistant to admitting mistakes.
So when informing the public about false information, one should avoid using negations?
Instead of saying "Saddam Hussein was not involved in 9/11.", you should instead say something like "It was al-qaida, who didn't particularly like Saddam Hussein, that were responsible for 9/11."
- These characters were randomly selected.
"Conspiracy Theories"
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
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
interests within our government and defense industry worked VERY HARD on inventing and perpetuating it. And our corporate media did their usual lapdog routine, and went along without questioning anything.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
That link is to the second page, for those that like to read from the start here is the first page
It seems that unless you have an account you can't click the links on the page to go back to the first page, but you can click next (from the first) and you can get to either page externally. Don't ask me why.
Actually, religion persists because of "common sense," which this article seems to help demonstrate. The problem is that commonly passes as "sense" is not very logically sound. Common sense is not a great tool for discovering the truth.
This is why the scientific method is so invaluable
Too bad most people are scientifically illiterate.
There are many stupid people who will believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of proof. They will generally want to force you to believe what they believe even if you have proof that directly contradicts them. And, if you refuse to believe, they may try to silence.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
No you dim witted troll, he said that religion is a man made construction around faith. He also said that faith is a belief beyond proof that something more exists. He also claimed that science has had many leaps of faiths that have lead to logical foundation throughout its existence. He never said that God was a man-made construction, only that the rituals to worship and appease God might be man-made around the faith that a creator exists.
Some of you people are so intent on being snide that you don't even read the post you're responding to. (It makes you look like a real dumb ass.) I hope someone with some common sense mods you down, even if they agree with you're slashdot-populist message. Straw manning someone to ridicule them is unnecessary.
"I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I've never had an affair with her." He should have just said "I went to lunch with my wife.. we had a cigar".
It amazes me how actually looking and trying to find out the answer is looked down upon by religious people, when just deciding that some superman in the sky sneezed everything into existence is defended so vociferously.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
Kind of hard to lose that one, don't you think?
There are many decent arguments both for and against the veracity of religion
Please list your arguments for religion. I'll start for you:
1 The Bible says so!
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.
...given the fact that we only use ten percent of our brains. :)
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Spanish-American War, and then the resulting Phillipine insurrection, which we both won. All on our own.
D-day? Battle of Midway, June 1942? 'Battle' of the Atlantic 1941-1943?
Battle of the Ardennes, December 1944. 101st Airborne held out for ~1 week against a numerically and technologically super ior German force before being relieved by Patton's 3rd Army. And no, the USAF(technically at the time the Army Air Corps) was not involved because there was bad weather during that week. (A big part of the reason the Germans launched the offensive then was the forceast called for bad weather). Also held out in Wake Island, Luzon and Corrigedor(sp?) for a while. Yes, the garrisons eventually surrendered, just like every large force of every combatant that has been cut off from supplies did for the last 200 years. If you have a counterexample, I would like to see it.
The US had beaten the North Vietnamese on the battlefield in every single major engagement when they were deployed. Even after the bulk of US ground forces left and all that was left was advisors and air support. The '72 NVA offensive failed. It was only after the US stopped funding the puppet South Vietnamese regime in '75 that they collapsed.
If you don't agree with my assements I would like to what other countries have been so much 'better' than the US.
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
The US had beaten the North Vietnamese on the battlefield in every single major engagement when they were deployed. Even after the bulk of US ground forces left and all that was left was advisors and air support. The '72 NVA offensive failed. It was only after the US stopped funding the puppet South Vietnamese regime in '75 that they collapsed.
Following your much appreciated defense of U.S. military capability*, I have to point out an important lesson that is relavent today: We may have won every battle of Vietnam, but we still lost the war. Because in a guerilla war, winning battles in the field is not as important. Being able to crush the enemy when they dare to stand and fight is meaningless when the survivors, the smart ones, will just fade in the face of the attack and blend back into the population. The same holds true in Iraq, which is why invading Falluja was both a cakewalk and a fool's errand. Our forces far outmatch the insurgents, and that hardly matters for victory. It's very frustrating for those who want military solutions for everything, who think the problem with Vietnam is that we didn't spend enough blood and treasure, but it's a lesson we'll have to learn.
* I liked the part where the OP said the U.S. only attacks when it has overwhelming force. Duh, because that's a good strategy for winning! The primary strength of our armed forces is logistics, the ability to move our forces to where they are needed, and to keep them supplied, and to take ground piece by piece by dropping shit-tons of firepower on it. It's how the North won the Civil War against superior Southern generals, it's how we kept the march across France going, and it's what our last Secretary of Defense decided to throw out the window because he thought he knew better.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
So Nobody has ever ODed on Religion...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown The Jonestown suicide/massacre would seem to be a counterexample to that.
There are also countless examples through-out history of people that have died or killed themselves for their religion
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
The idea that faith is a belief beyond proof is a relatively recent one (in historical terms), and a reaction to the encroachment of reason and science into realms that were previously those of the church. Redefining faith to be a righteous, unwavering belief in the face of rational arguments to the contrary was a defensive reaction on the part of the church, and a fairly effective one, it seems.
Faith, in its original meaning, is loyalty, confidence, trust. "In good faith" means something done with loyalty to a cause or agreement. One has faith in one's spouse, faith in one's king, and faith in one's god, meaning you stick with them through thick and thin. Loyalty to your god was exactly the meaning of the 1st commandment - "thou shalt have no other gods before me". Testing one's faith was the same as testing one's loyalty; losing faith meant throwing one's lot in with Baal, or Osiris, or another god who might offer you a better deal, and one could certainly do this without any loss of belief in gods or even in God. One could even forsake God or all gods, without loss of belief - the test of Job was not whether he would lose belief (it's hard to lose belief when suffering from the wrath of God), but whether he would lose loyalty.
In the primitive world, belief in some god was not necessarily irrational; there was an awful lot of stuff that begged for an explanation, and precious little hard knowledge that afforded an explanation. Believing in gods as the ultimate cosmic actors was an entirely different matter than offering one's loyalty to one or another of them.
But in the modern world, the pernicious idea that faith is a belief beyond reason (and that this is somehow a good thing), is dangerously irrational and entirely without merit. Belief must be consistent with reason, or else it is insanity. It is possible to rationally believe in gods (one simply has to define god appropriately), but incredibly most of the "faithful" prefer the insanity option.