Slashdot Mirror
Studies Say Ideology Trumps Facts
Anti-Globalism writes "We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that's not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population that's actively misinformed presents problems when it comes to participating in the national debate, or the democratic process. If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief."
Iraq did have WMD you insensitive clod.
The best example of this is how people of both major parties continue to believe in government.
Witness the current crisis, whose root cause is the concentration of power in Washington, D.C. Everybody proposes all kinds of solutions, and every one of them is to increase the power of government, which caused the problem in the first place!
That's just one example; this vicious cycle of government growth, especially at the federal level, happens in pretty much every area.
Does the second phase of said experiment contain a vote as to whether leaders in said country can now have more than two periods in office to see whether he gets voted in a third and possibly a fourth time?
Seriously, that would be a blast.
and what the hell constitues a "legal" war????
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Question: Even if Obama was a muslim, why on earth would it matter at all?
Because we've read the Koran.
Advice: on VPS providers
Are you recommending that libraries bolt their books onto the shelves? Or glue them down? If you can't remove books from the shelves, the library would be useless! You can't read a book that's jammed into a library shelf with all those other books. You have to remove the book from the shelf first.
Typical Dumb-o-crap, you want all the books to remain permanently on the shelves, instead of removing the books from the shelves and reading them. It is treason to vote for Osama Saddam Hussein Barracks! Vote for McCain! He was a POW, which proves that's he's already better than Barracks For Saddam Hussein And Osama will ever be!
Don't vote for elephants! The smart monkey is on the donkeys! MCAYNE / PAILING 2008!!
Godwin's law has been broken, yet it seems many posts continue.
Really ? Anyone who looks at physics immediately sees the immutable dogma : that the laws of physics exist and are utterly dogmatic, final and eternal. You will find this on page 1 of any decent physics book.
Now this is an abstract and untouchable dogma, so let's get a little bit of dogma that's been in science for over 2000 years already : that the current models for the natural laws are approximations that are, at most, a 10^-30 factor (just some number) removed from the "perfect" models. And that number has been going down, and down and down. But to be honest, there is much more variation in biblical interpretation than there is in variations in physics about the laws of physics, so you could easily call phyics more dogmatic than the bible.
And that's just physics, these laws are more or less "morally neutral" (even if some muslims seem to disagree). If you go looking in economics, those laws that they study, are equally dogmatic, even if much less precisely known, are often very much moral laws. (e.g. the result by John Nash that a capitalistic society without the "thou shalt treat your neighbour as you want to be treated" will catastrophically collapse, could easily be coopted as a "Jesus was right" type argument. Same goes for the "tragedy of the commons" and "capitalism is the best system"-retoric)
More to the point, the world is full of sheeple, they want someone to figure out what their world model should be so they don't have to do all that thinking. The cognitive dissonance resulting from that causes thinking, and thinking just won't do. The end result is that religious folk tend to be dogmatic about their beliefs because to doubt their beliefs causes more dissonance and thinking than it is worth to them. Simple. Sad. True
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
You might want to check the accuracy of that statement. It has most certainly not been proved to be wrong. It has been proven to be extremely slightly inaccurate in a few cases.
Besides, the law that replaced it is VERY similar to newton's law of gravity. It just contains extra terms that correct for a very, VERY insignificant inaccuracy. Note that this factor is always simplified to "1" for any calculation that applies to anything relating to humans.
So what has really happened to newton's law of gravity ? It's been proven that for certain required accuracy, in certain extreme conditions, there's a better - but equally dogmatic (in fact more dogmatic) and non-negotiable - alternative. Which still contains newton's law in it's entirety, but corrects it by a tiny, tiny factor. (you might say that the old dogma is a 99,99999999999999% correct simplification of the new dogma)
You might compare it with Pi. For millenia everybody used the 22/7 approximation (because it's much more useful if you're working with paper instruments and without calculator, not because they necessarily didn't know there were better ones. In fact, several did know there were better approximations, and chose not to use them. The 22/7 approx. was still used in my math classes barely 10 years ago everytime we drew something involving pi in gemoetry). That was a dogma.
That dogma has been "changed" the value of pi to 4 * atan(1), in radians, an infinite series yielding a "real" number. In other words the change of dogma, has "changed" the value of pi from 3.142857... to 3.141587...
To say that the dogma has been changed is perhaps literally true, but the "nature of the beast" hasn't changed. Pi was constant, was about 3.142 and still is about 3.142. In other words, I'd say the dogma is unchanged, we just know the dogma itself better.
The problem is, the same goes for moral laws. "help thy neighbor" is a statement everybody knows, including where it comes from. John Nash proved that if "too many" (the value of "too many" is being thorougly searched for, it certainly doesn't exceed 12%) people don't do that, our society will collapse.
So the "law" "everybody must try to help his/her neighbor, only mistrusting when there is reason to" is changed to "at least 88% of the population must help his neighbor"). Change in dogma. Obviously you'd want to keep well away from that line, esp. since it's a lower bound.
To do what many people here would like to do, to actually change those dogma's, those laws and consequences (e.g. the value of pi) to something else, that will never happen. You can however, destroy many, many, many lives trying to change them. (comminists destroyed at least some 100 million, muslims a billion, attempting to bend reality, and its dogma's, to their will)
According to the MSM
McCain is dropping in the polls despite the FACTS as illustrated below which lays blame for the current economic crisis at the feet of the former democratic president and the current democratic house and senate of which one Barack Obama is now the democratic candidate for president. In these last 2 years the republicans attempted to implement reform but were thwarted by the socialist loving democrats. No the crisis was not created overnight or just in this last term but-
-was initiated by clinton in 1999 and from start to finish is representative of democratic economic ideology
Despite these FACTS, most americans and especially on /fool, are a bunch of dimwitted knee jerk reactionarys who are now blaming republicans for what is essentially and leftist marxist socialist democratic party endeavor from the start
TOP 5 FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MACK CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION RECIPIENTS from 1989 to 2008:
1. Dodd, Christopher J S D-CT $133,900
2. Kerry, John S D-MA $111,000
3. Obama, Barack S D-IL $105,849
4. Clinton, Hillary S D-NY $75,550
5. Kanjorski, Paul E H D-PA $65,500