Beliefs Conform To Cultural Identities

DallasMay writes "This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work. From the article: 'In one experiment, Braman queried subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.'"

Comments

One needs to look no further than religion

[fpp]

to know that most people don't base their beliefs on facts. Like there is no evidience for Jesus outside of the Bible.

No shit, Sherlock.

[leftie]

Watch a Christian complete phase out and stop processing info when you point out the the many similarities between Jesus and many other similar shepherd gods in other cultures of that same region of the Eastern Med.

Watch a so-called science-focus skeptic phase out the same way when you point out that a recording of Dallas police broadcast has scientifically proven there were more than 3 shots fired in Dealey Plaza.

Re:The Irony

[stdarg]

I'm sure you can always find "problems" to hyperfocus on.

"Problems", sure, but you can hardly call the things that have been discovered "problems" in the sarcastic scare-quotes sense. The things I've heard about include miscalibrated sensors, locations that got hotter due to the urban heat island effect, huge parts of the world (for instance Siberia I believe) that are purposely excluded, the lack of transparency in the data, the hits to their credibility by switching from global cooling to global warming to global climate change and now back to "anthropogenic global warming", the predicted disappearance of the North Pole reversing and it suddenly growing 26% inexplicably...

I mean you have to be really stubborn not to acknowledge that climate science in general is a very inexact science. It seems to be mostly guesswork. To me, a real scientist is going to say "Look this is what we think will happen 100 years from now but honestly we have almost no certainty in the extent, the causes, or what the effects will really be. We're slowly getting a better picture but it will take time."

Now I have to admit, the publication of the guesswork and the cries for action are not entirely the scientists' fault. You can put a big piece of the blame on the spokespeople of the scientists, namely strict environmentalist politicians and sensationalist journalists who latch onto any scientific report that they even *think* says something scary. I've heard that climatologists never put much stock in the global cooling idea, but you better believe the public heard a lot about it (I was in elementary/middle school at the time and it was a regular topic).

If AGW is happening, dealing with its effects will cost more trillions and trillions of dollars than avoiding it.

You are asking me to take on faith that a band-aid solution at the right time will cost more than preemptively changing the economies and infrastructure of the entire world. I think it's instructive to consider why ships sometimes have to use bilge pumps when it rains, not just when they are damaged and leaking, rather than being designed to keep all water out at all times. Sometimes the band-aid solution really is easier and more efficient.

Surely if you're worried about wasting trillions and trillions of dollars you can write a well researched and well reasoned essay about why we should not reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

I prefer to argue from first principles in this case. A theory needs to be tested at least a few times and shown to be successful before it's used as a basis for policy decisions. Current AGW theories make no useful predictions (that I've heard of) that are testable in a reasonable amount of time (we'd have to wait about a century and measure the sea level), so we cannot base decisions on them. There are individual predictions that come true, but those same models fail to make correct predictions in other cases.

It's really as simple as that. I have no doubt that AGW proponents will work to refine their models and make them more accurate and thus testable in a reasonable amount of time, and then we'll take action.

So get back to me when you can point to a model that has predicted some of the major things happening, all around the world, fairly consistently, for at least 5 years. Say... the rapid disappearance of arctic ice followed by its rapid resurgence, also the unusually strong hurricane season followed by a period of unusual calm, mild winters followed by harsh winters. And it has to be more specific than "yeah ok this theory predicts MAJOR CHANGE, and those are all examples" it has to be "this theory predicts precisely those events happening in roughly the right sequence, and it predicted that stuff *ahead of time*, it wasn't designed with historical data and then measured against more historical data."

Re:A partial solution:

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Heck, I even count a lack of religion, as being a religion (in that it's often a closely held belief with no proof whatsoever).