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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.'"
Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished. That would reveal a big chunk of the world's assholes who can no longer point to the cross or to the Qur'an as justification for their actions.
The articles wisely cite valid questions concerning real-life phenominae. That's healthy debate, and it's a sign that hummanity is capable of "moving on". But there still a large number of "my god is better than your god" nyah-nyahs whose idea of healthy debate is killing others who don't agree with them rather than thinking.
Abolishment of religion won't solve all problems, but it has the highest ratio of simplicty-of-suggestion to worldwide-problems-solved.
>Both groups made their decisions based on the same information.
No they didn't.
They based their decisions on information gathered from outside the experiment - their own life experiences, and applied those experiences to their arguments.
This is surprising?
--
BMO
People thrive on information that reinforces their point of view and reject information that challenge it. How is this news?
That's basically what newspapers and TV stations thrive on.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think any of these individuals are a clean slate so it's not a surprise that they may have strong pre-conceptions that come into play. It's not that "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". Rather they already have some beliefs they consider true which they apply.
It's also no surprise that people in groups do not behave rationally. Even scientists and medical researchers can be downright stupid about things. I was listening to an interesting podcast this morning: http://www.americanscientist.org/science/pub/everything-is-dangerous-a-controversy
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Everyone knows facts have a liberal bias anyway.
Thanks for confirming confirmation bias for me. It was pretty much what I expected anyway...
Insert self-referential sig here.
Not commenting on the debate, but I think it's interesting that in an article about cognitive biases (particularly group cognitive biases) that they don't ever bother to probe the question of how such biases affect things like "scientific consensus," they only view it from the perspective of how such biases affect the freshly germinated views of the uninitated. You would think scientists, being human beings as well, would be in some way subject the same effects, and as long as questions are being raised about the human proclivity for certain viewpoints, someone might stop to wonder "in what ratio do people who go into the environmental sciences tend to be individualist or communitarian, and how is this likely to affect their judgment of related information?"
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
It's spelled "douche bag". And the answer to your question is any student of the Classics. Learn something.
After all, I am strangely colored.
That passage is of dubious authenticity and may be mistransliterated. It also includes other historical mistakes.
Personally, I think the arguments over transliterations (Chrestianos vs Christianos) are misguided since some of the PGM use "Chrestos" in clear place of "Christos" ("Christos" is Hebrew "Messiah" translated into Greek while "Chrestos" is Greek for "The Useful One" though Hans Dieter Betz translates as "The Most Excellent" in context).
However, the historical errors by Tacitus suggest he was not working from actual records, but perhaps simply entering a sidebar as to what the Christians said about the founding of their sect. Consequently I am not prepared to use it as evidence of Jesus's existance.
My own view is that Christianity began as a synthetic religion between somewhat Hellenized Jewish sects and Hellenistic mystery cults. I think the Gospels bear the same relationship to Christianity as the Asinus Aureus (as Augustine called it) bore to the Cult of Isis. That doesn't devalue the work as a mythological basis for religion and in fact may strengthen its pedigree. Such an interpretation however flies in the face of literalism.
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From TFA, one of the group is defined by:"Some embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise. They are labeled the 'individualistic' group."
Shock horror, the people who embrace new technology were more likely to embrace a new piece of technology...
This is almost a zero-information experiment. The definitions classified the results that were then analysed against the classifications. In other news, when we classified coin tosses into a "heads" group and a "tails" group, we found that the "heads" group contained 100% heads results, no matter how many times the coin was tossed ... we conclude therefore that randomness is an illusion.
The participants were not presented with "facts", they were presented with "claimed facts" which they had to both interpret and assess. (A process called "reading" and "understanding".) That the participants were able ahead-of-time to describe the foibles of their assessment strategies (that one group was able to say it was more amenable to new technology) merely shows that the participants were pretty good at reflecting on their own decision strategies.
Next...
We conducted a study of the nanotechnology risk- benefit perceptions of a diverse sample of 1,600 americans. The subjects’ worldviews had been previously measured using scales developed for the study of the cultural cognition of risk (Kahan, Slovic, Braman, Gastil & Mertz 2007; Kahan et al. in press). Those scales characterize individuals’ values along two dimensions: “hierarchy-egali- tarianism,” which measures how much subject’s value equality versus clearly delineated forms of social authority; and “individualism-communi- tarianism,” which measures how much they value individual interests versus collective ones.
They framed the questions in what looked like a newspaper article, which I thought was pretty ingenious. The headlines were: "Scientists Call for More Research on Nanotechnology Consumer Goods", "Scientists Call for More Research on Use of Nanotechnology in Government Regulation of Air Pollution", "Scientists Call for More Research on Market Potential of Nanotechnology for Cleaning Environment", and "Scientists Call for More Research on Potential Use of Nanotechnology to Fight Enemies at Home and Abroad"
Then there's a little inset containing the exact same information about Nanotechnology, and the outcomes based on their profiles remained accurate. This is sort of confirmation on the importance of framing questions to get the desired response, but I wouldn't call it a crap study. It shows that we are still a long way from the enlightenment dream of basing our reasoning on hard facts instead of bias and anecdotes. And you can bet your ass that the marketing companies that run the country are all too glad of this fact.
http://www.culturalcognition.net/storage/nano_090225_research_brief_kahan_nl1.pdf
You Satan worshiping scientists!
This article just confirms the suspicions I've had about academia all along.
Y'all will probably kill my karma for this, but: Established dogma is more acceptable than a new theory. Hear me out! If it were proven that "god is in the machine" (ex deus machina) to a group of individuals that don't believe in god but rather; a higher belief in an ultimate creator (one who creates and steps back allowing the course of events to fall as they may), then said group would obviously reject any belief, theory or proof that god is alive and well and influences their daily lives. Think about it. If I were to raise you to believe that god exists but not as a deciding factor but rather as an observer of his experiment, would you not reject out of hand any other individual that came along and insisted that the very same guiding hand that created you is determining which way you should/will live your life?
This is what I believe the author of this article is premising. Sorry to ramble. I hope you can see what I'm attempting to hypothesize.
"Bible thumpers" generally only care about early 17th century English. You would be hard pressed to find a bible thumper that knows Latin.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Wow! They found differences between individualist and collectivist cultures in their acceptance of nanotechnology!
Someone could write a really cool piece of scifi based on this idea.
Oh wait...
I am aware that the majority of scholars think Jesus existed. However, this strikes me as evidence of what this thread is about rather than a matter of solid evidence. I think this is for a couple of reasons:
1) Christians of course want to think that Jesus existed.
2) Atheistic approaches tend to assume that it is simpler to assume that Jesus was a great teacher than that everything written about him was pseudopigraphic or mythological in origins.
My reason for saying there is no real reliable evidence however comes from concluding (by studying Hellenistic religions) that basic outline of the story of Christ is probably mythological instead of factual, and that it combines pre-existing threads from a number of other Hellenistic religions. Secondly, there seems to have been a very lively tradition of writing what were essentially novels about religious subjects as a means of religious teaching (Apuleius's Metamorphosis/Asinus Aureus is a good example of that). This sort of thing has been called "pseudopigrapha" when the authorship is falsely attributed.
Furthermore, when you actually look at Paul's epistles, they are all over the place in which Hellenistic religions they incorporate pieces of. His general approach seems to be to incorporate the basic religious terminology and cosmology of whoever he is writing to.
So when we strip all of these things which seem to come from other sources away (the Trinity from Plato, the Archons of the Ages from various Hellenistic Gnostic cults, the Last Supper as possibly having Dionysian origins, the death and resurrection on Easter as the pagan sacrifice of world renewal), we are really left with nothing new under the sun.
I am not dismissing the possibility of Jesus's existence entirely. However, I am saying that it is more fruitful to look at Christianity as an outgrowth of the Hellenistic world in general than the outgrowth of one man's teachings, and that I have no immediate understanding of the exact circumstance of the formation of Christianity in the first place (our records until really near the end of the Hellenistic era are remarkably sparse).
BTW, I would also go further. I think that some of this Roman literature about other Hellenistic religions was formative on Christianity as well. The development of the Blood Libel really seems to have its origins in Roman literature such as that of Lucan, Apuleis, Horace, etc. If Christianity is seen as having its origins in a syncretic, Hellenistic branch of Judaism, then I think more problems are solved than created. The only problem created is a doubt as to whether Christ actually existed.
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I generally consider Heisenberg (author of "Physics and Philosophy") to be one of the finest scientists of the twentieth century. However, I am very much aware of how fast science is moving and so may be slightly unsure of my position on the matter at the moment.....
Seriously, Heisenberg's discussion of the process of formation scientific theory is the clearest work I have ever seen on the subject. The man was a real genius in this regard and certainly comparable to both Einstein and Feynman.
One of the clearest examples he makes in the book is the comparison between Heraclitus's selection of fire as the prima materia and Einstein's equation of E=mc^2. Einstein, Heisenberg tells us, basically took Heraclitus's statement and quantified it, telling us how much of Heraclitus's fire was used to make up the rest of matter.
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When was the last time you changed your mind about a significant, foundational piece of data in your life?
I'm not talking about an uncertainty being made resolute on one side of the fence or the other.
I'm talking about a belief you once held to be true and around which you based your daily decision-making processes and then after review, realized that you were wrong and then took steps to alter your behavior accordingly.
Now, if you have experienced that, ask yourself the following. . .
Did you change your mind because of your own curiosity, reasoning and data collection OR because your tribe and its associated authority figures changed their minds and you felt compelled to follow suit?
Are you the sort of person who switches back and forth between beliefs easily?
Are you the sort of person who refuses to change belief systems out of fear of appearing or feeling weak-minded?
Do you lie to yourself in order to take the edge off uncomfortable truths?
Are you lying to yourself right now about any of the answers to these questions?
Just asking.
-FL
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.
No, the article describes an experiment that shows that people don't necessarily trust scientists to get things right, and the degree of the trust varies by culture. This is hardly surprising. Scientists are people, and one's opinions about people tends to be a result of your interactions with people around you, most of whom are generally from your own culture. Most of what culture is is the result of such interactions. How could your culture not affect what you expect to see from a group of people?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
So, I was that guy in college who double majored in unrelated subjects. Chemistry and Religion. Then went on to a handful of jobs in unrelated fields. I get bored easily and put a lot of thought into some esoteric things that no one cares about.
As you look very closely at how belief functions in society, it becomes extremely obvious that belief in and of itself is not rational. It's a functional experience. This is true for all people, even scientists (reason is accepted because it's useful way of achieving a goal) Is a set of norms and beliefs useful for the person whom is called to believe? If answer is no, then they won't accept the belief structure or they will chose to be willfully ignorant of the subject. If answer is yes, they will accept it without question in so far as narrative can be used to explain any "apparent contradictions" between the belief and reality. The core idea of something being actually true is completely and 100% irrelevant to the evaluation.
As a side note, it appears the experiment cited in the article is useless for describing the problem. You describe nano tech to some people, then it's uses. They reject the tech, if they don't like the uses. Doesn't mean they don't BELIEVE the tech is possible, they just don't like it.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Social psychologists say no shit, thanks for finally hearing about our field.
Yes he read the study and he came to the conclusion that the study was wrong because it conflicted with his belief. Regardless of what the study actually says, because the GP believes there is no danger from being detracted by a mobile phone.
This is the reason the story is tagged "confirmation bias"
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Tag the summary flamebait and be done with it.
Nothing to see here.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Years ago I was taught there are 3 takes on reality: the way you see it, the way you want it to be, and the way it really is. TFA seems to be covering absoulutely nothing new in the world. That this comes as a surprise to anyone is the only newsworthy aspect of the story. It's how humans operate for the most part.
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.
I'm not religious, but I "phase out" at that, too. The problem is that these "similarities" are an invention of a whacked-out conspiracy nut who basically just pulled them out of his ass. Non-religious people who buy into it are simply swallowing another form of dogma.
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.
If you think that a recording of police broadcasts can "scientifically prove" anything, then you don't really understand what that phrase means.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that your two examples have in common is that they're based on ignorance. Anyone capable of doing basic research and applying simple logic should reject both claims.
The behavioral phenomenon is called "cognitive dissonance".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
I like how the Picture they show for the climate change article is a big scary looking cooling tower. What makes me laugh is the cloud of water vapor emanating from the stack would be mistaken by many as environmentally harmful smoke.
A premise of the social sciences is that human social behavior can be studied from outside, as if the person observing the social behavior is not part of society, an impartial alien observer. I think that there is an important consequence of thinking like a social scientist that is often overlooked. I believe that this type of thinking, where one observes society from the outside encourages passivity in the observer. Specifically, in the case of TFA, it is found that people filter their scientific views through a political spectrum, that they don't use logic, reason, and observation to form their opinions, that in fact many of the participants in the study are quite irrational. A person who views society from the outside, through the lens of social science might shrug their shoulders and think "hmmm....that's interesting. I guess people aren't as rational as we believe them to be.". And if enough of us think this way, a sense of profound apathy and passivity about our civilization becomes widespread.
I however have a problem with this passive outside view. In my opinion, if the participants in the study were behaving irrationally when forming opinions, then they should be ashamed of themselves!. Our civilization, our democracy depends on rational and logical decision making on the part of the public. If too many of us abandon logic and reason, then our democracy will begin to make increasingly bad and irrational decisions. If too many of us start to believe that there are no facts, only opinions, then democratic dialog between citizens will become increasingly difficult. Instead of debating based on a common set of facts, we will "debate" by shouting opinions back and forth at each other, with little reason and logic.
I do believe that the social sciences have their place, and that some useful insights can be gained from them. But I also believe that the ascendancy of the social sciences to the top of our academic pyramid has had damaging consequences, which if left unchecked could result in societal decay, intellectually, socially, and economically. We must remember that we are all part of this civilization, and that the willful ignorance of our fellow citizens can and will affect us. Though we are all free to think and believe whatever we want, there are some beliefs and ways of thinking that are worthy of shame.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Who in their right mind would read a Latin bible? If you wanted to get down to the root language, The Old Testament was written in ancient Hebrew, and the new testament was written in Greek. Which went on to be translated into the various languages and versions you see today. KJV is just one of many English translations available today, having both Formal and Dynamic equivalence.
The authenticity is also not at question of the various copies of the original scrolls, and by various I mean over 5600 original copies have been found, at 99.5% accuracy between them. There was also less than 100 years of time between the original and the earliest copy we have, however. For reference, Homer (The Iliad), only had 643 original copies, and at 95% accuracy! The time span between writing date and the earliest copy we have is 500 years. The works of Plato, a measly 7 copies found, at a non-measured accuracy. The time span between the copy and the original was over 1200 years. Many were willingly martyred within the first few hundred years, especially in the case of the eye witnesses at the time.
The theory of Jesus never existing is not a view widely held by historians either. r1 - r2
"Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus"
ABSTRACT:
People tend not to listen to your message if they view it as threatening to their livelihood, their community, or their ego.
--
Toro
Wow, you mean people don't like ideas that threaten them?
Hoo wud hav thunk it... :-P
Look, I grew up in a religious cult. Got ut, but do know shit a lot about the mechanics of belief. This is not news, although it may be verification of something caled "Milton's Demon", which is like an osmotic filter for thoughts and facts that do not fit your own world view.
This pattern of behaviour and associated topics like cognotive dissonance are as old as 'we' are.
Seeing as when they compiled the bible, they packed together all of authoritative, trustworthy written documents that gave an account of Jesus' life or spoke of the man, I'd say it's probably going to be pretty hard to find a "authoritative" source which is not present in the Bible. Of course, there are other written documents which mention then man. If you are looking for physical evidence, what kind of evidence are you looking for? He was a guy that lived 2000 years ago. He didn't build or have built monuments in his name, and he spoke out against such things (not that it's stopped "Christians" from doing it since then, but that's another argument). Literature is pretty much the only proof we have that any people in history really existed (we have bones in tombs, but how do we know they are who the literature says they are, and even if we did know, how would that verify other aspects of the literature). If you want to throw out the Bible as proof, what's to stop you from throwing out other literature?
I like these questions, Slashdot needs a like button.
Translated: "In a laboratory setting, we demonstrated we couldn't magically persuade people of whatever we wanted about hot-button issues by selectively presenting facts."
Good.
My own view is that Christianity began as a synthetic religion between somewhat Hellenized Jewish sects and Hellenistic mystery cults. I think the Gospels bear the same relationship to Christianity as the Asinus Aureus (as Augustine called it) bore to the Cult of Isis.
That's a very interesting analogy.
Is that pronounced 'Brahman' by any chance?
The people who did this experiment started out with a hypothesis (a belief). Their findings ("the facts") confirmed it, in their opinion.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Watch c6gunner prove my point
This...
"whacked-out conspiracy nut who basically just pulled them out of his ass" ...is logical fallacy called an ad hominem argument. You attack me with insults, and you never address the statement I made.
Police broadcasts recordings can be analyzed sound experts. There's a sub-discipline of physics which studies sound. The police recordings of the broadcasts coming from the motorcycles around the motorcade in Dealy Plaza can be analyzed just like any recording can be analyzed for the sounds of gunshots. There were sounds of more than 3 gunshots in those Dallas police broadcast recording.
A few days ago, there was an article in the NYT (titled "Are there secular reasons?") which is closely related, and worth reading. Basically, it argues that secular reasons alone (which we call "reason" here) cannot lead to any action. Science tells us facts, but they are useless without beliefs which set goals and allow us to use the facts to act in the pursuit of these goals.
Also related, the very old (16th century) quote from Rabelais: "Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme" ("Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul").
We are made of both beliefs and reason, and need both. It's no surprise that different people mix these two aspects in different ways, and that many give so much more weight to beliefs that it blurs their view of facts.
" people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief "
Facts don't require weight, they come with their own. Beliefs, having no solid anchor in reality, require the appearance of a basis in reality to remain believable.
Facts derive from data, they just 'are', beliefs are constructed a priori and adjusted as needed, the open ends of which are labeled and relabeled as needed as 'evidence' that supports the belief. The a priori belief is necessary so we can classify an observation, something far more necessary than getting it right the first time.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves
"Known to be a masterpiece of freethought literature, The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors has been out of print but sought after for many years. A small part of it was reprinted in The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You to Read in 1994, thereby causing renewed interest. Many people are unaware that before Christianity there were 15 other religions that also had a savior who died for their sins, then arose from the dead. Graves gives all the details inside, plus much more found in common like the immaculate conception of the gods, virgin born gods, magi, shepherds and angels who visit the infant saviors, the birthday of the gods being December 25th, plus an explanation as to how Jesus began to be worshipped as a God..."
http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Sixteen-Crucified-Saviors-Christianity/dp/1585090182
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.
A quick google brought me to a paper that said the chance of the shot being random noise was 0.037 or in other worlds 1:27. That's not much, but far away from a solid irrefutable proof that it was a real gunshot, especially considering that other evidence seems to be missing (shooter, bullet, bullethole, ...). Which would leave me to conclude that there is no solid evidence for more then three shots and that this is simply a case of anomaly hunting, i.e. when you search long enough, you are guaranteed to find something that is unlikely to have happened.
That's a strawman argument. People are for most part not proclaiming that piracy is good and should be practices by everybody, but that it is doing no harm or at least far less harm then the media companies want you to believe and well, looking at the evidence seems to confirm that as movie industry profits are still on the rise.
I am an atheist and I never saw any actual evidence that Christ was real, as in he actually physically existed ever at all. The ideas that are assigned to him are obviously much older than he himself, Plato and Diogenes come to mind (note how both of those are tied to Socrates.)
No, I never saw evidence that Jesus existed, so I take it with a huge grain of salt, his actual physical existence, forget about him being a god.
You can't handle the truth.
Penn Gillette turned me around on this issue.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Talk about confirmation bias. The study only "proves" confirmation bias to those looking for it. The irony! Look again. See that word "values" there? That's important, because it has meaning that goes beyond "belief" or "religion." It means "what people hold dear." A little example. Let's say you've been informed that your significant other has a life-threatening illness. Her (or his) chance of survival is 2%. Terrible, right? Now, let's tell you about the new experimental treatment, and its pros and cons. Now, let me tell this to your worst enemy. How do you think he's going to react? Back to climate science. Similarly, that 2% is the same 2% dissent we've got in climate science (which may be underestimated by its proponents, but we'll let it stand). For those whose lives and livelihoods depend upon the climate staying right where it is, they're gonna talk about that 2% like it's nothing. And for those whose lives and livelihoods would be ruined if they had to change and accommodate the long run (a lot of big businesses on the quarterly-profit-increase treadmill) they are going to talk up that 2% dissenting opinion. And really, since when did truth belong to the majority? That is merely the realm of popularity. When the majority is caught with their pants down fixing statistics to drum up more evidence, and using sources that may be flawed (NASA climate data?) that 2% begins to look less crazy. I dunno, this isn't really news.
Thanks for confirming confirmation bias [wikipedia.org] for me. It was pretty much what I expected anyway...
I know what you mean. I believe in confirmation bias. That's why I only acknowledge evidence for it...
So it's not really an ideal thing to be dumping into the atmosphere either. Once the fuel cell cars come along, I hope they'll have condensers. Of course this means that the roads will be wet and slick ALL the time.
I piss off bigots.
Thus proving the premise of TFA
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
In my view, the best evidence of these powers is that the disciples were all killed for claiming Jesus rose from the dead, but since they all claimed to be eyewitnesses they would have had to have known it was a lie. In my experience people don't cheerfully and joyfully allow themselves to be executed for something they KNOW to be false. I find their faith in a life after death, flowing from their experience, in the face of certain death to be compelling.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
This...
"whacked-out conspiracy nut who basically just pulled them out of his ass" ...is logical fallacy called an ad hominem argument.
No, it's a statement of fact.
You attack me with insults, and you never address the statement I made.
I wasn't referring to you - I was referring to the originator of that argument, who really IS a whacked-out conspiracy nut. I had assumed that you were simply misguided, although I'm starting to change my mind.
The police recordings of the broadcasts coming from the motorcycles around the motorcade in Dealy Plaza can be analyzed just like any recording can be analyzed for the sounds of gunshots. There were sounds of more than 3 gunshots in those Dallas police broadcast recording.
That's complete garbage, of course, although thanks to you I've now learned about yet another piece of Conspiracy Theory lore. D.B. Thomas' "paper" was thoroughly trounced by O'Dell, and has been dismissed by anyone who isn't already a CT nut. Subsequent research has further decimated those claims. You're grasping at straws. Please don't respond any more, if you intend to continue to lie.
They didn't. They gathered together *all* stories they had and then picked the ones they liked. So at the very least there's a ton of writing which isn't in the bible. And academic researches generally assume that two of the gospels were written much later and were largely based on the other two (with some random additions).
Facts are not goals. Thought and reasoning is driven by goals. The fact that people who have different goals make different decisions based on the same facts doesn't automatically mean they're *rejecting* those facts, it may mean that they are using those facts *correctly* to determine whether they approve of a development that supports or opposes their goals.
The problem with that particular subject matter - Global Warming - is that people have already been convinced through a smear campaign that the facts were politically motivated. Result is blinkered, heavy filtering of all input relating to global warming simply because they think it's all lies. Not because of any standing beliefs or "cultural identities".
And part of that smear campaign has now convinced them that science in general is a political entity and should be treated as if it's just one little pesky politician that needs banished for good.
I was not arguing the deity of Christ, only that he indeed existed (as well as clarifying the question of Latin translations). I'm not sure where you picked that out of my post.
Also, if you're going to refute someone's statement, at least provide some references and an actual argument other than "I don't have time to prove your obviously wrong evidence (because I said so; everyone knows this stuff, right?), but I will take everything you just said out of context and attempt to invalidate your argument via ad hominem".
I suppose it's also common knowledge that A.C. has a Ph.D. in history and archeology of course.
I've been reading through a lot of the discussions on this article, and I see what I consider to be a blind knee-jerk reaction against the "evils" of religion. Now, probably a lot of you are in the "kill all the stupid people" camp. But for those of us who aren't in to mass murder, we believe that the world has a place for those who have lower IQs or just fundamentally must think about the world differently from those of us who understand what's going on when we compile a Linux kernel. We "rational" people are able to do things like ponder two contradictory ideas at once (well, some of us are), change our minds in the face of new evidence (ditto), and not assume that unexplained things must be driven by supernatural forces (is Linus an incarnation of Vishnu?). However, there are people who contribute meaningfully to our society that do not have the mental wetware to do these things. They may annoy you because they have to come to more primitive conclusions, but they have value like any other human being. And they have different intellectual needs. They NEED to believe that fact==truth and to have the truth handed to them by an authority. They cannot manage in the world in any other way. The effect of ripping away their religion would be to ruin their ability to function in the world. Some would just glom onto another religion. Some would go into deep depression and/or go insane. And some would just continue to believe in secret. But they will NEVER be able to grasp your world view. They simply cannot process the concepts, and you therefore cannot force them to.
If you want to have the right to believe in your "weird" way (face it, we geeks are a minority and most people don't understand us), then those "morons" should have the right to believe their weird stuff too. And frankly, your attempt to "enlighten" them is just shortsighted and unethical.
It's kinda sad that the first thing in the discussion of this study is the most simple-minded moronic solution one can come up with. Abolishing religion won't remove this human tendency. Essentially if you want to introduce ideas to a cultural group of any sort, you have to relate that idea to something they already believe. Belief is a necessary component to the acceptance of truth. It doesn't matter if its religious or even antireligious, the key to adoption will always be whether or not you can adapt your message to your audience. This is the problem with trite solutions like 'abolish religion' and religion haters. they are some of the least creative minds on the planet, because they fail to crystalize what they want and adapt it to those who might help them obtain it--instead religion (or politics, or those darn hillbillies in the mountains) is to blame and becomes a weak-minded scapegoat. Turns out that most of us want very similar things, but if you force us to have them--against what we believe--we push back.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
"people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief "
pff. you do not need to tell me, i already knew that ....
that there is no external reality, in the sense that we cannot ever know it. The only things that we know are the ones perceived by our senses, which actually translate the 'reality' through the brain, normalizing it to something brain-processable and understandable. Id est, we know shit, we understand shit!
Of course, the Greek philosophers also said that, a couple of thousand years back...
By your argument, raising your children within a culture of any sort could be an "abuse of human nature and damages your free will to an extent that is [irreparable]". Religion is just a peculiar sort of culture which is entwined with, but not at all synonymous with, spirituality. As such, it generally does have a stronger impact than, say, what type of music you listen to, but it is still ultimately a culture issue. We all are influenced by our origins, and make choices as a result. Life in the long run is largely about progressing from that origin to a better place, often requiring that we recognize that our free will is not as "damaged" as we think, no matter what we have gone through. Granted, there are exceedingly many examples where religion is used as a cudgel to beat down free will, and it leads people to make horrible choices, and woe to those who wield such weapons. I do not mean in any way to excuse such actual abuse. But you overstate the case that "making" someone into a Christian or Muslim or Jew is in and of itself abusive.
I for one view myself as a Christian (culturally) who pursues Jesus as a spiritual choice. I know plenty of people who share one of the two labels above but not both. I don't advocate abolishing all Christian or religious cultures, but I am totally on board with loosening the coupling between religious cultures and spiritual choices because in the end it will only be good for people.
Really? If there was factual evidence of existence of Jesus years back, I would be able to accept that, not really a big deal. I am saying there is no evidence, there are scriptures written hundreds of years after the purported events supposedly took place. I also said that is very likely there was no such person as Christ at all, but it's not impossible that there was.
However, on the issue of that possible person being a god, well, that's a different story altogether.
You can't handle the truth.
The whole point of this article is that people believe information that confirms their biases and the react accordingly.
And you guys respond immediately with "See! This information confirms my biases against religion..."
I'm always the one among my friends talking about nanotechnology and it's implications. I was even caught preaching while drunk about nanobots. The thing is, most people don't even believe that some things are possible through technology, or at least not in their lifetime at all. If they can get past this belief, however, I've noticed that they don't take that much interest and seem to shut down all potential thoughts they could've formulated about future technology.
Hobbes' negative view of humanity is what convinced Bill Watterson to name Calvin's stuffed tiger after him.
I'm getting really confused. If the communitarians dislike nanotechnology, how come the Borg rule the Delta Quadrant?
That doesn't support the idea that people "don't put as much weight on facts as they do on their own belief about how the world is supposed to work", it instead suggests the much less interesting conclusion that what people subjectively like (rather than what they believe to be true in fact) is based not on facts alone but also on their personal priorities. This, of course, is true by definition, since you can't get to a conclusion about "X is good" without a premise of the same form.
What's odd is that the experiment that actually shows something closer to what is claimed -- conducted by the same group -- by showing that the perception of the existence of scientific consensus on various current issues, as well as the credence given by individuals to claims from particular scientists, is predicted vary strongly by where the subject stands on the "heirarchical individualist" vs. "egalitarian communitarian" scale isn't referenced here instead of this one, which shows nothing like what is claimed.
People's beliefs hinge on their world-view.
In other words, people's beliefs are determined by their beliefs.
How come I don't get paid the big bucks to do this research? I could've saved them a lot of time.
Well, I clicked a lot of links looking for sufficient detail to back the article's claims, but didn't find it. Based on the information I was able to find, I'd say this:
1) There is nothing new in the observation that people tend to favor information that confirms their already-established world view. In decades past terms like "cognitive dissonance" were used to talk about this.
2) That said, it's very hard to take two people with different value systems and distinguish whether they're "rejecting" different subsets of those facts as TFA suggests, or applying different values to those facts and therefore reaching different conclusions at a summary level. A person who oppostes embryonic stem cell reserach isn't necessarily "rejecting" information about how many lives could be saved or how much suffering could be stopped; they are, however, valuing those things less than the moral harm they ascribe to destruction of an embryo. A supporter of such research, meanwhile, isn't necessarily rejecting the premise that embryos get destroyed; but rather puts less value on that loss than on the potential gains.
The people I know who are most prone to outright reject a fact are those who cannot confidently stand by a solid core value system. That makes it very hard to say "I see that there are negatives to the solution I favor, but they are outweighed by the positives"; or to sacrifice convenience if it turns out that the pros and cons really do balance out to favor an inconvenient solution.
3) It's also nothing new that people put more trust in others who they perceive as similar to themselves. Again, this has been observed for decades (often when takling about ethnic bias).
4) The article fails to provide a useful conclusion. It talks about approaches they think won't work for getting people to think open-mindedly, but it doesn't offer any advice on what will work.
Back in the late eighties, I was required to get an EPA certification that allowed me to work on refrigeration and air conditioning. The course and EPA test centered on the effects that refrigerants were having on the ozone layer and techniques to mitigate the problem. Out of a class of twenty or so, I was the only person taking the course who actually believed that CFC's might be having a real environmental impact. Everyone else there believed that CFC's destroying the ozone layer was a hoax masterminded by DuPont because their patents on old refrigerants had lapsed. AC techs typically follow procedures to capture old refrigerants and re-use them, thus reducing their release into the atmosphere. But they don't do this because they actually believe there's a real environmental problem. Most of them just do it because the price of new refrigerants was too high to waste them. So to apply this to today's concern over greenhouse gases, if you want the Dale Dribbles of the world to reduce their use of fossil fuels, you're going to have to raise the price of those fuels. You're not going to convince them that the science is anything other than a conspiracy theory.
Well, I have concluded that we mostly know of "Christ, the mythological figure." What this means is that any historical figure may have had absolutely nothing in common with the stories. Philo's an interesting writer too.
I think Paul made his epistles conform to the cultural identities of the targets of the epistles. The frameworks he uses in different epistles draw from different Hellenistic traditions. It's as if he is trying to say "Christianity can incorporate your beliefs too."
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'm the only person left that I know willing to say "You know, I'm not sure" on a complicated issue. Everyone thinks they *have* to have a definite conclusion on every topic in the universe.
I also very rarely hear anyone else say "it depends" because not only do lots of folks think they need that definite conclusion, but that conclusion is invariable and must (MUST!) be applied to the letter in every possible set of circumstances.
The article states " ... negative or positive information ... ". Uh, people, information is
not negative or positive; the interpretation of
information is negative or positive (or maybe
neutral), depending only on the interpreter.
Ergo, we should not be surprised that different
people interpret the data data (information)
differently, depending solely on their frame
of reference.
Well, that misunderstands my point. If we remove from the New Testament elements which appear to be borrowed from earlier traditions, we have very little that is new, and what is left could reasonably be an invention.
As for what is "real" I think that is a far more interesting question than we are getting into here. I personally think that Odin is "real." So why would I think that Christ is not "real." I might only dispute the general historical assumptions and suggest that we have insufficient basis for concluding that Jesus lived a life around the time claimed or not, or what his life was anything like it was claimed to be.
A major part of the problem is that the Gospels actually arrived in their current form well into the second century. Some of our earliest references to Christ come from the Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri (and in these "Christos" and "Chrestos" seem to be used interchangeably, and invoked alongside various Greek and Egyptian gods).
Secondly there are a number of claims made in the Gospels of a historical nature which don't hold up. Herod's orders to the soldiers to go kill children for example would seem to be noteworthy enough to appear in other sources and we see instead a conspicuous absence of such a reference. For this reason I cannot really see the Gospels as a set of historical documents, and the other references to Christ in the Bible are based on them so that more or less ends that inquiry for me.
What I see the Bible as offering is instead something very different. Instead of offering an historical record, I see it as offering, like any good mythology, a set of templates for living life. For example, you can try to look at the Fall from Eden as history (which doesn't work), or as a lesson about how knowledge of good and evil is evil (then why study the Bible? So that doesn't work), or you can see it for what it is: a mythological template for an experience every one of us goes through in growing up where we become independent and are no longer welcome living in our father's house. Thus we can replay the story at different times in our lives from different perspectives (as a young adult being adam or eve, as a parent of an adolescent, etc).
Now, regarding changing minds....
The issue here is that data does not imply a single correct theory. We can arrive at more data which causes us to change our minds. However, in general two of us will put that data together differently into different theories based on pre-existing notions. Data + pre-existing notions = theory. Multiple interpretations of any set of data is always possible.
So I don't think this is about changing minds so much as asking why this happens. Funny though, Werner Heisenberg wrote a whole book on the topic (and of that I am quite certain ;-) )
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Did you change your mind because of your own curiosity, reasoning and data collection OR because your tribe and its associated authority figures changed their minds and you felt compelled to follow suit?
Purely empirical. From my conversion to atheism (more of a very stern agnosticism, perhaps) to my willful abandonment of "one size fits all" ideologies, it was all based on looking at the world and a voracious appetite for information... and after reading a couple books by John Douglas (famed FBI profiler), I realized that ideologues on the pundit shows sound *WAY* too much like the serial killers that Douglas interviewed when he as developing profiling techniques.
Are you the sort of person who switches back and forth between beliefs easily?
Define "easily". Do you mean wishy-washy and easily swayed by gentle breezes, or, once are there are sufficient facts to form a conclusion in a particular situation, a decision is made without hesitation?
I abandoned "beliefs" altogether. Every situation requires its own solution. The solutions may be labeled by others as "libertarian" here or "progressive" there, but all I give a damn about is what works. What others label it is their problem.
Are you the sort of person who refuses to change belief systems out of fear of appearing or feeling weak-minded?
No. Don't give a gnat's fart what people think about it.
Do you lie to yourself in order to take the edge off uncomfortable truths?
No. Well, OK, I'm guilty of little things like "a couple more cookies won't hurt" or "I'll do an extra workout tomorrow". :-) You gotta paper over the little things once in a while otherwise you katches teh crazies or you turn into Monk and start vacuuming your carpet diagonally.
Are you lying to yourself right now about any of the answers to these questions?
I don't think so. Would I know if I was? Maybe I'm a really good liar. :-)
Your opinions determine your opinions! Novel research guyz
AccountKiller
I thought a lot about these things (like “truth” and beliefs), and here is what I came up with:
————————————————————
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We are only
fighting for available resources
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I’m obviously open for corrections. But beware that I blew my own mind, multiple times, while in the progress of understanding it. So your quick shot will most likely turn out to be only valid until you think a bit more about it. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Well, we have a lot more evidence for Plato's life than we do for Jesus's. Not only do we have works purporting to be by his authorship and institutions created by him (the Academy), but we have histories of philosophy written by individuals such as Aristotle. Now, Socrates seems to be more than just a literary device of Plato's because we have other references to him as well. However, we really can't be as sure there. If the only two major accounts of Socrates come from Plato and Aristophanes..... So we can't say for certain the character of Socrates could be more than a cultural construct or shared literary figure. This is different as it regards Plato or even Anaximander.
What makes Jesus different in this case is that most of the works written about him are inseparable from the mythologies that came before, and Tacitus's passage in particular contains other errors suggesting that he is repeating hearsay rather than writing from records. This poses specific problems. This makes it easier to compare the questions surrounding Jesus's alleged life with the questions surrounding Socrates (I love it when philosophers attempt to differentiate the philosophy of Socrates vs Plato. I maintain that this is entirely impossible).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
First, Philo is an interesting source and I consider to be one important to the study of this topic. I would argue however that the trinity does derive (as was believed in the Renaissance) from Plato's works, in particular "Republic" and "Letters." However, the roots of the concept go even further back. In Republic you have Plato essentially arguing that a tripartite structure unites the human condition and society, and in Letters, this is applied to the structure of Godhead (though Plato only mentions two of the three components himself: Jupiter (The Shining Father) and the active principle, the son of Jupiter (Note that Jupiter, though the Latin name I have usually seen in translations was a word borrowed into Latin from Greek and seems etymologically related to Zeus but with -piter on the end signifying "father"). This Father/Son structure is particularly interesting here and worth coming back to.
Of course, the third element was filled in by Plato's followers by adopting the World Soul discussed in Timaeus. So we have The Shining Father (or The Father Zeus, or some other interpretation), The Active Principle/Logos/Son, and The World Soul. That is not far at all from Father/Son/Holy Spirit.
However, as Georges Dumezil has shown, this structure was not entirely invented by Plato. Instead Dumezil places the structure into a larger context comparable to the Vedic formula of Mitra/Indra/Ashvins (and in some rituals these are further divided as Mitra/Varuna, Indra/Vayu, and the Ashvins or Horse-Twins). This would also make the structure comparable with the Three Great Gods of Uppsala mentioned by Adam of Bremen (Odin, Thorr, and Freyr), of the three gods mentioned for their treasures in the Battle of Magh Tuiredh (Lugh, Nuada, and In Dagda). Other comparable structures include the Old Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus), and the three offspring of Rig in Norse myth (Jarl/Earl, Karl/Freeman, and Thrall/Slave).
To these I would add the Three Gunas of the Bagavad Gita (Sattvas/Truth, Rajas/Kingship, and Tamas/Inertia), the three top varnas in Hindu society (Brahman/Priest, Kshatrya/warrior, Vasaya/Farmer-merchant), and the three top classes in post-Solon Athens (Elites, Horsemen, and men-of-yoke).
This suggests a very old pattern, the ancestor to which (I think which was a spacial/cosmic model roughly comparable to heaven/earth/hell) was dispersed as the Indo-European peoples expanded out from the Pontic-Caspian steppes. However to get into that is at least a 30-page paper!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Certainly. I was not at all arguing that the Bible should be read in Latin. Merely that "bible thumpers" have this rather peculiar notion that a particular English translation produced in the early 17th century is perfect since the translators were supposedly inspired by God. The "King James Only" crowd are a bit nuts, to say the least.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The "King James Only" crowd are a bit nuts, to say the least.
This is the consensus on both sides ;D
a particular English translation produced in the early 17th century is perfect since the translators were supposedly inspired by God.
I was always under the impression that the 47 scholars that translated the KJV, while sincere in themselves, were threatened under the penalty of death, if they were to purposely introduce false doctrine or make changes to the message therein. The wording is also said to be quite poetic, thus it's popularity as a translation.
The New King James Version clears up a lot of archaic language and does change certain translations.
You can take a word from ancient Hebrew or Greek and it could easily equal out to a whole sentence or expression of an idea in English, this is where some inconsistencies and contradictions in translation can arise.
~Cheers
Like there is no evidience for Jesus outside of the Bible.
There's no evidence that life in any form exists anywhere but Earth, yet most slashdotters (myself included) believe that it's likely that there is life elsewhere (I do see the possibility that this may be life's only home, but not a probability).
But the Bible isn't the only place that documents Jesus' existance, as others have pointed out. But his teachings were revolutionary; SOMEBODY came up with those radical ideas.
Free Martian Whores!
I see your One True God and raise you 330 million!
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Bandwagon effect: n. The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to Groupthink.
Bias blind spot: n. The tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.
Choice-supportive bias: n. The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
Confirmation bias: n. The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Congruence bias: n. The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
Contrast effect: n. The enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
Disconfirmation bias: n. The tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and accept uncritically information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
Endowment effect: n. The tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
Focusing effect: n. Prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
Hyperbolic discounting: n. The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
Illusion of control: n. The tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
Impact bias: n. The tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
Information bias: n. The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Loss aversion: n. The tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains.
Neglect of Probability: n. The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
Mere exposure effect: n. The tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
Color psychology: n. The tendency for cultural symbolism of certain colors to affect affective reasoning.
Omission Bias: n. The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
Outcome Bias: n. The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Planning fallacy: n. The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
Post-purchase rationalization: n. The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was good value.
Pseudocertainty effect: n. The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
Rosy retrospection: n. The tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.
Selective perception: n. The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Status quo bias: n. The tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
Von Restorff effect: n. The tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
Zeigarnik effect: n. The tendency for people to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.
Zero-risk bias: n. Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Ambiguity effect: n. The avoidance of options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".
Anchoring: n. The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
Anthropic bias: n. The tendency for one's evidence to be biased by observation selection effects.
Attentional bias: n. Neglect of relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association.
Availability error: n. The distortion of on
Angry? I'm laughing at you right now, snipcock.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't think it's reasonable to characterize the Bible as a suspicious. The Bible in it's present compiled form has been subject to rigorous literary criticism for sixteen hundred years(and the majority of the Bible has been subject to this treatment for significantly longer than that, with the law of Moses being some three thousand and five hundred years old). I've not heard challenge to it's credibility that would warrant the description you have provided here. I can't prove that those who wrote it were telling the truth, but there is good reason to believe it was written when it claims to have been written.
Likewise, there is good reason to believe these have been used as holy texts for that whole time, and that the books which are presented in the new testament give an accurate account of the early christian movement and philosophy associated with it. Even if the books themselves were not written by the saints, they were definitely written by people associated with the movement, when it was first taking shape. Books which meet that description are generally considered to be a reliable source of historical information (most of the literature doccumenting antiquity is significantly less reliable than that).
Apart from the claims of supernatural occurrences, do you have any reason to believe it is incredible? Whether or not someone will accept it as true has a lot to do with their life experiences when they learn of it, so someone else who has personally experienced some of the things the Bible speaks of will be convinced, while if you have not, you probably won't find it believable.
The Bible is not like the book or Mormon, which makes claims to have been written thousands of years ago and have been recently translated, but offering no proof of the matter. All indications are that it has been continually in use since it's creation, and describes historical events which are supported by archeological investigations and other historical texts.
Other gospels, as far as I am aware, do not focus on giving an account of the life of Jesus, but rater give accounts of "secret" wisdom given to some of his disciples, myths and parables used to describe christian teaching, and parables and phrases given by Jesus. I just purchased a book containing all the other early works recovered to date, so I'll know better what they say after I've read them.
As far as the gospels go, most believe that Matthew and Luke were written from Mark (and some believe from the "Q-document", a hypothetical collection if phrases and parables spoken by Jesus). If you read John, you'll notice that it is completely different from the other three, both in form, and in terms of which events are described (though it does not contradict them). John reads like a personal account from a close friend, while the other three read like biography.
I was researching the Gnostic gospels because of your comment, and I came across a claim that John was included because it was widely accepted among Gnostics, and extremely important to them, but not considered heretical by the orthodox church. I think it is fitting that the gospel that speaks the most about love would be used in such a way, though it is just a hypothesis.
What the slashdot summery didn't mention was that the "individualists" were actually authoritarian capitalist/free market Ayn Rand types, and the "communitarians" were really left libertarian/progressive libertarian/libertarian socialist/Noam Chomsky oriented types. The Rand types embrace authority and the destruction of the earth via pollution and the extinction of humanity via forced-technology driven by profit motive. The Chomsky types prefer grass roots, humanitarian, individualism-for-the-rest-of-us (and not just the elite) solutions. Why does this not surprise anyone?