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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.'"
>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?
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BMO
>Which is why religion and all other straight-faced magical thinking should be abolished
As if religion is the only place this occurs or the only reason why people think what they think.
I put it to you that some fringes of environmentalism are *exactly* like religions.
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BMO
The fringes of any *ism are dogmatic, that's why they're on the fringes.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Thanks for confirming confirmation bias for me. It was pretty much what I expected anyway...
Insert self-referential sig here.
Newsflash: science works by subjecting everything to the scientific method. Including things that we think are obvious. Sometimes it confirms the obvious (like here), sometimes it throws everything into complete upheaval (like special relativity).
Next time I hear someone say "Durrr! Everyone knows that!" I'm going to smack them.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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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People who embrace authority are "individualistic"? Who came up with that definition?
After all, I am strangely colored.
As if religion is the only place this occurs or the only reason why people think what they think.
You start well, but you don't go far enough. It's not just "fringe environmentalism" and other fringes where this is a problem. It's a pervasive problem throughout human thinking generally, and it is just as likely to impact mainstream science as it is the fringes. To compound the problem, humans are notoriously blind to their own biases, tending to think that their evaluation of matters is rather objective and well-founded, and that any reasonable person should come to the same conclusions. This is why people are inclined to label those with radically different views as either mentally incompetent or maliciously deceptive. These two factors intertwine: most people want to believe they are right, and so selectively see the evidence supporting the hypothesis that they are.
The grandparent post used the term "magical thinking" -- a term that I associate with Dr Wallace Breen from Half Life 2. I submit that "magical thinking" is just a rationalist pejorative applied to the thought processes of those with whom they disagree. In other words, "magical thinking" is what those people do: the people who hold fast to some ridiculous theory. After all, thinks the rationalist, I used evidence and reasoning and came to a totally different conclusion, so their methods must consist of woolly thinking at best.
So long as everyone is just arrogant enough to assume that their own reasoning is pretty darn reliable, this problem will persist. Maybe we should all practice a little more recreational sophistry in the hope that it will teach us to take our own straight-faced in-earnest theories a little less seriously.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
I just added rightwingnutjob as a friend because the rest of his comments made sense to me, even if I don't always agree with him. Same with Moryath and a few others.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-- Aristotle
It's all cute when we're on slashdot and we can mentally masturbate all night long. But while there are people knocking on my door tryng to get me to turn to Jesus, people in congress voting for stem-cell research bans, legislators in my country asking to give creationism and "intelligent" design* as much face-time as evolution in science as opposed to philosophy classes, then I can say with a straight face that religion is a problem more than it is a romantic set of ideas; even if its idealogues aren't bombing my busses.
* My nipples, for example.
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
His name was Thomas Hobbes and he wrote a book called Leviathan. Hobbes wrote this book in the context of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, both of which were massive civil conflicts centered around religion (Protestant sects vs. Catholicism).
In order to prevent further religious conflict, Hobbes set out to create a philosophical basis for the bracketing of religion from public life. Not the abolition of the Church outright, but the removal of the ability for people to make (public) claims about what is true (private piety was still assumed). He rejected revelation as a basis for truth claims, but noted that most things that people 'know' aren't really derived from experience, but are instead things that they believe on the authority of someone else. For instance, we believe certain things about reality because we recognize the epistemic authority of physicists.
Without an ultimate authority to resolve claims about reality/truth, Hobbes believed that people would never escape the devastating civil wars that he saw all around him in Europe. Rejecting revelation as a source of knowledge, Hobbes said that the person of the 'sovereign' would have to serve as the ultimate authority on truth claims in order to prevent civil conflict.
Establishing a sovereign authority would be the only way that rational individualism could prosper. Individuals, freed from epistemic confusion or conflict, could then engage in public life with the maximum freedom to pursue their (material) interests.
This is relevant to TFA given that it pits individualists (epistmeic authority allowing for skeptical materialist individualism) against communitarians (people making broad values/truth claims supposedly binding on others).
It's hard to find a more relevant philosopher for understanding modernity than Hobbes. The way that authority, truth claims, individualism, state sovereignty, and materialism are politically entwined are all to be found within Hobbes' writing. Even if you disagree with the conclusions he came to, it's still worth reading and knowing why he wrote what he wrote.
So yes, individualism and authority are quite closely linked in the history of Western thought.
Footnote: Hobbes was the first major translator of Thucydides. Many of his views on civil war and epistemic confusion come from Thucydides' description of the Corcyraean Civil War (in Book III of Thucydides' History). The episode is only about 8 pages and well worth reading to see how deeply ingrained this particular strand of political philosophy is embedded in Western thought. It's a pretty chilling description of the collapse of convention, law, norms, and the very meaning of words in the face of violence.
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You start well, but go too far.
With regard to biased thinking being a pervasive problem, you are spot on. However, you throw the baby out with the bath water when you assert that all human thought is hopelessly biased, and that rationalism (and presumably, all other epistemological frameworks as well) is nothing more than a convenient way to disguise one's biases. If that's true, then science, philosophy, and all other human endeavors which involve the pursuit of truth and knowledge are merely various forms of bias masquerading as rational thought. I don't deny that we humans are all, by our very nature, incapable of 100% pure rational thought. However, most of us are, at least, capable of short spurts of mostly rational thought. Unless you believe that all of mankind's progress over the last few thousand years can be attributed to the "monkeys with typewriters" effect, I don't see how you can conclude that rationalism and biased thinking are merely two sides of the same coin.
Furthermore, both you and the grandparent completely misused the term "magical thinking". Magical thinking is not merely a synonym for bias, it is (in the words of the Wiki article) "causal reasoning that applies unwarranted weight to coincidence and often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world (see the philosophical problem of mental causation), and correlation mistaken for causation."
I'm not so sure I care. I'm an atheist, but was raised Catholic. I didn't disappear - I just realized that we turn to dust when we die, there's no reason behind anything, and we should make the most of our lives. It might be depressing if I wasn't happy with my life and how I'm leading it.
Going off heroin can kill you too. And I even concede that in a hypothetical world where religion disappeared one night, people might kill themselves. But the next generation would be raised with no ingrained religious misconceptions about the world, so the benefit would come fairly quickly.
In any case, how many religious people kill themselves because their life sucks, and it occurs to them that their lifelong friend God couldn't possibly be on their side?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I'd say you've proven the point of this article, your religious beliefs prevent you from accepting alternate arguments ...
I'd say you missed the point of the article, which was not that all viewpoints are equally valid, and that therefore, the only mechanism by which Person A could possibly dismiss Person B's viewpoint is by being blinded by his own biases. The point of the article was that people will ignore facts that don't jive with their own biases. In the case of the grandparent dismissing Christianity, exactly what facts has he ignored? There are no facts that support religion. Religion is based purely on faith, and survives only through indoctrination, not by any preponderance of facts or evidence.
Yet, you've managed to interpret TFA as meaning that anybody who dismisses another's ideas and/or beliefs, regardless of their rationale for doing so, is guilty of succumbing to their own biases. This implies that there is no such thing as a logical basis for dismissing an idea, which necessarily means that all ideas are equally valid. And since there are many conflicting ideas, this also implies, somewhat paradoxically, that all ideas are equally invalid. In other words, it's all relative, there is no such thing as truth, and basically, anything goes (except for dismissing someone else's idea, that is).
I'm sure that this is not, in fact, the meaning you intended, but it is the logical conclusion of what you said. Yes, "try[ing] to view both sides of the argument as fairly as we can" is a good thing, indeed. But at some point, you have to allow for there to be disagreement, or else it just devolves into the morass of relativism I described above, which means, for instance, that ancient beliefs about volcanoes and earthquakes being caused by angry gods are just as "correct" as the modern science of plate-tectonics. That's a bunch of crap, if you ask me. But then, I suppose you could just conveniently counter that I'm only dismissing the "angry gods" theory because I'm blinded by my own biases regarding plate-tectonics.
Further, you assert that the grandparent's views on religion are "based more on [his] beliefs than actual facts", which blindly assumes that you know what his line of reasoning was, even though he did not address that in his post. Calling someone out on their poor reasoning skills and their closed-mindedness, when you have in fact assumed (i.e., completely fabricated) what his line of reasoning was, and are apparently no more open to his religious beliefs than he is to yours? Really??? That just reeks of hypocrisy!
I only read the last line of your comment and let me tell you, I have *never* looked so hard for an asterisk before.
More than that, Slashdot needs agree and disagree buttons. The rest can just be modded.
You know, I keep hearing that argument, and it's just mind-boggling to me that any intelligent individual could say something so stupid. It's like claiming that abolishing cocaine would cause large tracts of the population to disappear, since cocaine is the the only thing that keeps them going.
I'm not saying I buy the GP's argument (at least not completely), but I think you vastly underestimate how important religion is to some people. The cocaine=religion analogy doesn't really stand up very well under scrutiny. And I'm not merely making the obvious observation that all analogies are flawed and fall apart if you examine them closely enough - I'm saying this one is worse than most.
Yes, many people who are addicted to cocaine may actually feel that they cannot live without the drug. But religion is not merely a drug - it is intertwined with all of the most important unanswerable questions in life. Does life have purpose? Is there such a thing as The Truth? Is there life after death? Will I see my lost loved ones again someday? Is there justice in this world? Will good ultimately prevail over evil? Why must there be so much suffering?
As an agnostic, I am used to having my religious friends and family members say that I'm just taking the easy way out. To them, no God means no responsibility, no sense of duty, no moral quandaries, no church on Sunday, etc, etc. However, as I'm sure many agnostics can tell you, being an agnostic is anything but easy. All of those Big Unanswerable Questions weigh heavily on you - much more so than for religious people who've found all of those questions conveniently answered by their religion of choice. Meanwhile, I've spent nearly my entire life being constantly tormented by those questions. Some mornings, I find it excruciatingly difficult to drag myself out of bed, because I'm desperately trying to figure out "What the fuck is the point of all this?" Don't confuse this with depression. I am not merely depressed. In fact, most days, I don't feel depressed at all. I enjoy life. But those questions are always there, always eating away at me, making it difficult to function at times.
I'm not trying to sound "deep" or compare myself to philosophers like Tolstoy who were nearly driven mad by those questions. I'm merely observing that life is difficult enough already without the struggle to find meaning. With that struggle, life can be unbearable at times. And for a lot of people, religion is the only thing that can fill that void and make life worth living, or at least seem to be so. I get the whole "religion is just a crutch for weak minds" thing. I really do. I felt that way in my early 20's. But I'm in my late 30's now, and all those questions have been a heavy burden on me in the intervening years. So although I'm still as much of an agnostic as I ever was, much of my arrogance has been replaced with understanding. My agnosticism is no longer something that makes me feel superior. In many ways, I actually envy my religious friends, and if I could force myself to believe in God, I probably would. Don't think I haven't tried - numerous times. I'm just not wired for faith, it seems.
Anyway, the point is, given how deeply intertwined religion is with those things which weigh most heavily on the human mind (or "soul", if you believe there is one), I don't think the cocaine analogy, nor the implied addiction model of religious belief, even come close to explaining why people adhere so steadfastly to religion. It's a LOT deeper and a LOT more complicated than you give it credit for.
As a former citizen of a totalitarian state, let me be the first to ask:
Citation needed!
And even if you dig up some I still won't buy it because I was there, my parents and grandparents were there too. I know, you just talk....
Sure, there was a killing of intellectuals and some of them were priests, but most were not. Teachers, scholars, generals, aristocracy - they all suffered. BTW, in 10 years the allegedly killed people by Stalin rose from a few million to (don't laugh) 100 million! I have seen such ridiculous numbers from "respectable" sources and most people in the west are conditioned to believe any bullshit about the communist you care to concoct.
Killing and burning churches never works in the long run. If it did, Christianity would have never survived (remember, 2000 years ago the Christians were minority!). You might want to dig up my post about the Ottoman empire and see to what lenghts they went to extinguish christianity in our land. They had 482 years to do so and failed! Because action cause reaction. People started to identify their nationality via their faith. The church was poor and harassed and guess what - they produced great people and did a lot of good in those dark ages. After they got their power back all went to HELL.You can never keep people slaves forever - you always fail.
The trick that the communist applied was more clever than just killing - they simply discouraged people to go to church. You could go to church (yes, you really could - I have been to a church every Easter and every Christmas, mostly because my grandma was a bit religious. No one ever stopped us, no one came knocking on the door. In school people wore crosses below their shirts and no one said anything). 3 generations aftfer communism was established in my country almost everyone was an atheist. Which is exactly what this article is all about. Repeat after me - if I am not reminded DAILY even hourly that I am a believer I will cease to be one - this counts for the vast majority of people. Religion is a meme and you can diminish its influence in the same way you would do it with genes - you prevent the spreading.
I am forever grateful to the communist for one thing only (in general I despise them) - they showed empirically that a particular religion is NOT something natural, something that is inheritable human. Spirituality - yes! It comes from the realization of one's own mortality - nothing new, just read a bit of philosophy. Particular religion however - NO! Nobody is born christian , muslim or jew - you are MADE one and you have no choice. Which is abuse of human nature and damages your free will to an extent that is unrepairable. The communist tried to replace religion with faith in the Party and the system but that ideology had such a vast gap between intentions and reality that it was self defeating. It never did catch up with people. Everyone who tells you that the common people believed in the system is fucking liar!
So at the end, a generation emerged which had limited if none exposure to the most popular belief systems and the "substitute" did not work so we got the perfect secular, scientific, civil generation. I am one of those people - everyone (+/- 5 years my age) around me during all my life is being one - at school, at university, at work. The very new generations are already lost - 2 fucking days after the wall collapsed I saw Mormons on the streets! TWO fucking days, people! Then followed all the sects - there was an explosion of kids running from home, drug abuse, suicide...parents went crazy! One of our prime ministers (democrat and very strong anti-communist) refused permission to enter the country to a sect leader who was legally recognized and pampered in the whole western world and he wanted to sue us in den Hague! Man, if I could just have 5 minutes with this arrogant asshole alone!!!
So, I am sorry my friend but you are not in possessions of the facts, neither (I suspect) you want to be. Millions of nuns my ass - check how much the population of the country was at the time, if you claim to be intelligent (posting on \. is a statement after all), estimate how many priest there were and then talk crap! You just might end up with minus 1 000 000 figure there.....
You'd think an all-powerful God might have something to say about all that priest-killing...
Let's see what he said about killing priests:
1 Kings 18:40: And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape . And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.
Seems he's fine with it, as long as they believe the all-powerful God has a different name.
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