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Given Truth, the Misinformed Believe Lies More
SharpFang writes "In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that misinformed people, particularly political partisans, rarely changed their minds when exposed to corrected facts in news stories. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
It's nothing but lies designed to obscure the fact that Barak Hussein Obama is a Muslim terrorist who wants to entrance our children with commie healthcare. The sooner he goes back to his hometown in Kenya the better.
And my facts are just fine. Bill O'Reilly told me so.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Didn't RTFA but if this study uses a logical positivist approach to a soc-sci research topic then it's completely pointless.
... when exposed to corrected facts in news stories.
Perhaps because we have learned to distrust the news providers?
Including this
Well people (and by people I mean you and me as well) believe a whole lot of things just because that's the way we were brought up. We have never really dug into our beliefs thoroughly.
When it comes to politics it really is some sort of emotional connection, not fact based, facts can't change our minds when this is the case. Politicians like to play on our innate sense of belonging, our fears, not however our minds.
No wonder people are insistent they have "faith" in the absence of facts.
Hah, you sir are truly delusional. *Every* political party has its share of disinformation and lies. To single out a specific party as being the culprit of misinformation only serves to show just how ignorant and naive you are.
There's something called the Kruger-Dunning effect which is kinda interesting as well Dunning-Kruger effect. The premise is the following one:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.
Seriously, this looks like a weak rehash of Festinger's (1957) Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, only without the data or depth of study. People change their opinions to suit their convictions, and shown by Festinger's study of the reactions of doomsday cults' reactions to the fact the the world didn't end on the expected date (c.f., "When Propheshy Fails"). Really, what am I missing here?
I know this is Idle but there's been a lot of articles related to how people think lately. Myself, I'm perfectly okay with people having different viewpoints. Even outright wrong ones. Why should I care about it? So there are people that think their party is infallible and fall for the party talking points. Nothing new really and understanding it doesn't really change much. I can't really use this information beyond what I think are some common sense rules about people in general.
Diversity is part of humanity. Who's to say where the next great change will come from? Logical thinking is not the end-all be-all for human prosperity.
As a wise man once said - let them live.
Excerpt from the article:
"CONAN: And again, we'd like to think of our brain as something that's been trained in, you know, Cartesian logic, when in fact, our brain is sort of hard-wired to leap to conclusions very quickly.
Mr. NYHAN: That's right. And what's interesting is in some of these cases, it's the people who are most sophisticated who are best able to defend their beliefs and keep coming up with more elaborate reasons"
I remember taking a neuroscience course in college once with a professor who had done experimentation that he thought suggested that what separated humans from other mammals (the cortex) was primarily a mechanism to _slow_ learning. In fact in studies I've read child apes are able to more quickly learn how to use tools than child humans. Humans are slow learners in the same way that a feedback control loop needs a dampener: it allows us to stabilize and converge on techniques and facts that serve us well without too easily 'forgetting' them.
WARNING: anecdotal evidence
Walking and talking with people, the more 'reasonable' of us tend to simply be those that think about the issues (whatever they may be) more than others, and so misinformation in their minds will more quickly be 'flushed out'. However you don't _want_ people to just believe 'facts' without great trepidation, that is a good thing, its called skepticism, and it should be hard to overcome. Facts printed in news stories or articles (as mentioned in the article) are often wrong, like the countless stories that mis-reported the Toyota accelerator problem without doing their fact-checking first (one of the biggest proponents was a repeat insurance defrauder).
end anecdotal evidence
--"You are your own God"--
People tend to want to hear information that agrees with their particular world view. This is why even though all main stream media has a slant to a story there are different "flavors". AP actually puts out 7 different versions of every story depending on which propaganda machine is quoting them. Today's media presents very few facts but presents lots of opinions. Every "expert" speaker is just a person presenting his opinion. While it is easy to bash Faux news you can just as easily catch the same thing going on at NPR, BBC, CNN, etc if you are observant. All of them have money behind them determining how a story is presented, or if it is even presented at all. If your smart enough to read slashdot you should be smart enough to research things for yourself.
After all, we know that the truth has a liberal bias.
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*Every* political party has its share of disinformation and lies.
I'll go one further and say that *every* political party actively engages in pastisanship, fearmongering, and disinformation - with the explicit intent of making the electorate less rational and less able to make clear choices. The study in TFA (correctly) paints this phenomenon as a bad thing, but for political hucksters it's not a bad thing; it's a good thing - a great thing - when you can turn people into mindless partisan zombies just by throwing a few lies around.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
This is a problem with pretty much every political issue there is. You have to pick a side eventually. Very few people are truly neutral as far as political spectrum goes. You are leaning either to the right or to the left. The problem is that when you finally pick your side (early twenties, typically) it becomes natural to stick to it no matter what new information comes your way and you end up in a "us versus them" kind of position. You see everything that doesn't make your side look good as propaganda or media bias. I think politics can be compared to professional sports in many ways in the sense that science, data and morality have basically nothing to do with who you are rooting for.
For most people, Politics, like Sports and Religion is all about having an emotional attachment to something - they're for/with/believe a group/ideology because they feel like "one of the group" and one cannot be against oneself.
A high level of intelectual abilities (i.e. IQ) is no defense against it: just look at all the religious-like flamewars around things like editors and operating systems.
In order to do trully informed judgements one must first be aware of one's inner-self, one's drives and fears and be capable of analysing one's motives. One must be capable of separating the "logic" from the "feelings" and the "habits" in the way things are perceived, interpreted and reasoned about.
Unfortunatly this requires a level of inner maturity that seems to be far above that of most people ...
I just read this a while back. There are larger ramifications than political sniping, and beyond politics altogether.
It's a perfect illustration of why this phenomenon matters to all of us.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Can be found here http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf. The statistical correlations found were weak, in some cases not even statistically significant. Also, for some questions they didn't see any backfire effect (where corrections make people believe the lies more) for all questions. For example, when dealing with liberals, there was no backfire effect when correcting the misconception that George Bush banned stem cell research (he in fact restricted it to a specific set of cell lines). However, in this case, correction did not alter the belief level although it didn't create a backfire result. Clearly, more research is needed. There's also a relevant older article which shows that uninformed people are more likely to think they are informed. http://ann.sagepub.com/content/560/1/143.abstract. This connects with the Dunning-Kruger effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect where incompetent individuals generally overestimate their own competency.
The saddest part of this story for us, nerds, is that our strongest weapon - our knowledge, superior understanding of facts, digging deeper into matters than cheap news stories, is in fact totally inefficient against "joe average". The more you argue your case the worse your chance to -really- win the argument, convince the other side. More often they will admit defeat to get you off their neck and keep believing their falsehood even stronger.
That is why John Hodgeman's punch line "Glen Beck makes a lot of sense if you think about it. If you don't think about it, he makes even more sense" makes me quite sad.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is one of the reasons that I dislike discussing/arguing issues in person. They will bring up some information I hadn't heard before, but I have no idea whether it is reliable or not. I try not to be set in my beliefs, but 90% of the "facts" that people spout usually had some foundation in truth originally but have become so misinterpreted by the time they heard it that it is almost complete crap. I like to look into things before I accept them, but that isn't an option in person. If you can't immediately refute any random thing they bring up and won't just accept what they say as gospel truth then you are pegged as a ignorant stubborn idiot. Furthermore, when I am pressed like that I do feel a strong desire to dig in and defend myself, when otherwise I would just take in the information and have one more thing to mull over while I continue to read about the issue.
oblig xkcd http://www.xkcd.com/765/
rewriting history since 2109
To be honest I am surprised that on Slashdot this article hasn't resulted in a full-blown trash-the-conservatives-fest. I'm impressed actually... perhaps the group here has matured. Although I am considering that the perceived difference is due to the fact that the 10:00AM EST Slashdot is different from the 4:00PM EST Slashdot.
In any case, reading through the article I found that it was a nice conversation, but really didn't tell us much of what we don't already know: people are social animals, and love to congregate in tight, defensive groups. In politics, this often means that they adopt a wholesale party line, without either thinking about the facts involved, or considering each tenet independently (what does denying gays the right to receive the benefits of marriage have to do with a policy of financial conservatism, that at this point exists only as a hypothetical construct?).
On the other side of the political spectrum, I've repeatedly seen those who identify with the liberal ideology come up with varying excuses for restricting gun ownership, who became rather aggressive when confronted with statistics about the level of violent crime among legal firearm owners.
I'm not even going to get started on the 9/11-Truth or Vaccines-Autism movements, because they attract the deeply delusional, but extremely aggressive and assertive members of the population.
Unfortunately I think that within the last 15 years I have seen this behavior worsen significantly, as the Internet has made it possible for people to interact exclusively with those who share their delusions, no matter how inane and obscure. As such, they can keep bouncing between the various websites and forums that support their point of view until it is so firmly cemented in their consciousness, that even when faced with overwhelming facts, they absolutely refuse to accept reality.
The only way we would be able to reverse this trend, is through educating the new generation about rational skepticism and the scientific method. Unfortunately, many of the deeply deluded members of my own political party (sigh... the party I joined in order to have a say in which candidates get through the primaries) have decided that a scientific education would be immoral for the children, while the other party has decided that it would be too hard. As a result, I can only see the current divides getting deeper, and the political spectrum becoming even more polarized than it is right now.
I have just run out of mod points...
Grandparent:
This explains the popularity of right-wingers, ordinary people who would have nothing to gain for voting for right-wing parties, yet who keep doing so.
Your answer:
Hah, you sir are truly delusional. *Every* political party has its share of disinformation and lies. To single out a specific party as being the culprit of misinformation only serves to show just how ignorant and naive you are.
As I write, the grandparent is modded -1 troll and you +4 Insightful. Unfair. The grandparent has a valid point. While it is true that no party can claim to be free of disinformation, right-wing parties can indeed be singled out for practicing it on an industrial scale. Just think of Fox, O'Reilly and Beck: no contest.
To accuse the grandparent of ignorance and naivete smells much more of trolling than the actual actually quite moderate tone of the grandparent.
The experience of the last century shows that fanatics can remain hermetically sealed from the truth until the fabric of their society collapses around them, and there is literally rubble in the streets.
I think that education is the only hope to fix this, but that means that this will be a problem for the rest of our lives, if not a lot longer.
First, The Boston Globe has an article that explains the same details, though not in question & answer interview format.
Second, the adult human brain is engineered to actually dismiss information that it does not agree with. There was a very good article I read (that I think was posted a while ago on /.) that explained the situation very well. In summary, the prefrontal cortex of the adult human brain is the "information filter" that is responsible for filtering out "unnecessary" information. For example, ask yourself how many people you walked by today. Then ask yourself how many of those peoples' faces do you remember vividly? Though your eyes most likely saw many, many faces, your prefrontal cortex filters out that information before it even is stored in short-term memory. I know there's an article out there that explains the science more thoroughly, but sadly I failed to find it.
Anyways, the same information filter that filters out unnecessary information also is also responsible for blocking any information that it determines to be dissonant from accepted information, i.e. cognitive dissonance. In this previously mentioned misplaced article, scientists hooked up participants to an MRI in an experiment analyzing how their brains processed conflicting information. The participants were sorted into two groups: physics majors and non-physics majors. The video was a recreation of Newton's gravity experiment, where a person drops a tennis ball and a bowling ball, both hitting the floor at the same time. When the physics majors saw the experiment, their brain did not register much activity, because what they saw was already what they knew to be true. But when the non-physics majors watched the video, the "WTF" section of their brain went crazy. In short, they believed that the bowling ball would hit the ground first, and when it didn't, their brain had a difficult time processing the information that conflicted with previously held beliefs. When faced with this confliction, adult minds must either reclassify what they know (a very difficult task for the adult brain), or filter out what they have just witnessed (a very easy task for the adult brain). In the end, I'm sure most of those non-physics majors ended up rationalizing what they saw with excuses such as, "Video editing" or "lead weight inside tennis ball."
As difficult as it is, the only way to prove to someone the truth is to first prove to them that their accepted beliefs are false. The only way this is possible is to take what they believe to be true, then show them how their own "facts" are inconsistent with one another. Only by creating cognitive dissonance within their own thoughts, rather than introducing it from an external stimulus, can you create the conditions necessary for them to be willing to listen to truth.
So this study proves that dumbasses will continue to remain dumbasses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
You, sir, are very delusional if you don't think the Republicans far outpace the Democrats when it comes to outright lying to their constituents. How many Fox News viewers think Saddam was responsible for 9/11? No, both parties manipulate the truth to their benefit but one party takes it to a whole new and exciting level.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Nobody would go to the cinema if the film didn't have a flow to it, a beginning, a middle and an end.
We like our facts to fit the same pattern and where they don't we twist them around in our head until they do.
What we also do is look for stories which fit our circumstances. If we are poor, we believe in evil rich oppressors and Robin Hood style heroes. If we are rich we believe in the feckless, unworthy poor, and our own natural superiority.
Don't imagine that it is someone else who is prone to this and not you. If affects us all. It's just that people don't tend to recognise it in themselves - because that sort of fact doesn't appeal.
The Republican party depends on a group of deeply delusional voters known as Evangelicals. That's why, in the 21st Century, there are elected officials pretending to be concerned about gay couples, pretending that evolution is a lie that shouldn't be taught as fact, and pretending that a woman's body is the property of the Federal Government.
And if you don't believe me, just look at how pathetic McCain was when he had to prostrate himself in front of these idiots: http://thinkprogress.org/mccain-flip-flops/
The Democratic party has it's fair share of hypocrites, but only one party demands delusion as part of their party platform. They are still demanding God be put back in Government, and pretending the founding fathers wanted the same thing. Their next sentence could be about the dangers of muslim theocracies, but their delusion is thought-proof. They know God chose America to fight Evil, just like their old hero President said himself: he answers to a higher father, even if the father he has in reality fought the same war against the same army only a decade earlier.
The thing that irritates me the most about the GOP is their attitude toward their OWN people. God forbid you don't do EXACTLY what everyone else does. People mock the dems for not being completely unified, but I think that's a good thing. I think the damn legislators ought to be out there using what brains they have, representing THEIR people.
The state where I live, it's absolutely the worst. The gop at the state level is extremely intolerant of other voices within the party, so if you have an opinion that differs from the majority, you hide it, or the state party will actively campaign against you in the primaries.
My local US rep is a dem...probably the most conservative dem in the entire house...and the republicans have run multi-million dollar campaigns against him for the last 3 election cycles. They can't even effectively campaign against him because he's a morally conservative, anti-tax hawk, so they have to field these whackjob wingnuts...It's ugly. They get crushed every election. And they're gearing up to fight him again, because he has a D after his name, and it drives them fucking MAD.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
right-wing parties can indeed be singled out for practicing it on an industrial scale. Just think of Fox, O'Reilly and Beck: no contest.
As opposed to MSNBC and Olbermann?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This is where American politics gets weird. The party that proports to be populist is on the wrong side of public opinion for almost all the one-issue voters: guns, abortion, gay rights, creationism, etc. etc. I guess the exception was the Iraq War, but as a issue that had the poer to decide a vote, it had a shelf life of about 18 months, whereas for the right guns and abortion have been going strong for decades.
The Democrats, as it were, just can't help but shoot themselves in the foot with the gun control issue.
It's more the urban base of the Democratic party that can't help themselves. Rural Democrats tend to be staunchly pro-gun, moreso than their GOP counterparts in many cases. The most out-outspokenly pro-gun US Senators are both Democrats -- Baucus and Tester from Montana.
But yeah, the urban liberals can't help themselves when it comes to guns. They literally work themselves up into a hysteria. It's pretty amusing to watch. Every single time there's an expansion of gun rights they predict that blood will flow in the streets. The fact that it hasn't happened yet does not prevent them from repeating the claim that it will. They also spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about what the law-abiding gun owners are doing -- witness Mayor Daley's new gun law after SCOTUS struck down his old one. He's going to limit law-abiding gun owners to a SINGLE handgun that they aren't even allowed to take INTO THEIR GARAGE. Want to clean your gun on the workbench in your garage instead of stinking up your house with the smell of solvent? Sorry but the City of Chicago has deemed that your 2nd amendment rights do not apply in your garage.
I'm sure this new law will deter the criminal element too. Murder is one thing but carrying a gun outside the home or owning more than one? What self-respecting criminal would cross that line?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This might also be in part because of... ah, a shattering of expectations. A lot of liberals had hoped that getting their party back into power would mean that they could get things fixed (and I count myself as one of them). Putting this administration into power has made a lot of us realize that there's a lot wrong with Congress that can't be fixed by putting any one particular party in power.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
We are a culture that values strength over intelligence. A man who is unflexible, unyielding, who cannot be changed is strong. A man who is open to change, who compromises appears to have a weak heart. When we argue and discuss, our goal is not to learn something, is not to find the right answer - our goal is to win the argument
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
"How many Fox News viewers think Saddam was responsible for 9/11? No, both parties manipulate the truth to their benefit but one party takes it to a whole new and exciting level."
Not many. How many people think that global warming is man-made, even though there is evidence to prove otherwise? How many people believe that bush started the war to make himself rich?
As you can see here about 1/3 of the american population believe that saddam was directly responsible for 9/11. I'd say that is pretty significant (and you can bet that the majority of this 1/3 is watching fox)
These findings are not a surprise to me.
Thanks to the innovation of the internet I've had probably thousands of arguments with people committed to a particular viewpoint.
The usual mentality is not curiosity, listening and interest in discovering truth.
It is a verbal boxing match with both sides flinging opinions and links until someone gets tired and stops
It's hard to blame them though. They feel that this issue is very important, and that the Democrats' stance on this basic right is merely a sign of a deeper disregard for personal rights in general
I've always felt that gun control was more a rural/urban divide than anything else.
If you live in the country, guns are how you hunt and keep the occasional mountain lion from eating your children. (And probably, in the event that someone does break into your house, having a gun is the only way to stop them in any kind of reasonable time -- the police station is probably not less than a mile away.)
If you live in the city, guns are how people in your neighborhood get killed. (And, sure, if somehow guns magically go away people would be killed by knives etc. instead, but try doing a drive-by and accidentally getting the wrong person with a knife.)
Speaking in broad terms that clearly don't account for every person in either situation, rural people don't want to give up an important tool, and urban people want the freedom to not be shot more than they want the freedom to own a gun.
I joined the Republican Party because I thought there were too many people spreading their "RINO" nonsense. I'm a moderate, but up to this year I was always independent. I want to bring moderation back to the party, as I believe the party was at one time more moderate and aligned to the middle. I also think that Christian right wingers (and i'm a Christian myself) are hijacking the party and turning it into a Jesus-fest. Again, I'm a believer. But that doesn't mean I want a "Holy Priest of the US" for President. The US was founded to escape religious oppression and I follow those tenants to a fault, regardless of my faith.
Barry Goldwater would be rolling in his grave if he knew of how the modern Republican party has been twisted.
I disagree.
The problem is that critical thinking is learned, not automatic. Shouting facts on to people's ears won't develop critical thinking, it'll just put them in a defensive position.
From what I can tell, critical thinking comes usually from the people you were raised with - parents, teachers, friends, etc.
It seems in the UK there are Critical Thinking classes offered to 16- to 18-year-olds. Although I find it to be too late for many people, it seems a step in the right direction.
I have no idea how well it works, though.
Dilbert RSS feed
It would sound like the perfect troll: find out how timid a kid was at age 3, that tells you how conservative he'll be at 23.
As it goes, it's completely backed up by research. And the researchers weren't looking for that info, it just sat there in the data.
In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments.
They weren't even thinking about political orientation. And why would they? They're psychology professors researching personality theory, personality development, research methodology, and stuff like that.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. Why? Who knows. Maybe for craps and giggles. Maybe because they had a column blank on their spreadsheet and wanted to fill it with one more metric to see if there was a link between voting and eating the erasers on the tops of pencils.
What was interesting to them was the arresting patterns they found.
As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient.
People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3.
Don't forget: the Blocks had NO IDEA what political affiliation any of the three year-olds would have when they did the survey in 1969. But go forward twenty years, and there it is. Everything that people say they want their kids to be: kids just like that became Libs. Everything that makes short-tempered parents scream and beat their kids: future applicants for a CPAC pass and an EIB golf shirt request on the Christmas list.
The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics. The article doesn't say if Professor N.S.Sherlock lit his pipe and smiled knowingly to himself upon hearing the results, but I wouldn't die of surprise if it happened.
Pure science: sometimes, the truth just hurts. Especially if you've been easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable all your life.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
B.F. Skinner did some very interesting experiments with pigeons. He kept them hungry and put them in a cage with a food dispenser that would dispense a food pellet at random intervals (with a known average interval). When the pellet dropped the bird would instinctively connect it with some random movement it had made just prior to the food appearing. It would then repeat that movement over and over again until another pellet dropped. Since it did not work every time the bird would also connect other random movements to the food. Over time the bird joined these random movements together in an intricate dance that it would perfom in front of the dispenser. The interesting part is that once the time taken to perform the dance was as long as the average interval between random pellets the birds did not change their routine, since they were almost certain to get the reward within two repetions. Once the bird was at this point it would dogmatically stick with same the dance even if the dispenser was turned off or the average interval changed.
It's my contention that most of the mundane daily rituals we humans perform, (including what we choose to read), are initially developed in the same manner.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
have you EVER seen a negative comment about bush on fox ? or a positive about obama on fox ? ...
I have certainly seen negative comments about obama on msnbc
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
It makes for a really neat Catch-22. Because the press is 'free', it is also for sale. There's no way to prevent the corporate/wealthy interests from gaining control over the media without allowing the government to control it instead.
So, pick your evil -
A) Government-run media
B) Greed-run media
There isn't any 'C'. At least not within the reasonable confines of established western civilization.
Humans are neat!
Confirmation Bias.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
This is me trying very hard:
Daily Show?!?!
hah! The Daily Show is NOT a news program. It's shown on COMEDY CENTRAL. Epic fail.
sudo eat my shorts
But on the subject of truth and lies, Hitler never started World War II, either. Britain and France had decided that Germany had to be taken down long before the actual Polish invasion. In fact Chamberlain said, in May 1939 "the fate of Poland depends on the final outcome of the war, which will depend on our ability to defeat Germany rather than to aid Poland at the beginning.".
I would not come to the conclusion based on prior events. From 1933 Hitler abolished democracy, re-militarized, tore up the Treaty of Versailles and reintroduced conscription. By 1935 Russia, the UK and others were trying to build pacts with each other because they could see where this was going! In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria then just before your quote of Chamberlain, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
In my view Hitler had started the road to WW2 probably by 1935 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland were the final straw. But because of Germany's head start France, UK, Russia and others were not willing to put their unprepared countries on the battlefield.
The most dangerous drug
How many people think that global warming is man-made, even though there is evidence to prove otherwise?
The entire point of the article is that people do not take facts into account when holding onto their opinions. Global warming is an excellent example, as you've proven. The facts show that it is man-made, without a doubt, but some people such as yourself refuse to believe it.
It's pretty obvious that the entire point of the "study" at UofM is to somehow prove that "misinformed" (or people on the right) people are believing lies more than the truth. This line of thinking is pretty typical of elitist leftists that feel they know what is better for the rest of society.
The study is showing that people are not believing in facts. You know -- facts? Unassailable truths arrived at by rigorous logic from concrete data?
This isn't a left or right thing, except that the right disagrees with more facts than the left does at this moment in history. In twenty years it'll be the other way around. But no matter who is doing it, I think we should all agree that people who cannot handle the facts are not being helpful to their society, especially when they involve themselves in setting public policy.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I noticed you focused on the negative aspects of that article. How about the later paragraph:
The researchers--John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley--found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
I guess you could make a value judgment on those attributes, but they have equal value in a person.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
have you EVER seen a negative comment about bush on fox ? or a positive about obama on fox ?
Yes and yes. Various Fox personalities ripped Bush when he nominated Harriet Miers to SCOTUS. I also saw some favorable coverage of Obama's handling of the General McChrystal mess and subsequent nomination of General Petraeus.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The problem is because of an inherent distrust of the source of the facts when they contradict information someone already believes to be true. Trust and knowing who to believe are big problems for people especially as they become more-and-more bombarded by bullshit day-in and day-out. Who do you trust?
After the trust hurdle comes the self/ego-preservation-instinct of people not being able to admit they are wrong or were ever wrong, despite evidence to the contrary. Think "LA, LA, LA, LA, I can't hear you". It reminds me of the Matrix a little; "We have a rule...We never free a mind after it reaches a certain age. It is dangerous, the mind has trouble letting go. I've seen it before and I'm sorry".
Yes. It's disappointing, but the way to sway people is to use anecdotes instead of data, and use appeals to emotion instead of reason.
So don't talk about a million sick children dying of a vaccine-preventable disease, just pick one kid and talk about him. And don't talk about how our purpose is to save lives and increase human prosperity, just say how that kid sure is sad and sick and it's such a shame and wah wah.
Yes, I'm serious, that's the way to do it. Take all of your nerdy intuitions and do exactly the opposite.
I don't see how this statement can be logically defended:
There is absolutely no way you will ever, ever, EVER keep a criminal who wants one from obtaining a gun. You might as well attempt to regular the air in the hope that they'll suffocate.
Let's illustrate with an extreme example. Certainly, if a government were to decide (and be able to enforce without a revolution, which is true in some countries but probably not others) that anyone caught with a gun in their possession was going to be publically tortured to death immediately, the number of criminals with guns would drop drastically. Make it something even more outrageously draconian (maybe you also seize all their property and kill their immediate family) and the number of criminals with guns will drop further.
I don't think these are good ideas; I'm not even actually for gun control. But it's very obviously untrue to say that there's nothing that could possibly be done. Along the same lines, I generally view the random gun violence deaths that do occur a price we pay for the freedom to bear arms, and I think that's a price worth paying -- but it's disingenuous to try to claim that either there is no such cost or that nothing can be done about it.
The study:
1. was done by professors at UC:Berkeley, an institution known for promoting left-wing points of view and squelching others.
2. was performed by a married couple; therefore it is unlikely that a serious evaluation of study shortcomings would have been performed by those guiding the study.
3. used 100 toddlers in the San Francisco Bay area. This is an incredibly small and narrow sample to draw such broad conclusions.
4. relies on the evaluations of a school teacher as to the state of mind and social attitude of a 3-year-old; no psychological professional ever did an actual review.
5. relies on 3-year-olds being in school (day care), as public school does not exist for 3-year-olds. This will taint the randomness of the sample with social and economic influences.
They talk about ties to your self-esteem. If you make them feel good first, they are more likely to consider your facts.
Just so you know, the reason we have elected representatives instead of a direct democracy is because public opinion is a shitty way of making public policy.
No, the reason why you have elected representatives is because the people who have originally created your political system were mostly of the wealthy landowner class, and didn't want to share power with rabble. So they arranged it so that the rabble elects them as their representatives, and then they rule in their name, ostensibly backed by popular mandate - but not truly beholden to popular opinion, and free to do anything in the name of "greater good".
There is a minor inconvenience of being voted out every now and then when the rabble get too unhappy about things being done differently from what they want, but does it really matter if your son, brother, nephew or other relative is going to get his seat in power not long after, anyway?
When I showed him that it was true and showed him that by percentage more Republicans supported Kennedy's Civil Rights reforms than Democrats did he went into a fit of rage!
A true fact but a bit misleading. The party composition was different then. Only a very few southern members of congress voted for the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 (introduced by Kennedy but passed under the Johnson administration) and only a few northern members voted against the bill. Among Northern Democrats a higher percentage supported the bill than Northern Republicans. Furthermore the passage of the bill caused many southerners to switch parties to the Republicans and is directly responsible for both parties respective positions on civil rights today.
You have to be careful comparing different eras. The Republican party of Lincoln's time bears little resemblance to the "same" party 100 years later which in turn bears only a casual resemblance to the Republican party of today.