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There are facts, and there are beliefs, and there are things you want so badly to believe that they become as facts to you.
The theory of cognitive dissonance—the extreme discomfort of simultaneously holding two thoughts that are in conflict—was developed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. In a famous study, Festinger and his colleagues embedded themselves with a doomsday prophet named Dorothy Martin and her cult of followers who believed that spacemen called the Guardians were coming to collect them in flying saucers, to save them from a coming flood. Needless to say, no spacemen (and no flood) ever came, but Martin just kept revising her predictions. Sure, the spacemen didn't show up today, but they were sure to come tomorrow, and so on. The researchers watched with fascination as the believers kept on believing, despite all the evidence that they were wrong.
This doubling down in the face of conflicting evidence is a way of reducing the discomfort of dissonance, and is part of a set of behaviors known in the psychology literature as "motivated reasoning." Motivated reasoning is how people convince themselves or remain convinced of what they want to believe—they seek out agreeable information and learn it more easily; and they avoid, ignore, devalue, forget, or argue against information that contradicts their beliefs.
[...] People see evidence that disagrees with them as weaker, because ultimately, they're asking themselves fundamentally different questions when evaluating that evidence, depending on whether they want to believe what it suggests or not, according to psychologist Tom Gilovich.
[...] In 1877, the philosopher William Kingdon Clifford wrote an essay titled "The Ethics of Belief" [PDF], in which he argued: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence."
[...] All manner of falsehoods—conspiracy theories, hoaxes, propaganda, and plain old mistakes—do pose a threat to truth when they spread like fungus through communities and take root in people's minds. But the inherent contradiction of false knowledge is that only those on the outside can tell that it's false. It's hard for facts to fight it because to the person who holds it, it feels like truth.
[...] In a New York Times article called "The Real Story About Fake News Is Partisanship", Amanda Taub writes that sharing fake news stories on social media that denigrate the candidate you oppose "is a way to show public support for one's partisan team—roughly the equivalent of painting your face with team colors on game day."
This sort of information tribalism isn't a consequence of people lacking intelligence or of an inability to comprehend evidence. Kahan has previously written that whether people "believe" in evolution or not has nothing to do with whether they understand the theory of it—saying you don't believe in evolution is just another way of saying you're religious. Similarly, a recent Pew study found that a high level of science knowledge didn't make Republicans any more likely to say they believed in climate change, though it did for Democrats.
[...] People also learn selectively—they're better at learning facts that confirm their worldview than facts that challenge it. And media coverage makes that worse. While more news coverage of a topic seems to generally increase people's knowledge of it, one paper, "Partisan Perceptual Bias and the Information Environment," showed that when the coverage has implications for a person's political party, then selective learning kicks into high gear.
[...] Fact-checking erroneous statements made by politicians or cranks may also be ineffective. Nyhan's work has shown that correcting people's misperceptions often doesn't work, and worse, sometimes it creates a backfire effect, making people endorse their misperceptions even more strongly.
[...] So much of how people view the world has nothing to do with facts. That doesn't mean truth is doomed, or even that people can't change their minds. But what all this does seem to suggest is that, no matter how strong the evidence is, there's little chance of it changing someone's mind if they really don't want to believe what it says. They have to change their own.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/this-article-wont-change-your-mind/519093/
[Related]:
The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions: [PDF]
THE POLITICS OF MOTIVATION [PDF]
Behavioral receptivity to dissonant information
"A man with a conviction is a hard man to change" [PDF]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @03:55AM
Its easy to be skeptical of someone telling you something you don't want to believe.
It takes discipline to doubt someone telling you something that you want to believe.
Remember: If its too good to be true, it probably is.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @04:09AM (1 child)
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence."
I don't buy it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @01:30PM
I wonder what his sufficient(!) evidence for this claim of an absolute was.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @04:18AM (7 children)
Ask a Liberal why certain minorities do so poorly on standardized tests, you can count on getting a huffy dismissal along the lines of "tests are racist!" Yet, like clockwork, every time the Democrats lose an election, out come the articles 'proving' by sober, official-sounding studies proving how everybody who didn't vote the right way is a maladjusted inferior buffoon, worthy only of scorn. Unless of course, you profess your sins, beg forgiveness, then go on to accuse your former brethren.
Every MSM propaganda machine out there is talking about 1984, but it feels more like The Crucible.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:01AM
You persecution complex is showing.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:17AM (1 child)
Ask a Liberal why certain minorities do so poorly on standardized tests, you can count on getting a huffy dismissal along the lines of "tests are racist!"
But Ask a Liberal why certain
minoritiesconservatives do so poorly on standardized tests, you can count on getting a confirmation along the lines of "tests are objective!". See, no hypocrisy, no double standard, it is just that racists are ducking fumb! This is why we cannot have white supremecy! These white trailer-trash racists keep pulling down the bell-curve, with their doo-rags and wife-beater shirts and all their "reverse discrimination" shit. So I say, just deport all the deplorables. That is what saved the Netherlands. They shipped all their stupid racist religious fundamentalists to South Africa! Worked out wonderfully! For Holland. Not so grate for Africa. Nobody wants Africaaners.(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @07:01AM
Yeah, dealing with deplorables is a complicated task. Sadly the people who don't like deplorable folks also look down on eugenics and other such methods of correcting humanity. Thankfully for you I don't believe eugenics is a good idea.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Lester on Friday March 17 2017, @08:59AM
You would have made a better statement if you had written also cases of "coincidences" from replublican . But I think that in your opinion liberals and democrats and a perfect example of beliefs over fact and republicas are the paradigm of rational thought.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday March 17 2017, @02:19PM (1 child)
So how do you counter the others that are unsurprised by the test results given years of inferior schooling and parents too busy working too many jobs to provide adequate educational support?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday March 17 2017, @05:56PM
So how do you counter the others that are unsurprised by the test results given years of inferior schooling and parents too busy working too many jobs to provide adequate educational support?
He seeks out agreeable information and learns it more easily; and he avoids, ignores, devalues, forgets, or argues against information that contradicts his belief.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @07:06PM
"Official sounding"? Example?
I must confess that I am extremely baffled why anybody would vote for T other an affinity for chaos and anarchy. He has an attention-deficit problem, an obsessive ego that distracts and occupies him, and the ability to offend people and countries without apology. He has never ever stated a carefully thought-out line of reasoning for ANYTHING, at least outside of beauty pageants. Just stream-of-consciousness mutterings that sound stolen from 6 year olds ("stomp the bad people!") that orbit around how great he is.
I once lost a job to an H1B (visa) worker, and if that were election day, I admit I may have pulled the lever for T out of anger and spite. But there is far more at stake than visa workers with such an immature personality.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @04:34AM (33 children)
How many times have all of us read what is, essentially, the same article before?
It doesn't matter if "facts" are real or not, all that matters is what enforces "the way I view the world." This is extremely elementary.
Yet, this is why people STILL think Trump isn't involved with Russia, and why Wikileaks is somehow still defensible, why people deny the gender wage gap, why race is indicative of IQ (or for that matter is scientifically determinable in any means whatsoever (HINT: IT'S NOT)), why immigration is somehow bad whatsoever, and so on and so forth. It's because people seek out information that backs up their preconceived notions of the world, or fabricate it themselves. There is, unfortunately, no good answer for this except stomping out this stuff, e.g. Fake news, before it has the chance to spread like the virus it is.
I really hope we as a species can learn from the mistakes and learn how to stop the BS from spreading and keep the waters of knowledge cleaner than before. Hopefully with AI in the future we can really break down these mental barriers because that's all that they are, and they're causing a lot more problems than solving (see: election of Trump).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 17 2017, @04:40AM (8 children)
So far AI is doing the opposite: suggesting stuff matching your own preconceived notions.
If you "dislike" a video you disagree with, you are telling Youtube that you don't want to see videos like that anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:05AM (4 children)
That's not "AI."
It is just marketing trying to maximize the number of commercials you watch.
Bias confirmation is addictive, so they give you bias confirmation.
Same as marketing always has.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @09:17AM (3 children)
That's not "AI."
No true Scotsman ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @01:32PM (2 children)
If you say that a tree is no Scotsman even if it is located in Scotland, that's not an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:16PM (1 child)
yes but demonstrate how his argument is metaphorically a tree.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 18 2017, @08:29AM
The algorithm used is most probably more or less the following:
1. Create a matrix which for every pair of videos entry givies the number of people who marked it the same (both like or both dislike) minus the number of people who marked it the opposite (one like, the other dislike).
2. Create a vector which contains a 1 for each video you liked, a -1 for each video you disliked, and 0 otherwise.
3. Do a matrix vector multiplication. The resulting vector gives a score for each video.
4. Output the highest scored videos.
I don't know about you, but I certainly wouldn't consider such an algorithm as AI.
Now implementing this in a way that it is efficient certainly requires intelligence, but that is intelligence of the programmers, not of the software.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Friday March 17 2017, @05:08AM (2 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 17 2017, @07:50AM (1 child)
I also avoid the dislike button for that reason. However, the implications of those buttons are not made clear.
Then just about every Youtuber tires to game the system by asking you to "like". That is why they moved to watch minutes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:34PM
Indeed. I must confess that I am not clear on why there even is a choice to downmod someone because you disagree. It doesn't really tell us anything about the quality of the comment that they are disagreeing with. What would be far more informative is if people would add their own comment telling us why they disagree.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @04:43AM (9 children)
Trivial to flip that around:
this is why people STILL think Trump is involved with Russia, and why Wikileaks is somehow still indefensible, why people believe the gender wage gap, why race is not indicative of IQ (or for that matter is not scientifically determinable in any means whatsoever (HINT: IT IS)), why immigration is somehow not bad whatsoever, and so on and so forth
Huh. It makes much more sense that way. Oh, BTW, by "Fake news" did you mean CNN or MSNBC? Eh, probably MSNBC, because CNN is now "Very fake news".
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:19AM (5 children)
> Trivial to flip that around:
You are right, it is trivial.
But only if you believe that facts are completely arbitrary. Only if you believe that there is no such thing as truth, only tribe.
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. Post-truth is pre-fascism.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @07:15AM (4 children)
4 out of 5 can be fixed. The situation with wikileaks is complicated, so not really fixable.
There is no evidence that Trump is unusually involved with Russia. On the other hand, Bill Clinton got a 1/3 of a $million for a speech to a Russian bank that was financing the purchase of 20% of our Uranium assets, and then later "donations" from related entities to the Clinton Foundation topped 100 million. Hillary Clinton's supposed hostility to Russia is interesting for sure. Did a deal go bad, perhaps involving a silly "reset button" with the ambassador followed by an embarrassing invasion, or is she just trying to pretend she isn't influenced by a 9-figure "donation", or is she really just itching for nuclear war?
The gender wage gap goes away if you consider lifetime hours worked (accounting for overtime and leave) and what jobs people do. Choosing to major in "Early Childhood Development" hurts your earnings. Taking a decade off to have kids hurts your earnings -- your experience becomes obsolete and your professional network forgets who you are. Avoiding overtime hurts your earnings. If you want higher earnings, suck it up.
As for the IQ... we've all seen the graph. It's even on Wikipedia. Go back to school if you can't read graphs. While the exact meaning of intelligence might be difficult to pin down, we all know what the word means and it is pretty damn obvious that IQ tests measure it more or less correctly.
Immigration didn't work out for the natives of the Americas. Immigration didn't work out for Lebanon, which used to be a lovely Christian country without horrific violence. Immigration didn't work out for Sweden, which now has weekly grenade attacks (seriously, OMG WTF!!!) and has seen skyrocketing rape. A nation isn't just land and laws. It is a people; a culture that generates those laws and claims that land. If the third world moves here, then they will act in third-world ways and vote for third-world laws. They come to our nice home, but they act to make it their home and by doing so make it third-world.
Of course, these facts won't change your mind. You don't have a clue about fascism, but it makes a nice label for the other team. You can also call them sexist and racist. Read "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" some time. Here, I'll label you: you are a fake American. Why do you hate America?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @01:07PM (1 child)
There is no evidence that Trump is unusually involved with Russia
Your failure to look [soylentnews.org] does not mean there is nothing to see.
That principle applies to pretty much every thing else you wrote.
Of course, these facts won't change your mind. You don't have a clue about fascism, but it makes a nice label for the other team.
And that, right there, is proof you have your eyes closed.
Those words I wrote are not mine. They are the words of one of the foremost experts on the rise of fascism in pre-WWII Europe. [alternet.org] If there is anyone who has clue about fascism, he is it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:48PM
I looked. The evidence is piss-poor for Trump being unusually involved with Russia. (never said "zero") The evidence shows that Trump is, oddly, less involved than Clinton. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Your "expert" is Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor being interviewed for Alternet. I'll accept that as much as you'd accept David Duke being interviewed for Breitbart or Infowars. The week after the election, Timothy Snyder cranks out a book that preaches to the choir, a rather blatant way to make money. He's laughing all the way to the bank, and so here he is pushing his book. It personally benefits him to get you worried about Trump.
I don't know why you aren't happy to see a president put America first. Why do you hate America and Americans? I find it sad that you are a fake American, but Trump is still your president.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @04:14PM (1 child)
Hey, Buzzard, why are you posting as AC? We all know this has to be you. And who the hell modded this shit up as "Insightful", of all things? Would somebody care to step forward and defend that upmod? Anybody?!?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 18 2017, @12:05AM
That doesn't look like Uzzard's usual tracheal diarrhea to me. It's written at a slightly higher grade level and doesn't seem to have that same undercurrent of vengeful, aggrieved persecution complex layered with entitlement and disdain.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 17 2017, @05:48AM (2 children)
Isn't it odd how you're denigrating those liberals for sliding into the same sort of behavior people like you engage in reflexively? Yeah, it's dumb to ignore plain facts and data, but what they're doing is the shadow side of what your kind does.
Y'see, *you* assholes, with your hyper-activated amygdalas and your my-tribe-uber-alles mentality, go from "Group X has lower IQ collectiveln that Group Y (which I belong to)" to "Therefore Group Y can do whatever it wants to Group X." Usually you're juuuust bright enough not to couch it in such direct terms, but the intent is obvious to anyone smarter than a bowl of moldy oatmeal.
The slower liberals, with good intentions but not much foresight, unfortunately knee-jerk and slip into the same sort of unthinking idiocy you do. In their case, though, they go "Certain members of Group Y are trying to derive ought from is in impossible ways with regard to Group X. There are too many of them and they are too loud, and their approach is cognitively "sticky" compared to reasoned debate, among other reasons because it is much less computationally expensive. Hence, we will deny the data rather than the conclusion, as this is competitive with their method."
And THAT is where they go wrong; they start acting like you pissfucks, putting their feelings above reality. Unfortunately, because they are fundamentally decent people unlike you, *they're not as good at this as you are.* IMO this is where the slightly shrill, deranged character and some of the weird obsessions of some leftists comes from; they *know* something's wrong but they're so driven to prevent what they (rightly) see as creeping, corroding injustice that they stuff that mental warning via displacement behaviors.
Now in my case, I look at the data and the conclusions you people draw from it vis-a-vis Groups X and Y and dispute the conclusion, not the data. This looks something like "Okay, yeah, the data show Group X has a lower collective IQ than Group Y. And...so fucking what? Where do you get off claiming that members of X are somehow undeserving of life compared to Y because of that? That is a blatant non-sequitur." This is of course only once I've vetted the methods of collection and presentation to the best of my ability; I only took up to 200-level statistics, but have retained the material well.
This of course gets me derided as an "ess jay double-yew" by you idiots and a mean mean meany mean head by the unthinking segments of the left. Thankfully, there aren't nearly as many of them as there are of you, and they happen to be only partly wrong some of the time, as opposed to almost entirely wrong nearly all of the time :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @01:33PM (1 child)
"Okay, yeah, the data show Group X has a lower collective IQ than Group Y. And...so fucking what? Where do you get off claiming that members of X are somehow undeserving of life compared to Y because of that? That is a blatant non-sequitur."
That argument isn't persuasive. If a group is provably different from another group in a meaningful way, which is the entire point of anyone making these arguments, then it follows that they should be treated in a way that takes that difference into consideration. And even if that doesn't lead all the way to eugenics, it does give moral support to paternalistic social policy like Charles Murray's The Advantages of Social Apartheid. [aei.org]
The powerful are always looking to find ways to justify and expand their dominance. Science is seen as a neutral arbiter of truth in the modern world, so the powerful will cloak their justifications in scientism and there will always be people willing to uncritically go along because it suits their prejudices. You can make all the moral arguments about personhood that you want, but if the science is bent to 'prove' that one group has less personhood than another that will be convincing, just like it is convincing at a more mundane level to say that fair-skinned people are more susceptible to sunburn than their melanin-rich counterparts.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 17 2017, @11:40PM
My argument *is* a scientific one though, or at least a logical one. It's specifically saying "you are overextending your epistemological reach here. You cannot get ought from is in this manner." The facts *are* neutral; science itself, because it is a human endeavour, cannot help but be at least somewhat politicized, but the deliberate abuse of science and statistics has got to stop. Those tools were never meant to be used this way, any more than a knitting needle is designed for eating soup, and willful misuse of them leads to a Pandora's Box of clinging, deep-burrowing evil.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday March 17 2017, @01:18PM (3 children)
I think they think that because so far there's been very little hard evidence to that effect, and the Democrats went to completely overblown claims immediately without anything remotely resembling evidence to back it up. For example, John Podesta's email was hacked using a simple phishing attack through Tor that absolutely anybody could have pulled off, no sophisticated state-level actor required, but the Democrats claimed it absolutely had to have been Putin. Which also involved assuming that all Russians automatically do the bidding of Putin.
You're complaining about fake news later in your posts. The one thing that Wikileaks has *never* been credibly accused of doing is faking the information they're publicizing. Providing detailed information on the activities of governments and public figures is called reporting, and that's always defensible.
I'm very left-wing, but your biases are showing. My guess is that you watch MSNBC, which has been pushing the "Russia Hacked the Election" story, largely without evidence, since the day after Hillary Clinton lost.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @03:06PM (2 children)
I think they think that because so far there's been very little hard evidence to that effect,
I tell you again. Will it sink in this time?
Trump himself has accepted the classified evidence.
The one guy in the world who made the most noise about denying it and who has the access to the most information to prove it has admitted it is true.
Trump Says ‘I Think It Was Russia’ That Hacked the Democrats [nytimes.com]
The one thing that Wikileaks has *never* been credibly accused of doing is faking the information they're publicizing.
That's reductive - literal lies are not the only way to deceive, in fact they are the worst way to deceive because when disproven there is no wiggle room for motivated deniers to continue denying the truth.
What they have clearly done, on multiple occasions, is misrepresent the information they've released in order to serve a particular narrative. For example, their claim that the CIA can bypass encrypted comms like Signal. [twitter.com] Which is true in the technical sense, but not in the way the average reader would understand it and they made no effort to inform the average reader they were really talking about rooting phones, not cracking the actual messages. Or when they claimed the CIA could turn on the microphone of a samsung tv [twitter.com] -- also technically true, but falsely implying it could be done remotely when in fact it required physical access to install the hack.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday March 17 2017, @06:54PM (1 child)
That has no bearing at all on whether I accept the evidence that I've never seen and never will because it's super-secret stuff and I'm not and never have been working for the federal government. The stuff they've publicized doesn't say what they claim it says, which already makes me suspicious.
Among other things, the same people and organizations that are telling me that Russia hacked the DNC were telling me 15 years ago that Iraq definitely had chemical weapons. That doesn't help their credibility.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @09:08PM
I don't believe there was any credible evidence that Russia hacked anything either, but in the instance of Iraq, there WERE WMDs. The CIA bought some: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/cia-is-said-to-have-bought-and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 17 2017, @03:43PM (9 children)
It doesn't matter if "facts" are real or not, all that matters is what enforces "the way I view the world." This is extremely elementary.
Yet, this is why people STILL think Trump isn't involved with Russia, and why Wikileaks is somehow still defensible, why people deny the gender wage gap, why race is indicative of IQ (or for that matter is scientifically determinable in any means whatsoever (HINT: IT'S NOT)), why immigration is somehow bad whatsoever, and so on and so forth. It's because people seek out information that backs up their preconceived notions of the world
I liked the part where you complained about people setting up absolutes and not listening to contrary opinions, then you listed a bunch of your own absolutes and said you wouldn't listen to contrary opinions.
why immigration is somehow bad whatsoever
You're seriously going to say there's no conceivable circumstance where immigration could be a problem whatsoever? Wow. I'm sure I could lay my hands on about 2 or 3 bombings in the last decade carried out by immigrants which would have demonstrably been prevented if the U.S. had a closed border policy.
2006 UNC SUV attack:
Mohammed Reza Taheri-aza intentionally rammed into people on the UNC Chapel Hill campus. Nine people were injured, none seriously. Taheri-aza was reportedly an Iranian-born U.S. citizen.
2013 Boston marathon bombing:
Double bombings near the finish line of the Boston marathon killed three people and injured at least 264. The perpetrators were brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. According to FBI interrogators, the two were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs, but were not connected to any known terrorist groups. Tamerlan was born in Russia but was a permanent resident of the U.S., while Dzhokhar was born in Kyrgyzstan and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2012. Both were ethnically Chechen.
2016 Minnesota mall stabbing:
Dahir A. Adan committed a mass stabbing at the Crossroads Center shopping mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, injuring 10 people. Adan was born in Kenya and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2008.
2016 New York and New Jersey bombings:
Over the course of three days in September, three bombs exploded and several explosive devices were found in New Jersey and New York City, injuring at least 30 people. The alleged perpetrator was Ahmad Khan Rahimi, an Afghan-born U.S. citizen.
2016 Ohio State university attack:
Abdul Razal Ali Artan carried out an attack on the Ohio State University campus, injuring 13. Artan, a student of the university, was a Muslim Somali immigrant.
http://people.com/politics/donald-trump-refugee-muslim-ban-terrorist-attack-us-statistics/ [people.com]
I'm not saying we should close the borders, but it is a thing.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @03:50PM (8 children)
You're seriously going to say there's no conceivable circumstance where immigration could be a problem whatsoever?
Yes, if only one child is saved, then it is better to leave hundreds of children to die [npr.org] in syria and millions to live in temporaryily permanent campsites wasting their lives away.
Because that's what makes America great!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 17 2017, @04:02PM (3 children)
Making it a numbers game does not disprove "somehow bad whatsoever." What you mean is "not worth the effort," which is a totally different argument.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @04:11PM (2 children)
> Making it a numbers game does not disprove "somehow bad whatsoever."
So your entire problem with the OP's statement boils down to their use of hyperbole.
That's about as shallow and empty a criticism as you can make because it completely sidesteps the intent of the statement.
Its one step up from a grammar flame. Why even bother? -- rhetorical question, just in case that was not obvious
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Friday March 17 2017, @05:08PM (1 child)
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Somebody making a bold claim and then, when called on it, immediately backing off, is rather disappointing. But if nobody calls them on it, people incorrectly take it at face value.
Their entire argument revolves around the claim that the issue is easily and obviously decided. In point of fact, it's not so cut-and-dried. QED
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:17PM
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Except it was not an extraordinary claim. It was hyperbole abbreviating an entire argument into a single, grammatically incorrect sentence.
You made the choice to interpret it that way despite all of the contextual clues that you should not.
people incorrectly take it at face value.
People are not computers, most of us can recognize a passionate argument as being passionate and not mistake it for a cold recital of bare facts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @06:00PM (3 children)
Syria can fix Syria.
We have our own problems. Our problems may be less awful, but they are more relevant to us.
We get Syria's problems too if we invite them to live here. You can take the humans out of Syria, but you can't take the Syria out of the humans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @07:31PM (2 children)
While the Syrian people obviously played a major role in breaking their own country, the USA also had a hand in it too. The US invasion of Iraq played an important role in destabilizing the entire region which allowed Islamist groups like al Qaeda and Daesh to get a foot hold there. There is a lot of blame to go around. In that light, it is not completely unreasonable for Syrians to feel that we owe them some consideration.
I got mine, to hell with all the rest of you? This attitude, right here, is why Americans are often despised around the world.
Let me guess: you are a Trump supporter, right? So, tell me: when should we rip that plaque with Emma Lazarus' poem off the pedestal that the Statue of Liberty stands on? You know, the one that says "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"? I think I would much rather have Syrians as my neighbours than Trump and his supporters. While there is the possibility that some would-be jihadis may have slipped in with the refugees, on the other hand, I am quite certain that Trump will screw me over first chance he gets. Frankly, I like my odds better with the refugees than with Trump and his supporters. More and more, the Trumpettes just plain scare me. Just sayin'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @10:52PM
Am I supposed to care if non-Americans despise Americans? The goal is to win.
The leaders of most countries don't give a shit about Americans, and that is OK. It's expected. They do their job, or not, and the American president does his job.
Emma Lazarus' poem is pretty offensive. Put the Declaration of Independence there instead.
Not that he isn't bad, but our standards for presidents are low enough that Trump is the best we've had in at least a century. Most didn't put America first (most important job qualification) and many were awful in other ways. So far, my only complaints about Trump are issues with the rule of law (failed to prosecute Hillary for her felonies) and the loss of net neutrality. I suspected both when I voted.
Unlike the hateful left, Trump supporters aren't out hurting people for their beliefs. You know who you'd be safe with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @02:07AM
Personally I have no problem with that, especially the bit about yearning to be free.
What I object to is immigrants who come here and want to impose their antiquated religious and authoritarian beliefs on the rest of the population.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @04:57AM (1 child)
Here's a book review from over a year ago, new book studying con artists. Looks like nearly everyone is vulnerable if the artist chooses the right con for the mark. http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/01/why-we-all-fall-for-con-artists.html [nymag.com]
Q. Are certain types of people more skilled or motivated in conning?
A. In my book I talk about the dark triad of traits: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. Any of those can predispose someone to being a con artist. In order to be a con artist you have to take advantage of other people’s belief in you, and psychopaths don’t really have a conscience, so it’s much easier for them to take that step. Narcissism, you have to have an overinflated sense of self in order to rationalize conning other people, especially if you’re not a psychopath. If you’re someone who feels emotion normally, narcissism will protect you, because you say, “Well, I deserve it.” And finally, Machiavellianism is a textbook definition of a con artist, because it’s someone who is like Machiavelli’s “ideal prince,” someone who uses the tools of persuasion and deception and connivance to get what he wants. The ends justify the means. But a lot of it, as with so many things in psychology, is a meeting of predisposition and opportunity.
A later Q sets off a long answer from the author, which starts out as follows:
Q. What are some common methods of subconscious persuasion that con artists use?
A. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People is kind of the unofficial con artist’s bible, because a lot of those tactics he talks about, in terms of building relationships and being successful in business, are ideal for getting people to trust you. One of the really easy things is creating a feeling of familiarity. You’re more likely to trust someone who feels more familiar to you. It’s even enough to exploit something called the "mere exposure effect," where, say, you just go to the same coffee shop as someone every single day, and they may not consciously note you, but all of a sudden you feel more familiar. ... ...
If you are interested in this topic, the whole review is worth a few minutes to read.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:15AM
> One of the really easy things is creating a feeling of familiarity. You’re more likely to trust someone who feels more familiar to you.
I experienced this one personally, quite by accident.
I used to be a contractor at a defense contractor. They made us contractors go through special hoops because employees were more trustworthy - even though contractors went through the exact same background check to get a security clearance as all the employees did.
One of those hoops was manually signing in and out every day with the guards while employees just badged in through any of the normal doors. The end result was that I was on a first name basis with all the guards, while they barely knew any of the employees. So if I needed a favor from a guard, bend the rules a little, they were pretty amendable. If one of the employees I worked with needed a favor from a guard, tough shit.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:50AM (10 children)
Seriously, read this book. It's short, funny and a real eye-opener. And directly answers the question using scientific research.
https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ [umanitoba.ca]
OK, what’s this book about? It’s about what’s happened to the American government lately. It’s about the disastrous decisions that government has made. It’s about the corruption that rotted the Congress. It’s about how traditional conservatism has nearly been destroyed by authoritarianism. It’s about how the “Religious Right” teamed up with amoral authoritarian leaders to push its un-democratic agenda onto the country. It’s about the United States standing at the crossroads as the next federal election approaches.
“Well,” you might be thinking, “I don’t believe any of this is true.” Or maybe, you’re thinking, “What else is new? I’ve believed this for years.” Why should a conservative, moderate, or liberal bother with this book? Why should any Republican, Independent, or Democrat click the “Whole Book” link on this page?
Because if you do, you’ll begin an easy-ride journey through some very relevant scientific studies I have done on authoritarian personalities--one that will take you a heck of a lot less time than the decades it took me. Those studies have a direct bearing on all the topics mentioned above. So if you think the first paragraph is a lot of hokum, or full of half-truths, I invite you to look at the research.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 17 2017, @02:51PM (7 children)
There any update to the "whole book" link on that page?
The pendulum has swung further towards authoritarianism in America. What's to be done about it? Many of us would rather do something other than watch helplessly as they seize the wheel and drive us all over a cliff, all while insisting there is no cliff.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday March 17 2017, @03:06PM (2 children)
What's to be done about it?
Buy guns.
Worst case scenario, the day Republicans come to send me to a concentration camp or corporate prison will be a good day to die.
Best case scenario, I help them to prove their assertion that if the Jews in Germany had been sufficiently armed, there wouldn't have been a Holocaust.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @03:09PM (1 child)
> Buy guns.
That's the last option, only useful when we've already gone over the cliff.
The flipside of the same authoritarian coin.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday March 17 2017, @08:56PM
When we go over the cliff, you won't be able to buy guns anymore if you're an undesirable.
Maybe we're not as close as I think we are. Don't give up on the ballot box just yet. In four years, maybe this will all seem like a bad dream. But be ready for the ballot box not to be enough. The jury box and soap box haven't been working in a while.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @03:16PM (1 child)
What's to be done about it?
short version [facebook.com]
long version [amazon.com]
Reviewed [theguardian.com]
I'm still looking for a pirate copy because I don't want to end up on a list for buying it.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday March 18 2017, @07:47AM
You're smart and technical enough to have been a regular slashdot reader. You are also curmudgeonly enough to have migrated to a new site when slashdot implemented "beta" (haurk-spit sound effect). You are almost certainly on the list already.
Just buy or download the book, it won't change your TLA profile at all.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @07:00PM
There any update to the "whole book" link on that page?
Yes or at least an archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160314160001/http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf [archive.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:24PM
The current website for the book is theauthoritarians.org [theauthoritarians.org] which has working PDF and ePub links (as well as a handful of blog articles about events after the book was written).
I just finally read that book myself after seeing it recommended on threads like this for years, partially because I had just read The Righteous Mind [righteousmind.com] at the recommendation of a friend, which I actually recommend more strongly than The Authoritarians. The latter book is also a pop science book about how the liberals and conservatives differ but focuses on moral psychology and is more applicable to helping understand how to talk to conservatives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @02:58PM
Good call. I'd like to add that even if ~250 pages may make somebody balk at it anyway, easily half of that are notes at the end of each chapter that aren't necessary for casual read.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday March 18 2017, @05:33AM
"Very relevant scientific studies I have done on authoritarian personalities"
Scientific studies on personalities? Were they peer reviewed?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @06:30AM (11 children)
Everybody will think it's talking about 'the other side.'
And I think there's a simple explanation. Most things we have no way of knowing as a personal fact. We're left to rely on information from others to inform us. Yet the media has really deteriorated in recent years in no small part thanks to the rise of social media. To compete in a world where 500 organizations are reporting on the same story and only the most "exciting" gets visibility on social media yielding those revenue generating clicks, media as a whole has begun to turn very click baity. Depending on your own bias: "TRUMP BANS MEDIA HE DOESN'T LIKE FROM WHITEHOUSE PRESS BRIEFINGS" or "FORMER NOAA CLIMATOLOGY SCIENTIST ADMITS ALL DATA FABRICATED." These articles often revert back to the much less interesting truth in the text, but in modern times that doesn't really matter. Nobody reads their stories - just the completely fake headlines which are taken at face value. Since I think most Soylentals lean left they probably know why the latter headline is false, but might still think the former is true. What actually happened is that a small one-off off camera Q&A session was held in the press secretary's office. Only a handful of hand-picked organizations were allowed in. CNN was not one of these organizations so they decided to run stories trying to imply that they'd been banned from all White House press briefings. They were and still are at each and every press briefing.
Search engines don't really help matters here. They, as they should, tend to sort data focusing primarily on popularity. But then in searching for information you end up getting news that is to information as 'Justin Bieber' is to music. Giving 'be a belieber' a whole new meaning? And most social media is even worse. Some sorts such as Facebook work by datamining individuals and then trying to link people to content that the data indicates they will be agreeable with. So you get an intentionally filtered slice of reality. Reddit-like voting systems suffer similar problems with selection bias in the voting schemes. Most people don't sit around for hours a day waiting to upvote news that they agree with. Those that do tend to have extreme views. So you get this radical left picture of reality on Reddit. You get this radical right picture of reality on Voat.
I don't know of a precise solution, but I think one good idea is to surround yourself with views you disagree with. When you start to see things from the 'other side's' point of view, you generally reach the medium between two extremes where the truth actually lay. But this is tough to get people to do since it requires about skin about 5" thick and lots of tolerance for stupidity. But you also get to experience how things are manipulated and presented when trying to appeal to one side. And you see the same thing happening on 'your' side. Like this article mentions it's much harder to see that when the manipulated content is stuff that you already tend to naturally agree with.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday March 17 2017, @07:58AM (2 children)
Extremist know this, so put forward even more extreme views to get what they really want. Classic negotiating tactic.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday March 17 2017, @06:12PM (1 child)
There's something else going on that's more complicated than that. This is the concept known as the "Overton Window", which is the range of ideas deemed reasonable and acceptable. If you're trying to change what happens, you change what the Overton Window is. The way most organizations try to change the Overton Window is by talking about what might have been once a fringe idea incessantly, ideally with good-looking people on the TV who can't be responded to, challenged, or demonstrated to be wrong. That's a lot of how propaganda works.
I also take exception to the concept of "extremist", for one simple reason: Who gets to decide who's an "extremist"? Declaring somebody an extremist is a clear attempt to effectively silence somebody without actually disproving their point.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @07:57PM
The internet is a curious monkey wrench there, wouldn't you say? I think it's working to chip away peoples' concerns of appearance and simply to pursue what they think is correct. Even if you choose to believe something that's objectively wrong, you can probably find millions that would support you in said belief thanks to the internet. So while it may be helping to mislead more people than before, I think people that are misled are being misled of their own accord. They claim to believe such things not because they worry what people would think otherwise, but because that is what they truly have been led to believe.
I think Sanders and Trump could be used as examples here. Their views were far outside the apparent Overton Window of society at the time and had people been left to receive information more unilaterally (as in just from the media) I think both of these candidates would have never received more than a fraction of any vote. But with the internet and people able to anonymously discuss issues and see others hold similar beliefs, it empowers people to give less regard to the social implications of supporting people that other people may think are simply unacceptable. Of course it still has a substantial effect, but I think ideally it would become a tautological notion that comes down to 'popular beliefs are popular'.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:15AM (4 children)
False equivalence. It's believable because Trump is prone to extremely petty and haphazard actions. Lo and behold, it did happen [cnn.com]. The normal daily briefing was replaced by the one-off session that day, CNN reporters were physically blocked from entering (you make it sound like they didn't try to get in), and some news outlets boycotted it because of it. The only inaccurate part of the headline is the plural "briefings". Search the headline you wrote and none of the top 20 "clickbait" headlines or CNN's own seem to make that mistake. Even Milo Y has the headline "LIBERALS FURIOUS AFTER WHITE HOUSE BANS CNN, NYT & BUZZFEED FROM PRESS BRIEFING".
Where's the archive link? Or are you ready to admit you are wrong?
Trump has called the press an enemy of the people and criticized them for using unnamed sources. Maybe he has a point, because unnamed sources [nytimes.com] in his White House are used to confuse the press. His people are creating fake news by using fake leaks. Maybe the media should just ignore what the White House and everyone in it have to say and do real investigative journalism instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @10:41AM (3 children)
It was not a press briefing. Note how your CNN URL refers to it as a "gaggle" which is what the event was called to clearly distinguish it from a press briefing. Yet they ran the headline as a press briefing. It was an atypical no-camera brief session held not in the press room, but in Spicer's office. It was also only open to a handful of invitees. This [npr.org] article states a reporter, during the 'gaggle', stated as part of a question, "This banner on CNN right now that says CNN and others have been blocked from media briefings."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @01:14PM (2 children)
It was not a press briefing. Note how your CNN URL refers to it as a "gaggle" which is what the event was called to clearly distinguish it from a press briefing.
You just keep grasping at straws don't you?
Motivated reasoning at its worst.
From the CNN article:
The meeting, which is known as a gaggle, was held in lieu of the daily televised Q-and-A session in the White House briefing room.
When you cancel the standard press briefing and replace it with an off-camera exclusionary meeting, it doesn't matter what you call it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:43PM (1 child)
Press gaggles [whitehouse.gov] are not the same thing as press briefings. It's a term that has been used for decades now. They're smaller, informal, off camera, and generally come with minimal content from the white house. This event was not scheduled as a press briefing, but as a gaggle. CNN intentionally misrepresented this in their headline. "CNN not invited to limited attendance Q&A session." would have been appropriate, but generated a tempered debate instead of appealing to pathos to spark emotion. Note the reaction was invariably a mix of, "omg Trump's a fascist hitler nazi" and "yay hope he bans all those other fake news outlets while he's at it." That is a result that's in no small part due to the means of reporting on both sides. You'd be hard pressed to find actual calm considerations of whether or not this is something that ought be allowed and if not then how ought "worth" for admittance to limited access venues be fairly assayed? The media is manipulating people who want to hear their side of "reality" on both sides and driving them to idiocracy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:47PM
Dude, you are out of straws.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday March 17 2017, @08:23AM (2 children)
Like all things, there is another side of what you say. While you pin-point the flaw of individual, I will point out a flaw in the whole society - that we seem to constantly have a bunch of people who are powerful and are good at commanding power, while rest of the people are powerless in their life, both inside and outside of their home. In my humble opinion, media is one way to gloss over this power-gap. So, in my view, the rise of consumer side of media (from breitbart/fox to buzzfeed/guardian) creates a false sense of power among the powerless.
It is an age old problem. So old, that we actually setup a system which only looked at fact, and hoped to make it better over time. It was called judiciary, and it had known flaws. I am not sure when, but it seems we have put down all our cards and given up our hands in making it better. Now judiciary doesn't bother to balance the powerful and powerless in search for truth, it is more interested in maintaining its own power and authority to pass closed-door judgements.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @10:59AM (1 child)
I do completely agree with you. I think there are a lot of possible solutions here, but many are so revolutionary that they probably cannot really be patch-worked into our current system even if we wanted to. And in reality they obviously never would be since it would entail the current power-system losing their grasp. The most obvious idea, and one I think we as a species will gradually trend towards, is direct democracy. And forget this 51% is enough. 80% to pass a law, 30% to overturn one. Other ideas include treating political service in a fashion similar to jury duty. The traditional argument there was that we'd end up with less than optimally meritorious representatives yet in the end they would be representative of the people. And in any case, I think we can all agree that our current system of elections also don't necessarily yield the most meritorious candidates... But these ideas all have so many further implications and nuance that I don't think they're viable except from the very advent of a nation (Mars perhaps...?) A true direct democracy entails a far greater level of responsibility and power than people have had. And like giving a man who's never dealt with much money a million dollars, it'd be little surprise to see that power misused. It's through no inherent flaw of the individual - but rather throwing somebody into an entirely new situation and expecting them to start 'playing' properly right away. That's just not realistic.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 17 2017, @03:21PM
80% to pass a law, 30% to overturn one.
80% is a bit steep but okay. I'd probably lean towards 70%.
But 30% to repeal? For examples why that doesn't work see Weimar Germany [wikipedia.org], or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [wikipedia.org], or even our own government under the Articles of Confederation. [wikipedia.org]
A true direct democracy entails a far greater level of responsibility and power than people have had.
Athens and Switzerland weren't things?
The world is a lot more complicated now than it was in the early 1800s, and we have access to a lot more information so there's really too much for a single person to stay well-informed about, unfortunately. But the really great part comes when your representatives are voting on multi-hundreds-page-long bills that *they* aren't even informed on. In secret. With only a couple days' deliberation so the public doesn't find out. Oh shoot, somebody tipped them off: well then put it on the backburner for a couple years and we'll try again later.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday March 17 2017, @03:23PM (1 child)
As others have said, this article isn't new or surprising. One thing I'd add to the summary is that "facts" don't exist as atomic nuggets of "truth" by themselves. They need to be seen in context to make sense.
There are certainly lots of reasons why people continue to reinforce their beliefs or hold to them in the face of opposing evidence, but one necessary step toward actually changing people's minds is to recognize the underlying assumptions of their belief system. A random "fact" may seem to contradict what you know/believe, but it may be interpreted very differently within the context of your underlying assumptions. Classic "conspiracy theorist" behavior is to take every bit of evidence against your theory and twist it so that it seems to support your theory (or, in the worst case, cite some background assumption of your worldview that allows you to categorically dismiss it).
Conspiracy theorists may sometimes be a lost cause, but other people CAN actually change their minds on other things. The important thing is understanding the underlying assumptions and figuring out how to work within those or perhaps interrogate those directly. You see this all the time in high-profile political debates with the standard "two sides." Abortion is a good example -- you're never going to win an argument with someone on the other side by arguing YOUR case according to YOUR facts. Pro-choice folks will cite all sorts of stats about women and freedom; pro-life folks will cite stats on the deaths of babies. The sides just end up talking past each other, because regardless of their "facts," the facts of the other side are irrelevant to their underlying assumptions. (Note even the names of the "sides" betray these assumptions: we rarely hear of "pro-death" or "no choice" or whatever. It's "pro-life" and "pro-choice" -- reflecting the underlying assumptions of each side, regardless of facts or stats or whatever.)
The only way to begin to get past such divisions is deep and open dialogue which can finally bring out some of those underlying assumptions, but most people don't have the patience for that. Instead, we all just debate the surface "facts" and talk past each other. I'm not saying it's necessarily feasible in many situations, but the problem isn't the facts. But that doesn't mean one can't try to engage with the broader context for beliefs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:08PM
Abortion is a good example -- you're never going to win an argument with someone on the other side by arguing YOUR case according to YOUR facts.
Moral reframing [theatlantic.com]
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday March 17 2017, @03:35PM (10 children)
saying you don't believe in evolution is just another way of saying you're religious
Using the word "believe" is just another way of saying you're religious.
My eyes were opened when I attended a talk by the famous (now deceased) atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair. She said (as I recall):
"I don't believe there's a freeway out there. I know it. I can see it. I rode here on it. Nobody has any doubt about its existence."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:03PM (9 children)
> Using the word "believe" is just another way of saying you're religious.
Then everybody is religious because it is impossible to function in life without accepting unverified knowledge from others.
For example, do you "believe" in electricity? Have you ever seen an electron? What about nuclear bombs? Have you ever seen a nuclear explosion? Have you ever seen radiation poisoning? How do you know the Earth orbits the Sun and not vice-versa? How do you know that human evolution is real rather than a really well-orchestrated con-job?
The overwhelming majority of the things we "know" are really just beliefs we accept with various standards of proof. It all comes down to commonly accepted standards of proof which are in turn the result of community agreement. Post-truth is really different communities picking and choosing different standards. And if those communities end up with significantly divergent standards, then society can not survive because it becomes two (or more) distinct societies as defined by those standards.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday March 17 2017, @05:13PM (7 children)
For example, do you "believe" in electricity?
No. Nor do I "know" electricity exists. It seems likely, given what I have observed, but it is always possible to learn more, for example, if someone proposes an alternate explanation.
Have you ever seen a nuclear explosion?
I've seen films. Yes I'm aware they could have been faked. That is why I neither "believe" or "know" nuclear bombs exist. It seems likely. I don't need absolute certainty. It seems religious people do, and since the world doesn't provide that, they turn to belief.
As a test case, to clarify my own thinking, I've asked myself whether the World Trade Center was really destroyed. (Not proceeding at this point to who did it or why.)
I have stood on the top of the World Trade Center, so assuming my senses and memories are valid (unproven) I think it is extremely likely that the World Trade Center did exist in the past.
I have observed thousands of people saying the World Trade Center was destroyed, and nobody disputing the claim. I have seen pictures (could have been faked) of the vacant space and then the new structure built in its place. But I haven't returned to New York to see for myself. So for now the conclusion is still tentative, although I rate the probability as well above 99.99%.
Does that help?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:24PM (6 children)
> Does that help?
No. Not a bit.
You told some stories about yourself in response to a bunch of rhetorical questions while completely sidestepping the thesis of my post.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday March 17 2017, @05:27PM (5 children)
The thesis of your post seems to be that everyone suffers from belief because "it is impossible to function in life without accepting unverified knowledge from others."
I gave you examples of how I function in life without accepting (believing) unverified knowledge from others.
Did I misidentify your thesis?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @05:44PM (4 children)
> I gave you examples of how I function in life without accepting (believing) unverified knowledge from others.
That's not at all what I read.
What I read was you admitting that there are different standards of evidence that you accept.
And you implicitly saying that some sources are of higher quality than others.
Exactly as I described.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday March 17 2017, @06:01PM (3 children)
So we agree, except I am saying you can do all that without "belief".
Believers fasten to some outlandish claim as Absolute Certainty, totally devoid of supporting evidence. Even questioning the belief can get you blackballed or worse.
Scientists recognize that all knowledge is tentative, nothing is certain, because tomorrow we will probably learn more. Some people just can't handle that.
But your generalization from "some people need belief to get through the day" to "everyone does" is what I tried to show as false, by example of someone who doesn't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:57PM (1 child)
Different AC here but I could just wish that you were a bit more self-aware. You just can't seem to bring yourself to admit that you--yes, you!--can't get through the day without taking some of your beliefs on faith. No, there is no reason to be ashamed of this; we all do it. Of course, this in no way implies that all beliefs are equally valid. The sad part is when we are confronted by someone who stubbornly refuses to change their beliefs when presented with new evidence and logic (cf., Trump and his supporters).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @06:10PM
Different AC here but I could just wish that you were a bit more self-aware. You just can't seem to bring yourself to admit that you--yes, you!--can't get through the day without taking some of your beliefs on faith.
"On faith" is not a bit you set. Belief that 911 destroyed the World Trade Center is not as much on faith as belief in a deity with particular properties that we can't ever observe.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday March 17 2017, @11:59PM
Epistemology is a stone-cold bitch, isn't it? :) We're essentially trying to look at the back of our own heads by rolling our eyes up and back as far as they'll go, which is a losing proposition.
Personally, I am a type of foundationalist. This means I have axioms, as few and as basic as possible, which cannot be *directly* disproven and would have to be asserted in order to be denied. These you might recognize as Aristotle's old classics: Law of Identity (A is A), Law of Noncontradiction (A is not not-A), and Law of Excluded Middle (A thing is either A or not-A but not both). I also have an emergentist view of logic and cognition, that being that they emerge or arise from lower, nonlogical, nonconscious substrates, which seems to imply that these axioms are good for a limited set of purposes only, and attempt not to go beyond these boundaries.
The problem with axioms is that, because they *are* axioms, you can't destruct-test them like you can with other hypotheses. So far, and here's where I get rather more Coherentist than Foundationalist, I limit the propositions I consider axiomatic to the set of "those propositions which, in order to deny them, you must assert them) because this has produced the fewest errors of any other approach, using the admittedly limited and flawed human mind and sensorium.
For example, if you were to deny the Law of Identity, it would be impossible to make any statements in the first place. Deny non-contradiction, and no deduction is possible. Deny the excluded middle, and no conclusions to arguments can be made. Now if an axiom gives rise to self-refuting theorems, it may be that it should not be taken as (that is, does not fulfill its function as) an axiom, and should be amended or discarded, but this is inductive rather than deductive.
As an aside, I've dealt with a few apologists who think they're reeeeeeeal fuckin' clever, who glom onto this and more or less say "Hurrrr, well then I take it as an axiom that my God exists! Checkmate, infidel!" This brings up one other aspect of an axiom: they should be as simple and irreducible as possible. Despite all wittering claims to the contrary, there is no such thing as "divine simplicity," certainly not if we're speaking of the kind of omni-$ATTRIBUTE being the Abrahamic God is said to be. This sort of God is a specific instance of the class "disembodied mind" with a very complex set of properties indeed. Now the Deist or Taoist God-concept, the one I hold, could conceivably with as an axiom, perhaps THE axiom, as it's not a person but the "ground of all being." This would never satisfy the bloodthirsty Muslim or Christian or Jew, of course, but it has the advantage, as a concept, of not stepping on its own unwashed Bronze-Age crank and tumbling down the stairs.
A little humor and a little humility is helpful. At the end of the day, we're limited and finite, and we really have no answer to the Cartesian Demon paradox. All we can do, as Pratchett says, is to look at the shadows outside the mouth of Plato's Cave and say "Oh, do Deformed Rabbit, it's my favorite!"
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday March 23 2017, @09:57AM
I'm pretty sure we actually agree on everything, but here goes anyway:
For example, do you "believe" in electricity? Have you ever seen an electron?
Not a great example. I see the effects of electricity every day, and trust in the scientific explanations of it. Believing in the competence and honesty of a scientific community (particularly when there are such testaments to their competence as modern electronics) isn't religious faith.
Have you ever seen radiation poisoning?
Again, I charitably assume I'm not being constantly lied to. Not quite the same thing as, say, taking 'on faith' the existence of a magical sky fairy who cares if I touch myself.
How do you know that human evolution is real rather than a really well-orchestrated con-job?
A better example, but being a serious solipsist takes more blind faith than not being one. Why would I be the only real human? I sure look and behave a lot like the others.
It all comes down to commonly accepted standards of proof which are in turn the result of community agreement.
Just so. That is what really defines 'religious'. Or at least, it's part of it.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Soylentbob on Friday March 17 2017, @08:19PM
This Article Won't Change Your Mind - the Facts on Why Facts Alone Can't Fight False Beliefs
Oh, I never saw it that way! Probably right, now they point it out. Oh, wait, they just convinced me based on facts, so the headline it totally wrong. On the other hand, now that I don't believe it anymore...