SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the smeared-electrons-and-live/dead-cats dept.
Review of a couple of recent publications, in The Boston Review
People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.
Aristotle emphasizes another characteristic. Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man, according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal. But on reflection, the first set of characteristics arises from the second. It is only because we reason and think and use language that we can be hoodwinked.
We'll get to the quantum mechanics in a bit.
The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker's What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason. Becker covers the sweep of history, from the 1925 birth of the "new" quantum physics up through the present day.
So, verifiable, experimental, experienced proof?
Not only can people be led astray, most people are. If the devout Christian is right, then committed Hindus and Jews and Buddhists and atheists are wrong. When so many groups disagree, the majority must be mistaken. And if the majority is misguided on just this one topic, then almost everyone must be mistaken on some issues of great importance. This is a hard lesson to learn, because it is paradoxical to accept one's own folly. You cannot at the same time believe something and recognize that you are a mug to believe it. If you sincerely judge that it is raining outside, you cannot at the same time be convinced that you are mistaken in your belief. A sucker may be born every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 09 2018, @12:51AM
On top of that most people think they are good at spotting it. *Especially* smart people. Today I got a room full of democrats to defend the electoral college. When 2 weeks earlier they were 100% against it. It is not even hard to do this. Most people have little clue what they are talking about or why they even took a position on anything. But our brains are *very* good at rationalizing any choice and making you think you are the smartest person in the room. If you feed those rationalizations in the right way you can sway someone into an argument they would have taken the opposite position on earlier.
I am 'ok' at spotting these things. But some (ok, many) slip by me. I spot them because I use these things to troll people. Oh and once someone knows it is a trick and they have been tricked? Oh boy stand back. Depending on how deeply they have convinced themselves they are right you may be in for a full on meltdown. They will pick some item you said and fixate on it. They will not let it go. They will ride it out to a maximal extremist view.
I find it quite fascinating how people decide to do things. I even catch myself making decisions before I decide. Once you 'see' it you notice it all the time (it is kind of disconcerting). If you can guide someone before they rationalize it you can get them do many different things. Once the rationalization is done though you have to basically 'reset' them in some way. Usually by creating a conflict in their logic. That will not be done with facts and figures. But with emotional responses. Real con men they know exactly how to do these things. They practice and help each other out. Basically the tricks of the trade. Some tricks are naive. Some are actually semi sophisticated with a few layers. With each layer meant to reinforce your emotional biases towards a goal. All the while stroking a particular emotion to provoke a response.