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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday January 13 2015, @09:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the arrogant-hubris dept.

We like to think that education changes people for the better, helping them critically analyze information and providing a certain immunity from disinformation. But if that were really true, then you wouldn't have low vaccination rates clustering in areas where parents are, on average, highly educated.

Vaccination isn't generally a political issue. (Or, it is, but it's rejected both by people who don't trust pharmaceutical companies and by those who don't trust government mandates; these tend to cluster on opposite ends of the political spectrum.) But some researchers decided to look at a number of issues that have become politicized, such as the Iraq War, evolution, and climate change. They find that, for these issues, education actually makes it harder for people to accept reality, an effect they ascribe to the fact that "highly educated partisans would be better equipped to challenge information inconsistent with predispositions."

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/education-plus-ideology-exaggerates-rejection-of-reality/

[Paper]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12098/abstract

Why do you think this is ? Would you agree with their premise ?

Related Stories

Why Twitter’s Fact Check of Trump Might Not be Enough to Combat Misinformation 116 comments

FiveThirtyEight is covering the efficacy of fact-checking and other methods to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Fact-checking, after the fact, is better than nothing, it turns out. There are some common factors in the times when it has been done successfully:

Political scientists Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood conducted an exhaustive battery of surveys on fact-checking, across more than 10,000 participants and 13 studies that covered a range of political, economic and scientific topics. They found that 60 percent of respondents gave accurate answers when presented with a correction, while just 32 percent of respondents who were not given a correction expressed accurate beliefs. That’s pretty solid proof that fact-checking can work.

But Porter and Wood have found, alongside many other fact-checking researchers, some methods of fact-checking are more effective than others. Broadly speaking, the most effective fact checks have this in common:

  1. They are from highly credible sources (with extra credit for those that are also surprising, like Republicans contradicting other Republicans or Democrats contradicting other Democrats).
  2. They offer a new frame for thinking about the issue (that is, they don’t simply dismiss a claim as “wrong” or “unsubstantiated”).
  3. They don’t directly challenge one’s worldview and identity.
  4. They happen early, before a false narrative gains traction.

It is as much about psychology as actually rebutting the disinformation because factors like partisanship and worldview have strong effects, and it is hard to reach people inside their social control media echo chambers from an accurate source they will accept.

[Though often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, one is reminded of the adage: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. --Ed.]

Previously:
(2020) Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts Pushing to Reopen America May be Bots
(2019) Russians Engaging in Ongoing 'Information Warfare,' FBI Director Says
(2019) How Fake News Spreads Like a Real Virus
(2019) More and More Countries are Mounting Disinformation Campaigns Online
(2019) At Defcon, Teaching Disinformation Campaigns Is Child's Play
(2018) Why You Stink at Fact-Checking
(2017) Americans Are “Under Siege” From Disinformation
(2015) Education Plus Ideology Exaggerates Rejection of Reality


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  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday January 13 2015, @10:30AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @10:30AM (#134334) Journal

    Reality is sometimes, but not always objective. I would expect that education increases scepticism. Unfortunately the article does not state, which aspects of reality were rejected. E.g. when mentioning the Iraq war, did they reject the "fact" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or did they reject the fact that the Iraq war took place? When discussing global warming, do they refuse to take global warming as a fact (i.e. maintain some skepticism), or do they deny global warming entirely (i.e. claim to know it wouldn't exist)?

    Also:
    PLEASE make it a policy to add a tag to the paper when it's paywalled. E.g. [Paper][Paywalled]:...

    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
    • (Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:12PM

      by AnonTechie (2275) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:12PM (#134360) Journal

      PLEASE make it a policy to add a tag to the paper when it's paywalled. E.g. [Paper][Paywalled]:...

      It was my mistake as I forgot to mention that the [Paper] was paywalled.

      --
      Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
      • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:36PM

        by q.kontinuum (532) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:36PM (#134379) Journal

        Ok, wasn't meant as a complaint, just as a kind request. Nice to see the processes are in place, even if not yet always followed :-)

        --
        Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
    • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:10PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:10PM (#134467)

      well there's data, and the interpretation of data....Reality is the data, perceived reality the latter.

      Here are some handy pointers to tell the one from the other (not being sarcastic, these were taught as part of the scientists best tools).

      1) What is the rarity of the event?
      Repeatability is important for the understanding of natural phenomena.
      It is why religious texts have a very low ranking on the objective scale. Little in them is repeatable or supported by any independent evidence.

      2) Statistics.
      Any time you hear a statistic you need to know what distribution it is drawn from to understand the significance.
      For example, average means little without the variance.

      3) Models
      What is the fit between the model and data? See 2) for data...

      4) Is the data independent?
      Prob(x) Source
      1/1 = Did you collect the data?
      1/10 = Did someone else collect the data?
      1/e^10000 = Did someone tell you about someone else collecting the data?
          = What's data, I want my

      You get the idea. The rational approach when taught to children, can nearly always restate most problems as "probable/not probable".

      It is essentially the reason WHY dogma is ALWAYS bad.

      Test, test and test again.

      a= Education is the tool we use to propagate to allow humans to pursue their dreams.
        b=Education is the tool for the oppression humans into compliance through dogma.

      Somewhere between a and b....

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @10:30AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @10:30AM (#134690)

        It is why religious texts have a very low ranking on the objective scale. Little in them is repeatable

        What do you mean, not repeatable? I looked in 20 bibles, and found more or less the same text! ;-)

    • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday January 13 2015, @08:12PM

      by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 13 2015, @08:12PM (#134517) Journal

      Reality is sometimes, but not always objective.

      Please explain.

      • (Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday January 14 2015, @12:04AM

        by Pav (114) on Wednesday January 14 2015, @12:04AM (#134581)

        I'm not sure what the parent was trying to say, but how about this scenario:

        Person #1 decides all middle eastern muslims are out to engineer the end of western civilization.

        Person #2 decides middle eastern muslims are the latest wave of people to come to his country to enrich the food and cultural mix.

        Both outlooks are simplistic parodies of reality, but if both interact regularly with middle eastern muslims these outlooks will "escape" and reflect back at them, and perhaps influence the wider society in a small way. That's why terrorism is so dangerous - by small and poorly supported aggressive acts it aims to cause the expectation of aggression/reprisal between communities, and that expectation feeds back into reality.

      • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday January 14 2015, @09:15AM

        by q.kontinuum (532) on Wednesday January 14 2015, @09:15AM (#134674) Journal

        To speak with Socrates: "I know that I know nothing" [wikipedia.org]. Even though not brought into that context on the wikipedia article, in my perception it is related to the "Allegory of the Cave" [wikipedia.org]. The idea there is (at least that's my interpretation) that we will never know what reality is, we only have our own representation.

        Perhaps my comment should have been "Perception of reality is sometimes, but not always, objective.". According to Socrates, it is never objective. But in practice it helps to assume a strong correlation between each our perceptions of reality, and to assume that reality is also strongly correlated to this common perception.

        So, for practical purposes I'd say the fact that Earth is more or less round and rotates around the sun is objective reality (although I acknowledge that others might adhere more strictly to Socrates and claim that these facts are also a mere thesis and only reflect our current perception).

        On the other hand, e.g. the existence of God can never be proven nor confuted, because most believers are forbidden to create a picture of their god, thus not allowing for any verifiable or falsifiable hypothesis. Therefore, if someone believes, the existence of god can be seen as perfectly real in his personal subjective reality. For another person, the non-existence of God can be just as real, because *even if* something God-like existed, he could explain it by giving it a different name and calling it just an extraterrestrial being. (Not surprisingly, I call myself an agnostic.)

        In between are a lot of hypothesizes, which are accepted as pure truth by some, disputed by others. E.g. was it seen as totally true a couple of years (decades?) ago that eating fat makes you fat. Those disagreeing ($groupA) would have been seen as in denial of reality. Nowadays, a growing number of nutrition scientists tend to believe that carbohydrates are the root cause of obesity, and the same $groupA is suddenly right. Educated people might now be skeptic to these new findings and Reject this Reality. Same goes (unfortunately with more severe consequences) e.g. for global warming: For me (and apparently most scientists), anthropic global warming is real. But I do consider the possibility to be wrong. Others are more skeptic, and see anthropic global warning as an unlikely hypothesis. But I find it biased to claim that distrust to certain scientists (and therefore to their findings) is automatically rejection of an objective reality. In most cases, I'd consider it skepticism, unless the opposite of these findings is claimed as only possible truth.

        --
        Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 13 2015, @12:16PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 13 2015, @12:16PM (#134343)

    I'd propose that uneducated people gain all their knowledge about conspiracy from laughter on late night shows, but educated people realize that historically most governments do participate in propaganda, false flags, corruption, etc.

    Where things often get lost is the late night mainstream propaganda claims 100% of conspiracies are BS. Historical evidence shows its less than 100%. Its possible to go to far and think 50% of conspiracies are BS aka 50% are true. Reality over the decades I've been alive is about 95% of conspiracies are BS.

    Reality has little relationship with corporate agitprop news channels in general. So their propaganda reality isn't going to have much in common with ours.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday January 13 2015, @12:27PM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @12:27PM (#134347) Journal

    "Your facts are irrelevant when my pastor tells me the contrary! Don't give me the Devil's lies from your study! Ezekiel 25:17!"

    "Your facts are irrelevant when my NPR-listening friends tell me the study was funded with corporate money! Down with Monsanto!"

    In other news, this study gives the ruling class yet another reason to believe in its own superiority.

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:50PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:50PM (#134384) Journal

      NPR Listening Friends

      You have no idea how right-wing NPR is, do you? If they had a segment about Monsanto, one of their two guests(it's always two) for discussing it would be from Monsanto. Try to believe me when I say this that I'm not anti-monsanto, except to the extent that I have a general preference for locally owned farms(who still sometimes buy Monsanto products).

      • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:44PM

        by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:44PM (#134423)

        Those who get their news from right-wing sources assume that PBS and NPR are liberal news outlets, because those right-wing sources regularly refer to those networks as "liberal". And in their fictional shows they do make some decisions that are absolutely motivated by liberal ideas, such as very intentionally making the human cast of Sesame Street a very diverse group with the goal of presenting American kids compelling characters that are more like themselves and the people around them.

        But the NPR and PBS news shows are mostly friendly to the political establishment: The "liberal" position will generally be represented by a Democratic Party hack, and the "conservative" position by a Republican Party hack. That means that (a) both positions get approximately equal airtime, regardless of who's right and who should be in trouble, and (b) positions agreed upon by both parties are never challenged. On any political issue right now, if you listen to All Things Considered or watch Newshour, you'll find that the two sides represented are the President's side, and the Republican Congressional leadership's side. This does you no good if one or both of those sides is completely wrong or lying, or if there is significant dissent within either major party, and neither NPR nor PBS will tell you when this is the case.

        One reason for this phenomenon is that part of their funding comes from Congress, and Congresscritters have threatened to cut off that funding when they get too critical of political leadership.

        --
        The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
        • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday January 14 2015, @09:48AM

          by Magic Oddball (3847) on Wednesday January 14 2015, @09:48AM (#134680) Journal

          NPR and PBS news shows are mostly friendly to the political establishment: The "liberal" position will generally be represented by a Democratic Party hack, and the "conservative" position by a Republican Party hack.

          Except that doesn't mean that NPR/PBS don't favor a conservative stance — by just about any other First-World nation and our own definitions from prior to 2001, the Democratic Party has actually been conservative for some time. They just don't look like it to us because the Republicans are so far rightward at this point that it'd be fairly difficult to not look quite liberal by comparison.

          Back on-topic: I think that education can teach or strengthen critical thinking skills, and I did take one mandatory college class in 1996 that did a pretty good job of it. Trouble is, it's not initially taught at an early enough phase in the student's life (we need the student questioning reflexively long before they reach adulthood), it's an elective at best at most schools — people that believe the only thing they'll benefit from is classes related to their planned career aren't likely to bother with it, especially if it's taught through an entirely different department.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @04:51PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @04:51PM (#134789)

          One reason for this phenomenon is that part of their funding comes from Congress, and Congresscritters have threatened to cut off that funding when they get too critical of political leadership.

          This. I used to know someone who was a manager of some sort at a fairly large and well-funded public radio/television complex in Virginia. I was much younger and much more into politics at the time, and the topic of Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" came up in conversation with her: I asked why the local public stations weren't carrying it. She explicitly said that they were afraid that it would alienate their Republican listeners, and that the public radio and television networks make a pronounced effort to include both Republican and Democrat viewpoints, because they're constantly under fire for not being sufficiently neutral. Their funding is basically always under implicit threat from the Republicans and sometimes from the Democrats. Moreover, their listeners who send money to pledge drives include a lot of wealthy Republicans (who like listening to old music).

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 13 2015, @12:41PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 13 2015, @12:41PM (#134349) Journal
    Isn't it interesting how suddenly the scientific community gets funding to study human rejection of reality, with plenty of media attention to the results, about the same time that "climate change" was oversold? And as a bonus coincidence, every single one of these studies which manages to find its way into the media explicitly includes climate change. From the metadata associated with the abstract:

    Keywords:

    Citizenship and Democracy; Participation; Education; Informed Citizens; Robust Democracy; Partisanship; Political Sophistication; Global Warming; Climate Change; War with Iraq; Evolution; Democratic Theory; Cognitive Bias

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @12:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @12:59PM (#134353)

      And as a bonus coincidence, every single one of these studies which manages to find its way into the media explicitly includes climate change. From the metadata associated with the abstract:

      Selection bias much? (Not a grumble about methodology, some traces of paranoia/conspiration theory. 13 keywords, only 2 hit the raw nerve)
      Lemme guess: you are over-educated, neh?

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:23PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:23PM (#134362) Journal
        Note the keyswords are divided into two groups, the on topic cognitive science keywords, which are mostly bunched to the front of that list, and the off topic keywords of which the first two are the most general "climate change" keywords you'll find. Whoever made that list, decided that those "climate change" keywords were important enough to put ahead of any similar subject.

        Moving on, yes, there is selection bias - "into the media".
        • (Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:57PM

          by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:57PM (#134388) Journal

          Good god. It's because they're study included science denying douchebags. If you get past the paywall and look at the methodology, global warming denial was one of the things tested. It is made worst by education. Less tractable to evidence, no matter how substantive.

          And you're doing it now. You don't even see that you're doing exactly the process described in the article, using a more complex mental framework to pre-ready your mind to reject findings you disagree with. You didn't actually know how it relates, but you're already inventing excuses. And I'm not under any delusions that I'll convince someone as far gone as you, just hoping, and maybe begging that you'd let in a little self-doubt because of how wrong your the hypothesis in your OP was.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:36PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:36PM (#134419)

            I wish I had mod points right now. +1 Informative. We have many examples of exactly what this article discusses right here on our forum.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Covalent on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:03PM

    by Covalent (43) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:03PM (#134355) Journal

    The underlying truth here is doublethink, and Orwell had it right again. Humans are supremely good at this. Think about it: The vast majority of Americans are religious, with a large majority being Christian. This means that most Americans believe if they believe in and pray to a Jewish carpenter who died 2000 years ago, they get to go to heaven and have their sins forgiven, but if they don't, they'll burn in hell for eternity. This is the same group of people, though, who have no problems at all completely dismissing Islam, Hinduism, and even Judaism as total hogwash.

    As Orwell put it:

    To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

    Education doesn't eliminate doublethink - it is possible to be educated in the part of your life that you choose to be educated in, and then to continue to doublethink the other side of your life into complete ignorance.

    Look at my signature (which I shamelessly stole, because it is awesome) for yet another example of this. If you want to cure ignorance, education is not the answer. The answer is a cure for doublethink, and so far as I know no one has ever figured out how to make people critically examine the things they believe.

    --
    You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:11PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:11PM (#134358)

      Bill Burr has some great comments on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spvzNmUurhc#t=23m50s [youtube.com]

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:54PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 13 2015, @01:54PM (#134368)

      The vast majority of Americans are religious, with a large majority being Christian. This means that most Americans believe

      I would disagree in that extensive Pavlovian conditioning is provided such that the victims provide very simplistic answers to prepared questions. Do you believe in evolution, no. I would not even go so far as to describe it as a belief, more of a reflex.

      Now, ignoring where they sip coffee on Sunday mornings and gossip, and ignoring a handful of Pavlovian conditioned responses to certain prepared questions, how do they actually behave WRT whats written in their books? Whatever our society is, its definitely not Christian. I'm OK with that, not being much of a fan of it to begin with. Personally I think we'd all be better off as a society with Druids or Zen monks in charge. Maybe both.

      Over a couple decades, I've noticed a peculiar similarity in statistics, where you can brainwash and propagandize kids all you want, but the percentage of people where the teaching actually sticks is about the same for math or history as for religion, maybe a little higher for the academics. I suppose this is no great shocker, the average totally innumerate American has at least 2000 lifetime classroom hours in math, yet can barely make change on a good day, so religion isn't going to stand much of a chance beyond the most basic of Pavlovian conditioning.

      • (Score: 2) by Covalent on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:11PM

        by Covalent (43) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:11PM (#134371) Journal

        You do have an excellent point. I have extensive experience with Catholics, who by and large are the people most ignorant of Catholicism. :) But when asked to vote Pro-Life, many do so, just because the priest said so.

        So it is either that many people are incapable of learning complicated things, or that they are willfully ignorant of those complicated things, or a combination of the two. You are right that many can't make change despite years of math. Are they incapable or unwilling? Stupidity or Apathy?

        And in the end, does it matter? Both produce the same results, and both appear to be incurable!

        --
        You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @03:32PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @03:32PM (#134404)

          But when asked to vote Pro-Life, many do so, just because the priest said so.

          Of course I'd vote pro-life, because I'm really for life. I mean, I'd definitely prefer life to death.

          Oh, you mean anti-abortion. Damn newspeak!

          • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:44PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:44PM (#134424)

            I think its funny that pro-life people support letting children starve to death without any kind of nutrition support. I have never in my life ever seen a "pro-life" person who was also pro-foodstamp. How can you be "pro-life" if you support letting children starve to death?

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @10:41PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @10:41PM (#134562)

              I think its funny that pro-life people support letting children starve to death without any kind of nutrition support.

              I'm a Christian who leans pro-life and I don't think starving children are at all funny. What's so funny about starving children?

              I have never in my life ever seen a "pro-life" person who was also pro-foodstamp.

              Now, food stamps is a slightly different issue. I am currently volunteering my time with a group helping people on public assistance to get out of poverty. These people on public assistance say they hate it. They find it humiliating. Now, granted, there may be some people for whom public assistance is the least-worst option. On the other hand, I will gladly help those who wish to climb their way out of poverty and get off the public dole. Does this make me "anti-foodstamp"? Does it make me some sort of hypocrite who enjoys letting children starve to death?

              How can you be "pro-life" if you support letting children starve to death?

              I don't support letting children starve to death. In fact, I regularly give generously to various charities to fight poverty and disease. How about you? Do you regularly give to charity? If I may be so bold to ask, how much? Is it at least 10% of your income? If not, why not?

            • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday January 14 2015, @09:37AM

              by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday January 14 2015, @09:37AM (#134677) Homepage
              Ask Mother Theresa of Calcutta, whose anti-contraception stance led to more people starving in India than even Stalin's efforts in Ukraine.
              --
              Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
        • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday January 13 2015, @05:02PM

          by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @05:02PM (#134443)

          I have heard Catholics argue bot for and against sex before marriage....it just depends on how many cocktails they've had....

          Awesome Orwell quote!

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:31PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:31PM (#134377) Journal

      Education doesn't eliminate doublethink - it is possible to be educated in the part of your life that you choose to be educated in, and then to continue to doublethink the other side of your life into complete ignorance.

      Doublethink may be an explanation for the "rejection of reality even bt educated people".
      However, you didn't address the point of when taken with ideology, education exaggerates the rejection of reality.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:07PM (#134412)

      People often single out religion when they're talking about this; I think it has more to do with ideology, i.e. what people would like to be reality. They usually construct a wishy-washy argument effectively based on semantics to defend their underlying subconscious feelings.

      For example, a lot of Christians decry abortion as murder of a baby. To do that they label a particular range of dates as the point at which life begins, after that abortion shouldn't be allowed (usually forgiven if the mother will die). Of course, how does one pick the point at which life begins? It's largely subjective to each person hearing it. They present that as an argument, but in some cases that's merely a facade for the real reason, possibly for a disdain of "degeneracy"--promiscuity, premarital sex, a unwillingness to have children, MUH DEVALUATION OF LIFE, MUH HEDONISM, etc--that has more to do with emotion than anything else.

      Papers like these often result in a circle jerk about the harrowing effects of religion on a person's understanding of the world. But, for example eras like economics -- which often produce papers that say that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment and increases underemployment (e.g. a increase in part time work) -- really rustle the jimmies of liberals, because it may crack their view that MUH CORPORATIONS IZ SATAN which would undermine their world view. Obviously validity and methodology of papers like economics can be criticised as incapable at presenting the full picture (which is true in most cases). However, other contentious not-very-scientific "sciences" like sociology and psychology (often the basis for quite a lot of liberal thinking) are often uniformly accepted as true and proper by the same people without the same precursory critique, even though these are often even more abstract and often written by people who have no qualms about airing their political biases.

      One must continually evaluate one's position and perspectives of things. I have a feeling that the roots of the fatalistic far right-wing and the utopian far left-wing are based on a person's inability to do that.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:47PM (#134427)

        not-very-scientific "sciences" like ... psychology

        You mean psychiatry. Psychology is very much a hard science.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:20PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:20PM (#134469)

          No, it isn't. There are good reasons to say it isn't. [arachnoid.com]

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @10:42AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @10:42AM (#134696)

            From the article you linked:

            Because this article is directed toward educated nonspecialist readers considering psychological treatment, students of psychology are cautioned that terms such as "psychology," "clinical psychology" and "psychiatry" are used interchangeably

            In other words, it's about psychiatry.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @07:24PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @07:24PM (#134839)

            Psychology is neuroscience, and includes pharmacology, toxicology, neurology, etc; hard, physical science. Psychiatry is "everyone wants to fuck their mothers" and all that interpreting dreams bullshit. Basically everything you think "psychology" is is actually psychiatry. Its exactly the same as confusing "astrology" and "astronomy"; most people think "astronomy" involves horiscopes and nonsense like that, and they're wrong, just like you're wrong in thinking psychology deals with anything involving Sigmund Freud (except for all the cocaine he did, because the effects of drugs - pharmacology - is psychology).

      • (Score: 1) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:23PM

        by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:23PM (#134471)

        Nonsensical studies in soft sciences (mainly psychology) seem to be accepted by all authoritarians (not just the ambiguous "liberal"), because they're a means of advocating government control over others' personal affairs. Do video games cause people to be aggressive? This unscientific cherry-picked study says yes/no, so I'm going to cite it. Does porn make people callous towards women? And so on.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @09:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @09:33PM (#134540)

      Exaggeration and satire sometimes work. Taking something to an extreme past the person's views can prompt examination of the view. If they are so far gone that they cannot laugh about the topic then there is no point wasting time on them.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:32PM (#134378)

    They just undermined their own findings.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:50PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 13 2015, @02:50PM (#134383) Journal

    Why do you think this is ?

    Hypothesis - there are two factors that contribute:

    1. today's "education" is, by and large, anything but. I'd go as far as calling it... training (better said "taming" or "conditioning" [wikipedia.org]).
      Critical thinking? Hell no, obedience is preferable
    2. "Just don't tell me all those years and money I spent on education doesn't mean a thing. I'm educated, thus I know better"
      And because "learning the game of obedience" is what substituted the education, of course the reaction is "whoever is more educated have the right to be obeyed more by the others, these are the rules of the game"

    But, of course, I won't waste my time to verify the hypothesis (I wasted too much already being "educated").

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Fauxlosopher on Tuesday January 13 2015, @03:13PM

      by Fauxlosopher (4804) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @03:13PM (#134394) Journal

      today's "education" is, by and large, anything but. I'd go as far as calling it... training (better said "taming" or "conditioning").
      Critical thinking? Hell no, obedience is preferable

      The first half of your hypothesis is supported by John Taylor [youtube.com] Gatto's [amazon.com] thirty years of work within the US' current school system, how the system was derived from the Prussian school model [theatlantic.com], and how the design of that model is harmful to curiosity and critical thinking.

      Speaking from experience, education in a Prussian-model school damages the desire to learn. In contrast, self-directed learning is extremely engaging: the hated subjects of history and social/government studies within the Prussian model became irresistable treasures when exposed to even a damaged curiosity via self-directed learning, where categories of information are intertwined instead of being sharply segregated.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:08PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:08PM (#134413) Journal

      I'd go as far as calling it... training (better said "taming" or "conditioning").

      I'd call it what it was and remains: indoctrination. I matriculated at a university that prided itself on "critical thinking," but even then as an undergrad indoctrination was all they did. After all, it's easier to indoctrinate than to challenge.

      It was only after I went to grad school there that I finally, finally got the tools to dismantle all the bullshit. And I only got them because I happened to take a class taught by a Marxist professor (of all the ironies) who insisted on an insane reading list that no human could possibly accomplish in 10 weeks. He was an idealogue whose intent with the reading list was to imprint the reality of the material dialectic on his students, but for me it finally opened the gates of rhetoric vs. reality. I learned to sift out real outcomes from rhetorical screeds.

      As such, I've discerned the rhetoric on the right and the left is practically and essentially indistinguishable when you look at the outcomes they produce. If the Right talks about individualism and self-determination and "doing for yourself" and that produces a result that means Wall Street wins, and the Left talks about human rights and community and security and produces a result that means Wall Street wins, then you can be sure that the same puppet master is holding both sets of strings.

      So for me, with respect to this topic, I'd say that education can help you perceive reality, but if it does it's because you got a real education by accident, and not by design. "Education" as it is defined by curricula, is and always has been part of the Spectrum of Control. Shape the perception of reality of your young, and they will accept it as reality itself and reach the conclusions you want them to reach. It's much easier to maintain control if your populace never learns enough to know they need to fight. "You can take Door A, or Door B," you say, knowing that both of them lead to a place you already control, while assuring them, "It's up to you to decide the Future (tm)!" and all the while you never let them consider that they might choose to take Door Z, which leads noone-knows-where.

      To date, humanity will choose Door A or Door B even if you tell them about the existence of Doors C through Z, because it, like a child, wants approval and reassurance from an authority figure. The day that we as a species choose Door Z because WTF?, then we'll be at least an adolescent species that might reach maturity.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by dcollins on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:21PM

        by dcollins (1168) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:21PM (#134470) Homepage

        "The day that we as a species choose" anything is the day that we're finished because it must be the case that only one person is left alive. Any ideology that requires the entire species to choose some particular option uniformly is either a joke or doomed or both.

        • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 13 2015, @09:25PM

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @09:25PM (#134537) Journal

          Yes, of course. But if that's your starting point, then you believe it's impossible or undesirable for humans to gather and cooperate in groups larger than 10. I don't necessarily disagree, but you must admit it would be very hard to fund nanotechnology strictly within the circle of people that you know.

          There are many immediate benefits of withdrawing from the circle of humans you know. There are many others that will never come, and which you will never know, if you choose to live in a cave.

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 14 2015, @08:07AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 14 2015, @08:07AM (#134659) Journal

            then you believe it's impossible or undesirable for humans to gather and cooperate in groups larger than 10

            Let me get this right. Because dcollins believes there is no such thing as unanimity of agreement among the extremely broad grouping of humanity, which currently encompasses 7 billion people of a ridiculous variety of beliefs, customs, and outlooks, then he must believe that it is "impossible or undesirable" for more than 10 people to cooperate? Stop doing that to the precious fluids of my internet!

            My view is that you can get a large subgroup of humanity to open "door Z" for the purpose of "WTF?", but you will never get all of humanity (even while it remains a single species) to agree on doing that - no matter what "door Z" is (even if that door is just mere peaceful coexistence).

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @10:54PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @10:54PM (#134566)

        As such, I've discerned the rhetoric on the right and the left is practically and essentially indistinguishable when you look at the outcomes they produce. If the Right talks about individualism and self-determination and "doing for yourself" and that produces a result that means Wall Street wins, and the Left talks about human rights and community and security and produces a result that means Wall Street wins, then you can be sure that the same puppet master is holding both sets of strings.

        No, you can't, ya blithering ninny! More likely it means is that large social systems are complex and that this often produces unintended consequences. The invisible puppet master is a figment of your (conspiratorial) imagination. For someone who likes to tout his critical thinking skills, you still have quite a bit more to learn on the subject.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by fritsd on Tuesday January 13 2015, @03:04PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @03:04PM (#134390) Journal

    Maybe the problem is that, even though people can be highly educated, they can still show flaws in their reasoning skills:

    From Chapter 3 of "The Authoritarians" by Bob Altemeyer (please download and read it for yourself [umanitoba.ca]):

    "Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large
    samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames
    more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or
    deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:

                          All fish live in the sea.
                          Sharks live in the sea..
                          Therefore, sharks are fish.

    The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the
    reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they
    would likely tell you, "Because sharks are fish". In other words, they thought the
    reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is
    right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way,
    they don't "get it" that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test.
    "

    (the acronym RWA stands for "Right Wing Authoritarian")

    The syllogism that he describes is called a "non sequitur" [wikipedia.org] ("it does not follow").

    So I'd imagine that a highly educated RWA with a broad general knowledge would just have more facts to their disposal to fuel his/her false argumentation.

    On the Guardian newspaper comment section, in the articles about the Ukraine conflict, this is described as "whataboutery".

    "party X has done heinous crime W"
    "what about party Y? they have done heinous crime W as well, yae verily, even worse!11!"

    I think "whataboutery" falls in this category as well, because more facts that prove that another party Y is also guilty of the crimes that party X has done, does not in any way absolve party X from doing these crimes.

    • (Score: 2) by dcollins on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:25PM

      by dcollins (1168) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:25PM (#134473) Homepage

      This is the most interesting comment in this thread, thanks for that.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @03:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @03:27PM (#134402)

    As strange as it seems, it may be rational to hold a counterfactual belief (of course assuming you don't believe that it is counterfactual).

    Very little of what we know we know from our own experience. Most of what we know (including most facts about the world) we know because someone told us about them.

    Let's take as example the "Bielefeld conspiracy" (if you don't know it: It's the humorous theory that the German town Bielefeld doesn't actually exist, but is an invention of THEM (whoever THEY are), and all evidence of existence of that town is faked. Sometimes people disappear, and then later reappear and claim they have been in Bielefeld; that's a clear sign that they have been brainwashed by THEM), and lets assume there were someone who actually believed it (I don't think anyone does, but then, who knows).

    Now how could you convince someone who believes this that Bielefeld really exists? They have never seen Bielefeld themselves (and certainly won't accept an offer to see it because it would mean they're brainwashed), and even if you managed to get them there, they'd not believe that they are in Bielefeld. You can show them pictured of Bielefeld, but they well know that pictures can be faked. You can show them the city on satellite images, but then, how do you prove that the satellite images weren't manipulated?

    The point is: Their world image may be wrong, but it is consistent. And as long as you manage to keep your world image consistent, you won't see the need to change it. And they can keep their world image consistent because any fact they get presented which on first view would not fit in can easily be fit in by simply assuming that it is not a fact. And that works because the facts are all obtained indirectly; things they are told, but which could be lies or delusions, images which could be fake, possibly data from a GPS which could be manipulated, etc.

    Now you might argue that it is very improbable that all that evidence is faked. But then, we get to the problem that you always have to start with a prior to obtain probabilities, and different priors can lead to different probabilities (note that we are faced here with single instances — Bielefeld either exists or it doesn't, there's no ensemble of existing and nonexisting Bielefelds — so a frequentist account of probability isn't applicable at all). And if your prior contains a high probability that Bielefeld doesn't exist, then suddenly you'll find, based on that prior, that there is indeed a high probability that this evidence is faked (simply because based on your prior, without faking you'd have an extremely low probability of getting that evidence). And of course our prior is that our believes are almost certainly right (that's what makes them believes).

    So in short, if you have a counterfactual believe, it is generally rational to keep it unless you cannot avoid giving it up.

    And who knows, maybe my believe that Bielefeld actually exists is counterfactual; after all, I've never been there yet ;-)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:05PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:05PM (#134466)

      Sorry, I have to point this out...

      The word is belief, not believe. The first is the noun, the second is the verb.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @10:51AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @10:51AM (#134697)

        Well, if you read my comment carefully, you'll notice that I used both the noun and the verb, to technically your claim "the word is belief, not believe" is wrong, because several times in the post, the word indeed is "believe". However I indeed got the noun wrong several times (although not always; look at the very first sentence), while I didn't get the verb wrong anywhere.

    • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by jmorris on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:30PM

      by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:30PM (#134475)

      That is why Science has a way to deal with that class of problem. When you propose your "Bielefeld conspiracy" theory you are required to state how it could be falsified. If the theory is entirely circular, if there is no possible way it could be validated or falsified it ain't Science. Go ask the String Theorists on this point. Their theory suffers from exactly that problem, but they are Scientists because they admit the problem and are working toward ways to use their proposed theory to ask questions that could be used to falsify the Theory.

      When the worldview is entirely closed, it is a faith, like every religion. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Marxism, all entirely impervious to reason because they are faiths. You don't reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into because any successful faith is circular like you describe, it is why they persist. 9/11 Trutherism crossed that line almost instantly, the Bigfoot and Ghost hunters too.

      And for a more controversial example; my objection to AGW is exactly this problem, as currently described it is a faith based system in that it isn't falsifiable and literally any evidence is quickly interpreted as another confirmation. Meaning it ain't Science anymore and more a textbook example of the corruption of Science. Note for example the article cited here takes belief in AGW as a given for one to be deemed 'reasonable'.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @07:36PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 14 2015, @07:36PM (#134847)

        When the worldview is entirely closed, it is a faith, like every religion. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Marxism, all entirely impervious to reason because they are faiths. You don't reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into because any successful faith is circular like you describe, it is why they persist.

        Baha'i would be the one religion that isn't faith then, because one of its central tenets is:

        Religion must conform to science and reason, otherwise it is superstition. God has created man in order that he may perceive the verity of existence and endowed him with mind or reason to discover truth. Therefore scientific knowledge and religious belief must be conformable to the analysis of this divine faculty in man.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 13 2015, @04:53PM (#134432)

    Delusional people are delusional, and education won't fix that.