Partly because there's no clear evidence that one of those things is the truth. There's only what seems to be a high probability.



In that case, I think it's more indifference than anything else. I don't think it's an inability to think rationally, as such. That poster simply doesn't seem to really care about any issues for their own sake. His only interest in life seems to be the worldly pursuit of putting himself over other people, and being able to think and/or say "I'm better than you". Since he isn't more knowledgable, more ethical, or superior to everyone in any noticable kind of way, he does this through superior martyrdom. "All these bad people are against me, but I, noble suffering hero that I am, endure it." Exactly what the issues are, or what positions anybody takes on them doesn't matter, so long as his is different than yours. Trying to show him "the error of his ways" is doomed to failure, because "his ways" don't matter one way or the other. The ego game is all that matters, and there's simply nothing to base the claim of the ego on, except superior martyrdom.

Or superior steadfastness. "They tried to change me, but I was too strong for them." It's not a battle of facts, it's a battle of wills, which is why your facts don't matter. Take this thread, for example. We're discussing Global Warming, even though nobody is making any kind of case against it. The thread exists because one person, who has made no case whatsoever, does not accept your case, right? You could make a hundred good and totally unanswerable arguments, and it would have the opposite effect of what you want. All that poster derives from it is "This thread exists to get ME to change my mind! That makes me really important!" Since being important is the most important thing in the world to this poster, and since changing his mind would take the focus off him, what possible motivation is there to listen to anything you say, no matter how good it is? If he believed the same thing as everyone else, people wouldn't come to him, and he wouldn't stand out. What self-respecting egomaniac is going to do that?



I think in that person's case the picture does mean something, but the poster simply has no concept of what is and isn't public knowledge, and thinks his own experiences are universal. That same person also thinks that the most horribly twisted and ungrammatical sentences are clear, and disbelieves people who claim not to understand them. He knows what they mean, so everyone else must also.

Remember your post about how "W is taking the Eagle to war over WMD's" would have a very clear meaning to someone in 2009, but might be totally incomprehensible to someone in 2209, even if all the words were understood? It's probably something like that. For all we know, the user could be making a reference to something from his own childhood, without grasping that not everyone shares his experiences.

I once knew a guy in a newsgroup devoted to a show that was big in its day (40 years ago), but almost forgotten today. He was a nice enough guy, but simply could never seem to grasp that the show was not mainstream any more. There was one episode where one character, who was a kind of Margaret Hamilton-like sourpuss spinster, was giving a waitress in a diner a hard time over her mayonnaise, and how it wasn't as fresh as the stuff she made at home. This guy was beaming on about how she should be hired to do mayonnaise commercials. I tried to imagine it. "Hi, you don't know me, but I once griped about mayonnaise on a show on the Sci-Fi channel that you've never heard of, and I'm telling you to buy Hellman's." It was so embarrassing. One other time he was going on about how they should get cast members from this show on a celebrity edition of The Weakest Link, and just couldn't accept that it isn't well enough remembered to do that. I was being negative by telling him that, you see.



We don't. We're not doctors. All we can do is decide who to assocate with and who not to.


____________________
"I wish I was someone else, so I could kiss me!" -- The Cat

I didn't think so? I thought Crumhorn founded it just to find out what people thought. I didn't jump in on it till a number of pages in, and it has been extremely educational. Everyone else may think it is a waste of time, but I'm quite happy. I've learned so much and still am.


In the book I'm currently reading Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) this opposite effect was predicted. A doomsday UFO cult said the world would end Dec 20(?) at midnight. A reporter (or researcher....I'll have to check) had infiltrated the group, and was observing their behaviour. Some members sold their house and gave away all belongings.

The researchers predicted that when the deadline passed the devotees who gave away all their stuff would not say, "We've been such fools!", because that would produce a cognitive dissonance as their self-image is "We're smart, we're rational, we aren't gullible". Instead they would hold more tightly to their beliefs. The ones who didn't give stuff away would gradually leave the group when the UFO didn't come as they hadn't emotionally/intellectually invested as much.

Furthermore, the "give stuff away" devotees would become more vocal and attempt to get people to join them in their cult (if you get people to join that is a form of self-justification--see, I'm not crazy, this person also agrees with me).

So, that night they devotees gathered in the living room and prayed as the deadline approached (the leader's husband just went upstairs to sleep, so guess he wasn't overly concerned about missing his trip). The deadline approached, arrived and passed without incident and the devotees were very depressed. Between 4 and 5 in the a.m. the leader declared she'd just received a message that because of their faithfulness and their prayers the earth had been spared from doomsday.

As predicted, the devotees mood turned to exhilaration, and after that they ardently tried to get more people to join their group, becoming very public about it. Those who hadn't invested as much were able to gradually walk away from it.

The same effect was seen when Wallace demonstrated the curvature of the earth for his bet. Despite agreeing beforehand on what would constitute evidence for a curved earth (which Wallace demonstrated) the flat-earthers rejoiced and said that this evidence was evidence for a flat-earth after all (Wallace reports being absolutely stunned).

We see it on the threads too. A link is posted to an writer/talk show host/whatever, a 20 second Google search demonstrates the link contents are factually wrong, the thinking is riddled with internal inconsistencies yet the one(s) who posted the link still thinks the author is trustworthy. That happens a few times till everyone realizes the author has no credibility except the poster(s) who not only thinks the author is trustworthy, but now hold(s) they're even more credible.

To say otherwise would be to introduce cognitive dissonance ("how can I be wrong when I have the truth?", and when that dissonance is introduced reasoning shuts down till the dissonance is resolved. (not that I'm fully convinced of the C.D. hypothesis yet...but that isn't for this thread...actually none of this is global warming...I was thinking I was posting in a religion thread but just checked).

The person needs to justify to him/herself why they hold the view they do despite contrary evidence. This self justification not only minimizes the mistakes and bad decisions it also is the reason that everyone can see a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite, because anyone who has justified his actions to him/herself, believing that he has the truth, becomes impervious to self-correction.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously said "Trying to educate a bigot is like shining light into the pupil of an eye—it constricts."

Edit: not that i understand C.D. either...I have no doubt I've done it great injustice in talking about it as that is the way it is when you first start learning about something.

I haven't read every post in this thread, but here is where I stand on the subject of Global Warming. First of all I live in southeastern Michigan, of the United States where the local economy is driven by the automotive companies.

I am sick and tired of my government trying to shove more and more burn less fossil fuels rules down my throat, while other countries such as India, the Soviet Union (Russia), and China (which is just starting their industrial revolution, and will be so big as to make the one we had look like a model railroad set)keep polluting left and right. Yet, we are losing jobs by the 100's of thousands every month indirectly because of this BS global warming fiasco.

Remember in the 80's the big scare was the hole in the ozone? Or how about the late 90's, the Y2k bug was going to end civilization as we knew it. We've had mad cow, now pig flu. It's mostly a big fear mongering game to make lotsa money for the precious few at the top. Hell two years ago we were going to run out of oil in 10 more years, then miraculously they found some more,prices went back down, and auto companies got serious about making battery cars.

Take a hard look at Al Gore if you don't believe me. He's made millions (if not more) on his hedge funds that focus on green energy. The man sure does fly a lot for somebody worried about the earths health.

I figure by the time Boston is underwater my grandchildren's grandchildren will be dead and gone, so I honestly don't care about it. Just quit imposing these rules on us while the rest of the world does as it pleases.

Sorry, if what I said is unpopular, but I'm not going to lie about how I feel just because it's not the PC thing to say.

Hello emstrem,

If you do go back and read much of this thread you'll find that most of us are concerned about putting feelings aside and learning what the evidence leads us to conclude.

You've been up front about your biases, but the real question is: are you willing to put your biases aside and examine the evidence or are you going to provide one more example of how trying to educate the masses is a waste of time.

You could be right. I wasn't really thinking of how the thread started so much as where it has been. I haven't followed it closely, but it hasn't looked for a while like much serious debate was going on.


Yeah, but those are people who really believe what they're saying, and are in the game for the sake of the issue itself, not merely for their own self promotion. The person you're describing hasn't given away his stuff, and still seems to have a 401k and other retirement planning. At least I assume so. I once saw him pointedly ignore that issue when asked about it, which I'd learned was his code for "The answer is embarrassing" (when such answers are not embarrassing he's only too happy to brag about them).




I certainly see the principle involved. The more you've invested and sacrificed for an issue, the harder it is to give up on it. And that's natural. If you tell me that John Jones (who I've never met) is a murderer, I'd probably be easier to convince than if you told me that someone I'd known all my life was. If it was someone I believed in, it would be a lot harder to get me to give up on his innocence than to give up on a stranger's. But that's not to say that I could never be convinced. If I could never be convinced by any conceivable set of facts, then I'd be irrational (though not necessarily stupid).

But again, that's why this doesn't apply to the poster you're talking about. He's given up nothing for this issue, made no sacrifices, made no investments. It's just something to take bows over, and for that purpose one issue is as good as another. If it doesn't work out, it can just be dropped and replaced with another.




You know, I like that. A lot. It's a good, all-purpose excuse for never bothering about this issue again. ("I have faith that your prayers will avert whatever disaster it is you're talking about this time.") I do plan to use this in the future.

There's just one thing. Is that really what they were praying about in the living room? That the whole thing would be averted? I'd have thought that they were praying about something else, like that they might get through it easier. If they had been praying for the disaster to be averted, then clearly they considered in advance the possibility that it might be. And in that case, any claims they may have made to certainty couldn't have been true, right? It makes no sense to say that I KNOW the world will end tonight, and yet also pray that it will not be.




What, was he born yesterday? Imagine being taken off guard by something like that.


You might see it on the threads, but I don't. I generally make a point not to check out links posted by someone unwilling or unable to explain why they should be looked at. It's not hard and fast, I sometimes make exceptions for people I know to be reliable. If someone like you or Ed posts a bare link saying "look at this story" with no explanation, I might break my rule of thumb and check it out. My judgment must be good here, because when I do check out such links, they've generally been pretty good.





My problem with that is that it seems oddly self-fulfilling and circular. If such a person does change their mind despite everything, then we simply say "Oh well, I guess he wasn't a bigot after all." It's not hard to know that someone is a bigot after they prove it, it's identifying them earlier that's the tricky part. I'm sure that if I thought about it, I could remember having believed things in the past that I'd be embarrassed to cop to ever having thought them. But the fact that I altered them at all demonstrates that I wasn't impervious to evidence.

I don't think I'd agree that anybody who thinks the world is flat... or will be ending soon, is necessarily impervious to truth. I admit I'd strongly suspect it, though. But at the same time, I don't want to fall into the Michael Savage Syndrome. As you remember, my big gripe about him was that he considers all his views to be too obvious to need any explanation. If you're going to assume that all dissenters are irrational, then there's no point talking to them at all.

It's not that hard to give people the benefit of the doubt on things like this, because the ones that are irrational usually don't keep you waiting very long to prove it.

I like this.

First I like that you've made the conditional "people I know to be reliable." If we could simply get people to properly discriminate between sources that are usually reliable and those that are not we will have made great progress.

The other, not directly stated, piece is that you, like all humans, trust certain individuals to be reliable. One of the problems that I believe exists is that in modern society our evolved mechanisms for identifying reliable information sources are being "tricked."

One such mechanism seems to be the number of people who agree that something is correct. I read a short summary of recent research with preschoolers where the preschooler was placed in a room with others and a novel object. Most of the people in the room referred to the novel object with one name while a lone dissenter referred to it with a different name.

No great surprise that the child accepts the majority opinion on what the object is called.

Continuing on, the child was once again placed in a room with one member of the old majority and the dissenter and another novel object. In this case the child still followed the lead of the majority member in object naming.

Even at pre-school age the child is relying on majority rule and recognition of who is part of the majority in order to decide what to believe--in this case belief about the correct name of the object.

So why should we care? What does this have to do with believing in false authorities?

If we search for information regarding global warming on the internet we'll find at least 10 denial sites for every scientifically reliable site. To the "preschooler" it certainly appears that denial is the majority and reliable opinion. Having decided that the deniers are the correct ones, the person will then continue to identify individual deniers as members of the majority and therefore reliable sources of information on the topic.

Now, this hardly explains all following of bad information sources, but provides a single example of what I believe is a much larger problem: The structure of modern society and technology provide fertile ground for the mistaken identification of false authorities.

I see your point--unfortunately my analogy suggested something to you other than what I was trying to suggest.

What I was trying to suggest was that for a long time we, as a society, blindly followed certain information authorities. If you were an M.D. or a Physics Ph.D. you were recognized as an authority on topics well outside your field of specialization. (A left-over from the days when human knowledge was limited enough that a single person could hold most of it inside their head?)

These days many people seem to blindly reject authority. Doesn't matter that you have a Ph.D. and 20 years of experience in climatology, you are rejected as a legitimate authority source on climate change. For most people their friend, preacher, shop keeper, other poorly informed source says that climate change is just political nonsense, so it is.

I agree that blindly accepting authority and blindly rejecting authority will both lead to a belief in nonsense, as you state. I think I was talking about the source of the nonsensical thinking.

Ed says that training people to think is a waste of time. Accepting that premise for a moment, we could still avoid a lot of problems if we would train people to properly discriminate good information sources from bad.

Alas, it might be easier to teach thinking than source discrimination. As already mentioned in this thread we have experts showing up on Oprah, and other places, who are spouting a mixture of good and bad information. When you get that sort of mixture it can be really hard to spot the woo-woo elements. Especially when the speaker has legitimate credentials.

Hmm, I think you're right. If they've given up all they have, they wouldn't exactly be praying for the doomsday delay. Maybe they started going along the lines of "your will be done", after a long night of specific requests.

Yes. Or no??? I'm not sure how to go about teaching source discrimination? Do you think that learning how to think is too closely entwined with source discrimination for them to be taught separately? That is, maybe you can't teach source discrimination until you're taught how to think?

For example, we have the Gore Gambit that says, "Gore does/did/says/is a X...therefore, this discredits warming/science". This gambit is found on many websites. A critical thinker knows this statement is non-sequiter/irrelevant, one does not lead to the other. Any website that uses the Gore Gambit loses some credibility as a reliable source.

If you don't see the error in this gambit, then you can't see that the source is unreliable, therefore, first you need to be taught to think critically. [Is "how to think" the same as "thinking critically" though?].

Which leads me to another question: Exactly what does it mean to think critically? I did find this list of 35 skills that are divided into three parts (Affective Strategies and Cognitive Strategies Macro-Ability and Cognitive Strategies Micro-Skills. Strategy S-16 (Macro-Ability) is evaluating the credibility of the sources of information.

I think this site summarizes things better and answers my questions. It first lists the disposition of a [potential] critical thinker. Having these qualities may mean you are a critical thinker, but that you have the potential to be one. Perhaps people with these qualities are the educable ones, and maybe those lacking these skills tend to be the ones that make Ed (and others, myself included) rant.

Secondly, are the abilities of a critical thinker. These are items that can be taught. Abilities Part I are the elementary clarification skills. Formulate a question, have people clarify answers, identify relevance/irrelevance (this is where recognizing a Gore-type Gambit would be taught).

Abilities Part II are the ones that form a basis for a decision, and this includes Judge the Credibility of the Source (with 8 sub-criteria that need to be taken as a whole, not one by one---e.g. "Agreement Among Sources" won't help you if 10 out of 10 are written by denialists (pick your denial: HIV, vax, AGW, Landing Hoaxers, etc)).

Next 3 sections are inference skills (deduce, induce, logic, judgements, background facts), and then there are more sections after that.

Guess my main question/point was can we separate source discrimination from teaching people how to think? My 5-minute Googleversity Education leads me to believe you need to be taught to think before you can discriminate bad from good sources (which is really just a confirmation of what I already suspected so I more readily accept the links above as being "reliable" and hence may be misled by my bias and am actually very wrong---how's that for practicing my metacognition? And I didn't even talk about being misled by my own lack of knowledge in the area (violation of principle 1c).

btw, that second link is Robert Ennis's work, and it seems he is a prolific author.

Cool! The Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test pdf Supplement here. From the same sites, Cornell Class Reasoning Test, and The Cornell Conditioning Reason Test, both pdfs. Looks like I have some fun things to do...see if I can crush my ego.

Second thoughts...maybe we can teach discrimination of bad vs good sources as a shortcut. Give them a few tools, rules of thumb. It won't be reliable all the time, but maybe enough to work.

For example, is the site university or government affiliated (usually reliable--except in politics where you don't want to believe what the gov't is saying about itself).

Is the site well referenced (claims are backed up), and do these reference link back to reliable sources themselves (university, gov't, respected organizations like WHO, CDC, NASA, etc).

These are the signs of a reliable site. Doesn't mean they are reliable, but it is a start.

Does the site rely on anecdotes or testimonials? Does the site contradict what you may know to be general knowledge (vaccines are good, we landed on the moon)? Does the site use generalizations like "scientists can't explain..." or "scientists are ... x, y, z" with x, y, z, leading to an argument that shows scientists are wrong (except for one brave maverick who....)

These would be the signs of an unreliable site. Doesn't mean they are, but again a start.

And if the website has LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS, loads of punctuation, that's PUNCTUATION FOLKS!!!!, and MSPELLELT words, different fonts (too lazy to look up the code), and different colours on the various WORDS!!!!, as well as strange leaps like the price of tea in China and damn koala bears, then possibly you may, perhaps, be on an unreliable site.

And if the person learns about confirmation bias, causation versus correlation, then those are more tools they can add to their ability to distinguish good from bad.

I've heard of studies like that, like where a whole room full of people would agree on something that was visibly untrue, and the one guy who was the test subject tended to go along with the crowd rather than stand up and say that the emperor had no clothes. (But I was never sure if that meant that he agreed with them, or if he simply didn't want the hassle of taking on the whole room single-handed).

Surprisingly, I saw another Danger Man episode applicable to this discussion the other night. Drake is trying to get someone to confess to murder, through a complicated psychological war that I won't go into too much detail about here. But one of the ploys involved having an accomplice who looked like the murder victim dress up in a Wave's uniform and stand under a street light where the guy could see her (and then disappear into a building when he ran after her). The idea of course was to have him think that he DIDN'T really see what he knew he saw (Drake claimed to have seen nobody, of course), but was just cracking up.





Yeah, going along with the majority is the most obvious reaction, though I can think of other factors that might influence me. If 20 people in a room called a substance Cesiumfrancolithicmixialibidiumrixidixidoxidexidroxide, and 2 people called it "green stuff", I might just call it "green stuff" myself (maybe with a wry expression), going with the simpler answer rather than the majority one, and also knowing that the non-technical label is less likely to be provably wrong than the technical one. After all, I don't KNOW that it's Cesiumfrancolithicmixialibidiumrixidixidoxidexidroxide, but I do know that it's green stuff.



Are these people all strangers? I think a kid would be less likely to go along with the majority if the minority were his friends, or if the majority were people he knew and disliked.





That's true, but how is a person who really and genuinely wants to be reasonable about this supposed to decide who's being irrational and who isn't? Go by the evidence, you say, but the evidence is of a complex, scientific nature that laymen, (including me) may not be qualified to evaluate.

And whose job is it to do what? Is it my job to go out, find evidence I can use, and reach a verdict here? Or is it the job of the advocates (on both sides) to convince me of their position? Or is it both those things? Does Gore have any obligation to help convince me? If it is, then it must be admitted that he's done a pretty poor job. What emstrem says about him is largely true; the guy's got a carbon footprint bigger than Sasquatch, but he thinks it's other people who need to make the lifestyle changes. Maybe the failure is partly his.