Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
This is a great article in the New Yorker about why facts don’t change our minds. Well worth the read and well worth us thinking about why we cling to our own ideas, theories and models despite lots of evidence against.
Here is an excerpt:
“Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views.”
You can read the article in its entirety here…
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
Actually, facts do change our minds. Otherwise we would all be theists forever and regressive physicists forever. Social evolution occurs through contradiction. Faced with one contradiction, we often can gloss over it, but faced with dozens of contradictions, that is less likely. Mostly, we change our minds only when it is financially beneficial for us. Faced with a choice between relativity and starvation, guess what we will choose? Thus, “fake” news that benefits our finances always will be preferable to real news that doesn’t.
“What men want is not knowledge but certainty.”
-Bertrand Russell