Mockingbird's Nest: Why are so many people so quick to doubt the facts, even when presented to them, but swallow some BS narrative because it's popular?

Why are so many people so quick to doubt the facts, even when presented to them, but swallow some BS narrative because it's popular?

This is an important question. In fact if I could get people to listen to just one thing from me, the answer to this question might be it. I believe it's that important.

Because “the facts” is just a category of information that one considers authentic.

We don't generally carefully weigh the best evidence and arguments for and against an idea and apply strict intellectual rigor and scientific standards to our thinking. That's incredibly rare, and this includes people with high intelligence and people who have degrees or doctorates even in scientific fields.

We generally don't believe things that we should, we believe things that our parents and peers taught us, things our accepted authorities and experts say, things the culture we fit in accept and we believe almost all these things in a very uncritical way, meaning that critical thinking and independent analysis of the beliefs is rare and slight or never occurs.

A few mistakes that we almost all almost always make almost all the time automatically contribute to this.

We have probably a couple hundred cognitive biases as humans. We all have them. These are errors in our thinking that are built into how we think. You usually don't notice them in yourself and rarely notice them in others unless you have very specific information on them.

Several of them help us to fool ourselves into thinking that “I” am sane and logical and have good sound judgment.

There is the fundamental attribution error. Attribution means to assign a cause to something.

We tend to assign the cause to good things in our lives to good qualities and good character in ourselves but are less generous with others, especially others we see as different or opposed to us.

If I am late for work I can assign the cause to circumstances outside my control like the weather or traffic or anything that does not reflect badly on my character and behavior. But if a coworker who I dislike is late? Obviously that guy has fouled up!

In this way we edit the failures of ourselves and our peers, our in group as outside our control and blameless but the same errors of people who we are not a part of our group or especially against? We count those against them personally!

So, we see ourselves and our groups as morally more pure than we really are and groups we are not in as morally more at fault than they truly are.

This bias makes it so we reclassify much of the information we get and reject some as BS while embracing some as facts, even though the same degree of proof may be provided for the different information.

We also have naive realism, the concept in psychology in which it is observed that everyone tends to believe they are not swayed by bias or emotions, that my political beliefs are the most sensible ones possible and that I have no problem seeing truth, while others may be biased or mistaken.

We similarly have the bias blindspot, the fact that it's incredibly difficult to directly observe bias in ourselves. We generally need to learn about bias in others. Then observe strong convincing evidence regarding others and gradually realize that just as they are unable to directly observe bias in themselves that strong evidence exist that they are biased, by reading the details regarding experiments and studies that have supported the claims of specific biases existing to understand that if everyone else has these hidden biases then we must as well.

Numerous books have excellent descriptions of the research on this topic. The entire field of behavioral economics exists because the classic economic models all fail when applied to human beings, because we don't follow them. We have behaviors they don't predict. So classic economic theory is frankly a fraud.

The following books all have evidence regarding this topic:

Sway by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman

Influence by Robert Cialdini

Age of Propaganda by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson

A Theory Of Cognitive Dissonance by Leon Festinger

Social Psychology for Dummies by Daniel Richardson

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow

The Influential Mind by Tali Sharot

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Behave by Robert Sapolsky

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Travis and Elliot Aronson

The Brain by David Eagleman

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think alone, book by Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman gets to the heart of the matter perhaps better than any other.

They provide meticulous research that shows that the Dunning-Kruger effect defines our behavior.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is one of the most popular ideas in psychology and probably the most misunderstood.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the fact that people are likely to overestimate their knowledge in areas in which they are not experts. This includes intelligent people and people who are experts in multiple fields, even related fields and subjects.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is often MISREPRESENTED as ”stupid people don't know that they are stupid” and the equally false corollary “I am not stupid, so the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't apply to me!” No, you are subject to the effect just like the rest of us!

In The Knowledge Illusion the authors describe in detail how they asked people to rate their expertise on things like how a toilet or bicycle or zipper or coffee maker work. They then asked these people to describe in precise detail how these things work, in sequence with the steps.

The people wrote down answers. Then the authors described how these things ACTUALLY work. The respondents could then see that they were wrong and then rated their understanding as lower than they they originally did when they first were asked.

The respondents did something else interesting as well, they avoided the researchers in the future. We like certainty and feeling like we have a good grasp on what we know and don't know.

Having people prove to us that we are profoundly wrong and that confidence in our knowledge is no guarantee of accuracy in our knowledge is unsettling and unpleasant, so we avoid the people who are the source of this unpleasant reality.

So, to answer your question more often than not “facts” are ideas we are comfortable believing while “BS” is ideas we prefer to reject.

And we generally don't like finding out that we routinely make hidden unnoticed errors in our thinking and that judging the truth of an idea based on our confidence or comfort is the usual way we operate rather than using scientific method or critical thinking.

A terrible corollary of our tendency to overestimate our knowledge regarding subjects we are not expert in is that we use our imperfect and uneducated opinions, our folk knowledge as if it was accurate and fully validated in place of real expertise.

I might be able to seek a real doctor to care for my body and a real mechanic for my car but we are all folk psychologists and folk critical thinkers, in other words we are usually no more qualified to be psychologists or critical thinkers than we are to be medical doctors or astronauts (if we are not doctors or astronauts) but life requires near constant critical thinking and psychology.

We have whatever information our parents and peers and religious beliefs and so on contribute to our “understanding” of critical thinking and psychology. In my opinion this generally gives us a very poor and often incorrect and incomplete understanding of these two vital subjects and we stumble along making terrible and frequent errors in both subjects.

I can put off home maintenance and repairs until the appropriate experts are available and put repairing my car and body and even pet in the hands of experts but unfortunately understanding human psychology and critical thinking are two things that I must constantly deal with and can't say that I will leave to the experts.

I have to use thinking constantly and interact with human psychology (my own if I am alone, and others whenever not in total isolation) all the time!

This puts me in the unenviable position of thinking that I have a vital point to share. Because you have this tendency to overestimate your expertise on subjects you are not expert on and because you can poorly apply your own folk version of any subject you are not expert in the subjects that you cannot simply leave to experts are the ones you want to be at minimum capable of forming a solid educated opinion on are at an absolute minimum critical thinking and psychology!

You simply can't outsource that work! Because you automatically apply your own understanding of critical thinking and psychology to yourself and others and if you are incorrect it can have dire consequences!

One thing that I have to point out is that critical thinking is a subject. It's not a tendency or a natural aptitude. You have to study materials on critical thinking and develop critical thinking skills and practice it for many hours to improve. You wouldn't say a doctor or theoretical physicist or engineer could just use natural talent with zero education or very slight education, well neither can a critical thinker.

I have written on critical thinking and recommend the books and videos by Richard Paul and Linda Elder. They developed a curriculum for serious students of the subject.

I must also recommend the book How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Lewis Vaughn and Theodore Schick. It is used by David Kyle Johnson in his critical thinking classes and is an excellent beginning point for the topic as well as On Liberty in which John Stuart Mill gives us crucial information.

I wrote the following blog posts on the topic of critical thinking and they are merely a starting point. All are available at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology.

Critical Thinking

Sunday, July 4, 2021

Why are so many people so quick to doubt the facts, even when presented to them, but swallow some BS narrative because it's popular?

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