Cultural Blindness

One of the core tenets of scientific skepticism is what I call neuropsychological humility – the recognition that while the human brain is a powerful information processing machine, it also has many frailties.

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8 logical fallacies that are hard to spot

In arguments, few things are more frustrating than when you realize that someone is using bad logic, but you can’t quite identify what the problem is. This rarely happens with the more well-known logical fallacies. For example, when someone in an argument starts criticizing the other person’s reputation instead of their ideas, most people know that’s an ad hominem attack.

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“…Even those of us with excellent critical thinking skills and lots of experience trying to dig up the truth behind a variety of claims are lacking one important asset: the scientific expertise necessary to understand any finds or claims in the context of the full state of knowledge of your field. It’s part of why scientific consensus is so remarkably valuable: it only exists when the overwhelming majority of qualified professionals all hold the same consistent professional opinion. It truly is one of the most important and valuable types of expertise that humanity has ever developed.”

You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science

“Research both sides and make up your own mind.” It’s simple, straightforward, common sense advice. And when it comes to issues like vaccinations, climate change, and the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, it can be dangerous, destructive, and even deadly.

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Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

The economist J.K. Galbraith once wrote, “Faced with a choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.”

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Last night I found myself re-reading portions of a The Art of War by the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and began to think that the book describes strategy based on these human biases.

This Business Insider article provides great list of 60 cognitive biases and how they influence our judgments.

60 cognitive biases that screw up everything we do

The affect heuristic describes how humans sometimes make decisions based on emotion. The psychologist Paul Slovic coined this term to describe the way people let their emotions color their beliefs about the world. For example, your political affiliation often determines which arguments you find persuasive.

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Back thirty years before he was President in United States, twenty years before there was a United States, John Adams as you may know served as the defense lawyer for the British soldiers who had killed some of his fellow Patriots in the Boston Massacre and at that trial John Adams made his first statement that became famous. He said: “Facts are stubborn things and our wishes and our inclinations and the dictates of our passions do not alter the state of facts and evidence”.

Two and half centuries later this nation that Adams co-founded has almost become a refutation of that line as a another great American leader of our lifetime Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say: You’re entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

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Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies?

Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t).

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24 Cognitive Biases That Are Warping Your Perception of Reality

We are each entitled to our own personal world view. Unfortunately, when it comes to interpreting information and making objective sense of reality, human brains are hard-wired to make all kinds of mental mistakes that can impact our ability to make rational judgments.

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Why incompetent people often think they’re actually the best

Maybe you’ve experienced this at school or work before: Dealing with someone who thinks he’s much better at his job than he really is. This can not only be really annoying, but it can lead to disaster as a group project is made much more difficult by someone’s unchecked ego.

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At approximately 37:00 minutes in he explains how the reasoning powers in our prefrontal cortex can evaluate the interpretations from other areas of our brain and use “Critical Thinking” to evaluate what is true.

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It bears repeating and emphasis:

“THIS IS WHY WE ALL NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.”

and

People having an uninformed opinion about something they don’t understand and proclaiming their opinion as being equally valid as facts is what is ruining the world (and this country!).

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