You may find this enlightening.

Very interesting unfortunately as I am sure you are well aware, those with the most need for such information are the least likely to view it!

Vey nice.

Cliff's Notes for the time impaired --

"Be open to the possibility you may be wrong."

This was excellent

I got the gist of what the guy was saying, but admittedly didn’t know some of the words he used. The Dr. Seuss style illustrations helped.

The argument that curiosity and humility are the antidote to bias isn't well made nor do I think is valid.

I've long thought about how do we know what we know to be true is actually true. In a way, I think I share or overlap some of his thoughts. I've concluded two things: 1) To not personally identify with my beliefs. People personally identify with their beliefs and take any arguments against what they believe to be true as personal attacks and they become defensive and even more entrenched. It prevents them from letting go of faulty truths and taking hold of more accurate truths. It is with this attitude that one can minimize any bias in the trek towards gaining truth.

2) One should periodically critically examine their beliefs from a distance, to pressure test them and see if they still hold.

I disagree with the finding offered in the first few moments of the video - highly intelligent people are more biased. It's like saying very muscular people go to the gym; they don't go to the gym because they're muscular, they are muscular because they go to the gym. Intelligent people spend more mental resources thinking about issues and so they are more firm in their beliefs or, in other words, more biased. Whether their beliefs are correct is more dependent of what I covered in my conclusion above.

I also don't like the pandering. "You're watching this video so you're more intelligent." "You're watching this video so you're more curious."

After Skoolis a great channel. It has lots of interesting and thought provoking content.

I thought the presentation made a few valid points, including the likelihood that people who think about their beliefs tend to become more convinced they are true than those who simply believe (although there are plenty of the latter). I mentioned that in a conversation about religion with a friend recently. As I told her, I have heard the arguments over and over; they never change, and I’m therefore not going to seek out more arguments that say the same thing. Does that make me biased? Perhaps, but I simply don’t care and have no reason to care. The same is true of many of my political/social beliefs. I know enough about socialism in general and Communism in particular that hearing additional claims about their supposed superiority won’t change my mind.

Though I always do find it a little ironic when someone says in essence, “Don’t believe what people tell you,” or to put it another way, “I’m telling you to not believe what some people tell you; find other people to tell you things.”

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
I thought the presentation made a few valid points, including the likelihood that people who think about their beliefs tend to become more convinced they are true than those who simply believe (although there are plenty of the latter). I mentioned that in a conversation about religion with a friend recently. As I told her, I have heard the arguments over and over; they never change, and I’m therefore not going to seek out more arguments that say the same thing. Does that make me biased? Perhaps, but I simply don’t care and have no reason to care. The same is true of many of my political/social beliefs. I know enough about socialism in general and Communism in particular that hearing additional claims about their supposed superiority won’t change my mind.

Though I always do find it a little ironic when someone says in essence, “Don’t believe what people tell you,” or to put it another way, “I’m telling you to not believe what some people tell you; find other people to tell you things.”

I was having a similar discussion with a friend. He seemed to be settling into a familiar discussion (about atheism), I asked the qustion, "are we talking about religion or the teachings of Christ?" He asked why it was important, and I said "because religion is made by man for man so it is full of sin."
We had a very enlightening discussion after that. Once someone learns you are open to new ideas it is very freeing.

quote:

Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

Because they’re not so smart after all.

Finally made time to sit and watch and found it very interesting, TY.

I can say that my favorite take-a-way was “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”
- Saul Bellow. This brings me to where my beliefs about the antidote to bias are different. The part about goals was interesting to me. As an example I can give, learning about the ways our forefathers built this country (and gave us American exceptionalism), is why we have a goal of preserving that above the DEI and socialist goals.

We've said this here for years now that the leftists are all about their feelings. Seems like this shows the subliminal leftist goals of socialism is a goal because it is what makes them feel better. Leftists cannot handle or grasp our MAGA principals if it opposes feelings, when as stated above “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”.

The smarter you are the more you out smart yourself.

I was with a guy a few days ago, he’s 32 or so, college grad, good job. He said he had a question, knew I flew planes a fair bit.

His question was if I thought the world was round(a globe) or flat? I didn’t call him an idiot, though I thought it was settled a few 100 years ago, guess not.

I just told him, in my mind it’s kinda round. Yes I know it’s not perfectly round, but you get the idea.

quote:

Originally posted by sourdough44:

His question was if I thought the world was round(a globe) or flat?

Flat. Definitely flat. Get up to cruising altitude and on a clear day, you can see the edge.

Human "intelligence" is the ability to recognize patterns and then make predictions based on the patterns. But we evolved to recognize patterns we observe directly.

Media and especially social media are short circuiting our pattern recognition. When people see media saturated with images of say, police harming "unarmed" minorities, or of shark attacks, the FAR overestimate the actual frequency of occurrence. Stranger abduction of children is exceedingly rare, with almost all of it by family members or close friends. Yet parents fear stranger abduction because of a few high profile cases and movies.

People who don't put much thought into things are swayed easily by the larger group. Think of the memes of NPC's all parroting the same line. The same people saying "my body my choice" over abortion also agreed with vaccine mandates regardless of choice. The people demanding freedom of speech and for Hamas supporters and LGBTQ people also favor censorship of what they deem to be "disinformation" or "hate speech".

People who put thought into things arrive at conclusions and are less easily swayed. The idea about intelligence being used to achieve greater social status or influence, rather than finding objective truth, is interesting. That is what we are seeing now with the climate hysteria, DEI, the COVID response, and many other things. Politicians are not doing what they know is right, but what gets them popularity and thus more votes. "Scientists" and "Doctors" ignored decades of knowledge about respirator viruses and advocated nonsensical lockdown and mask policies, using vert bad science to justify it.

Here's an honest question:

Many believe the 2020 election was stolen. Yet no hard evidence has been presented. We do know that media/tech/democrats colluded to steer the narrative and suppress negative information about Biden, because they've admitted it and because the Hunter laptop was later confirmed to be real. And we do know that the Democrats engaged in ballot harvesting in states with universal mail in voting - ferreting out every ballot and ensuring it was filled out "correctly".

But what about actual voter fraud - actual fake ballots, or voting machine tampering, and the kinds of things people asserted early on. No evidence has actually been presented proving any of this and all the "bombshells" promised turned into nothing burgers. No great conspiracy has been discovered, no one "talked" to reveal the grand scheme.

So on what grounds do people still believe it?

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:Flat. Definitely flat. Get up to cruising altitude and on a clear day, you can see the edge.

On one of my cruises, the ship was in a part of the Pacific where one of the corners could be seen. But I had to fly to almost 84,000 feet to see it.

quote:

Originally posted by Lefty Sig:
Many believe the 2020 election was stolen.

You don't say. I didn't know that. Did you guys know that? Let's have a DISCUSSION ABOUT IT IN THIS THREAD, shall we? Doesn't that sound like a great idea?

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:

quote:

Originally posted by Lefty Sig:
Many believe the 2020 election was stolen.

You don't say. I didn't know that. Did you guys know that? Let's have a DISCUSSION ABOUT IT IN THIS THREAD, shall we? Doesn't that sound like a great idea?

Nope

Politics aside, evidence vs. proof plugs into this thread.