Belief and Reason (was Guns...)
Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Thu, 27 May 1999 19:36:09 -0700 (PDT)
> The interesting thing for me is how, for some people, issues like
> this become religious, by which I mean a person will take a conclusion
> (however arrived at) and keep it safe from any evidence or reasoning
> that would tend to discredit it.
It is an interesting cognitive malfunction, present in many, including
creationists, legislators, and poker players. Humans tend to believe
what they would like to believe, regardless of the evidence. Some can
even know what the rational conclusion is and /still/ cling to what
they want to believe. There are many trained doctors who tout worthless
herbs or homepathic crap despite years of education in how to properly
evaluate a drug. Many a poker player can tell you that ey is precisely
an 11-to-1 underdog to fill that straight, but ey will call the bet
anyway because of a hunch ("I can feel it coming"). I paid my rent by
exploiting them, and they kept coming back to the table despite the
mounds of cash they spent chasing those hunches.
Dawkins makes an interesting argument that credulity is an advantage
for children, and to some extent it may have been for adults as well
during most of our evolutionary history. I haven't found a cure yet,
but I have seem people make the transition so I know it can be done.
I wonder how you would go about measuring it?
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC