Re: Belief and Reason (was Guns...)
Joe E. Dees (joedees@bellsouth.net)
Fri, 28 May 1999 18:23:31 -0500
Subject: Belief and Reason (was Guns...)
To: extropians@extropy.com
Date sent: Thu, 27 May 1999 19:36:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Lee Daniel Crocker" <lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net (none)>
Organization: Piclab (http://www.piclab.com/)
Send reply to: extropians@extropy.com
> > 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?
>
Knowing that this is the case with you, it seems that you would
somehow be able to deprogram yourself, but I guess a True Gun
Believer, just like a True Antiabortionist, would never want to...
> --
> 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
>