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My cynical side views this as creating herd immunity against bullshit.
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Someone else thought the exact same thing:
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To quote one of the USA’s top comedians, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Stephen Colbert said that sarcastically, but apparently, lots of people believe this to be true. Facts don’t matter any more.
What matters is another Colbert-ism-- Truthiness. To quote Wikipedia, “Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, examination, or facts.”
You can spout “facts” and interpret “data” all day and it DOES NOT MATTER. To a certain kind of person, you decide what is true first, and the facts will fall in line. Facts that don’t fall in line are ‘fake news’, ‘liberal bias’ or they come from flawed assumptions. Science education would have to begin with epistemology for first graders. “How do we know?” is probably the biggest question in any field, yet you don’t get to that until (or if) you take philosophy in college. And first graders are generally dualistic about things-- good/bad, true/false. Explaining that adult experts are often uncertain would be kind of shocking to them.
I suspect that a lot of the science rejectors are disappointed dualists. They have learned that experts can be wrong and decided that it’s ALL BS. Their dualism leads to a wholesale rejection of science and expertise. Nuance, probability, preponderance of evidence-- these are all too hard. To paraphrase George Carlin-- think of the average person, then understand that half of the people are stupider than the average person.
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Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things
Facts don’t stain the furniture
Facts go out and slam the door
Facts are written all over your face
Facts continue to change their shape
The philosopher, D Byrne
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I don’t think anything you’ve said there is inconsistent with anything I said.
I wasn’t explicit about teaching epistemology to first graders, but that was exactly what I was referring to in point #1. Maybe don’t call it epistemology though, call it something that sounds fun - maybe Truthiness or something. And I think it should start with preschool, not grade one. I dunno. But if I had children, I would absolutely be teaching them to establish a useful truth in sea of contradictory and incomplete information. Going slightly off topic here, but I don’t belief truth has to be absolute, it just has to be useful. Science has been progressing quite happily for centuries on incomplete and sometimes ‘wrong’ information.
I’m well aware that there are certain people that are immune to facts and reason. I don’t have a solution to address those people - See point #1 again where I said fuck those guys.
I did try to address the larger problem with my other two points though.
BTW, that George Carlin thing about the average person is an excellent example of truthiness. It seems true but it gives completely the wrong impression. Most people are in and around average intelligence. There are relatively few stupid people and there are relatively few clever people and the difference between the average and the extremes isn’t really all that wide.
This is why it’s wrong and probably unhelpful to characterise those armed, Confederate flag waving anti lockdown protesters as stupid. They are probably in and around average intelligence just like everyone else, they just have beliefs that are based on differing information.
And therein lies the problem…
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