On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 10:44 AM, Joe Hass <[email protected]> wrote:
> To bounce back to PGage's comment: > > I'd add a couple points to your argument. One, the general media has > adopted the mentality that talk radio started pushing 25 years ago: > your opinion is just as valid as the next person. Because of this, the > population in general has decided that it's okay to share your opinion > with anyone (and, thanks to the Internet, anyone is now everyone). (SNIP) > > Jonah Lehrer talked in his blog last week about the political > dissonance that grabs root in so many people. The very short, > oversimplified version: the less you know about something, the > increased likelihood that you are overconfident in your errant belief > (e.g., welfare haters tend to think that almost all people on welfare > are black). It's well worth a read. > > The Frontal Cortex: http://icio.us/z0d4ui > That is really interesting; I agree with the expansion you give, and thanks for the link, which was great. I would quibble a bit with the use of "cognitive dissonance" to explain this - a lot of it is confirmation bias. Homo Sapiens are just hard wired to to pay attention to information that confirms what they already believe, and ignore information that is inconsistent with prior assumptions or schemas. This has adaptive value in a lot of settings (like when your survival depends on finding one particular kind of nutritious berries amongst a lot of toxic stuff) but is much less helpful in a complex, pluralistic world of ideas. Formal higher education is designed to teach people how to do what is actually very unnatural, which is pay attention to dis-confirming information. Of course the pressure in recent decades in higher education has been to spend less time on helping students develop the habits of attending to non-confirming evidence, and more time on giving the student consumer the credentials they think they are paying for. And that circles back to the Palin Effect. Sarah is not really dumb. No doubt she is smarter than her grandparents and parents, and smarter than the average person with her background would have been a generation or two ago. The problem is she has just enough intellectual ability to enter the public arena, without most of the skills and habits that would allow her to engage in the public discourse in a productive way. And at the same time there are hundreds of thousands and millions of people just like her who have also entered the public arena, and of course she is appealing to them. Like him or not, what makes Obama different from Palin (and from Bush) is that he is "smart" in just this sense (note, I don't mean that he is necessarily correct, or that his ideas are better, though of course I think they are). He does seek out contrary ideas and dis-confirming evidence, and he does take this into account, and he sometimes changes his mind. It is this quality that has made him so unpopular not with the right wing, but with the left-wing equivalents of Sarah Palin, who wanted him to somehow mandate solar power as a replacement for fossil fuels by 2012, or convert the US health care system to a single payer system, or remove all US military personnel from Iraq and Afghanistan within 9 months of taking office, or issue an executive order reversing DADT. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
