Mark Iverson-ZeroPoint <[email protected]> wrote:
> I said I lost respect for him “as a scientist”… I still respect him as > being a most intelligent human being. But science is all about > exploration, discovery and explanation of the anomalous. He is > exceptionally well educated in science, has published numerous papers on > nuclear physics, and yet, doesn’t care to even read peer-reviewed papers > about a very interesting, and possible very important, anomaly… that kind > of human behavior **from a scientist** defies all rational thought. > It is not rational. This person has a mental block with regard to this specific subject. Probably he is every inch the scientist with regard to most other subjects. People are selectively irrational. This is something my mother often dealt with as a social scientist designing public opinion questionnaires. To take a well-known example, up until the mid-1970s, many otherwise rational, scientifically minded, well-educated people were racists. Of course some still are, especially here in Georgia, but they were more prevalent, and more extreme. These people would be careful, thoughtful, objective and all those other good things . . . until you brought up the issue of race. Then they would fly off at the handle. They would become argumentative and refuse to look at facts. To take a specific example, they refused to consider the possibility that environmental effects or lack of opportunity might be causing dissimilar outcomes in public school test scores. I am talking about the early 1970s, when my brother was teaching in Atlanta schools. At that time, public schools were segregated, and black schools got only a fraction of the funding that white schools got. They could not afford school libraries or athletic equipment. They were so understaffed that many schools held two sessions per day, with half the kids coming in the morning, and half in the afternoon, giving them half the instruction time. Many white people in Atlanta, including mainstream editorial writers and other opinion makers, simply could not believe this had an effect on the students. They said all of the differences in test scores were inherent to race. Inborn, that is. I think most of these people were sincere. They were not just trying to save tax money. They were prisoners of their own Jim Crow ideology. Unfortunately, so was the black population. Sorry to bring up politics and controversy, but that is the best example of irrationality I know, and I happen to know a great deal about it. - Jed
