CycloWizard: Some of you may have noticed that I don't really visit P&N anymore. This probably makes most of you very happy, as my approach here was never popular (except, perhaps, with the largely silent minority). I attempted, however unsuccessfully, to bring facts and logic to the argument. In this way, I changed my own mind much more often than I influenced anyone else's opinions.
What more could you ask for? But more importantly you cannot know this. When I was six or seven, dressed in my finest cowboy outfit with two big colt revolvers I shot a man driving by in his car. He threw his hands up and slumped over the wheel. He was alive and awake and gave me the gift of his being. He sowed seeds in me to wish to be alive for others. In a second of life he left a mark on me, whereas I lived in his memory probably no more than a minute.
CW: People on both sides of the aisle hate me because I don't have a side. I could never figure out why anyone would align themselves with one side or the other as neither side was aligned with reality.
M: I have objections to this based on what I think are assumptions, that your sideless side is not also a side, and that you determine who posesses reality. I believe this is basically immodest and not unlike what you are complaining about.
CW: After talking with a friend (who is also an engineer) working on his MBA, he said that the hardest thing about managing people as an engineer is that he's used to working with other engineers who consider things logically and reasonably. With most people, that's simply not the case. Things started to click into place.
M: This is ancient and obvious news to me and I react to it in a completely different way. You have a bias in favor of logic and reason and believe therefore, that being your good, that it is also who you are. But it is totally irrational to believe in logic and reason when you can see that for most folk it means nothing at all. It is foolish to have faith in things that have no practical value. People, including you, are irrational and the question is 'what now?'.
To function in this world requires, in my opinion, the capacity to operate in a totally different dimension. What I always presume folk will take from what I say is absolutely nothing. My efforts are on what effect I have on them and what others may see in that. My aim is to infect folk with an alternate method of perception. That and humor can open the doors of perception where logic and reason will fail.
CW: After years of beating my head against the wall that is the vocal majority of P&N posters, I finally found an article that explained what I already knew: most people simply accept tidbits which agree with their predisposed positions while summarily rejecting all other information as bogus.
M: The problem, of course, is that you've beat your head for a reason. You are wedded to the notion that reason and logic should have some effect. It's a kind of faith and misplaced. But when one door closes another opens. Just because folk can't reason or think very well doesn't mean they can't grow and change. Becoming more enlightened is all about letting go. You let go of reason and logic, I let go of hope, Joe lets go of his fear of his black neighbor after he saves his wife. We aren't so much missing brains as we are missing love.
CW: When confronted with facts, most of you will actually cling tighter to your position which is in direct opposition to those facts rather than adapting your position to bring it into line with reality. This is why conservatives prefer Fox News, why Rand Paul makes liberals so uncomfortable when he says that the poor here don't really have it so bad, and why most of you have never and will never change your opinions on any political issues.
M: I have said this over and over for years and years and nobody will ever hear me. I have explained why this happens with total logic and reason, hehe. He who hates himself, and that would be everybody, will never trust himself, the biggest fool in the world, and to fill the void we identify with whatever we are taught is the real good. We become attached to something that gives us our worth because it is the good. To see what we have attached to as wrong and evil thereafter is to be thrown back on the self. We will never allow the self to express because we hate ourselves. If what we believe is wrong then we are the worst in the world. But nobody will see this because nobody whats to know how he feels.
CW: In any case, here are some key points from the somewhat lengthy (4 page) article that about three of us will read.
M: I won't because I know I am hundreds of years in advance of anything that will be said, hehe.
Quote:
The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
M: Poor blind fools who imagine the problem is in others, when they are as infected with it as anybody else on the planet. A natural defense is nothing but total bull shit. It is a defense but totally unnatural as learning words like you are bad and believing them. We were put down as children and made to hate ourselves, every single one of us, and we will not remember because it is too painful.
More quote: In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept.
There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views.
M: And no psychological understanding of why because to know would expose the truth of how we feel.
Quote: If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn't’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.”
M: But no recognition of the actual nature of the motivation, the need not to know that we feel worthless.
Quote: Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.
M: Duh
New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge.
And no fucking research on why, that they are our substitute for our missing ability to value our true selves.
Quote: In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
For the most part, it didn't’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction.
M: Of course, they had a powerful need not to feel worthless, like somebody who could make a mistake is. Stupid, you made a mistake.
Quote: With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire.
M: Let's call it backfire, in those folk over there, a nice sweet harmless name that will never address the fact that we ourselves are the ones who feel like shit. It's those stupid liberals or conservatives, not us analysts of human nature. We are OK. Jesus.
WC: The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn't’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.
M: Well what can I say. Liberals feel as worthless as anybody else, but we don't become liberals to join a herd of similar bleating sheep maintaining their way of seeing is the only good. Too fucking liberal for such massive absolutes, perhaps.
Quote: It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.
M: It is unclear to those to whom it is unclear. It is crystal clear to me. Defensiveness is defending the ego, the false self, the false set of beliefs that we were trained to call the good instead of the one true God within, the real self that we were forced to hate as children.
Good luck to you. May you find your way to what you really feel.
What more could you ask for? But more importantly you cannot know this. When I was six or seven, dressed in my finest cowboy outfit with two big colt revolvers I shot a man driving by in his car. He threw his hands up and slumped over the wheel. He was alive and awake and gave me the gift of his being. He sowed seeds in me to wish to be alive for others. In a second of life he left a mark on me, whereas I lived in his memory probably no more than a minute.
CW: People on both sides of the aisle hate me because I don't have a side. I could never figure out why anyone would align themselves with one side or the other as neither side was aligned with reality.
M: I have objections to this based on what I think are assumptions, that your sideless side is not also a side, and that you determine who posesses reality. I believe this is basically immodest and not unlike what you are complaining about.
CW: After talking with a friend (who is also an engineer) working on his MBA, he said that the hardest thing about managing people as an engineer is that he's used to working with other engineers who consider things logically and reasonably. With most people, that's simply not the case. Things started to click into place.
M: This is ancient and obvious news to me and I react to it in a completely different way. You have a bias in favor of logic and reason and believe therefore, that being your good, that it is also who you are. But it is totally irrational to believe in logic and reason when you can see that for most folk it means nothing at all. It is foolish to have faith in things that have no practical value. People, including you, are irrational and the question is 'what now?'.
To function in this world requires, in my opinion, the capacity to operate in a totally different dimension. What I always presume folk will take from what I say is absolutely nothing. My efforts are on what effect I have on them and what others may see in that. My aim is to infect folk with an alternate method of perception. That and humor can open the doors of perception where logic and reason will fail.
CW: After years of beating my head against the wall that is the vocal majority of P&N posters, I finally found an article that explained what I already knew: most people simply accept tidbits which agree with their predisposed positions while summarily rejecting all other information as bogus.
M: The problem, of course, is that you've beat your head for a reason. You are wedded to the notion that reason and logic should have some effect. It's a kind of faith and misplaced. But when one door closes another opens. Just because folk can't reason or think very well doesn't mean they can't grow and change. Becoming more enlightened is all about letting go. You let go of reason and logic, I let go of hope, Joe lets go of his fear of his black neighbor after he saves his wife. We aren't so much missing brains as we are missing love.
CW: When confronted with facts, most of you will actually cling tighter to your position which is in direct opposition to those facts rather than adapting your position to bring it into line with reality. This is why conservatives prefer Fox News, why Rand Paul makes liberals so uncomfortable when he says that the poor here don't really have it so bad, and why most of you have never and will never change your opinions on any political issues.
M: I have said this over and over for years and years and nobody will ever hear me. I have explained why this happens with total logic and reason, hehe. He who hates himself, and that would be everybody, will never trust himself, the biggest fool in the world, and to fill the void we identify with whatever we are taught is the real good. We become attached to something that gives us our worth because it is the good. To see what we have attached to as wrong and evil thereafter is to be thrown back on the self. We will never allow the self to express because we hate ourselves. If what we believe is wrong then we are the worst in the world. But nobody will see this because nobody whats to know how he feels.
CW: In any case, here are some key points from the somewhat lengthy (4 page) article that about three of us will read.
M: I won't because I know I am hundreds of years in advance of anything that will be said, hehe.
Quote:
The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
M: Poor blind fools who imagine the problem is in others, when they are as infected with it as anybody else on the planet. A natural defense is nothing but total bull shit. It is a defense but totally unnatural as learning words like you are bad and believing them. We were put down as children and made to hate ourselves, every single one of us, and we will not remember because it is too painful.
More quote: In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept.
There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views.
M: And no psychological understanding of why because to know would expose the truth of how we feel.
Quote: If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn't’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.”
M: But no recognition of the actual nature of the motivation, the need not to know that we feel worthless.
Quote: Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.
M: Duh
New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge.
And no fucking research on why, that they are our substitute for our missing ability to value our true selves.
Quote: In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.
For the most part, it didn't’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction.
M: Of course, they had a powerful need not to feel worthless, like somebody who could make a mistake is. Stupid, you made a mistake.
Quote: With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire.
M: Let's call it backfire, in those folk over there, a nice sweet harmless name that will never address the fact that we ourselves are the ones who feel like shit. It's those stupid liberals or conservatives, not us analysts of human nature. We are OK. Jesus.
WC: The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn't’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.
M: Well what can I say. Liberals feel as worthless as anybody else, but we don't become liberals to join a herd of similar bleating sheep maintaining their way of seeing is the only good. Too fucking liberal for such massive absolutes, perhaps.
Quote: It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.
M: It is unclear to those to whom it is unclear. It is crystal clear to me. Defensiveness is defending the ego, the false self, the false set of beliefs that we were trained to call the good instead of the one true God within, the real self that we were forced to hate as children.
Good luck to you. May you find your way to what you really feel.
I must have been reading all the wrong threads/posts by him. Please point me in the direction of one of his Socratic posts. I have to see it to believe it.
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