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by chillingeffect
3410 days ago
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>people in general will say and believe a lot of stupid stuff if it helps their team It's all about "Motivated Reasoning," a term I learned from Jonathan Haidt. For things we want to do, we ask ourselves, "how can I?" For things we don't want to do, we ask, "must I?" Since I've learned this, about 95% of discussion has been reduced for me. It doesn't make things easier though. It's hard for me to take that so many people are operating in such a biased way. And it's even harder because it means really thinking through concepts like fairness, immigration, sexism, etc. These are not easy to reason about. And it takes a lot of time. |
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I think what also contributes is the idea that the brain will twist and contort reality to protect foundational beliefs (beyond my own observation of human behavior, there are a number of studies backing this up). We make decisions based on what we believe to be true, and the more decisions based on and built on a belief, the more foundational that belief is to our life. The more foundational a belief, the harder the brain will work to protect you from facing something that contradicts the belief head on (because directly facing the fact, without being prepared for it, that a significant number of decisions in your life have been based on false information could cause real system damage). Changing foundational beliefs must occur in steps, as you can only move so far from the current belief at once. And in the other direction, we much more readily accept anything that reinforces our foundational beliefs, even more so when being bombarded with ideas that may challenge those beliefs at the same time.
Religion and politics are extremely foundational things for most people, thus people are much more likely to overlook facts contradicting their beliefs and accept irrational ideas that happen to reinforce the belief.
> Since I've learned this...It doesn't make things easier though...
Same.
EDIT: Another complex/interesting idea to think through is that Us vs. Them is baked into human nature. You can change who "us" and "them" are, but I don't think you can change that there is always an Us vs. Them, and that "us" is always the good guys and "them" is always the bad guys.