[im3w1l]

> Why should facts exert only a slow, painstaking generational force on belief if people are actually rational? Surely it should have immediate effect?

If you look at rational as a binary, then people aren't rational. But people are a little bit rational. Sufficiently rational, to eventually find the truth.

I like the parallel with machine learning. Many, many bright minds have tried to formalize our intuitions into automatic systems. Gradually they make progress. But it's plain to see that it's not as easy as "just incorporate the new fact". We have systems that can deal with facts, and systems that can learn from experience. But systems that do both, that can learn from experience and express that in terms of facts, or use facts to guide it's exploration, that's an open problem.

As for who has to gain, I do think journalists, and editors, and newspaper owners have something to gain. Their role transforms from giving people "just the facts", to manipulating people into the right beliefs. What the right beliefs are? That's for the journalists and their benefactors to decide.

[michaelmrose]

A small minority of people are rational enough to forge new truths in the face of conflicting and complicated information usually in a small narrowly focused way. A much larger minority is capable of digesting and making use of the work product of the former group in a productive way again within the scope of a broader but still narrow scope.

The majority is too stupid to make up their own minds and needs to be educated at a young age to accept the work product of prior generations experts because they are just too unintelligent to evaluate it for themselves. This is literally most people.

The fact that this is unpleasant doesn't make it untrue.

[simonh]

>If you look at rational as a binary, then people aren't rational. But people are a little bit rational. Sufficiently rational, to eventually find the truth.

Right, which is pretty much exactly what the article says. It shows what forms the flaws in our rationality take, and suggests procedural methods we can use to help the process of rational analysis along.