| >How is it possible for the most modern society in the world, with all the evidence right at our fingertips, to be so misinformed? well there's two answers to that question. Either the society you're talking about is in fact not the 'most modern' society on the planet, or having evidence at the tip of your fingers doesn't make you more informed. Spoiler alert, it's both. American society has a knack for conspiracy theories, rugged individualism and responding to expert recommendations with contrarianism. I've seen no other place whose response to climate change is not just mere indifference, but coal rolling. Secondly, and this is not America's fault, people don't do that well with a surplus of information. Even smart people don't. Experiments have shown that the mathematical intuition of statisticians is not much better than a laypersons, and modern behavioural science has highlighted the extreme cost of choice. Achen and Bartels in their most recent book have shown that folk theory of democracy is largely a myth. People are not naturally enlightened. Being more engaged and higher educated actually leads people to hold more false opinions on politically charged factual matters. (Highly educated Democrats tend to overestimate how homophobic Republicans are, highly educated republicans are climate deniers more often than working class ones). Reason is indeed slave to the passions as Hume had already figured out and trying to cure motivated and psychologically biased reasoning with more information is going to make the problem worse, not better. |
Entire books have been written on the subject:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...