[BeetleB]

People here are taking an overly cynical binary stance. It's not that logic cannot reach such people, but that there are barriers to them thinking and accepting your logic. Once you remove most of the barriers, most of these people are happily logical.

The important realization I had is that this is true even for fairly rational people. If you've ever encountered someone who tends to listen more to one source than others, they are exhibiting the exact same behavior this thread is complaining about. And in my experience, this happens to everyone, even the most rational people I've met.

[ACCount37]

"Once you remove 97% of human nature, what remains is quite logical and reasonable."

That's what I'm talking about. That one person who seems way more rational than most might be 95% irrational - just outperforming the "97% irrational" baseline. And those 2% that make up the difference? How much of this is teachable skills, things you and me could learn and apply, and how much of it is just some weird brain wiring?

That appearance of reason may be deceiving too. You'd expect an atheist to outperform the average by a lot - but is this true? How many atheists are atheists because they carefully examined the case for God's existence and found it lacking - and how many are instead atheists because of something like an innate contrarian streak, or just because of conformism paired with non-religious upbringing?

I happen to remember the reason why I ended up an atheist quite well. I just didn't like the idea of God existing, at all. I didn't get there by being reasonable - I got there by being lucky.

[lovecg]

Those barriers often exist as survival mechanisms. It could be quite rational to not even give a hint that one will even consider the logical viewpoint if some of the consequences involve losing one’s status in the community, losing one’s job etc. The overly “rational” loners have something broken with this survival instinct.