A fascinating perspective that appears to provide a deep insight into the answer to the question "how can that moron not believe the facts in front of them" that we have all asked ourselves at one time or another. " https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/f...ts-are-driven-by-values-instead-of-knowledge/
This has become a real issue now vs. the one off it used to be. The Donald rump phenomenon has created a "Fake News" mentality that has directly led to undermining of fact as the basis for data. It is unfortunate but with luck will pass when he does. If not then our little experiment is over.
When someone is talking about their golf game and in doing so stretch the truth quite a bit it's not a big deal. When the President of the USA LIES to the citizens of the USA, or when some citizens accept LIES and distribute to others either knowingly or unknowingly, it is a BIG DAMNED DEAL! How can tens of millions of SO-CALLED Americans not care about their nation and the Constitution? It's such irony that those who claim to be the most patriotic are in fact the least patriotic. Multiple times every day the president of the USA is a lying ignorant bafoon! It is incredulous why people blindly support such behavior and will vote for him again in the next election. The most evil on Earth are Republicans in Congress who support the bafoon with zero regard to the Constitutional responsibilities they swore to uphold. Politics and greed rules and has made a mockery of our federal government. Perceived WINNING has become the total and complete goal no matter how it is achieved. There can never be negotiation on any topic, domestically or internationally, when this presidents only goal is WINNING. And this would be great if the goal was WINNING for the best interest of the USA...but sadly the goal only serves to feed his ego and very very narrow-minded and misaligned dictatorial perspectives...
It's very hard to disentangle your beliefs-about-factual-issues, and your beliefs-about-values. The Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo because they saw his factual assertions as underming their moral framework. When there appear to be facts that undermine your values, you have a strong tendency to ignore the facts -- perhaps with the rationalization that the source is tainted, or you don't have time to investigate the issue thoroughly ... or you just simply brush them aside. Every single person I know, Left or Right, including myself, has this tendency. We can try to fight it ... the best antidote I know is to try to incorporate into your thinking the test which I believe was popularized by the philosopher Karl Popper: "What evidence would make you change your mind?" If you can't think of any such evidence for a particular proposition you fervently believe, there's a good chance you have an irrational attachment to your belief ... an essentially religious one. Of course, sometimes it's very difficult to imagine any actual evidence that would make you change your mind. I can't come up with anything that would make me believe that life on earth is not hundreds of millions of years old, and that species have evolved. (The exact mechanism of their evolution is another matter.) I can just barely construct a scenario that would make me doubt that the Nazis undertook the systematic extermination of the Jews ... just barely. (And the issue is complicated by the fact that you can imagine a spectrum between, on the one hand, an official approved decision by the Nazi leadership to systematically kill every living Jew they could find, and, on the other, something that was not exactly an official decision, but just the logical outcome of the general German attitude towards what they saw as inferior or hostile life, given the material difficulties of an increasingly straightened German state fighting for its survival. And because most Holocaust-deniers are unpleasant people with an agenda of their own beyond strict historical truth, it doesn't seem worth the time to find out where on that spectrum the truth might lie.) People on the Right don't like to confront the reality of the Nordic social democracies, which according to orthodox free market theory, should be like Venezuela or Cuba. People on the Left don't like to even entertain the possibility of group differences in desirable cognitive characteristics (the race and sex and IQ etc hot potato). I don't see this changing, human nature being what it is, but it would be good if it did.
It doesn't help that we give such miniscule attention to science throughout our education system. Far too many leave HS without knowing what science is, how to deal with statistics, or how to interpret data. When science is such a murky topic, it's far too easy for total nonsense to appear equivalent.
Is that ever true! Same in the UK, where I live. I tutor young people in science, and it's painful: mainly the memorizatin of isolated facts. In mathematics, they learn some formal statistics, but there's never a hint of applying them to the real world. I believe there are two reasons for this: learning how to think critically would mean being critical of the beliefs of various interest-groups; plus, it's easier to examine isolated facts. It's also the case that you necessarily have to dull down the curriculum if you're teaching an IQ range from 80 to 140.
