[extropy-chat] Bush wants another $75 billion for wars

[Matthew Gingell]

Hal Finney writes:

 > I am interested in understanding how people cling so hard to
 > beliefs in the face of evidence of widespread disagreement, which
 > would suggest that in fact the issues (in this case, which
 > candidate would make a better president) are quite uncertain.

 I don't think this is a difficult problem to understand. You just
 have to get used to the idea that most of the electorate isn't in the
 business of forming good judgments on the basis of rationally
 evaluated evidence, they're in the business of voting for "us" and
 against "them."

 People don't believe Saddam Hussein planned 9/11, or George Bush
 planned 9/11, because they know something we don't or they've made
 some correct inference we haven't stumbled into. They believe it
 because they want to, and they've build a model of the world for
 themselves based on reasoning from the conclusions they prefer to the
 facts which would support them.

 What we're witnessing isn't for the most part an intellectually
 honest dispute among informed, dispassionate theory generators. It's
 media age tribalism, and the fact large numbers of people have had
 their brains eaten by non-rational belief systems doesn't suggest
 anything at all about the actual factual realities of the situation.

 Matt