You can't test for gullibility and mark out all the people who fall below a certain threshold as cult-susceptible. Take cult members, for instance - most of the research I'm aware of suggests that while there are common conditions that make people susceptible to being sucked into cults, there aren't necessarily common traits among people who join cults. But those people are not representative, and it is silly to think that everyone works this way. Obviously there are people (like cult members) who have incredibly wrong ideas and are very resistant to efforts to change them. As the article itself occasionally glimpses, there are better and worse ways of dealing with error-prone brains - ways we've all been working on for centuries if not millennia. There seems to be this implicit suggestion in all of this that conservatives and liberals, the educated and the uneducated, the critical thinker and the cult believer, are all just sides of the same emotional, irrational coin. As long as there are pathways to getting righter (eg, education, science, critical thinking, debate), why must it be presented as an insurmountable problem to overcome emotion and bias? And if it's not a super-big problem we all share, what is new in all of this? What teacher on earth needs a dozen experiments showing that people are often reluctant to learn and rationalize their existing beliefs? And what teacher doesn't also know that most people can overcome this if given the right environment? Yet many people still manage to get righter when presented with the right info, enough time, and good people to talk it through with. We're all error-prone and emotional, but we knew that. I fail to see what is either new or especially worrisome about any of this. People are reluctant to change their mind, and come up with counter-arguments, when confronted with a fragment of new "information" presented by a purported expert. Perhaps some scientists between 65 might be surprised by this, but even then, I doubt it. That's a new insight? "A key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion". So, people are error-prone and think emotionally. After all, "reasoning" is as much pattern-finding as "rationalizing", it's just that, culturally speaking, we've decided reason is synonymous with truth. Similarly, I suspect whether we push away or pull in information has more to do with the human propensity for pattern seeking in general, and less to do with actively seeking out that which we, in retrospect, classify as "positive" or "negative".
They say, "See, if evolution were real, I'd be able to run as fast as a car because evolution would know that's better." But evolution happens only because some random changes happen work out a little better than other random changes - it doesn't mean those changes are "good" or "better", just that the result was that death happened after procreation.
Evolution doesn't "require" anything of us amusingly enough, one of the biggest reasons cited by evolution-deniers hinges on a misunderstanding of evolution that positions the process as a force which causes plant or animal life to adapt to environmental conditions. I was really feeling this article until I got to the sentence that began, "Evolution required us to react."Īnd then I realized how, in more ways than one, the author was putting the cart before the horse.
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