Faux Fu

Monday, April 07, 2014

Ezra Klein - "How Politics Makes Us Stupid!"

This is an amazing, eye-opening post by Ezra Klein - "How Politics Makes Us Stupid." It examines how we use reason to trick ourselves to adhere to our tribe's worldview - cultural and political.

It explains how some of our deepest political disagreements are immune to the accumulation of "evidence." If the evidence is a threat to our identity within our social group, well, that evidence can be denied, or reformulated, dismissed, discredited. 

We can use "reason" to trick ourselves that our beliefs are believable. Even if the evidence shows us that our beliefs are wrong.  We can use reason to disarm reason. Big example - Climate Change. How can intelligent, engaged people bury their heads in the sand? Well, if all their friends and family have their heads buried too, it's almost a tribal requirement.

And what happens when all the ice melts? 

The whole article begs us to question our own cultural/social/political biases.  What are the biases that our tribe holds that leads us to close our eyes to the "real world?"

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