> And that leads to a world where HN commenters trip over each other in a rush proclaim that Ghandi is morally equivalent to Atilla the Hun because he once said something that they can twist as not being totally in support of whatever the fashionable morals of the minute are. Point is that if people don't like what they read they'll do all sorts of mental gymnastics to delegitimize the source even if it's a squeaky clean source.
There seems to be a natural tendency to believe that people do this deliberately/consciously, but if you look at it from a psychology/neuroscience perspective, I think it seems more likely that this is just the nature of the mind. The mind evolved to make decisions, and there is a trade-off between accuracy and speed. When the mind is considering something, there is (something like) massively parallel, high-dimensional computing going on under the covers, and then an "answer" is calculated and pushed up to the conscious level. And if this answer is questioned, a secondary process of post-hoc rationalization [1] will kick in to justify the conclusion. But if you really think about it, this whole process is typically the equivalent of educated guessing.
I don't think it's very controversial in 2020 to say that our perception of reality and cognition is quite a ways off of the objective truth of what is really going on, and this applies to everyone.
Above, @duxup says:
> I find little value providing URLs. Much of the time I provide them, few folks seem to read it, fewer actually want to read it in an intellectually honest way and usually they respond with some bonkers links of their own that don't say what they think they're saying.
To that I say: look a little closer. Once one has gone through this work (for years or many decades), you then have a massive amount of data (of unknown quality/accuracy) resulting from direct observation of actual human behavior, as opposed to extremely low-dimensional and inaccurate (but confidently stated, and peer-reviewed!!) insight into human behavior. My conclusion from this process (and reading about the mind) has brought me to the tentative conclusion that most people usually only kinda know what they're talking about. Reality is far too complex (and our data sources too sparse and inaccurate, and our language too limiting, and so forth and so on) for the human mind to properly process even mildly complex problems with high accuracy.
But...all is not lost. If knowledge of this phenomenon somehow became widespread, what outcomes might mankind be able to bring about? Consider the amazing benefits that things like the first enlightenment [2] and the industrial revolution brought to mankind. Then, imagine if we could have something like another enlightenment, that consolidates and corrects (to the best of our current collective abilities) all the aggregate knowledge that is currently scattered all over the place (in books, scientific studies, the internet, within people's minds, etc), and brings widespread awareness and acceptance (or at least consideration of the possibility) of the fallibility of the human mind, and our corresponding beliefs - what might mankind then accomplish?
I think there's lots of reason for optimism, you just have to look for it (and support/promote it, to increase the likelihood of it happening, as nature seems to not guarantee an optimal outcome).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment