Posted on 07/03/2018 6:55:35 AM PDT by Heartlander
There are some things that you can be absolutely sure of. The Earth is round, it goes around the sun, everybody is going to die someday, and tax day is going to come around every single year. But if you feel that you've got the one correct answer to a question that's a little more controversial, then you might want to double-check that. It turns out, the more certain you are about something, the less informed you're likely to be about it.
According to a new study by Michael Hall and Kaitlin Raimi from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, people with a high degree of what they call "belief superiority" had the largest gap between how informed they believed they were and how informed they actually were about the subjects they were so opinionated about. First, let's clear up what, exactly, belief superiority is. It's not just how confident you are in your belief; it's how much you believe that belief is better than those of other people. In other words, confidence is an absolute value, but belief-superiority is a relative value based on what you think of others' opinions.
It's yet another version of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where the most qualified people feel the least confident about their abilities and the least qualified are the most certain that they've got the skills to pay the bills.
For this study, the researchers gathered their participants through Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which allowed them access to people of a wide variety of demographics and viewpoints. When they asked those people about some politically contentious topics, they were able to find which of them had the greatest sense of belief superiority. Then, they compared how those participants ranked their own knowledge about those subjects and how much they actually knew. Then came the fun part.
After they compared people's presumed knowledge against their actual knowledge, the researchers then presented them with a spread of headlines from various sources. They included a mix of headlines that were belief congruent and belief incongruent — that is, some headlines that participants would agree with and some that they'd disagree with. The participants were then asked how likely they would be to read each article to the end. You might not be too surprised to find out that the people with the strongest sense of belief superiority were also the least likely to read articles that didn't jibe with their previously held beliefs.
In other words, not only were they less informed about the things they felt the most strongly about, but they were also less likely to seek out information that might expand their knowledge about those things. It's not all bad news, though. For one thing, the participants with the bias against headlines they didn't like were absolutely aware of that tendency in themselves. And secondly, the researchers found that when they tried methods to lower their sense of belief superiority, those same participants were more likely to try reading horizon-expanding think pieces. So maybe the answer is that the next time you're feeling especially fired up about something, it's a good moment to step back and consider a different point of view.
I’m a southerner
I understand
I just don’t agree
In fact I don’t agree at all
Free Republic is full of Holy Rollers who think they know best and live to hammer that home
I’m not one of them
I do however think people in Kentucky ignorant or not per Seattle lofty standards are far more God fearing and their voting habits and culture in general reflects that by a 24 point swing in KY to Trumps favor over the Wash state vote
I don’t see how a Christian can vote for infanticide and the homosexual perversion of our culture just for starts no matter how high their IQ
Hence Kentuckians dullards they must be have more faith and less hubris about their beliefs than those super intelligent northwest denizens
Doesn't that kind of miss the whole point RRW was making?
The minority subset of Christians in Seattle have to exhibit more dedication to follow their faith than the majority Christians of Kentucky. How the aggregate of both places vote in a general election says little to nothing about the depth and dedication of their respective Christian's faith.
For what it's worth, I KNOW why I am no longer an Evangelical Protestant. Nevertheless, I have had only one Evangelical Protestant Freeper ASK me why I'm a Catholic now; the rest are too busy TELLING me why I am a Catholic. So in that sense, I see RRW's point as exceedingly plausible.
Many know what they believe, but few can lay out clinically, logically, and dispassionately why they believe it.
I denounce so-called Higher Criticism, and am more orthodox than any of the Celebrity Preachers.
I also wrote the first draft of a monograph emphasizing that truth from I Corinthians 13:12 in 1988.
I consider it churchianity versus Christianity.
That’s fine
That’s wonderful
I didn’t bring up your Catholicism or anyone else’s
You did
You’re not the first person I’ve known go from whatever to Catholic or Catholic to whatever
I don’t care why you wen that way if it felt appropriate to you....you’re still a Christian. Good enoug
The rest of what both you and her said I don’t much cotton to
No offense it came across as snotty
So save the offended Catholic strawman for someone else
I detected the usual Yankees are simple smarter crap
Then stay with the smart folks and leave we dullards in our less analytical faith be
But how do we define a “day”?
To an earthling, a day is defined as one revolution of our planet (measured from sundown to sundown in the Bible?).
But how does the Creator measure each of His first days in the beginning? Is His “day” measured the same as our “day”?
Would His “day” be the rotation of a planet that He was just creating in the beginning?
Does it matter beyond stating that He also created time while creating everything else?
To me, that part of Genesis reads like white boarding a new project at work, or in this case, whatever this matrix program and on-going story is that He created and that we’re all born into.
Beyond that, I’m content to say that I don’t know, like how I don’t know if time references are in our time or His and I’m okay with that.
Actually, what difference does it make? The important thing is Jesus Christ and Him crucified, no one comes to the Father, but through Jesus, and “the Words I give you are life”. Everything else is gravy. I don’t need to know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I just trust the LORD that His Word is true.
Well, you might read up on Jesus’ experience with dinner at Mary and Martha’s house. One of them just sat and drank in what Jesus said, and the other one fretted over every little thing. Now why do you suppose the Holy Spirit prompted the writers of the New Testament to include that episode?
Most of my childhood and half of my biology came from western Kentucky and, iirc, “which church do you belong to/go to?” was the one of the first questions you got no matter where you went.
Our pastor (suburb of Seattle) says that the Pacific Northwest has never had a “revival” of faith like everywhere else in the country. His dream is to change that, and he is working with churches from all over the area to do that.
“So now if each one of you, just by living a Godly life, and interacting with others could change just ONE person in a year - why that would be 3,000 new believers!”
Easier said than done, but....
A couple of weeks ago he was saying how he was getting ready to officiate a wedding on a Saturday. Some muslim guy walks in off the street. Asks to talk with someone in charge. He ended up meeting with one of the associate pastors.
“Um - yes - may I help you?”
“I hope so. Jesus came to me in a dream, and he gave me an image of your church. I finally found it. I want to be a Christian.”
Here in the suburbs of Seattle! And a “boring” Presbyterian church. Although we do have a group of Christians from Rwanda that have set up church in another building on campus, and they add some spice when they join us on occasion!
Do you work a million years before you get a say off for the Sabbath? NO. So my point stands.
And if the Creator, too, was on this same time clock when He created whatever this matrix thing is we’re living in, then I’m okay with that, too.
It doesn’t add or subtract from my awe for the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
However, now that you mention it, I am still a bit confused as to which day the Sabbath actually is.
I know it’s the last day of the week, but calendars start with Sunday and in many languages the word for Saturday looks/sounds a lot like “Sabbath”.
Hmmmm...did we go rebel on that one? I’ll tell you what, man, that parable about the sower and the crows seems to be working OT in our times.
Every day I’m more and more convinced how much humans MUST have a few standards and definitions that we can’t change. We’re like little kids who have to mess with everything, but who can also rationalize anything.
Romans 1:18-32:
Willful self-determination > Wicked self-deception > Woeful self-destruction.
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