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 believe that the cure for that is being rid of career politicians through a combination of TERM LIMITS and REQUIRING ALL POLITICAL DONATIONS TO BE ANONYMOUS. If they can't stay forever, and they can't sell influence, only those who truly want to serve will seek the office.
Americans should be permitted to donate any amount they please to any candidate or party; that's FREEDOM. But receiving an outcome in exchange makes it BRIBERY, a CRIMINAL ACT. Lock 'em both up!
“It turns out that we subconsciously manipulate ourselves
to “Prune” data inputs, and it requires engaging the Prefrontal Cortex or the “Command Pathways” to overcome it”
Ben Franklin wrote, “...for having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration to change opinions even on important subjects which I once thought right but found to be otherwise...”
Now, I’m no Benjamin Franklin, and I’ve been wrong about so much stuff that I’ve had to change my mind on almost everything: divorce, premarital sex, adultery, abortion, economics, and on and on.
I didn’t do it lightly, but after lengthy, intense study of each of these matters.
Now, if you show me an article that merely recaps what I struggled with decades ago, with no new arguments or information, then no, I’m not going to waste time on it. I presume there’s nothing exceptional about that.
If you’re trying to run a life, you can’t be dealing with every issue anew each time you run into the same old arguments.
What the authors really wanted to say was, “If you’re not a leftist, you’re closed minded and a dummy poot poot.”
I worked with a man like that. He was so dumb he did not know how dumb he really was. Sad thing is he was so dumb everyone felt sorry for him. Not retarded or mentally impaired, just DUMB.
The men who were to train him, after a year said that he was a danger to himself and everyone around him. The bosses got nervous when they found how dumb the guy really was.
BUT, his dad was a BIG SHOT in the company so we were saddled with him for a year. When he went to a plant in the South, he did massive damage to it due to his dumbness.
The stories we could tell about him.....every story true.
“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do”
Actually, Asimov came pretty darn close.
There are some on the forum who would disagree with you vehemently.
The only absolute I believe in is that I absolutely have the right to change my mind when presented with new and better evidence or a better argument.
Faith is fine, faith is wonderful, but you have no right to expect someone else to accept anything on the basis of YOUR faith, nor judge them for not doing so.
So the most I will ever say, on subjects besides those known only by faith, is : “ This is my opinion based on the facts as I currently understand them and here is the structure of my reasoning utilizing those facts.”
The article avers that there are degrees of intensity of belief.
Thus, one can hold a tentative belief (e.g., "The U.S. will be the first nation to establish a permanent base on the Moon.") - and be fairly open to counterarguments.
One can also be relatively convinced of something ("In the U.S., there is a greater degree of economic and political freedom than in, say, Turkey.") - which belief one would abandon only in the face of very convincing arguments.
And then there are beliefs for which one would be willing to die, if necessary.
Do you dispute that?
Regards,
There are some on the forum who would disagree with you vehemently.
I came across it in a small church here in KY. I was trying to discuss ECT vs CI in the bible with one of the elders. He and I were both about 60 years old. He had gone to that one small church his entire life. I’d become a Christian in my late 20’s and had attended four churches in my time in Seattle.
When we started debating, it became pretty clear he had no clue what he was talking about, other than to say that he believed it. Finally, red-faced, he held up his KJV bible and said, “I believe what the bible says!” To which I responded, “So do I. Where we differ is interpretation.”
He was beside himself and stormed out of the sanctuary. I was very saddened by the whole thing. My whole Christian life it has been imperative to me that I be able to support my beliefs, especially with those outside the church.
You’re missing my point. I have learned to acknowledge that today we see “as through a glass darkly”. There are things we can know, absolutely. But other things we can’t - e.g. the number of “days” it actually took God to create the earth, or how long people suffer if they don’t accept Jesus’ free gift, or the nature of the suffering, or its purpose.
Did Mary die a virgin? Is drinking alcohol permissible? Etc.
So they are saying cannibals are smarter than I am, because I think my beliefs are better than theirs?
Reuben Westmaas must be an idiot who believes in nothing and want the rest of us to believe nothing too.
There are some on the forum who would disagree with you vehemently.
I think those flat earth YouTube videos are an experiment designed to see just how much baloney you can get people to believe if it’s presented in a slick video.
I’m only half joking. ;)
I’ve had people argue about what the Bible says with me who have never sat and actually read the Greek and/or Hebrew! As if one could begin to understand what the writers were saying without knowing what the words meant in the original language :-(
Ah!
Beliefs, opinions, etc.
But To GROK!
;)
+++++
Perspective is important in all things, but especially so with religious interpretation, which is fraught with danger from the Garden to this day.
It’s far too easy to become way too certain about an incorrect interpretation and then run with it, even build a denomination based upon it.
Jesus created one Church, but we have created many.
At some point, we have traded His Truth for our own and at some point are worshipping a false idol of our own creation.
It’s tough to find His Truth amongst our own, but such is the journey of a seeker.
Like a buddy of mine used to say, “Never drink downstream beer.”
Knowledge can be argued, the tools of logic apply. Beliefs cannot be argued (though many try). Here are the beliefs and some of them are clearly uninformed with respect to governmental effectiveness which would lead to a knowledge based solution/answer. It has the bias of denying logic can be applied to some of these solutions, that they can only be opinions...and of course the logical conclusion that I am right. I just had to throw that in. With the first “opinion”. Add the fact that at current rate Canada will use 80% of their revenue to pay for health care by 2030...they won’t pay that, so they will deny healthcare...that is an economic argument, not really an opinion. That is a projection I read in a Canadian venue. So is it my opinion that government really does not hold in costs, bloats the labor in any solution, and acts like a monopoly in most large scale governmental solutions or is it an arguable set of economic facts?
“The participants answered online questionnaires, with the first one measuring belief superiority on nine political issues on which conservatives and liberals tend to disagree:
— health care (the degree to which health care should be covered by the government or by private insurance);
— illegal immigration (the degree to which people who enter the country illegally should be dealt with more strictly or more leniently than at present);
— abortion (the conditions under which abortion should be legal);
— how large of a role the government should play in helping people in need;
— voter identification (whether people should be required to show personal identification in order to vote);
— the degree to which income taxes are too high;
— the conditions under which torture should be used to obtain information from terrorists;
— affirmative action;
— the degree to which national and state laws should be based on religious beliefs.
“The tendency for people with extreme views to be overly confident is not limited to politics,” said Leary. “Any time people hold an extreme position, even on a trivial issue, they seem to think that their views are better than anyone else’s.”
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