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,
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.”