Subject: I have one more comment to add to this fascinating thread w

Comment:

See Original Content on OpEdNews in article titled "Governing Smaller Americas"

I have one more comment to add to this fascinating thread where so many brilliant thinkers offer their insight.

Synchronisty is at work, because The Feb 27th issue of "The New Yorker" has a wonderful essay by Elizabeth Kolbert, entitled "That's What You Think:" New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason."

A small sample:

"Even after the evidence "for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs," the Stanford researchers noted." The Stanford studies became famous. As everyone who's followed the research--or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today--knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?"

"In a new book, "The Enigma of Reason" (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question."

Other interesting books apropos of what is afoot today are included in this wonderful article.

"In "Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us" (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous."

"The Gormans don't just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they'd like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn't seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. "The challenge that remains," they write toward the end of their book, "is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief."

"The Enigma of Reason," "The Knowledge Illusion," and "Denying to the Grave" were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of "alternative facts." These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring."