"Why Do People Persist in Believing Things That Just Aren't True?"

Think Jesus and Allah and feng shui.

One of the best books you'll ever read:

Because government run schools have a vested intrest in teaching "what" to think instead of "how" to think.

Because of that, we get a society full of idiots who believe that it's wise to let the biggest debtor in human history (the US) "invest" even more of our money.

Generally speaking, people will believe what they want to believe. They will use science when it agrees with their beliefs and ignore or dispute it when it does not.

This goes for people on both sides of the political spectrum. Science is to neither be inherently praised or demonized, science just is.

I think the real issues are three fold:
1. Quality of reporting. Our media is so inconsistent with their reporting about science. Often, it is clear that they are not attempting to inform, but instead to push an agenda or fear monger.
2. Politicians and scientists politicize science for personal gain. It makes it really difficult to determine what's right when politicians use science to their own devices while the scientists endorse it. When reputation, tenure, and research depends on towing a political line, that immediately discredits academia and science by extension.
3. Over-abundance of information. Thanks to the internet, we now have access to so much information, that it is harder to tell fact from fiction. It becomes much more difficult to verify information because anyone can find some kind of seemingly credible information that supports any opinion on every issue that exists. It is impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff when there is such a volume of info at our disposal. This leads to people purposefully searching out info that agrees with their opinion and clinging to it as unchallengeable fact. When people challenge those citations with info of their own gathered in the same way, those challenges can be met in the same way. No one is ever "proven" wrong because no one ever runs out of info that "proves" their correctness on an issue.

Because "science" is often blamed rather than reporting, academia, politicians, bloggers, and beaurocrats, people lose their trust in science because "consensus" and certainly consistent consensus are impossible in this day and age due to politics, reporting, and the glut of info at our fingertips.

I considered starting a post on this article.

Anyway, this is an interesting facebook page from the antivax crowd.

LINK

Did anyone read the magazine article mentioned in the OP??

Did anyone read the New Yorker article?

To the OP:

I read the article and it was very interesting. I feel that people often integrate and idea of the truth so deeply into their belief system that it becomes synonymous with their ego(sense of self). Therefore to question or attack that idea transforms from an attack on an idea into an attack on ones person directly. Fundamentalism is a good example where a violation of a belief can be met with mass-murder. People build entire identities around these beliefs. So much so that to destroy those beliefs would be to "destroy" the person.