Home » Facts, truth, and changing one’s mind

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Facts, truth, and changing one’s mind — 17 Comments

  1. I think Iraq will have to turn into Switzerland before some of these people will change their minds.

  2. Man of La Mancha does have a certain adolescent appeal not found in Don Quixote. We chose “The Impossible Dream” as our graduation theme song in 8th grade, I recall. There is rather an American cult of Follow Your Dream, as if that in itself were a noble act, regardless of the content of said dream, or the cost to yourself and others of getting there. Not to mention dreams that are never going to be fulfilled, leading to years of misery by those who won’t accept that: athletes and entertainers of merely average talent, spouses of sociopaths…

  3. neo,

    I wonder if … the constant necessity of making choices based on imperfect information … is partly why it is difficult to “change false belief by facts”?

    Could the someone have an instinctive expectation that more facts exist to back their belief, if only they could get to those facts?

    Could a politically correct dulling of our logic muscle: of our skill at constantly asking ourselves “true or false?”, “right or wrong?”, contribute to an over-reliance on our instincts?

  4. I think Iraq will have to turn into Switzerland before some of these people will change their minds.

    You mean we have to teach them to yodel?

  5. The problem is that too many people think that picketing the local USMC recruiting office is “marching into hell.” If they only knew what the Marines know, and what each new generation of Marines learns, they would change their minds. Yes, there are a few veterans of Korea, Vietnam, and even WWII among the moonbats, but somehow they forget that the price must be paid again and again.

  6. Many people place themselves into a political category which they cannot deviate from even if they know the reasoning behind a certain policy is wrong. How can a liberal, for example, suddenly praise American policy in front of his peers? Impossible for many. Unfortunately it usually leads to complete hypocritical behaviour and reasoning.

  7. Egad…

    “Follow your dream”?!??

    “Who knows what visions appear during the sleep of Reason?”

  8. Zhombre:

    You are correct…I looked it up in Bartlett’s.

    Us old folks still use Bartlett rather than Google and its ilk.

    Time Marches On, though

  9. Assistant Village Idiot Says:

    February 19th, 2008 at 6:05 pm

    “Not to mention dreams that are never going to be fulfilled, leading to years of misery by those who won’t accept that”

    Now that people are living longer (70-80 easy) I’m guessing they’ll blow their 20s doing that kind of stuff and grow up by 30….

  10. Neo,

    Man of La Mancha was a horrendous — though, alas, hardly unique — bastardization of a great work. If all anyone remembers from Cervantes’ classic is a deluded dreamer “tilting at windmills” they’re sadly missing a brilliant, complex, and unbelievably rich story — of which “impossible dreams” play a minor and largely metaphorical role.

    As for some implication that the book itself might give succor to jihadists, consider the following self-referencial quote:

    “If there is any objection to be made about the truthfulness of the history, it can only be that its author was an Arab, and it’s a well-known feature of Arabs that they’re all liars; but since they’re such enemies of ours, it’s to be supposed that he fell short of the truth rather than exaggerating it.”

    ‘Don Quixote’, Part 1, Chapter 9

    (… and check out those semicolons — not to mention those uses of “its” and “it’s”!)

  11. Charlie, I’m one of the old folks too and have a copy of Bartlett’s on my shelf. But I’ve adapted to Google. And one thing about Cervantes I like to point out to the folks who are gaga over alternative energy sources like windmills, is that Don Quixote didn’t tilt at internal combustion engines, which is to say wind power was a great technical innovation during the Middle Ages and some current alleged progressive thinking about energy is really quite reactionary.

  12. Been a while since I read the novel, but I definitely remember it as a satire. Seems like the doddering old DQ got filtered through the Romantic age and emerged as an individualistic hero.

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