https://www.oyez.org/cases/1998/97-8629

the whole tableau seems like something out of Frank Miller’s anarchist phase after dark knight series, Give me Liberty, where some character which seems to be a funhouse perception of Reagan, President Rexall seizes power for about a dozen years, you might call it a premature DEI graphic novel, because the heroine is a young African American woman from Cabrini Green,

You’re my kind of guy!

My point though is that most humans aren’t. Even the so-called smart ones. To me this is like Guys want the Babes and Gals want the Alphas. It’s deep biological programming.

IMO to rail against this as evil or stupidity doesn’t make sense. They are being human.

When evidence accumulates in favor of other understandings of reality I acknowledge my previous error and change my mind. I am aware that I am not a ‘normal’ person.

Case in point: Nuclear Power. In my youth I was an uber-environmentalist and contributed to efforts to stop the construction of nukes. I have changed my mind.

Another case: Negative Population Growth. In my youth [you see the ‘young and foolish’ theme here?] I advocated for people having no children so as to reduce population. I have changed my mind.

As for evaluating evidence, well, the more sources the better. Is the ocean rising? There is in New York City a sea level gauge which has been in place since the Civil War. In the one hundred 149 years since the ocean has risen about an inch, with the graph of the increments basically a straight line. So, yes, the sea in rising. And no, it is not a crisis. Nothing at all like the catastrophic rise following the end of the last period of glaciation, which was something like 400 feet.

Very few are Jewish.

File under: The Doors of Perception…

David:

I would call them human and limited.

Reality is so huge. How strenuously have you checked all your truth claims by evidence? Given that evidence accumulates or changes, are you still checking? If you ran into a contradiction, what would you do?

Time is limited. Changing one’s truth claims can be expensive.

Nonetheless, people can change their positions in the face of evidence, though it can take a while.

Well, nobody is smart about everything. In fact, it’s often the case that the bigger one’s expertise in one area, the bigger the blind spots in other areas. Sir Isaac Newton was the foremost genius of his age, yet he lost most of his money in the South Sea Bubble.

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/73/7/30/800801/Isaac-Newton-and-the-perils-of-the-financial-South

“Aknowledgment of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.” as Plato said.