6mo ago

Doctrine

43 comments

I think this makes it seem a lot more black and white than it really is. Defaulting to information that agrees with your word view is a natural human bias. We all suffer from it and it's important to actively try and work against that
- Defaulting to information that agrees with your word view is a natural human bias.
  In general, perhaps, but in the face of conflicting facts?
  
  Everyone has their own set of facts. That’s the basis for their world view. Doesn’t mean those facts are pertinent to the question at hand but upsetting their entire worldview is not something people allow easily.
  And that’s human nature. We’re a social species. We belong to tribes and depend on our tribe for survival. If we could drop our worldview like a load of dirty laundry then we’d be walking away from our tribes and dying.
  Ask anyone who has had profound political disagreements with their family. It’s enormously painful. While you can drop a position here or there in an election, it’s not at easy to drop your family.
  
  Everyone has their own set of facts.
  If you mean their own configuration of facts, I agree. If you mean “things they believe”, I disagree that those are “facts”.
  
  Perhaps I was being too vague but the key to my point is this:
  Doesn’t mean those facts are pertinent to the question at hand
  What I’m talking about is facts about people’s situation in life. Their friends, their family, their community. It’s well-known that many people will believe the medical advice of a close family member over that of a doctor. Does this mean that they (through family connections) have access to some secret medical knowledge?
  No.
  What it means is that a person’s instincts to trust their family and close friends — members of their tribe — make it difficult for them to accept contradictory information from their doctor (a stranger). You can extend this issue to almost any domain of expertise (apart from those in which the person in question has had formal training). This is why conspiracies, myths, and other falsehoods can be so difficult to dispel from the outside of communities: the people who believe these things are not going to take the word of strangers who try to contradict their friends and family.
  And so what I mean about people having different facts is this: their relationships and communities are different. Their whole worldview depends on their ability to trust the people they’re closest to. So when it comes to the question of whether to believe a falsehood (myth/conspiracy/scandal) or to reject it and in so doing reject their own community (with catastrophic results for their life), it should not be a surprise that they choose to believe a falsehood.
  
  And in that I agree. But I read the OP as saying something different.
  As an example: Trump is a rapist. That’s a fact. How is that a fact? Well, his victim detailed the rape, produced evidence to corroborate it, and a judge and jury agreed, fining him 85 Million dollars for saying he didn’t rape the victim. Was he tried, convicted, and sentenced under a charge of rape? No. Statute of limitations and other reasons prohibited that. But the “fact” remains.
  Now, the evidence of that fact is: the corporate news reporting of it AND the trial AND the transcripts which include witness testimony. Can all of those things exist for something that isn’t a fact? In extreme examples, yes, but it’s very rare. So as best as anyone can determine, this is a fact about a political figure.
  A trump supporter will not believe it. Just like that. No reasoning, no plausible counter-argument, just - no. Because that is against their belief system. A straightforward rejection of a simple proven fact.
  I’m saying I think that’s qualitatively different from a person altering their belief about the relatively unknowable - what is “god”, the purpose of life, how health is maintained - all of which have varying degrees of provable empirical fact but which are malleable to one’s family, society, culture, etc.
  Reality: 2+2=4
  Trump: 2+2=5
  MAGAts: 2+2=5!
  Reality: no, it really, really doesn’t.
  MAGAts: I don’t subscribe to your facts! 2+2=5!
  That’s. what I think the OP is describing.
  
  Right, but now we need to ask ourselves how a person could get to the point where they don’t believe the media reporting all of this and instead they choose to believe Trump.
  It starts with their community and it ends with a total collapse in their trust in public institutions, including the media. Then, if they and all their friends and family have begun to believe that the media (what they might call “left wing media”) are engaged in a conspiracy to disenfranchise themselves and their community (by trying to disqualify their chosen candidate through alternative means) it becomes easier to see why they would reject the facts.
  It’s really a serious problem for democracy in the U.S. (but also in other western countries) and it didn’t begin nor doesn’t end with Trump. It’s a sign of major fault lines through society.
  
  It’s a good question. However, I think it’s been answered before by about 30 or 40 years.
  The answer is that media consumption and propaganda are often exactly the same thing and we don’t limit, police, suspect, or explain media consumption at all. That’s usually considered to be a good thing, but I think we see in the age of TikTok that it’s gone way too far, and we need to have basic media literacy as an elementary school-level learning.
  That’s something that none of trumps supporters have had. I think what’s working in that situation (the right wing blogosphere, etc.) is some bastardized and weaponized version of “media literacy” that is strictly focused on not believing standard authority, and only believing the “new” authority.
  Which is itself a very old ploy.
  
  I think the problem is much deeper than media literacy. It’s social stratification and bubbles. There are so many people who will say that almost all of their friends and family are in one party. Heck there are even people who don’t even know people of races other than their own.
  It’s also an issue of education and brain drain. Suppose you’re born in a rural community in the Deep South and you decide to go to medical school. You get accepted to a school in another state and move away to study. After graduation you go into residence in a hospital and eventually you become a fully licensed doctor, ready to start practicing.
  Where do you go? It’s possible for you to go back home to your rural community but in all likelihood there’s no room for you there (not enough patients) and besides all that you likely don’t relate very well to everyone else. So you leave. You move away to the big city in another state.
  This is happening on a massive scale in the US. Brain drain from red states and rural areas to blue states and big cities. It’s hard to have critical thinking and media literacy in an area if all the educated people are leaving!

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