You've seen it: a "fact" conflicts enough with other facts that the person asks for clarification, but cannot accept that their first "fact" was wrong.
I see this effect in myself all the time - If I am already aware of something happening and have made some sort of sense of the who, what, where, when, and why before it becomes a controversy, it takes an awful lot of effort to change my mind once a bunch of partisans are arguing about it.
I read pretty widely and voraciously, so there seems to be a lot of "news" that surprises others and is not even news to me.
The stubbornness of my pre-formed views is probably enhanced by repeatedly seeing opinion about an event, questioning if what I thought was true was wrong, and then digging out primary sources only to discover that I was not wrong. This happens ALL. THE. TIME.
I've even postulated versions of "Douglas2's Law", which are: a) if you can't get to primary sources within 3 clicks of hyperlinks (such as to a transcript or video of the talk or interview, the actual court decision, or the journal precis of the scientific paper), they are intentionally lying to you. b) sensational articles will include links but trust that very few of their readers will actually click and read what is linked, as it nearly always contains the refutation of their headline claim.
Douglas2 - those deserve wider circulation. Not that it will do any good, you understand, but just for the satisfaction of putting it out nicely in print.
Sounds like a form of confirmation bias.
ReplyDelete"The weatherman said it would be sunny today."
ReplyDelete"It's raining pretty hard."
"But he said it would be sunny."
x N different topics
I see this effect in myself all the time - If I am already aware of something happening and have made some sort of sense of the who, what, where, when, and why before it becomes a controversy, it takes an awful lot of effort to change my mind once a bunch of partisans are arguing about it.
ReplyDeleteI read pretty widely and voraciously, so there seems to be a lot of "news" that surprises others and is not even news to me.
The stubbornness of my pre-formed views is probably enhanced by repeatedly seeing opinion about an event, questioning if what I thought was true was wrong, and then digging out primary sources only to discover that I was not wrong. This happens ALL. THE. TIME.
I've even postulated versions of "Douglas2's Law", which are:
a) if you can't get to primary sources within 3 clicks of hyperlinks (such as to a transcript or video of the talk or interview, the actual court decision, or the journal precis of the scientific paper), they are intentionally lying to you.
b) sensational articles will include links but trust that very few of their readers will actually click and read what is linked, as it nearly always contains the refutation of their headline claim.
Douglas2
Douglas2 - those deserve wider circulation. Not that it will do any good, you understand, but just for the satisfaction of putting it out nicely in print.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like AVI got there first. Which is good: he has better circulation, and these are good rules.
ReplyDelete