Assistant Village Idiot has linked to an article in The Week entitled "Made-Up Minds," about the distressing resistance of certain people to persuasion by facts of logic. What kind of people? Well, you know. The kind who can't be made to understand what's wrong with the free market, gun ownership, patriarchal families, restrictions on abortion, or global warming, all of whom are very similar to end-of-the-world fanatics who cling to their delusions even after the world doesn't end on the scheduled day. Although, in fairness, the problem is not 100% about them; there are also those prominent leftist believers in vaccines as the cause of autism. And now back to conservatives: aren't they funny?
Articles like this one, with its discouraging comment thread, tend to make me take stock of my own prejudices. Lord knows I'd never claim to be free of confirmation bias, but I've been known to change my mind even on firmly held beliefs, when mugged by reality. It does take more than someone screaming "Denialist!" or "Rethuglican!" at me. They have to be willing and able to answer questions to my satisfaction. Questions like: "Suppose you're right -- is your proposed solution likely to do more good than harm?"
A big problem with the idea of scientific proof, and the question whether liberals or conservatives are the worse offenders at ignoring it, is that most people have almost no contact with the proof in question. They're getting their facts from a cloud of popularizing sources, from which they derive the hazy notion that "all that stuff has been proved by someone somewhere." The recently popular phrase "peer-approved" is very useful shorthand for this approach. It's a naked appeal to authority, but it makes its users feel that they're members of the great priesthood of the rigorous, skeptical scientific method. You don't agree? Why, you're no better than the Church fathers who persecuted Galileo! In fact, you're a heretic, and should be burned.
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