Why Do Conservatives Fall For Fake News?

[dbcowboy]

"Your truth".

And therein, lies the problem.

We're dealing in truths and not facts.

Facts are; 2+2=4, the sun rises in the east, the sun sets in the west.

Those are facts.

Truths are just people's own interpretation of reality.

Ask any Christian if God exists, and they will say "yes" and pass a lie detector test because they believe that to be true.  That is a truth.

Is it a fact that God exists?

Dunno.

Now we deal in politics.

The truths are democrats and republicans.

The facts are, more freedoms and rights versus less freedom and rights.

There are sides.  Those are the facts.

Fact, some want fewer rights and bigger government.

Fact, some want smaller government and more rights.


Truths are subjective, facts are objective.

[Infolurker]

Good point,

I myself need to start using the word FACT instead of Truth in reference to Factual information.

[Ninurta]

You don't come off as uppity to me, but I have noticed at the other site psychological intimidation tactics such as labelling someone using a negative term/word such as that is really an attempt to manipulate and intimidate when their political spin or their twisting the facts or them leaving out other truths is called out.

No,@"Freija" is not "uppity", but she is defensive, and understandably so. Almost all humans - or any other organism for that matter - will become defensive when it perceives a threat against itself, independent of any social, moral, religious, or political stances. The urge to defense transcends all those things, and is one of the more basic instincts anyone, or anything, has. It's more primal than even the urge to reproduce. It is the instinct to survive. That is why attack posts are so effective at eliciting a desired, usually emotional, response.

You are correct about negative terms/words being used to intimidate and manipulate. I noticed that right off several years ago, when that business of anyone having an opposing opinion to one's own was suddenly called a "racist" in an attempt to shut them down, regardless of whether the discussion had anything at all to do with race or not. it was just used to squelch any opposition, in any situation. That too seems to elicit a primal response, usually one of flight rather than fight, which is why it is used and abused so much.

Rather you come off as a warrior standing up for what you know to be your truth. Those than don't walk in your shoes do not know your truth and most here and the other site have no interest or unable to objectively open their mind to other people's certain realities and truths in life, but I am trying to listen and understand.

There is no "your truth", "my truth", or "their truth". there is only "truth", and it belongs to everyone. The problem is, humans are really damned ineffective at ferreting it out. Experiences vary from person to person, but Truth does not.

I'll stick with the science and watch what happens in the courtrooms because there we get more than an inkling of what is empirical evidence and societal truth, or at least what the majority of society deems equitable (jury of one's peers) and where the science holds truth, and from this position we can then know better where the culture/religious/political wars are heading.

It's sad, but I was trained to science - physics and astronomy - but nowadays I find myself less and less convinced of the objectivity of current scientific effort. It seems to be increasingly politicized with a concurrent decrease in objectivity. The hell of it is, you generally have to actually read the papers, and step through the experimental design they used to achieve that desired goal, to really see what they are really doing, and most folks are just not equipped for that - so, they either blindly embrace what they believe to be "science", or blindly reject what they believe to be "not science" because it conflicts with their own pet theories. Both stances are just as invalid as the other.

So, people usually do what they are told by "experts" or else reject what they are told out of hand just because it conflicts with their worldview... but most of those never, EVER, read and evaluate the actual papers - they just take someone else's word about the "Cliff's Notes" of that paper.

Tq Freija's credit, she actually reads those papers, where most of her opponents do not, so she actually has the intellectual upper hand in most of her discussions.

.

[quintessentone]

You don't come off as uppity to me, but I have noticed at the other site psychological intimidation tactics such as labelling someone using a negative term/word such as that is really an attempt to manipulate and intimidate when their political spin or their twisting the facts or them leaving out other truths is called out.

No,@"Freija" is not "uppity", but she is defensive, and understandably so. Almost all humans - or any other organism for that matter - will become defensive when it perceives a threat against itself, independent of any social, moral, religious, or political stances. The urge to defense transcends all those things, and is one of the more basic instincts anyone, or anything, has. It's more primal than even the urge to reproduce. It is the instinct to survive. That is why attack posts are so effective at eliciting a desired, usually emotional, response.

You are correct about negative terms/words being used to intimidate and manipulate. I noticed that right off several years ago, when that business of anyone having an opposing opinion to one's own was suddenly called a "racist" in an attempt to shut them down, regardless of whether the discussion had anything at all to do with race or not. it was just used to squelch any opposition, in any situation. That too seems to elicit a primal response, usually one of flight rather than fight, which is why it is used and abused so much.

Rather you come off as a warrior standing up for what you know to be your truth. Those than don't walk in your shoes do not know your truth and most here and the other site have no interest or unable to objectively open their mind to other people's certain realities and truths in life, but I am trying to listen and understand.

There is no "your truth", "my truth", or "their truth". there is only "truth", and it belongs to everyone. The problem is, humans are really damned ineffective at ferreting it out. Experiences vary from person to person, but Truth does not.

I'll stick with the science and watch what happens in the courtrooms because there we get more than an inkling of what is empirical evidence and societal truth, or at least what the majority of society deems equitable (jury of one's peers) and where the science holds truth, and from this position we can then know better where the culture/religious/political wars are heading.

It's sad, but I was trained to science - physics and astronomy - but nowadays I find myself less and less convinced of the objectivity of current scientific effort. It seems to be increasingly politicized with a concurrent decrease in objectivity. The hell of it is, you generally have to actually read the papers, and step through the experimental design they used to achieve that desired goal, to really see what they are really doing, and most folks are just not equipped for that - so, they either blindly embrace what they believe to be "science", or blindly reject what they believe to be "not science" because it conflicts with their own pet theories. Both stances are just as invalid as the other.

So, people usually do what they are told by "experts" or else reject what they are told out of hand just because it conflicts with their worldview... but most of those never, EVER, read and evaluate the actual papers - they just take someone else's word about the "Cliff's Notes" of that paper.

Tq Freija's credit, she actually reads those papers, where most of her opponents do not, so she actually has the intellectual upper hand in most of her discussions.

.

Freija actually explains bimorphism and other scientific evidence from those research papers so her truth is actually scientific fact, IMO as well as the expert's opinions who are working in that specific field.  It then remains that it is one's freedom of choice (?) to accept the empirical evidence as scientific fact as truth or not. Then we are delving into all sorts of nastiness about beliefs, programming ... you get where I am going. Believing is seeing. Believing is also confirmation bias so no amount of scrutiny or peer review will ever make a subjective biased thinker be objective.

[Ninurta]

Freija actually explains bimorphism and other scientific evidence from those research papers so her truth is actually scientific fact, IMO and in expert's working in that specific field opinions.  It then remains that it is one's freedom to accept the empirical evidence as scientific fact as truth or not. Then we are delving into all sorts of nastiness about beliefs, programming ... you get where I am going. Believing is seeing. Believing is also confirmation bias so no amount of scrutiny or peer review will ever make a subjective biased thinker be objective.

Most of the papers she brings I'm not qualified to evaluate in anything more than a very rudimentary way. That just wasn't my field. So I can make a cursory analysis of general experimental design, but not fine-grained enough or specific enough to be meaningful most of the time. Most of her opponents are no more qualified than I am.

Most of them seem to be running on pure emotion and conjecture. Because they cannot evaluate the papers to critique them, they have to fall back on emotional responses. So, what they do, is get her ramped up enough that emotion takes over on her end too, in order to drag her down into their own mud for the battle.

That's why there ever even IS a battle - if she stuck to her guns and refused to take the bait, her opponents would have insufficient ammo in the Social Wars to drag her down.

So as I said before, she is not "uppity" nor is she "a problem child", she's just human, with human reactions, and that is what her opponents count on.

Most of the rest of us either have to accept "empirical evidence", and accept the assumption that it even IS empirical, or we have to reject it out of hand based upon emotional response, because the one most valuable thing we are unqualified to do is evaluate it.

Long, long ago, an old man with a long white beard - this was in the long-ago days before I was capable of developing my own magnificent chin-ferret - said to me "There are people who will tell you that you have to fight fire with fire. Don't fall for that. it'll only get you burnt when you get caught between the flames. The way you fight fire is with WATER."

.

[quintessentone]

Freija actually explains bimorphism and other scientific evidence from those research papers so her truth is actually scientific fact, IMO and in expert's working in that specific field opinions.  It then remains that it is one's freedom to accept the empirical evidence as scientific fact as truth or not. Then we are delving into all sorts of nastiness about beliefs, programming ... you get where I am going. Believing is seeing. Believing is also confirmation bias so no amount of scrutiny or peer review will ever make a subjective biased thinker be objective.

Most of the papers she brings I'm not qualified to evaluate in anything more than a very rudimentary way. That just wasn't my field. So I can make a cursory analysis of general experimental design, but not fine-grained enough or specific enough to be meaningful most of the time. Most of her opponents are no more qualified than I am.

Most of them seem to be running on pure emotion and conjecture. Because they cannot evaluate the papers to critique them, they have to fall back on emotional responses. So, what they do, is get her ramped up enough that emotion takes over on her end too, in order to drag her down into their own mud for the battle.

That's why there ever even IS a battle - if she stuck to her guns and refused to take the bait, her opponents would have insufficient ammo in the Social Wars to drag her down.

So as I said before, she is not "uppity" nor is she "a problem child", she's just human, with human reactions, and that is what her opponents count on.

Most of the rest of us either have to accept "empirical evidence", and accept the assumption that it even IS empirical, or we have to reject it out of hand based upon emotional response, because the one most valuable thing we are unqualified to do is evaluate it.

Long, long ago, an old man with a long white beard - this was in the long-ago days before I was capable of developing my own magnificent chin-ferret - said to me "There are people who will tell you that you have to fight fire with fire. Don't fall for that. it'll only get you burnt when you get caught between the flames. The way you fight fire is with WATER."

.

We don't have to be qualified we just need the desire to read with an open mind, understand the methodology and the results. If it's peer reviewed then others have qualified the study for us. I think the truth in all of this is we have to want to understand someone else's life experience even when it disagrees with our programming and/or cemented values.

But you are right and here's another wise adage - You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

[Ninurta]

We don't have to be qualified we just need the desire to read with an open mind, understand the methodology and the results. If it's peer reviewed then others have qualified the study for us. I think the truth in all of this is we have to want to understand someone else's life experience even when it disagrees with our programming and/or cemented values.

But you are right and here's another wise adage - You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

That seems to be the general consensus among people, but I do. I have to be qualified. I don't feel comfortable forming an opinion based upon information I cannot comprehend. But I do agree, it appears that most folks are not burdened by any such disability.

"Peer review" doesn't cut much ice with me, especially in matters that I cannot understand the nuts and bolts of. At one time it did, but in this day and age of politicized science, not so much any more - peers can be just as politicized as principles, so reality lies in the data itself rather than anyone else's interpretation or evaluation of it, in my estimation.

So, my fallback in these matters is what @Freija has to say, because she lives it, and I can't even comprehend it. Her experience tends to carry more weight than any peer review board that ever sat in the matter, but I also have to temper that somewhat, and account for potential biases, because everyone sees things through their own eyes.

It can get exhausting some times, but I just keep on slogging along, and may eventually get there.

.