Why Do Conservatives Fall For Fake News?

[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."

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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.