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Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos
You don't seem quite as outraged when the same charge is leveled in the other direction.
You posted a WSJ article suggesting that the scientists are fudging the everything to keep the funding dollars coming in.
Are they evil? Are they KNOWINGLY helping/working go destroy the economy for Dr. Evil overlords? Seems pretty juvenile, don't it? You'd think adults...
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Just read this article, thought it was quite interesting for discussions like this one.
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How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
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http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/id...ire/?page=full