Preface. All of us, no matter how much we’ve read about critical thinking, or have a PhD in science, and are even on the lookout for our biases and fallacies can still fall prey to them, after all, we’re only human.
But false belief systems get dangerous when taken too far, resulting in fascism and cults. Consider Qanon, which has inspired violence, intimidation, discourages vaccinations and denies climate change. Trump has yet to deny these claims or disavow QAnon even after the FBI has called them a domestic terror threat. And good luck dissuading them from their beliefs, they will see you as spouting fake news and a part of the problem.
Conspiracy theories and fascism go hand in hand, to see how, read this article: 2021 American fascism isn’t going away.
A scientific paper on Bullsh*t was recently published: “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit”, which attempts to identify what makes people susceptible to nonsense. The authors defined BS as a statement that “implies but does not contain adequate meaning or truth”. To form a BS Receptivity scale, they used satirical sites such as www.wisdomofchopra.com (a random phrase generator trained on the online excretions of guru Deepak Chopra) to create vapid, portentous-sounding aphorisms, which were then judged by participants for profundity. The authors found that those who judged this BS as profound were more likely to hold a belief in the supernatural, and that “a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound BS receptivity” (NewScientist 12 Dec 2015).
What follows is from Wikipedia. Yikes — we are all delusional!
Critical thinking in the news:
2020 Even If It’s ‘Bonkers,’ Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories
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Cognitive Biases: Decision-making, belief & behavioral biases
- Ambiguity effect – the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
