<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>In case anybody wonders why a passion to play politics doesn't lend itself to good decision making ..<br><br>--srs (iPad)</div><div><br>Begin forwarded message:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><b>From:</b> Dave Farber <<a href="mailto:dave@farber.net">dave@farber.net</a>><br><b>Date:</b> 19 September 2013 6:00:44 IST<br><b>To:</b> "ip" <<a href="mailto:ip@listbox.com">ip@listbox.com</a>><br><b>Subject:</b> <b>[IP] The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever</b><br><b>Reply-To:</b> <a href="mailto:dave@farber.net">dave@farber.net</a><br><br></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><br><br>---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b>Dewayne Hendricks</b> <br>Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2013<br>Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever<br>To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net - Sent by <<a href="mailto:dewayne@warpspeed.com">dewayne@warpspeed.com</a>><br>
<br><br>The Most Depressing Discovery About the Brain, Ever<br>
Say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, or reason can provide the tools that people need in order to make good decisions.<br>
By Marty Kaplan<br>
Sep 16 2013<br>
<<a href="http://admin.alternet.org/media/most-depressing-discovery-about-brain-ever" target="_blank">http://admin.alternet.org/media/most-depressing-discovery-about-brain-ever</a>><br>
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Yale law school professor Dan Kahan’s new research paper is called “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” but for me a better title is the headline on science writer Chris Mooney’s piece about it in Grist: “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math.”<br>
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Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people’s ability to think clearly. His conclusion, in Mooney’s words: partisanship “can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills…. [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.”<br>
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In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. It turns out that in the public realm, a lack of information isn’t the real problem. The hurdle is how our minds work, no matter how smart we think we are. We want to believe we’re rational, but reason turns out to be the ex post facto way we rationalize what our emotions already want to believe.<br>
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For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.<br>
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Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter?<br>
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The answer, basically, is no. When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.<br>
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• People who thought WMDs were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting it.<br>
• People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.<br>
• People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year – a rising line, adding about a million jobs. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.<br>
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