energyskeptic | I doubt many Republicans are going to read this book. They ought to.
Mooney is thoughtful and insightful. Compare his evidence-based book
with the Republican counterpart, Ann Coulter’s “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d be Republican”. Some chapter titles:
- Teddy Kennedy: apparently fat, drunk, and stupid is a way to go through life
- Liberal “argument”: hissing, scratching, and hair-pulling,
- Liberalism and other psychological disorders
- Liberal tactics: distortion, dissembling, deception—and the rest is just run-of-the-mill treason
- Baby-killing: Abort liberals, not children
- Blacks: the only thing standing between the democrat party and oblivion
- Christians: must Reproduce More
- Communism: a new fragrance by Hillary Clinton
- Environmentalism: Adolf Hitler was the first environmentalist
- Evolution, Alchemy, and other “settled” scientific theories
Some good news: not everyone is equally biased. Many of us are
capable of listening to others and changing our views. But this varies a
lot from person to person, because people differ in their need to
defend their point of view, in their need to have convictions that must
not change, in their need to believe their group is right, and in their
need for unity with their group. If you’re wired and strongly motivated
to have unwavering convictions, it will be almost impossible to change
your mind with any facts, logic, or reason. Mooney makes the case that
this kind of person has a conservative mind, and is therefore likely to
be a Republican.
Mooney likens someone with a strongly held opinion that’s being
challenged to experiencing a physical attack, because these beliefs are
physically embedded in the brain.
Which means you can’t expect to come up with undeniable, irrefutable
facts and suddenly change someone’s mind, since their strongly held
beliefs are literally wired into their brains.
Linguist George Lakoff, at the University of California, Berkeley,
says that to think you can change someone’s beliefs with well-reasoned
arguments is not only naïve, it’s also unwise and ineffective.
Reasoning is emotional, what psychologists call hot reasoning. We are
not coldly rational. Not even scientists are immune. But what makes
science the most successful way we have of testing reality is the
scientific method, since peer review, experimental replication, and
critiques from other scientists mean that eventually the best ideas
emerge despite any individual’s biases. Within scientific circles, it’s
considered admirable to give up cherished ideas when evidence shows you
to be wrong.
Mooney believes this is a key difference between liberals and
conservatives. Scientists are overwhelmingly liberal — they have to be,
or they won’t get far in their profession. Please note this does not
mean that their scientific discoveries are liberal or democratic.
Scientific findings aren’t political, they’re reality, and only become
“political” when spun that way. The opposite of a scientist is a
religious, authoritarian, political conservative, because they tend to
have a strong need to never modify their deeply held beliefs, or to ever
appear to be uncertain and indecisive.
Since most of the most important problems that need to be solved
require scientific literacy, which less than 10% of Americans have,
here’s how Mooney says scientific news is interpreted by the other 90%
of the public:
“When it comes to the dissemination of science—or contested facts in
general—across a nonscientific populace, a very different process is
often occurring than the scientific one. A vast number of individuals,
with widely varying motivations, are responding to the conclusions that
science, allegedly, has reached. Or so they’ve heard.
They’ve heard through a wide variety of information sources—news
outlets with differing politics, friends and neighbors, political
elites—and are processing the information through different brains, with
very different commitments and beliefs, and different psychological
needs and cognitive styles. And ironically, the fact that scientists and
other experts usually employ so much nuance, and strive to disclose all
remaining sources of uncertainty when they communicate their results,
makes the evidence they present highly amenable to selective reading and
misinterpretation. Giving ideologues or partisans data that’s relevant
to their beliefs is a lot like unleashing them in the motivated
reasoning equivalent of a candy store. In this context, rather than
reaching an agreement or a consensus, you can expect different sides to
polarize over the evidence and how to interpret it”.
