11/7/2016

Crony Beliefs | Melting Asphalt

Melting Asphalt

by Kevin Simler

Credits up front: This essay draws heavily from Overcoming Bias, Less
Wrong, Slate Star Codex, Robert Kurzban, Robert Trivers, Thomas
Schelling, and Jonathan Haidt (among others I'm certainly forgetting).
These are some of my all-time favorite sources, so I hope I'm doing them
justice here.

For as long as I can remember, I've struggled to make sense of the terrifying
gulf that separates the inside and outside views of beliefs.
From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty
damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for
the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don't lie awake
at night fearing that we're massively deluded.
But when we consider the beliefs of other people? It's an epistemic shit show
out there. Astrology, conspiracies, the healing power of crystals. Aliens who
abduct Earthlings and build pyramids. That vaccines cause autism or that
Obama is a crypto-Muslim or that the world was formed some 6,000 years
ago, replete with fossils made to look millions of years old. How could anyone
believe this stuff?!
No, seriously: how?
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/

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