Frustrating for RR but for myself I am happy to express my views and let it go.
Stan
-----Original Message-----
From: R George <xgeorge@xxxxxxx>
To: sparkscoffee <sparkscoffee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tue, Aug 30, 2016 11:53 am
Subject: [sparkscoffee] Why Is It So Hard to Get People to Change Their Minds?
Suppose you’re trying to convince somebody that Obama’s economic policy
has been a failure? You lay out statistics to make your case,
but the response you get is, “Well, those numbers would have been even
worse if not for Obama’s policies.”
How do you rebut that? It’s a hypothetical claim, and we can’t go back
in time and run the clock all over again with different policies in
order to compare outcomes. When it comes to economic, criminal, or
military policy in general, we can’t run experiments – say, create
two identical societies, give one of them a 5 percent sales tax and the
other none – in order to determine what the cause-and-effect
relationships are in the world. Not in the way we can with physics or
chemistry.
What’s worse, even when we can predict the consequences of our actions,
there are conflicts between moral values that defy easy answers.
And that’s why it’s so hard for us to get others to change their minds
on politics, and for other people to get us to change our minds.
(Really, think about what it would take for you to go, say, from being a
Trump or Obama opponent to a supporter.)
Not that it never happens. Sometimes we shift course dramatically (like
Paul on the road to Damascus). But we also resist changing our minds
– just like our opponents do – on the basis of knowledge we claim to
have but can’t prove conclusively. We’re sure that we’re right about
economic policy, but we don’t actually have the experimental data to
prove it.
As much as we insist that our beliefs are based on facts and reason (and
that our opponents’, naturally, are based on emotion and ignorance),
facts and reason don’t give us clear-cut answers nearly as often as we’d
like. They usually do more to call our beliefs into question than to
validate
them. They show us how complicated the world is, and how inadequate our
beliefs are.
And, to go back to pride, nobody likes to have the flimsiness of their
beliefs pointed out to them. Socrates gained a reputation for being the
wisest
person in Athens, mostly based on his ability to prove how the
politicians, artists, and teachers of his day didn’t actually know what
they claimed to
know. The people of Athens rewarded him with a jail cell and a free cup
of hemlock.
This is, ultimately, one of the greatest tests of virtue we face in
life: how do we treat people who disagree with us, and how much effort
do we make
to prove our beliefs before we adopt them?
And, in the middle of facing this test, are we expecting other people to
behave with greater virtue than we are?
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/why-is-it-so-hard-to-get-people-to-change-their-minds/
