Listening, learning, absorbing information, communicating, teaching, the thrill of better understanding.
Why’s that seem to mean nothing to some folks?
I keep wrestling with why communicating with right wing types always devolves into dismissals and juvenile sniping as we’ve seen here.
But when trying to communicate things I’ve learned, including the sources that I learned from, it’s consistently met with an onslaught of derision and distractions, misrepresentation, and kindergarden logic. So f’n depressing.
(so wish I had more time, but gotta run off and spend the day fixing funky old stuff, so Ill just leave this dangling.)
Anyone have any thoughts that might help in dissecting the mechanisms of denial?
The biggest problem is people who deny science are not deep thinkers. They make decisions based on what makes them feel good, not on evidence. Once they believe something presenting evidence only makes them dig in harder and fight to defend their beliefs, as we have seen from Stardusty and Yohe in the threads about glaciers.
It’s human nature to accept things on faith.
It’s human nature to not want to lose face in an argument.
It’s human nature to be lazy and accept things as their first explained and simply carry on believing.
It’s human nature to see agency where there is none.
It’s human nature to follow the crowd.
It’s human nature to believe what you want to be true.
Some people just like to be jerks and contrarians.
Human nature is a powerful influence to overcome and not everyone has the ability or drive to do so. You can get through to some of the people some of the time, but don’t expect a success rate in the double digits (or even in the whole numbers!)
I don’t think anyone here isn’t equally frustrated with the ignorant pig-headedness of that type.