Why Obstinate Humans Find It Hard To Believe Science

Not even those of us who are scientifically trained actually do objective science consistently well. Like all other humans, we are predisposed, with biased, emotionally prejudiced human minds, to first see what we want or expect to see—a dilemma first illustrated by Plato as “The Allegory of the Cave.”

In one of the few things Plato got right, he showed how each of us allows our subjective will to overlay and mask anything inconvenient about the objective world…

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Now Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, explains how this age-old human flaw is being analyzed in scientific detail, by researchers who reveal it to be dismayingly intractable. It seems that obstinacy is as deeply rooted as love or sex!

From Mooney’s new article, “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science”:

    Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it.

    That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It’s a “basic human survival skill,” explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

    We’re not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn’t take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that’s highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.

Of course, there’s hope, or we would never have climbed so far. In the last few centuries, we discovered a general way around this dilemma. It is through the enlightenment process that underlies almost everything successful about our civilization—not only science but also free markets, justice and democracy. It is the one tool that has ever allowed humans to penetrate the veil of their own talented delusions.
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It is called Reciprocal Accountability. Or criticism, the only known antidote to error.

We may not be able to spot our own mistakes and delusions, but others will gladly point them out for us! Moreover, this favor is one that your FOES will happily do for you! (How nice of them.) And, in return, you will eagerly return the favor.

In our Enlightenment—and especially in science—this process is tuned to maximize truth-output and minimize blood-on-the-floor. But it requires some maturity. Some willingness to let the process play out. Willingness to negotiate. Calmness and even humor.

It doesn’t work amid rage or “culture war.” Which is precisely why culture war is being pushed on us. By those who want the Enlightenment to fail.

And that brings us back to Mooney’s cogent and detailed article, which explains the problem of “narrowcasting” to specifically biased audience groups, who get to wallow in endless reinforcement of their pre-existing views, avoiding the discomfort of cognitive dissonance from things like evidence ...

... a problem—exacerbated by the Internet age—that I predicted in my 1989 novel Earth, describing a near future in which people shift their attention only to those sources that confirm and reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. (A forecast I would rather not have seen come true.)

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Our Worst Frailty: An Electro Magnetic “Hit

The Electric Infrastructure Security (EIS) Council agitates for better infrastructure protection against electromagnetic threats. EMPACT America is a bipartisan, non-profit NGO for citizens concerned about protecting the American people from a nuclear or natural electromagnetic pulse (EMP) catastrophe.

To be clear, we face other dangers of a chronic nature, for example the need to develop sustainable energy to escape dependence upon foreign oil-masters and to possibly save the planet. Educating a smarter generation and rescuing our decaying infrastructure also matter a great deal, over the longer time scale.

But acute-impact threats fall into another category. They are events that could possibly knock us flat in a single day, or instant. Those of us with memories of the Cold War know how it feels to be constantly aware of a Damoclean Sword, hanging overhead…

By that standard, an EMP calamity ranks higher than anything else visible on the horizon—unlike the trumped-up panic and distraction that were foisted upon us over ‘terrorism’.* (We could have suffered a 9/11 hit every month for the last ten years and still maintained a vibrant, healthy civilization. Our parents suffered worse in WWII. It was one long scam.)

There are two possible ways that we might be hit by an EMP pulse strong enough to cripple a continent.

1) Natural cycles can apparently lead to the sort of solar flares that did little to disturb our ancestors - other that creating scary-gorgeous aurorae - but that could devastate an electricity-dependent civilization. For example, the “Carrington Event” of 1859 and another large solar storm in 1921 show that such things happen fairly frequently, and we’ve been lucky, so far.

Even lesser events can wreak havoc. According to a report in IEEE Spectrum: “In March 1989, such a geomagnetic disturbance took down the entire Hydro-Québec power grid, leaving six million customers in the Canadian province without electricity for 9 hours, and also knocked out power stations in the Northeastern United States. That disturbance occurred at one peak of an 11-year solar cycle,”

A Congressional EMP Commission report recently estimated that a once-in-a-hundred- years solar flare could cause $1-2 trillion worth of damage, if the electric grid went down for weeks. Worse, if most truck transport failed, millions of Americans might simply starve.

2) A devastating electromagnetic pulse can also be man-made. Already, more than half a dozen nuclear-armed nations have missile capabilities that- - now or soon—would tempt them to try knocking out Pax Americana with a single blow.  Just one warhead, detonated high over North America, could cause untold amounts of EMP chaos. Weighing the scenarios, this is a no-brainer. Sending such a missile to take out one US city would be a nasty hit, but it would leave us almost intact and ready for vengeance. But knocking us back to the stone age? Far more tempting, whether it is realistic or not.

With the number of nuclear armed states rising, is that a temptation we really want to be left on the table?

At recent congressional hearings on the matter, several agency heads agreed with the assessment that “it is now a matter of if, but of when.” According to Lifeboat Foundation member Paul Werbos: “One official said, after looking at the report, that $1-2 trillion was a ridiculously low estimate of the risk. ‘Yes, we have three months food stockpiled, but with electricity out for more than three days, it will all go bad. And how long can we live without water?”

“So there was serious talk of the end of civilization (their words) and of more than half the US population dying (and likewise other nations), and so on. Franks, a staunch conservative from the oil business, basically said “hey folks, this is no CO2 thing, this is real…”

Werbos continues: “And so stakeholders will take strong and vigorous action. In the face of 2012, there will be stakeholder’ s meetings. And maybe some education campaigns. And a few more spare transformers. But will anyone install the relatively simple isolators to protect transformers? Will the planning include anyone who knows what a transformer IS? And all of the usual complex ways of doing nothing useful all come into play, in all the usual myriad of ways. It will be interesting to see whether a few meager bits of light can help…. maybe…”

Now, in full disclosure, let me say that I haven’t really pored through the thousands of pages of material, and there is certainly a lot I still have to learn about this topic, as it has evolved since I last studied it.

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