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I honestly don't know; I just see the apparent speed of a change of expressed opinion in, for example, American right-wing politics where dearly-held beliefs seem to spring up out of nowhere and wonder if people are being sincere, because they've decided which opinions fit.

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I think you're overestimating the strength of the non-utilitarian causes of expressed beliefs. We can't all be

, y'know. You could even argue that categorically & firmly principled stances are *abnormal*, and rarely a deciding element in how most people live their lives.

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Which makes perfect sense, given that your propensity for holding beliefs has most probably evolved as some kind of survival tool, or is the outcome of one. Not, however, so that you can be a "good person", or some other thing nature gives absolutely no fucks about whatsoever.

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So when we see many people give little thought to anything else than "how do people I care about regard this?" before they opine about something, that seems perfectly consistent with what human beings *are*.

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Right, which is kind of what I was trying to get at - even if you're actively trying to be objective, in reality the incentive to try to convince yourself that your peers (in whatever fashion) are correct, reasonable and honest is way too strong.

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With a near-endless pool of virtually limitless information at your fingertips, "proving" to yourself that your existing feelings and your friends' POV are correct is easy and fast. You can pick the "facts" you like and really easily ignore anything else.

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Slower information may have always been drip-feeding us convenient spins on whatever is going on, but now we can spin for ourselves and build an echo chamber on a whim.

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Yes, that is true to a very large extent. And have them built for us by eager spin doctors. The rate of spread of hysterias like the latest anti-vaxxing movements are fairly effective proofs-of-concept here.

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Pretty amazing to see in the case of one of my in-laws: He left Poland as a clueless neoliberal type for a summer job. Came back several months later as a born-again fundamentalist. Completely bizarre. Completely normal, too.

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Yeah. These things evolve like religions. I guess that's just humans.

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Now he also believes vaccines cause autism (no small irony, given he's like 90% likely to have undiagnosed Asperger), and that you need to supplement vitamin C in quantities that would make Hitler's ol' "inject methamphetamine directly into the spinal cord" doctor blush.

11:04 AM · Mar 4, 2019Twitter Web Client

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Sounds like a good test-case to see if there's a way of talking people down from this stuff. For some anti-vax types it's a whole lifestyle - Steiner fans, homeopaths - but these recent converts must surely be curable - there's less of a reason for them to believe.

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I think it's reasonable to state that we can be quite sure that MMR is one of the few things that we have a high degree of certainty does *not* cause autism, thanks to this: newscientist.com/article/dn7076