“It’s not a virtue to be easily persuaded by people.”
I wish everyone would watch this video. Most people I know aren’t interested in doing this kind of thinking – that is, thinking about thinking, but I soak this shit up. If I had a child, I’d sit them down with this video and go over what it says minute-by-minute, and make them explain to me what it means. Militant athiests – this is about you, too. While this video uses the supernatural as a specific example, I think it makes a great case for reason in general.
If anyone wants to chat about this, I am all about it.
“You’re no longer communicating – you’re just rehearsing your own prejudices.”
“When a friend tells us about a day at work, we don’t ask them to back up what they say … but when someone’s trying to persuade us to accept something as fact or take some sort of risk, demanding valid evidence helps us distinguish true claims from false ones; and that’s an invaluable ability when living in a world where believing false claims can seriously damage your wealth and your health.
“Critical thinking is not incompatible with open-mindedness … Even though demanding valid evidence may occasionally lead you to reject ideas that are poorly supported but nonetheless valid – if and when evidence accumulates for those ideas, an open mind will lead you to reconsider them, and possibly dislodge false ideas you previously thought was true. This approach is promoted by science.”
In psychology, we call this kind of thinking metacognition. I enjoy it tremendously when I get the opportunity to spend a lot of time really paying attention to this stuff. The video displays the act of overcoming cognitive dissonance, however, as if it were an easy thing to do, for an actively reasoning mind. The truth is that it’s not easy for anyone; human minds have a make-up such that this task is inherently difficult.
Militant atheist or militant christian alike will behave in an unreasonable manner when cognitive dissonance gets in the way. Overcoming this dissonance takes an incredible degree of discipline. I admire all who are capable of doing this.
This is awesome. I am tempted to repost in my LJ. Would you mind if I did?
No, that’d be excellent!
that was awesome!
Phenomenal. Causes me to wish to rub up against my formal logic text books again.