Still holding out for The Dude 84's insights

Originally posted by Scriabin
didn't go back the 2nd day?

Well, as Yogi used to say: "If they won't come out to the ballpark, how're you going to stop 'em?"

I posted this elsewhere, but I want to cross post this where I've been trying in vain to get into a logically valid discussion.

All these political threads, appear to me to be useless because of the way our brains work with respect to politics.

Some of us fall into the erroneous notion that the mind as thought of by philosophers, cognitive scientists, economists, and political scientists since the 18th century -- a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions -- bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work.

1. information that feels threatening to us, even if we won't admit it, make our brains associate that information with negative emotions;
2. what passes for reasoning in politics, especially in debates online like these or in blogs, is most often rationalization, the motive being an effort to reason to emotionally satisfying conclusions;
3. the part of the brain that lights up when looking at and resolving conflicts has been shown by clinicians to light up when there is a conflict between what a reasonable person could believe and what a partisan would want to believe; and
4. Folks reason with their gut rather than analyze the merits of things. Even when you present partisans with a reasoning task through a carefully crafted, even neutral post, what you get back invariably is an emotional response rationalizing what the partisan wants to believe.

This is, btw, why Republicans have been successful in US elections while Democrats have failed. When partisans face potentially troubling political information, they become emotionally distressed, whether consciously, unconsciously or some combination of the two.

So we try to turn away from the source of unpleasant emotion -- fight it, contradict it, ignore it,. whatever works. This is why almost all of what one can see in these online debates, here and everywhere on the internet, involves faulty reasoning -- reasoning twisted to avoid unpleasant emotion, to confirm pre-existing, comfortable emotions. We're wired that way; we can't help doing this.

In fact, there is evidence that once partisans find a way to reason to false conclusions, they not only turn off the negative emotion switches in their brains, they turn on the positive emotion switches -- so they feel good reasoning to false conclusions, they feel self satisfied, justified, and entirely in the right. We get a jolt of positive reinforcement for biased reasoning. These are the same switches, incidentally, biologically speaking, as those thrown when drug addicts get their fix.

We're all political junkies.