CryoNet #32716 - #32717

CryoNet - Sun 18 Jul 2010

    #32716: =?utf-8?B?IEZhY3RzIGRvbuKAmXQgbmVjZXNzYXJpbHkgaGF2ZSB0aGUgcG9... [rr ss]
    #32717: Evidence against Johnson [Ettinger]

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Message #32716
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2010 04:53:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: rr ss <[email protected]>
Subject: =?utf-8?B?IEZhY3RzIGRvbuKAmXQgbmVjZXNzYXJpbHkgaGF2ZSB0aGUgcG9...

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full

How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains


It's one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it's an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won't it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It's this: Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

....


etc

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Message #32717
From: [email protected]
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2010 11:32:10 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Evidence against Johnson

I have lately received documentation of some of Larry Johnson's vicious  
lies. Some of the people providing the evidence don't want to be publicized.  
Over time I will decide whether and when to post this information or some of 
it.  Suffice it to say now that I am more than ever convinced that Larry 
Johnson is  not to be given the benefit of any doubts. He is basically a nasty 
fraud.
 
Robert Ettinger

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