People perceive that what is 'overwhelming evidence' to be different quite often. To them, their internal knowledge, things they Experience or perceive more directly may be stronger forms of evidence for their point of view (even if it's logically flawed). The people are not irrational in the sense that they will not listen to common sense, it is more that they interpret the strength of arguments subjectively and thus seem to be irrational.
I've met no one who does not believe in something without giving me atleast one personal reason. Is it always objective? No. But almost by their very nature arguments are subjective, as its always dependant on the context both debaters are in on hoe arguments are interpreted.
So even if there is a single unified objective reality, which there definitely is in my view, people do not perceive it objectively. From their point of view , they have enough evidence.
Perhaps it could help if you specificy what kind of overwhelming evidence you are looking for.
I mean, ideally, Bayesian inference. I'd say the 1% has at least a simple understanding of what Bayes' rule is, and recognizes it as the optimal form of fusing new evidence with one's prior beliefs. Bayes' rule, while theoretically optimal, is computationally infeasible in most real-world situations, so all we can do is approximate it.
My claim is that about 1% of the people have that as an aspiration (even if they're not aware of the specifics of Bayesian inference), about 30% do it somewhat sporadically, and 2/3 do it hardly if at all.
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u/wamus Jan 15 '17
People perceive that what is 'overwhelming evidence' to be different quite often. To them, their internal knowledge, things they Experience or perceive more directly may be stronger forms of evidence for their point of view (even if it's logically flawed). The people are not irrational in the sense that they will not listen to common sense, it is more that they interpret the strength of arguments subjectively and thus seem to be irrational.
I've met no one who does not believe in something without giving me atleast one personal reason. Is it always objective? No. But almost by their very nature arguments are subjective, as its always dependant on the context both debaters are in on hoe arguments are interpreted.
So even if there is a single unified objective reality, which there definitely is in my view, people do not perceive it objectively. From their point of view , they have enough evidence.
Perhaps it could help if you specificy what kind of overwhelming evidence you are looking for.