LikeLike

Ha ha that is a great way to put it, dogs are smart, but I think we can make progress using technology as long as it is accompanied by some wisdom too.

LikeLiked by 1 person

LikeLiked by 1 person

Thank you so much Patricia. It was a very good book.

LikeLiked by 1 person

LikeLiked by 1 person

Yes politics, religion and world views often trump rational thought and intellectual honesty

LikeLiked by 1 person

Yes, that’s so true. I think it’s a psychological thing where you don’t want to disagree with your side about anything so you go along with it without proper research or through bias research. And sometimes people just want to fit in like I read a couple of days ago about a girl whose father was a climate scientist but became a climate change denier after becoming a part of a right wing political group.

LikeLiked by 1 person

I think for me it was a few things that made me fall in the trap. I did not know much about the subject and thought I was smart enough and educated enough that I would notice if the media I trusted (all rightwing) and contrarian books I read, really were misinforming me. I also did not know that nearly 100% of climate scientists around the world, as well science academies, NASA, NOAA, etc., were all in agreement that global warming is happening and that we are causing the current warming not a natural cycle. If your belief contradicts scientific consensus that is a big red flag. So once I realized that I decided to take a more serious and honest look at the topic. It turns out I had been bamboozled. I once thought that earth was only 6,000 years old and that scientists were agenda driven, until I learned that’s not reality. Here I had been bamboozled again. It is very easy to confuse people when there are mixed messages in media. Many people tend to side with their “tribe”, or what they want to believe, rather than checking out the evidence.

LikeLiked by 1 person

That’s a really good point and I think it really is easy to be bamboozled like you said. And it’s hard to break out of that mindset but I’m glad you took the time to do your own research and let go of past beliefs. It’s really important to do that with anything really. When we find undeniable evidence about something it’s important to rethink our beliefs. I guess what frustrates me is that a lot of people see ample amounts of evidence for climate change and yet refuse to believe it because of one random article written by sources that are not credible. But like you said, it’s hard to change our beliefs especially when the social media and media in general give a lot of attention to the opposite side.

LikeLiked by 1 person

You are right Pooja. It is frustrating when people blindly deny climate change at this time when you can directly observe it in certain places and all the world’s climate and meteorological institutions including NOAA, as well as NASA, have been measuring it and confirming for many decades. Same with the evidence that it is us causing it. It’s been well presented to the public for many decades. Like you say there are tens of thousands of peer reviewed articles and only a few dozen contrarian ones that are error-ridden and published in obscure places, but they get by far the greatest attention.

On the other hand, I was contrarian myself until just a bit more than a decade ago. I did not know much about the topic; I just believed the rightwing news sites that I was listening to or reading. That’s the thing, it is easy to be bamboozled when you haven’t yet taken an honest look at something, and you need to trust scientists in their field, not political propaganda, but that is hard. It is hard when a small group of contrarians get an enormously large attention.

LikeLiked by 1 person