[Peace-discuss] History lessons

[Szoke, Ron]

One of the saddest lessons of history is this:  If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, were tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.  The bamboozle has captured us.  It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.  Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.  So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones arise.
— Carl Sagan
From:  The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark  (1996), p. 241.
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 . . . better facts tend to be counterproductive on hot-button issues like gun control. As Tali Sharot notes in her book “The Influential Mind<https://us.macmillan.com/theinfluentialmind/talisharot/9781627792653/>,” when you present people with evidence that goes against their deeply held beliefs, the evidence doesn’t sway them. Instead, they invent more reasons their prior position was actually correct. The smarter a person is, the greater his or her ability to rationalize and reinterpret discordant information, and the greater the polarizing boomerang effect is likely to be.
— David Brooks, NYT online, 10/6/17
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