Rational thinking is not enough to save you from stupidity

Rational thinking is not enough to save you from stupidity

Some more thoughts on statistics and why people do apparently very stupid things despite not actually being very stupid.

The difficulty with thinking statistically is that our own personal experiences are always true. When someone says something that's in flat contradiction to what we've seen with our own eyes, there is a certain logic in denying it. "You can't possibly have seen a black swan, you must be a very stupid person." The problem is that that's equally true from their perspective, but remembering this isn't easy - instinct takes over. It's even more difficult to realise that your experiences will have been influenced by a thousand different factors, and there's no reason to suppose that those will be the same everywhere.

When we find an anomaly, we don't automatically say, "All my previous observations were unusual, this new thing is normal." Instead we assume that it's the new thing that's the anomaly...Thinking about what sort of selection effects are at work does not come naturally, and it's difficult. Because we tend to say that anything unusual to us is unusual overall (rather than assuming we've been in an unusual position), things that don't fit the pattern don't necessarily challenge our ideologies. If we find more examples, we just say there are more exceptions, more mitigating factors.

A cult of ignorance probably doesn't look like that to its followers. It probably looks like someone is finally being honest enough to say what they're really thinking (despite the fact that that is not a virtue), to have the courage to agree with their entirely rational but uninformed conclusions, to circumvent the apparently highly contrived excuses of an intellectual elite. It does not necessarily happen simply because people are stupid.