“The Internet might very well have been designed for confirmation bias.”

[supergee]

Can we think critically anymore?

Thanx to Follow Me Here

Comments

What do you mean 'we', white man?

[arlie]

I'm frankly not sure that the folks who've taken to confirmatory internet soundbites would have done any better getting their soundbites from television.

We have a whole industry dedicated to subverting people's limited ability to think critically. It's called advertising. It existed long before the internet, and doesn't require the internet for its effect.

We've also got relatively resistant subcultures and individuals - many of which are less resistant than they think, but still not quite as gullible as advertisers would prefer.

I'm currently engaged in a protracted argument with a coworker about a rather skillful attempt to influence people in our workplace, based entirely on emotion and group membership. He seems to have bought into it more or less completely; I'm maintaining that the managers involved are thereby demonstrated to be untrustworthy in all respects, whether or not the positions they are pushing this way have any element of validity to them.

I know I'm in a minority position. I suspect that the only reason I'm even seeing the behaviour this clearly is my autistic traits - various non-rational brain circuits that should have been triggered by this campaign don't work normally in my brain, leaving the campaign looking to me like a naked manipulation attempt. (For what it's worth, the coworker is also on the autistic spectrum. But apparently his circuits are working normally in this area.)

At any rate, I find my autistic traits often help me see far outside the box. I'm just as subject to bias as anyone else, but I do my biases differently, and there's less effort put into triggering the kind I have. ;-)

AND I'm aware of concepts like "evidence" (or its lack), "logical fallacies", etc. and value data above clever argument.

So yes, I can to an extent think critically. And I suspect you can too.