Otto Kretschmer

Nothing in particular, just sharing loose thoughts on the topic.

Sorry for doing that. I had thought it's just a generic thread for "motivated reasoning in politics".

- What's the favorite work of philosophy of porn stars? - The Analects of Confucius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analects Though I guess The Rectification of Names comes close.

A more currently relevant example is supply-side economics - after Reagan, Bush Jr and the 2017 tax cuts, the predicted revenue surge never materialized, yet its proponents kept generating ad-hoc hypotheses why it didn't happen - the cuts weren't large enough, Fed tightened too much, baseline spending was too high etc. No novel predictions, just endlessly folding the failed ones back into the narrative.

Well, I meant "reaching a conclusion" in a more metaphorical sense since actual logical reasoning is rarely involved.

I debate political fanatics a lot and there's a recurring structure in all of them, a two-part one: Reach conclusions fast via a snap judgement Refuse to update based on new evidence The second part is more imortant. It's not just that they draw conclusions fast - literally nothing can convince them that their positions are false. Peer-reviewed studies show that LGBT people aren't dangerous to children? Theose studies are fabricated by leftists. Talmud doesn't tell Jews to hate non-Jews? That's a fake Talmud they fabricated to woo non-Jews, the real one is different. Gorbachev recognized the Katyń massacre as done by the USSR? He was a western agent/bourgeois traitor etc. literally got permabanned from a sub yesterday for correcting Katyń misinformation, the reason given was "spreading liberal content" (since obviously, Bush Sr., Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl didn't have other things to worry about in 1990 than healing Polish historical trauma).

TIL that German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued in 1801 that there cannot be a planet between Mars and Jupiter. He argued this in his doctoral dissertation De Orbitis Planetarum by saying such a planet is not needed because of well, Plato's numerology. The entire work was heavily anti-Newton. By the 1790s astronomers were excited by what we now call the Titius-Bode law: take the sequence 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52… and you get a pretty good fit for the spacing of planets in the solar system from Mercury through Saturn, except there is nothing at 28, right between Mars (16) and Jupiter (52). A group of German scientists was organizing a hunt for that "missing" planet in 1800. Hegel, fresh in Jena and trying to get a teaching license, thought the whole hunt rested on bad philosophy of number. In Section III of the dissertation he wrote: He then turned to Plato's Timaeus, where the Demiurge builds the world-soul from two geometric progressions - powers of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8) and powers of 3 (1, 3, 9, 27). Hegel tweaks the list to 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 16, 27 (he swapped 16 for 8, probably to get a smoother spacing) and said: Hegel was showing that an empirical pattern (Bode's law) is not necessary, because you can find another badass pattern that fits the known planets just as well and leaves the Mars-Jupiter gap empty. The bottom line? Ceres was discovered on January 1st, 1801 - just as Hegel was finishing his dissertation.

The 1970-84 one is the best:

@swansont or any other mod can feel free to move the thread.

This is a cognitive phenomenon, not solely a political one. Humans use this hearistic when reasoning about many different things.

Yep. That's broadly what I meant.

You're welcome!

I'd say it's the 2nd. I just thought about the negaive impact of this tendency first, since I learned about it through the negative examples.

Does it? The quality of politics around the world suggests otherwise...

It's a tendency to assume a certain conclusion before any evidence is even examined and then to cherrypick or invent evidence to fit that preexisting conclusion. It leads to obvious closed epistemic loops - the worst case I am familiar with are conspiracy theorists who treat lack of evidence for the conspiracy as evidence of it being... correct (since it means the conspriacy is powerful enough to suppress evidence). Any ideas?