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How facts backfire Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains Itâs one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. âWhenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,â Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but itâs an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight. In the end, truth will out. Wonât it? Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. Itâs this: Facts donât necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
Leo Berman has to go, there is no room for whackos like this. It is nice to see unbiased media representation from Anderson cooper though...... It would have been nice to see him excoriate some of the liberals who thought 9/11 was caused by bush, especially given the fact that roughly the same amount of people believe that Bush was behind 9/11.
It would be nice to see the original "Birth Certificate", the one that was used to issue the above "Certification of Live Birth". I have my original birth cert and it has my foot print on it. It also has my parents names, occupations and places of their birth. If I had been born in Hawaii and lost it, they would issue me a "Certification of Live Birth", just like they did for Obama. The 2 documents ARE NOT the same, but both are recognized legally. Just for the record I couldn't care less where he was born. I just wanted to point out that the document in the video is NOT Obama's original "Birth Certificate". http://hawaii.gov/dhhl/applicants/appforms/applyhhl
Thoreau made this observation 150 years ago. "The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor."
Certainly Anderson Cooper is a smug and facile liberal, and the Texas legislator was an older guy, but to me Cooper didn't exactly destroy him. Cooper kept referring to the Certificate of Live Birth as if it proved something. It proved only that the state issued it. It is not a Birth Certificate as commonly understood. After trying to confuse the issue Cooper retreated to a statement by the state's governor. The statements of the governor and health director are rank hearsay, which is not credible legal proof. If the certificate exists, why not just present it publicly and end the controversy? The legislator also had a very valid question about Obama's travels. The obvious question is what kind of passport was he traveling on, a US-one or one from another country? Similarly, what did he list as his nationality on those college applications that are more top secret than State Department cable traffic. Comparing this to Bush is typical for a partisan like Cooper but the two cases are not at all comparable. Bush had a legitimate right to keep his personal information personal. His college GPA had no bearing on whether or not he met the Constitutional qualification to be president. In Obama's case, the information is central to that question. Cooper hardly demolished the legislator's questions. Sidestepped them would be more accurate. As I understand it, the reason the guy was on was that he was pushing a law requiring candidates to prove they meet the constitutional requirements for the office. I wouldn,t have thought that was controversial, but then I didn't think real americans would object to immigration laws being enforced either.
Ahh, here's the quote from Thoreau I was trying to recall: "It is discouraging to talk with men who will recognize no principles. How little use is made of reason in this world! You argue with a man for an hour, he agrees with you step by step, you are approaching a triumphant conclusion, you think that you have converted him; but ah, no, he has a habit, he takes a pinch of snuff, he remembers that he entertained a different opinion at the commencement of the controversy, and his reverence for the past compels him to reitereate it now." From his journals.
If, as Anderson Cooper claims, Obama has "already shown his birth certificate" and "it has been certified by the state of Hawaii", then why does the left go into full batcrazy mode over a proposed law in a state to compel future candidates to show their birth certificate, and prove they are a natural born citizen? Only the very small percentage of swing votes in the middle are too dumb to figure this out, and that's who they're after.