The problem with Democrats is the problem with us
Nobody changes their minds about anything, ever.
This is a simple experiment about people’s beliefs about falling balls. Nobody is saying anything physicsy about “freefall”, “under the earth’s gravitational field”. The experimenter holds up two identically sized balls, one is a relatively light red basket ball and the other is a heavier black medicine ball. All he does is ask people, if the two balls are dropped simultaneously from the same height, which one will hit the ground first.
What do you think will happen?
Universally, everybody is very certain the black one will hit first. In some cases, even after the demonstrator tries to instill some doubt in their thinking, they go back, even stronger, to their original “black will hit first” belief.
Now watch the video, but stop after the experiments have been performed, at 1:45.
What do you think happened?
Again, everybody on the video sees that the black one landed first, justifying their original belief. Is this confirmation bias? I think this is self-justification “See, I was right!” bias. They aren’t even crowing about it. They are like, “Of course I was right, no biggie.”
Now continue the video, they watch the experiment in slo-mo. Guess what happens. Now the subjects do concur, with the evidence before their eyes, which seems undeniable, that “both land simultaneously”.
See how hard it is to convince somebody even of what we take to be objective reality? And this is just Physics — it is not as if it is about your core beliefs about human beings, your morals, your racism … nothing. Most people hate Physics and so you would think they don’t care enough about it to be right (or wrong).
Is that the end of it? Nooo! Because now what happens is that people start coming up with squishy stuff, to slime their way out of having to admit they were wrong and thus having to give up their beliefs and possibly change their minds. One person argues that “the balls didn’t fall far enough … to reach their maximum speed”. There is so much wrong with this I won’t even start, but I hope my main point has been made:
People will deny the evidence before their eyes in order to hold on to their beliefs. If reality -the evidence- is too overwhelming to easily deny, they will come up with the most hare-brained of ideas, crackpot thinking, the equivalent of “conspiracy notions”, in order to maintain their grip on their beliefs.
So now, imagine trying to convince someone that vaccines cause autism or that Trump won the election but it was stolen due to fraud or that the Earth is flat or that the government is run by a bunch of Russia loving pedophiles. Not going to happen.
Nobody changes their minds about anything, ever.
Except, mostly, hard scientists. Yeah, I know this is going to piss people off. But in terms of openness to change and the inverse timescales on which they are willing to do so, probably: Mathematicians > Physicists > Chemists > Life Scientists … > the heavily politicized and finally, religious people.
