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People just canât see reason, and perhaps thatâs a good thing.
Nobody feels happy about it when explaining a stark, obvious fact, and hearing lazy, irrelevant nonsense as a reply. Telling people that X is a genocides, and all genocides are bad should make sense. Hearing âyea-butâ, and âwhataboutâ can make the blood boil. I donât have much consolation for this, except that this has to be the case, because the alternative might bring worse problems.
When I imagine what people can feel convinced by, though reasons, quite easily, a few things come to mind:
In all of these examples, the reasoning doesnât matter much. People listen to information and simply donât want to listen to anything which violates Logic or affects anything they care about significantly.
Despite salesman trying to reason people into things all day, despite their efforts at constructing seemingly-excellent reasons, their success rates remain low. People on the street who try to ask you to sign up for a charity, or insurance, or whatever, find perhaps a couple of people a day willing to speak with them. If the general public felt like making decisions based on syllogisms more often, they might end up buying a lot more insurance.
I donât think insurance makes a good purchase all the time, but in order to avoid buying insurance, someone either needs the reasoning skills to not feel bamboozled by armies of skilled salesmen, or they can reflexively say ânoâ, without any reasoning.
Bad ideas can spread quickly, but most of these bad ideas (âthis brand of clothes is greatâ, âforeigners are badâ, âI need to get âbeach-body readyâ soonâ, âthe moon landing was a hoaxâ) have very little impact on the person with the bad idea. If more substantial ideas could take hold, then people would either need such reasoning and knowledge that they could never be convinced by bad ideas, or dangerous ideas would spread as quickly as any lolcat meme.
With some tricky reasoning and false stats, entire countries might go to war overnight. Everyone could lose their money to a scam (as opposed to now, where only some tiny percentage of people buy into pyramid schemes).
So people donât think about reasons too much. They keep themselves safe from bad ideas by listening to everything, believing nothing of any value, and watching how other people, with other ideas, get along.
Still, to say âI donât know why I do this, I just doâ, doesnât feel very nice. It sounds like youâre an idiot. Itâs also not true that people donât reason about things - what I mean to say is that they donât reason much, and donât do things based on those reasons, but they will still reason a little.
I donât think Iâll ever stop feeling annoyed by someone playing the game of âI have good reasons for my beliefsâ, then pulling out transparent nonsense, but I understand the shrugs very well. Clearly Linux supports most users better than any other operating system, smoking should be allowed in pubs, and politicians need to do more about global warming very fast indeed. But if someone can only shrug at these ideas, and say âI donât know about thatâ, then I canât see anything wrong with that. Itâs not a matter of ignorance, but safety.
I do the same thing with most of my life. If you told me I should really eat less aubergine, or that Iâd bought the wrong washing machine, I might shrug, and say âreally?â, and I might even believe you. But I wouldnât do anything about it.