Why Myths Persist 988
lottameez recommends an article in the Washington Post about recent research into the persistence of myths. In short: once a myth has been put out there (e.g., "Saddam Hussein plotted the 9/11 attacks"), denying it can paradoxically reinforce its staying power. Ignoring it doesn't work either — a claim that is unchallenged gains the ring of truth. Over time, "negation tags" fall out of memory: "Saddam didn't plan 9/11" becomes "Saddam planned 9/11." From the article: "The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths... The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind works. Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain uses subconscious 'rules of thumb' that can bias it into thinking that false information is true. Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency."
LBJ story (Score:1, Interesting)
Negation (Score:5, Interesting)
Negation (in natural language) is a tricky business, even if we forget about the psychological part for a minute. Just to give one example:
Presuppositions [wikipedia.org] - I have seen her again. and I haven't seen her again again. both presuppose that I saw her (before) so large parts of what I say persist under negation.
In addition, results from psycho-linguistic research suggest that negation involves some sort of double processing, that is we transform a negative statement in an equivalent positive one before we further process it. That in all this the negated statement stay activated and is thus reinforced is more than plausible.
Some unexpected examples.... (Score:1, Interesting)
We haven't fought a victorious full-scale battle on our own since the Civil War. And I can't think of any occasion where we have won a battle against a half-way decent foe. We tend to run if they come at us hard. When was the last time you heard of a glorious last stand of US troops, outside a Hollywood film? We only fight when we think outnumber or out gun the enemy so much that the result is a certainty. And when we find we made a mistake, like Vietnam, we collapse.
But the most amazing story we tell ourselves is that we're good at inventing. In fact, we're good at developing other people's inventions - usually stolen ones. If you don't want us to steal your invention, you'd better come over here and develop it for the US market yourself - and then we can claim that the invention was American!
Probably the calssic story we tell ourselves is that the Wrights 'invented the airplane'. In fact, they wer the first (by a short head) to make a machine fly according to certain precisely defined criteria. Change those criteria, and others become the first. The Wright machine turned out to be a dead end in aviation technology - the wing-warping idea does not scale - but the legal fight over this meant that the US aircraft industry was held back so much we had to buy aircraft from the French for WW1!)
Re:Saddam (Score:3, Interesting)
How would you like if Iraq invaded teh USA because they might have weapons of mass de...
Oh wait, you do.
Also known as... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Saddam/911 myth persists because powerful (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Saddam (Score:1, Interesting)
Picture of Henry Ford being rewarded by the Nazis. [orange-papers.org] I'm sure he was "a good American."
I'm sure the Bush family wouldn't get involved with... ah, whoopsie [rense.com].
Conservatives. Always on the wrong side of history. Take the Kosovo War. Remember that one? Let's look at a few comments on that...
"No goal, no objective, not until we have those things and a compelling case is made, then I say, back out of it, because innocent people are going to die for nothing. That's why I'm against it."
-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/5/99
(Why was Sean such a surrender monkey in the face of a tyrant and his concentration camps?)
"You think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo."
-Tony Snow, Fox News 3/24/99
(Would this be the same Kosovo War that resulted in ZERO US COMBAT DEATHS?)
"I don't know that Milosevic will ever raise a white flag"
-Senator Don Nickles (R-OK)
(Is this the same Milosevic that raised the white flag? Why did Senator Nickles question the abilities of our brave boys in uniform?)
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)
I'm sorry: you were saying "something, something, peace-activist liberals, something, non-confrontational"?
Was that it.
Yeah. I thought so.
You're on the wrong side of history again, and there are enough Progressive Americans (you know, the ones that value the US Constitution and don't treat it like a dish rag) that are willing to remind you of it every single day.
I'm just waiting for someone to mention BJs. Whoo boy, do I have a reply for that!!!
Not really myth we're talking about here (Score:4, Interesting)
The phenomenon being studied is more about how to associate two unrelated pieces of information so that people will begin to think they are connected, or how to plant a lie so that people will eventually believe it to be true. This is nothing new: everyone from politicians to writers to artists to horny teenagers have been doing this forever. The current studies are showing more of the details of how it happens.
Dr. Thompson recognized and clearly defined this phenomenon: make your opponent deny that he rapes barnyard animals and you're home free. "I am not a pigfucker", no matter how true a statement, will not get you elected.
Re:And why is the US myth leader? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Truthiness... (Score:2, Interesting)
As Colbert would say, any statement has some level of truthiness to it. And truthiness can become the truth if you push it enough.
Take lessons from the master. Goebbels (Score:3, Interesting)
It might leave a bad taste in your mouth, but you have to know your enemy.
Re:Biggest myths of all have been around for ages. (Score:5, Interesting)
2) I really, really wish it was true.
Is there any other argument for religion left behind? Wait, I forgot, there is that grilled cheese sandwich with Virgin Mary in it. Great.
OK, I've been trolled. I can't believe I am about to do this on Slashdot.
Not everyone who professes to be religious believes in a white robed deity sitting on a cloud chucking thunderbolts. To a logical person, the concept of an anthropomorphic divinity is laughable - if you attribute truly "godlike" qualities to the divine (i.e. God is infinite), things like gender really become kinda silly. (However, I will grant that it certainly makes it easier to conceptualize and discuss - a fiction that people use to make lives easier, much like physicists can use algebra based equations (F = ma) rather than the calculus based ones which are more correct).
The problem is, what the hell language do you use to describe such a thing? You can call it "energy", or the "Force", but that gets you lumped in with the crystal wavers that are often more flaky than your traditional religious types. So you say God, knowing full well that 99% of the people who hear you don't have a clue what you really mean.
So I ask you - does someone who believes in an infinite, unifying principle beyond our current understanding sound to you like a cultist or a scientist?
Don't be so quick to dismiss those who profess to be religious. Damn near all of the greatest scientific minds of the last thousand years fall into that category.
Re:Faith in Carbon (Score:3, Interesting)
Marcus Aurelius FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is more what the GPP was getting at... However, if not, it is still a good, apt quote in my opinion.
Never good philosophy. (Score:3, Interesting)
There are also plenty of sound philosophical arguments against God, as he's frequently defined. For example: God is omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent. Yet there is evil in the world. Therefore, God cannot be all three of these -- pick two.
There's another argument that says heaven cannot possibly exist, even if it was possible to have a God with these properties.
Now, that doesn't mean philosophy can't talk about God. It just means that you're not going to find a philosophical argument that will convince someone to be religious. The closest you could come is Pascal's wager, which doesn't account for multiple religions.
Myths != Lies (Score:3, Interesting)
Many posts assumes myths are plain and simple lies (religion/politics/etc).
But there are another reason for myths: The wish to overcome our limited memories. Take the Diluve episode, exist in almost all the big (and not so big) cultures around the world, and in some traditions it is explicitely stated that the history/tale have to be told to transfer the knowledge that something so terrible that descendants will not believe it to be true had really happened.
So our memories are really limited, it's not strange that not literate cultures 'invented' myths as an efficient (time wise) transmission method.
Re:It's one of those persistent myths (Score:4, Interesting)
Rumsfeld related Iraq and 9/11 days after it happened when he suggested we should attack Iraq instead of Afghanistan. As far as public statements, they never explicitly said Saddam caused 9/11, they only mentioned the two things constantly within the same sentence. Dick Cheney went so far as to actually imply a causal relationship, saying Mohammad Atta had met with senior Iraqi officials in Prague just months prior to 9/11. And he even started by saying "I'm not saying that Saddam was involved in plotting 9/11 for certain, but..." What's this article about? How even negating a myth can cause it to be reinforced? Well how about just not saying it's specifically true, just here's a bunch of statements that suggest so?
Strange how if they never said it, so many people believed it. Of course the whole point was to create the connection in people's minds, but to do it in such a way that they couldn't technically be accused of lying.
P.S. I don't care that Clinton used some of the same justifications for his make-Congress-happy-take-attention-from-my-proble
The truth is, Hussein had an obligation to prove that he had destroyed his WMDs. He did possess them before, and by the terms of the ceasefire for Desert Storm, he had to prove to weapons inspectors that they had been neutralized. He failed to do this. For more than a decade. That alone was proper justification for the invasion.
Don't use the weapon inspectors as justification for the invasion when the weapon inspectors' opinion was ignored. The statements made by the admin, particularly Rumsfeld when he said that not only did Iraq have weapons as a certainty, we also "know where they are". No, they didn't. And according to the inspectors, Saddam's weapons program was disabled.
The idea that we attacked Iraq for complicity in 9/11 didn't show up until well after the war had begun, after US troops failed to discover any significant caches of NCB arms. Those that opposed the administration found it to be an effective strawman.
Oh, right, it was a strawman invention of Bush's opponents. And those clever bastards somehow forced Dick Cheney to keep repeating it!
No, the "Iraq is part of the war on terror -- remember 9/11" justification is what the administration started to push harder after the "Iraq has WMDs!" justification fell through. It was part of it all along, it was just second fiddle to the WMD claims which were what were truly effective in gaining support from the populace.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong on this. If anyone can dig up a pre-war speech that accused Hussein of plotting 9/11, I'd love to be corrected.
Enjoy [mtholyoke.edu]. Try searching for "specific allegation" to get to the part where he can't exactly say Iraq caused 9/11, he just has "credible" intelligence that might imply it.
Re:And.... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.stats.uwaterloo.ca/~cgsmall/ontology.h
If they don't already have a PhD in Math, or at least some real familiarity with the specific area of modal logic, it will probably take 6 months to a year of work acquiring the basic concepts for the average person who would give a damn to check this out.
I haven't done any of you Atheists a favor by pointing this out. Many of you will dismiss it. Some will follow through, and end up believing they are now saved, part of a special group of really bright people who know the truth, but they will be believing in the kind of God who sits around in heaven, surrounded by only a few mathematically brilliant saints. A formal religion based only on Godel's 3rd proof would be the most emotionally sterile 'faith' I can imagine. Posting this link to you was, in a very literal sense, damnable, and I will feel the burden of having done it for at least the rest of my life, but now all of you get to share that weight too.
Re:And.... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, religion isn't about "searching for the correct" answer. It's about making up a fantasy and calling it the answer to why we're here. That's not searching, that's fabrication. It may seem like searching to some people, because they've been told throughout their lives by religious people that these beliefs are "true", but as this article shows, it doesn't take much to get people to believe outright lies. There's no evidence whatsoever that any religion is based on anything besides lies and misperceptions. In fact, I believe that many religions are based on outright and intentional lies by their founders: Scientology and Mormonism, in particular. The others are so old, based in times of strong oral tradition and poor record-keeping, that very little from then can be really trusted to be factual. A list of Roman Emperors is probably reasonably accurate, but all the miraculous religious stories from then are second-hand accounts of oral histories, so they're not trustworthy at all. Everyone should know by now how easily oral stories get embellished and twisted around.
I'm all for searching for the correct answers. But when you get into questions about supreme beings and other metaphysical stuff, there's no scientific way to deal with these issues, so I don't see the point in studying them at all. There's no evidence, nothing testable, no trustworthy record that any supreme being actually communicating with mere mortals (or do you believe all the stories about Greek gods?), and I can testify that no supreme being has communicated with me personally, so what exactly is the point of searching for answers here? It's more productive to search for answers that we have some hope of finding instead, like how to cure our diseases, make the world a better place to live, etc. For questions about ethics and morality, we have philosophy (which has been around for thousands of years, longer than most surviving religions) where we can create ethical systems to allow us to determine for ourselves what is correct and incorrect action; we don't need the fear of divine retribution to scare us into behaving well.
Re:Unless they actually said it (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually it's not partisan politics. It's partisan politics if the democrats accuse bush of saying exactly that, which I haven't seen. The point the post you replied to was making and you completely chose to ignore calling it "all partisan politics", had nothing to do with partisan politics at all, but rather the basic point the OP made.
If I talk about bob and in the same breath mention 9/11, if that sentence comes from somebody in a position of knowledge or power, enough times, everything between bob and 9/11 blends, and misforms, and becomes bob caused 9/11
This is the beginning of Myths. nothing partisan about it. For a completely unpolitical thing. Bob saw Lisa at the bar last night (Bob saw her from across the room, but the phrasing is key and it's perfectly accurate), will eventually become Bob went out with Lisa, to Bob and Lisa are a couple, to Bob had sex with Lisa. Now all Bob did was see her from across the room, and now both their names are attached to this stigma.
Re:And.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you rather live in a world that has meaning and purpose, and a moral absolute, or would you rather live in a world where nothing you does ever matters and the only purpose of existence is for you to feel good about yourself enough to continue to procreate?
Straw man; I don't believe that nothing I do matters, and neither do any of the other non-religious-believers I know. There's a lot in my life that has meaning and purpose: my family, my friends, my work, and my community all come to mind. And there is a moral absolute here, when judged by those standards: that which is good is that which helps make the world the kind of world I want to live in, and my children to inherit. Not by faith, which has never accomplished anything*, but by works. You go on believing in the kind of world you want. Me, I'll be over here making it happen.
*At this point in the argument it's canonical to cite MLK or Gandhi or Mother Theresa and say, "What about so-and-so? Their faith accomplished something!" To which I reply: no, it didn't. Their faith may have motivated them to accomplish something, sure. But you can bet that they were surrounded by a bunch of very faithful people who were just as miserable as they were, and did nothing about it except to pray for relief. What makes people like these few stand out in history is that they didn't rely on faith, they got out and actually did something.
Re:And.... (Score:3, Interesting)
You have faith that your observations accurately reflect reality. This is a faith that underlies all of science, and generally goes unacknowledged.
You know that your observations are all analyzed by your brain, and you know that your brain gets its information from your nervous system and your senses. You also know that it's possible to stimulate your nerves in ways which can create false readings from your senses, and that there are people with medical conditions that alter their senses. (Blindness and deafness being the most obvious, but also color blindness, heightened or decreased sensitivity to tastes and smells, and even people who see sounds or hear colors.) Therefore, logically, you can't trust your senses or your observations, even if they seem to be internally consistent. For all you know, you're just a brain in a jar with a very accurate and consistent reality being presented to you.
You might think that's unlikely, and I tend to agree with you, because I have faith in my observations as well. But it's still just faith; there's no way to prove it one way or another using the scientific method. Trying to do so is no more reasonable that someone using statements of facts from the Bible to prove that the statements of facts in the Bible are true. You also can't prove that your observations reflect reality using logic, because logically there's every reason to believe observations are untrustworthy.
Re:Never good philosophy. (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no inconsistency between the existence of evil and the 3O god. Your claim that there is one is completely unsubstantiated. There is "cognitive dissonance", yes. But inconsistency? Not one whit of it.
There is another argument that says it's turtles all the way down, but then who cares? Some arguments are just ludicrous.
I think that most, if not all, people who become convinced to become religious are convinced by a philosophical argument. Ultimately, it is an argument that they construct for themselves, internally, but it is quite clearly a philosophical argument.
Of the major socially constructed religions, only Christianity and Islam are contenders for Pascal's Wager. They make opposite claims. Of course one could construct an infinite variety of alternative contenders, but only Christianity and Islam have any substantive grounds for historical claims of factuality. Personally, I find Islam internally inconsistent and transparently self-serving, much like Mormonism (which is not "major", but if it were would be even more obviously fraudulent, on grounds of historical evidence -- cf. "The Book of Abraham"). Christianity is a bit more difficult to dismiss, with a lot of historical and testimonial support. Of course there's enormous antipathy to it, so one might well chose to ignore it on grounds other than factuality. Then there's the issue of factional subdivisions and their associated doctrinal differences -- Christianity doesn't really mean one thing, but rather refers to a range of religions nearly as broad as are the range of religions which are not included within nominal Christianity. That's enough to discourage almost anyone from taking it seriously.
Re:And.... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's Slashdot, where not actually reading the article is a tradition.
Re:d00d (Score:2, Interesting)
Even if the fire weakened the steel, why did the building collapse at roughly free fall speed? The fire surely wasn't raging on the lower floors. How does the top of a building fall unhindered through the lower floors at free fall speed without support from underneath being removed? If it wasn't demolition, why weren't any of the 47 giant steel columns sticking up out of the rubble about 20 stories?
As for WTC #7, two large skyscrapers rained tons of debris (literally tons of steel and concrete) on it, it caught fire and was allowed to burn. There were large diesel fuel tanks for backup generators that probably fueled this fire as well. The FDNY had more important things on their hands and didn't wan't to risk more life unnecessarily. The fact that it contained things "convenient to dispose" for some shadow conspiracy is irrelevant, it was in a disaster zone and lots of other buildings were damaged to near collapse, and many buildings in that area probably fit the criteria of "convenient to dispose of".
What evidence is there that there was a raging fire at WTC 7? What evidence is there that any of the diesel tanks were breached? What evidence is there that raging fires have brought down other high rise structures? How do you explain the BBC reporting that the WTC 7 had collapsed approximately 20 minutes before it actually DID? How do you explain Larry Silverstein's statement that he told the firefighters to 'pull it'? Why didn't the 9/11 Commission Report even address WTC 7? At least the FEMA report tried to address, but this page [wtc7.net] explains some of the problems with that account. The FEMA report has even gone on to say that your explanation for the collapse of WTC 7 has a low probability (http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch8.pdf). See section 8.2.5 I believe.
We know Al Qaeda tried to blow it up once before, there is pretty damn compelling evidence that they tried again and succeeded. These conspiracies not only fail Ockham's razor, they fail a simple logic-check: if there existed a conspiracy powerful enough to orchestrate the collapse of WTC #7 to get rid of data and services, they would be powerful enough to accomplish it by means less crude than blowing up two adjacent buildings and then collapsing it in the mayhem.
Once again someone knows who Al Qaeda is; let me guess, you heard it on the news or read it in a book? 'Al Qaeda' tried to blow up the WTC once before, and I presume you're referring to the '93 bombing. Interesting how all of the people implicated in it (except the FBI informant) were on the CIA payroll in Afghanistan.
As for the Ockham's razor argument, you forget also the motivation the neocons might have to 'blow up' the buildings by planes. The reasons for collapsing the twin towers is pretty easy to detect, and the reason for using planes isn't terribly difficult to discern as well (fear from the sky helps secure funding for missile defense and other new weapons, easier to explain hijackings bringing down towers than bombs placed within the building, etc). WTC 7 was conveniently located to bring it down in the process and few would question it when there were two much more exciting collapses nearby and something at the Pentagon. The fact that WTC 7 is hardly ever mentioned in the media and was totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report seems to support the idea that no one