On 03/26/10 01:28, Warp wrote:
>   I have hard time understanding the psychological phenomenon that many
> people are eager to believe in some things based solely on what other
> people *claim*, without any actual convincing evidence, or with just some
> flimsy circumstancial evidence of eyewitness testimony, and *keep believing*
> in it even after an enormously more comprehensive and accurate testing shows
> that the thing is bogus.

	Finland must be an awesome place to live.

	Seriously? You find it hard to believe? I suspect that if I want to
make big money in marketing, I'll have poor competitors where you are
(although perhaps you just limit your own exposure to ads).

	Don't separate evidence with claims completely. For most people, the
evidence they know for anything (including legitimate science) is via
claims.

>   Someone might believe that something works because someone claims that it
> worked on 10 people. Even if a scientifically accurate study is then performed
> repeatedly on 1000 people, and this test shows that it doesn't actually work,
> these people will *still* believe it works.

	How many of these people have been told about its failure on the 1000
people by *someone they trust*?

>   Why do so many people think like this? What is the psychological phenomenon
> behind this kind of thinking?

	Scientific rigor is abnormal. It's not innate. It needs to be taught,
and reinforced. Most people may learn it in school, but few apply what
they learn in school to their lives out of school.

-- 
Mary had a little lamb, a little beef, and a little ham.

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