this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Skeptic

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Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things (youtu.be)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Steven Pinker explains the cognitive biases we all suffer from and how they can short-circuit rational thinking and lead us into believing stupid things. Skip to 12:15 to bypass the preamble.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Automatically? No. But that's, as I said, why you can't trust a documentary. How will you know that you're getting an actual education.

If you don't think that's a problem, you should check out how many people got fooled into thinking What the Bleep Do We Know was an actual documentary about quantum physics. They even interviewed some physicists (without letting them know who they were) and cut their interviews to make it look like they were supporting the documentary's ideas.

And then it got into theaters nationwide and made a bunch of money and many people to this day believe the nonsense in that film.

Why wouldn't they believe it? It sounded true, it was being presented authoritatively.