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Comment by super_scooper | Hacker News Reader

Your solution assumes that logic and reasoning is somthing that can be ingrained in a person's thinking and lifestyle through education. Maybe you can train those skills to a certain extent but it also seems entierly possible that there will always be a portion of the human population (maybe even most of the population) that simply doesn't possess the cognitive trait or ability required to seriously interrogate various viewpoints or even their own ideas.

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> a portion of the human population (maybe even most of the population) that simply doesn't possess the cognitive trait or ability required to seriously interrogate various viewpoints or even their own ideas

Funny how everyone who's saying something like this is always sure they belong with the smart ones

I believe it is not even relevant, there are very smart people who support completely different policies. Nobody is smart enough to process all the data points about a certain subject, especially when it is something that is not hard science. Political and policy decision are based more on gut feeling than on logical critical thinking. Do you think Karl Marx or Milton Freedman lack the cognitive ability to do some critical thinking? And what would the green haired 21 yo "fact checker" decide is "fake news" if both of them were tweeting at the time?

Beyond "tribal ideology" idea clustering - there are tribal collections of shared assumptions, but personally there are also hierarchies of values.

Out of (say) 5~12 "values" that might matter to most persons - they are in different order, and change the way we process data. To provide a simple example, some people value freedom (autonomy) over safety, and others value safety over autonomy.

So even if people share the same assumptions about how the world works - and they have the same ideology as their tribe - disagreements will still arise.

It's hard!

For me the biggest problem is discovering/finding (often accidentally) where I need to introspect and/or drill-down.

It doesn't occur to me to examine unexamined assumptions - at all. It's like a blind-spot until one-day: Bam! "You need to go verify this assumption!" (Or conclusion or chain-of-reasoning or theory or whatever)

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