I agree with your thesis that facts don't matter when forming public opinion. Feelings and perceptions matter much more. I do disagree about the mechanism. I d

I agree with your thesis that facts don't matter when forming public opinion. Feelings and perceptions matter much more. I do disagree about the mechanism. I don't find that humans are very generous to one another - public opinion very often assumes the worst and takes the least generous interpretation. People are more than happy to vilify a reckless driver who caused a death. I think the mechanism here is media coverage. We are still seeing articles pushed out by media corporations about this one accident from a year ago. Meanwhile, human drivers kill thousands of people a day and you don't hear a peep about it. So naturally public opinion becomes scared of self driving cars and ignorant of the real issue. All of that is really tangential to my point, though. My point is that "feelings over facts" is grossly immoral when ignoring facts causes tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year.