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While I agree with that sentiment (and as you say, "not a silver bullet"), I despair over something I see more and more lately: people who do have at least some

While I agree with that sentiment (and as you say, "not a silver bullet"), I despair over something I see more and more lately: people who do have at least some understanding of logic, and make "logical" arguments... but they've chosen the outcome they want to believe in advance, and are just using logic to rationalize / justify their belief. And yes, that's more or less exactly what logic is in a sense... except the people I'm talking about skip the part about checking the base premises they are building their argument on - because they so badly want to arrive at a specific conclusion.

ineedasername 6y ago
Yes, "knowledge" is so broad that even if you have lots of learning you can choose subsets that support your predispositions. That's an understanding of human nature we've had for some time, giving rise to things like double blind randomized studies and the (too often ignored nowadays) need to reproduce results. But in less scientific environments (everyday life) we don't have easy workarounds for that aspect of human nature. I don't know the answer. I don't know how you get people in general to plow through emotional reactions first and then give in to them only after a thoughtful process. Education seems to help though, and lacking some other solution it seems a reasonable thing to focus on. Yet even that is now more of a political issue than it has ever been.