Adopting beliefs that conflict with your preexisting belief system is incredibly difficult. It’s arduous and confusing. It’s not as simple as looking at one pie

Adopting beliefs that conflict with your preexisting belief system is incredibly difficult. It’s arduous and confusing. It’s not as simple as looking at one piece of evidence and saying “oh I was wrong”. This is because beliefs form a web of knowledge, and they reinforce each other. On the other hand, adopting evidence based beliefs is very very easy when those beliefs line up with your existing belief system. If you’ve ever tried to, say, talk an anti vaxxer into taking a COVID vaccine this becomes very obvious. The discussion notably is not straightforward. It’s not “here’s the report saying it reduces hospitalizations and deaths” “oh I can’t refute that okay” It’s more like “here’s the report saying it reduces hospitalizations and deaths” “that report is lying because Fauci ordered it, here’s a headline i saw that there were tons of deaths in the Israeli vaccine trial, and here’s a link that describes the evil peoples intentions with the vaccine” Instead of convincing them with evidence you’ve forked into 3 separate arguments (trust in validity of peer review + what happened in the Israeli trial + can you trust this article that claims fauci and bill gates are satanic cultists) And that’s without diving into the ocean of human bias that allow us to reinforce our belief system with little effort.