Thursday, February 11, 2016

Equal Time For Nuttiness Sake

So, recently I was spouting off about that old devil may care, "Confirmation bias".  And example AAA111 landed in my soup. So to speak.
First, defi from the Skeptic's Dictionary:
"Confirmation bias refers to a type of selective thinking whereby one tends to notice and to look for what confirms one's beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or undervalue the relevance of what contradicts one's beliefs."
The gentleman pictured above is Mark (not Mork) Sargent, and he is convinced that:
The Earth is flat.
The Sun and Moon and stars are not 'out there', but actually are light sources moving across the 'sky' WITHIN the dome covering our flat planet.
NASA faked not only the Moon landing, but are part of the conspiracy masters master plan to hold us in the darkness of ignorance concerning everything we think we know.
The world is flat like a plate, the North pole at the center and Antarctica is actually the outer rim of the plate which works as a boundary set by...someone.
Sargent has proofs which satisfy him. He has shared these proofs with the world on the interwebs, and is enthusiastic in the arguing/defense/promotion of his beliefs.
I've listened to a few interviews where he shared his views, and...yeah. 
Confirmation bias. As he is the sole arbiter of what constitutes 'proof', the evidence convinces him that he is right, and he believes he is right because of the evidence. 
In the interviews he had a ready answer for every argument. 
But those ready answers often fell back upon the assumption that most of the countries of the world are complicit in a global conspiracy. 
I think Sargent is a good guy who suffers from a class A 'Confirmation Bias'. He's not alone.



1 comment:

Doug said...

About the picture-I get my giggles where I may, so to composite his image in a diagram of fabric bias...our quilters may shake their heads at me, but I laugh.