| | Michael,
I wrote, "They will find that it is more powerful than their conservative band wagon, some of them will find their ideas changing as they ride about, and their yelling from that wagon bed will attract new people to Rand, but not so much to them.'
And in reply you wrote, "You certainly do not mean that conservatives will become atheists who support a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy."
Does it look like I meant that? Really?
In my post I differentiated between the different kinds of conservatives. Those whose primary motivation is religious, who as I said, are not going to be swayed. But I specifically mentioned fiscal conservatives and constitutional conservatives. And any conservative, even a social conservative, can move closer to Capitalism and further from a mixed economy position even if they are not going to be moved on their religion-based positions.
You mix all conservatives together which, depending on the question at hand, is a questionable practice nowadays. And there are atheists that oppose late term abortions and Christians that support a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy.
Objectivism brings an increase in clarity to all political issues, most of which are a muddle in today's culture. Riding Ayn Rand's band wagon, while trying to hold onto muddled, confused positions based upon mixed premises is hard to do. And in that ride, the Objectivists are not going to find themselves becoming more like conservatives, since their positions are so much clearer and well integrated - but some of the conservatives will go away thinking a little more clearly in some areas.
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Michael, you wrote, "I know that you think that other people are motivated by ideas, as you are. You disagree with me that people respond to emotions and justify their actions later."
No, that's not right. You've misunderstood something I've said. We are all motivated by our emotions, and our emotions are based upon ideas. Some of us exercise reason as the primary means of deciding between alternatives, and some of only use reason in a very fuzzy way and often employ it to justify acting on emotion. But everyone uses reason to a degree before acting. This MUST be since emotions are not tools of cognition, you can't even button your shirt without a tiny modicum of thought. People react to emotions differently as they "reason" what to do. Some people treat an emotion as almost imperitive and their reason is about how to act so as to satisfy it, then justify it. Ideas don't motivate in the sense we discussing here - but people can have powerful emotions about an idea and that emotion will motivate. Or people can have powerful emotions wrapped around an idea they have buried in their subconcious mind and the emotion associates with a defense mechanism to keep the idea buried, to avoid a subject, etc.
If you say you use reason primarily to justify your emotions that might be so, but you are speaking for yourself rather than all of mankind.
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The paper you referred to, which was funded by tax dollars, starts like this, "Why do members of the public disagree—sharply and persistently—about facts on which expert scientists largely agree?"
For whatever reason, I immediately thought, "Like man is the cause of global warming?" Hey! I was right - in the next sentence they are going to demonstrate something about climate change... and disposal of nuclear waste, and concealed possesion of guns. The hair on the back of neck lifts as I begin to suspect this paper is really about the annoyance of an elite directed at all of who don't go along with their "scientific" reasons for controlling the behaviors of the rest of us - it's a public policy thing.
I found my brow wrinkling in disapproval as I plowed through phrases like, "the cultural cognition of
scientific consensus" - my mind telling me, cognition isn't a capacity of a culture - sloppy use of terms, and telling me that consensus isn't the same as truth - do they understand that?
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From the paper: "Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to fit their perceptions of risk and related
factual beliefs to their shared moral evaluations of putatively dangerous activities. The cultural cognition
thesis asserts that individuals are psychologically disposed to believe that behavior they (and their peers)
find honorable is socially beneficial, and behavior they find base socially detrimental."
All that this is saying is that humans believe that truth is derived by consensus. Your beliefs are formed to conform with what others think. But note that it is formulated as an assertion of human nature - not just some people but all people. Which makes one wonder what species the authors of the paper are - clearly not these muddled humans that are forced to divine some collective thought pattern and then accept it. These authors are clearly above that.
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From the paper: "For its part, cultural theory remedies the psychometric paradigm with a much-needed theory of individual differences: the interaction of values with the psychological mechanisms featured in the psychometric position explain how one and the same dynamic—whether affect, availability, biased assimilation, source credibility, or others—can nevertheless produce diametrically opposed risk perceptions in different people and indeed intense forms of polarization across groups of persons."
Culture theory: Birds of feather flock together - except here it is a similarity in values that are the feathers.
Psychometiric paradigm: Your values will effect your outlook, including your estimation of risk.
Hang in there... the authors are working their way up to saying those who have bad values will group together to make bad evaluations that don't listen to the elites that have all this good government science to back them up.
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(Hint: There is a psychological aspect to this tendency to clump people into elites and the great unwashed masses. It is a high level of insecurity in one's efficacy and worth, which has driven a person to become an expert - their defenses have been useful - it has driven them to get degrees, and to succeed in academia. But unfortunately, they are still a touch insecure, and a defense is still a defense. So, they cling to their ivory tower and anything that separates themselves from the ignorant hordes - each difference separating them from those they see as their shadow fear, is like a soothing charm to be focused on to help themselves feel better. ("I'm not like them" is the denial of the subconscous fear of "I'm helpless and unworthy") And here we have a study, that is based upon other studies that examines why the masses of people keep ignoring their studies - because they can't help it - their subculture did it to them.)
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See, here we go: "Of course, laypeople are not in a position either to investigate for themselves or fully to understand the technical data compiled by scientific researchers on risks of these sorts. They must therefore turn for assistance to experts. One might thus anticipate (or at least hope) that regardless of the tendency of predispositions and biased information processing to push people of opposing cultural outlooks apart, the need of all them for expert guidance would cause them to gravitate toward the consensus positions among scientists."
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I can't bear to read any more of this. Suffice it to say, the suggestion they craft into their conclusion is to present public policy proposals in a way that doen't conflict with the identity of those people out there in the heartland that don't really think. In other words, utilize propaganda tailored to the ignorant masses somehow slides past their core values.
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