{"id":2682,"date":"2011-04-23T08:55:25","date_gmt":"2011-04-23T13:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=2682"},"modified":"2011-04-23T08:55:25","modified_gmt":"2011-04-23T13:55:25","slug":"thats-nonscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=2682","title":{"rendered":"That&#8217;s nonscience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chris Mooney (coauthor of the Republican War on Science) has an article in Mother Jones&nbsp;called &quot;<a href=\"http:\/\/motherjones.com\/politics\/2011\/03\/denial-science-chris-mooney\">The Science of&nbsp;Why&nbsp;We Don&#39;t&nbsp;Believe Science<\/a>.&quot;&nbsp; A&nbsp;sample:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;In other words, when we think we&#39;re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist <a href=\"http:\/\/people.virginia.edu\/~jdh6n\/\" target=\"_blank\">Jonathan Haidt<\/a>: We may think we&#39;re being scientists, but <a href=\"https:\/\/motherjones.com\/files\/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">we&#39;re actually being lawyers<\/a> (PDF). Our &quot;reasoning&quot; is a means to a predetermined end&mdash;winning our &quot;case&quot;&mdash;and is shot through with biases. They include &quot;confirmation bias,&quot; in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and &quot;disconfirmation bias,&quot; in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the whole thing.&nbsp; Read it and despair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chris Mooney (coauthor of the Republican War on Science) has an article in Mother Jones&nbsp;called &quot;The Science of&nbsp;Why&nbsp;We Don&#39;t&nbsp;Believe Science.&quot;&nbsp; A&nbsp;sample: &nbsp;In other words, when we think we&#39;re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we&#39;re being scientists, but we&#39;re &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=2682\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">That&#8217;s nonscience<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[483,1042,1041,1043],"class_list":["post-2682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-chris-mooney","tag-climate-denialism","tag-the-science-of-why-we-dont-believe-science","tag-vaccines-and-autism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2682"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2684,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2682\/revisions\/2684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}