Dunning-Kruger effect - about how to think

[sonia]

A young woman, 20-something, bright, said more people get cancer recently because evolution tends toward entropy. I said, uh, no, bad mutations get eliminated over time, and she said well, the Bible says we used to live so much longer, and I said, I like my woo and science kept separate, and also the Bible and science. The Bible is not historical! And she said we'll have to agree to disagree on that, and I was sputtering internally for a good half hour.

She attended public schools in a small town in Oregon, not religious school as I would have guessed. I've run into this wall with her before, where she thought she could assert something as fact because she felt like it, or change the meaning of a word, and now I see the underpinnings. I can see that I know so much more than she does (about how to *think*!), and she can't, and she's asserting her view as valid. Microcosm of our political situation. Reality bats last...

I did mention the dinosaur feathers in amber. (So cool!)

I wonder if in twenty years or so she'll be sadder and wiser, or if she'll continue to be hermetically sealed against actual thought. She can't *learn* with her current framework!

Comments

[silveradept]

These days, she won't have to venture outside her bible bubble to interact with the world, and there will be plenty of fake news to collect so as not to have to think outside it, either.

[sonia]

Sadly!

I'm wondering what effect it will have to attend an event regularly at my house, where she encounters friction with her way of being in the world. Every time there's friction I wonder if she'll stop coming, but she keeps showing up.

[silveradept]

Perhaps it will bring about needed changes of mind. It might also be useful just to listen in and hear what someone else's arguments are, so you can deal with them more effectively later.

[sonia]

When there's an argument like, "The Bible is factual," it stops the discussion as far as I'm concerned.

[silveradept]

There is that. At a certain point, you can't actually do something about it until someone gets to a particular level.