The Truth about Fast & Furious

[DanTex]

70. The skill you need to work on is tolerance of uncertainty.

It's really important, because once you move past the third grade, you will find that the world is full of situations like this one, where you don't have all of the facts.

People who can't reason in the face of uncertainty often tend to buy into conspiracy theories, UFOs, things like that. There is a lot of "evidence" for conspiracy theories that can't be immediately explained away, so you need to be comfortable with uncertainty. I don't know why that picture looks like an aircraft and 20 different people said they saw a bright light, but I'm still pretty sure it's not a UFO. I don't know why the pictures of the moon landing have no stars in them, but I'm pretty sure there's some explanation besides it being faked in a studio and they forgot the stars. I don't know why Obama decided to wait for so long before releasing the "long form" birth certificate, but I'm pretty sure it's not because he had to wait until his operatives had bribed enough people to get it faked. Etc.

Actually, since a government official getting something wrong in congressional testimony is not really very unusual, it's kind of surprising that your head is exploding over this. I guess the thought of losing the beloved F&F conspiracy theory strikes terror and triggers desperation. Like I said, getting something wrong doesn't imply lying -- Holder could have been mistaken. Or not -- like I also said, there actually was at least one instance of "gunwalking". We simply don't know how thorough an investigation the DoJ performed, after all, they did give two different answers to the "gunwalking" question, so they got it wrong one of those two times. What it looks like to me is that Holder's testimony was motivated by political expediency, but in the end, we don't know.

This whole incident reminds me again of that study about the difference between thought patterns of conservatives. As I've noted before, the thought patterns pro-gunners and conservatives are very similar. And this is not just because they are usually the same people, it's because the kind of propensities that would drive people towards believing the NRA line are simply more common among right-wingers. Not surprisingly, intolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity and a need for order, structure, and closure are some of the significant differentiating characteristics. This is one of the reasons why conservatives have trouble dealing with the chaotic real world in which reasoning under uncertainty is an essential skill.

Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (–.32); uncertainty tolerance (–.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (–.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (–.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.

http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/jost.glaser.political-conservatism-as-motivated-social-cog.pdf