Being cancelled or given a Twitter pile-on by woke warriors doesn’t seem to be the solution – it only entrenches the true believers and epistemically stubborn in their false ideas.

A paragraph later:

So the vaccine for this epidemic is more likely to be facts, stated plainly and often, and for the bad thinkers to be called out and ostracised if they refuse to listen.

There's not much difference between those two. 'If X didn't work we need to try X harder, because its gotta be the solution' is just another variety of bad thinking.

http://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/eecxiw/wake_up_olive_has_destroyed_my_friends_grip_on/

http://churchleaders.com/news/367958-bethel-church-stops-praying-for-god-to-wakeupolive.html

When I was growing up a christo-fascist republican youth in the 90's and early 2000s it would have been ludicrous, even to me, even to my evolution denying, young earth believing brethren, that after a person dies their body would be treated with anything less than the most care, gentleness and dignity possible given circumstance. If one of our congregants had a family member pass away, and another family member received a 'prophetic word' or some other such nonsense that their loved one would be raised bodily from the dead, the rest of the church wouldn't pile on and give that persons grief induced psychosis fuel and $60,000 of gofundme money. EVEN. THEN. We knew that grief causes people to think and feel and act in bizarre, uncomfortable, and unpredictable ways. The delusion that a loved one is 'merely resting' and will wake up any time is one of the more common ones from the little digging I bothered to do on the subject.

The case I linked above is referred to as 'Wake Up Olive.' In short, several years ago a child unexpectedly died whose parents were high in the food chain at a major, internationally infamous evangelical church. They kept this poor girls body unrefrigerated in a church sanctuary for days praying for her resurrection. The process in total was weeks long, painful for family and community.

This event has happened again here in Metro Detroit. Someone in the constellation of my in laws church and affiliates passed away, and they kept the body unrefrigerated in a sanctuary for DAYS as they prayed over it trying to bring it back from the dead.

They did a good job keeping things quiet on the whole, the announcement that this was to occur was made only over live, non recorded facebook streams of church services. I have checked to see if any headlines have popped up in the Detroit Free Press about bodies in sanctuaries but however it resolved, it did so quietly, or such news is not yet public.

Take this as my usual anti-religious screed if you wish.

Harper's is a great source of entertainment. I must have unsubscribed at some point, finding dumbth in the world is too easy and gets boring.

Here’s a sample from this month: “Percentage of Democrats that Republicans believe are atheist or agnostic: 36. Percentage that are: Nine.”

Ahler and Sood found that party members' perceptions of each other were vastly out of step with reality.

"People make large, systematic errors when judging party composition, considerably overestimating the extent to which partisans belong to party-stereotypical groups," they wrote.

Democrats thought that 44.1% of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year. The actual proportion is 2.2%. They also thought that 44.2% of Republicans are 65 or older, more than twice as high as the actual percentage of 21.3%. They were a little better at guessing how many GOP members are Evangelicals or Southerners, only overestimating those categories by about nine points.

Republicans were even worse at guessing the composition of the Democratic party. They guessed that 46.4% of Democrats are black. The real value is 23.9%. They further estimated that 43.5% are union members, 38.2% are LGBT, and 35.7% are atheist or agnostic. In order, the actual values are 10.5%, 6.3%, and 8.7%.

Ahler and Sood replicated these findings in three more studies conducted with Amazon's Mechanical Turk...

Surveys are poor sources of evidence, and paid online surveys may be the worst. I don't dispute that many people have stupid ideas, but this author does not distinguish himself as above average.

“Proportion of Republicans who believe high-level Democrats run a child sex-trafficking ring: Half.” Half of American Republicans think Democrat leaders are paedophiles! Good grief.

The source is a YouGov survey which asked if "Top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings." To me this brings to mind the Epstein case, the court documents of which named high-level politicians like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.

"There’s no indication that any of the individuals named in the sealed court documents had any knowledge of or any involvement with Epstein’s alleged crimes" but perhaps in the popular imagination "high-level Democrats" like Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. George Mitchell are "involved" simply by being named in the case.

If it seems that politics makes people stupider, perhaps we should ask how our own thinking is distorted, rather than repeating the familiar list of dumb things the other side says: "vaccination causes autism, or that prominent politicians and movie stars are involved in a cannibalistic paedophile ring, or that climate change is a hoax or that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election."

How about a look at the ideas that genetically modified organisms are harmful, or nuclear power is more dangerous than alternatives, or recycling is a worthwhile activity, or "no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change"? Isn't the Doomsday Clock running a bit behind?