The Fickleness of Human Opinion and Why We Are Close-Minded

A pundit on CNBC Business News expressed a couple of days ago his concern that governments throughout the Western world are now experiencing a new threat of populism, comparing it to the rise of tyrannical regimes in former decades. People of low information needs are electing demagogues championing the will of the people through false promises and over-simplification. What he forgot to mention is that it may be flourishing at the moment but it has always been a risk of democratic nations. For example, many Brits feel they were lied to regarding a Brexit promise that their yearly contribution to the EU would be funneled into funding for the National Health Service. Similarly, the promise of Mexico paying for a southern wall across the US is not considered (1) realistic humanly, (2) possible politically on either side of the border, and (3) very effective in the end anyway. But, whatever, the case the simplistic solutions and promises made to the population is effective without a doubt.

In reference to the Chilcot Report, Matthew Syed wrote an article for the BBC Magazine section entitled: Why We Cover Our Ears to the Facts. Of course I respect his opinions here and appreciate them for no other reason that they give me something to write about!  But his observations are woefully naive and inadequate to answer the question he poses.

He states that, despite evidence to the contrary, people always stick to their position on a matter. I agree with him concerning this overall truth but disagree with him on why people do so, especially in the case of the Chilcot Report. 

People stick to their earlier decisions regarding the Western coalition's intervention in Iraq, not because they defied the facts; they supported the intervention because they never heard the facts! Moreover, the false information they received came from the intelligence services of the number one superpower in the world that shared many of their same values, beliefs and language--the United States. By and large, the US has always been a reliably partner in Britain's transatlantic relationship and this trajectory was one that lulled Britain into a national support for US foreign policy (which apparently was really being controlled by President Bush's aides and not himself). The "slam dunk" certainty about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction came from information delivered to congress that was the result of cherry-picking and the influence of Dick Cheney and other neo-cons. Still the same, Canada was one of the few allies of the US that did not buy the intelligence and this later became a point of pride among Canadians (although they did participate in Afghanistan). 

What provoked the strongest reaction from concerning Syed's article were his statements, "Science has changed the world because it prioritises evidence over conviction. Judgements are subservient to what the data tells us." This is only partially true because science itself is only partly verifiable. The science based on observable evidence that can be repeated at will is certainly evidence upon which decisions and opinions can be made. And so our engineers and other applied scientists do. But historic science is not verifiable and is frequently contradicted though published as fact. 

Science has never answered the biggest questions in life, the questions its own theories are based upon. How did the element of time arise? (It is present in our smallest particle of matter, radioistopes.) How did life arise when no current intelligence can created it (except the parent of every plant, animal and human).? How can the probabilities of millions, billions or even trillions of sequential events have arisen by random chance? Statisticians recognize a virtual impossibility when the smallness of a number is inversely lower than the number of atoms in our universe. 

And it gets even worse: The notion that science can speak to the origins of time, space and life is absurd. It cannot because it is unable. So it attempts to explain its wisdom by, in some cases, publishing meaningless tautologies like "survival of the fittest", "time may have arisen from a singularity (spacetime, Stephen Hawking), or by dating non-radioactive strata by its index fossils and, on other occasions, turning around and dating fossils by the strata they are found in. 

And if Mr. Syed has any confidence in the scientific community and its peer review process, he should research this subject further. Both British and American sources expose the flat-out chicanery of the process and how easily it is circumvented and, therefore, how unreliable it is. An article, The Peer Review Scam, from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine should dismay him enough: "So we have little evidence on the effectiveness of peer review, but we have considerable evidence on its defects. In addition to being poor at detecting gross defects and almost useless for detecting fraud it is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone to bias, and easily abused." Then he might move on to another article from Canada's CBC | Technology & Science Q&A webpage by Torah Kachur, 2016 ("Science Community Looks for Ways to Stop Fake Papers", where she submitted her own fake paper and received favourable peer reviews. An article from CBC's radio program, the Current, published an investigation into peer review revealing that most of the papers submitted paid for their reviews while other submissions were reviewed by as little as two contributing editors. Lord Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist and member of Britain's House of Lords, assured BBC's Stephen Sackur on his program, HardTalk, that scientists were the least able to change because of their deeply entrenched biases. (She said this in response to her being roundly criticized by her academic colleagues for publishing an article raising the question of cell phones' impacts on neurotransmitters, backing up her concerns by citing some 500 papers published by mostly Scandinavian and Australian universities.) Perhaps our confidence in the objective nature of science needs to be reexamined.

Therefore, it isn't just that people are intransigent when it comes to defying the evidence before them. It is also a matter of believing that the evidence is really true after all. CNN announced some two years ago that 15% of all article published in all medical journals were retracted. Some 5% were actually falsified! 

Mr. Syed must also acknowledge that Prime Minister Blair and some senior members of the British military have denied the truth of some of Mr. Chilcot's conclusions. I guess it all depends on where you get your information from!

A perfect example of the population being dazzled by insufficient evidence is a new book coming out by Canadian-American writer, Malcolm Gladwell, entitled David and Goliath. He has already been on several major US programs promoting the novel and convincing idea that people breaking new ground traditionally are often rejected later on because of a moral license people adopt. His example were powerful to be sure. America had its first Catholic President with John Kennedy but never another one since. How many US cities had one black mayor only to never have another one? By this metric, President Obama may be the last president the US may ever have. And, as a warning to Secretary Hilary Clinton, he mentioned the same trend with regard to women political leaders. (While in Toronto, he cited the case of Kim Campbell and her lone status as Canada's only woman prime minister.) 

If we listen only to Mr. Gladwell's evidence, we might think he has fallen upon some novel truth. But, while speaking in Toronto, he was thoughtfully opposed by a Norwegian lady in the audience who cited the fact the Norway has had several female prime ministers to which Gladwell could not speak to. Likewise, someone from the same audience brought up the integration of African-Americans into the sports world (e.g. Jackie Robinson), paving the way for many African-Americans to come. All of a sudden the new truth he has stumbled upon may not be so universal after all. (He also forgot to mention Britain's several queens.) 

It is true that humans are resistant to change but, as it turns, out this makes them very typical and very average. And the empiricism of science doesn't alter this. "A man convinced against his will of of the same opinion still," goes the old rhyme. 

Would scientists dare to believe that something can come from nothing and then explode? They do. Would scientists believe in this day in spontaneous generation? That life can come from non-life? Despite the law of abiogenesis, they do. Would scientists embrace a molecules-to-man evolution contrary to the class law of cell theory, that no new genetic information can ever be added to a daughter cell? They do. And if the chance that all 52 cards of a deck could be drawn sequentially be 1/(52^52), would scientists believe that millions of sequential developments could bring about our orderly universe and our earth? They do. 

People universally are close-minded it turns out. Very few have been given the gift of an open mind that judges all the evidence critically and arrives at the most logical conclusion. Without this gift, I am afraid our world will continue to teeter-totter back and forth politically and socially until the most harm is done to the most people.