(March 4, 2014 at 3:24 am)Aractus Wrote: LP you are actually right about me (partially anyway) - I think the majority of people are unbelievably stupid. I think that smokers do not actually believe that smoking causes cancer. I think that overweight and obese people do not actually believe that it causes cancer, diabetes, heart disease and strokes. And I think that drug users do not believe in the dangers of drug use - until it actually happens to them.
As I understand it, research indicates that we are wired to believe that these things do happen, but that they will not happen to us. Hence we are more likely to warn people away from certain actions that can lead to harsh consequences, while taking risks of our own because we're pretty sure we can avoid the harsh consequences. I think it's why we are often unfazed by news of a terrible disaster that befalls people we don't know, yet thunderstruck when something even relatively minor happens to us or someone we know.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
