Hot damn. Anil Dash hands Malcolm Gladwell a scotch and says, “Sit down, old man.”
Study: Misinformed Partisans Really Hate Facts
via savingpaper:
It’s what one researcher calls the “I Know I’m Right” syndrome:
Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
In another study:
More than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)
Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion.
His party also won 6 of the City Council’s 15 seats. Mr. Gnarr, in search of a coalition partner, ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of The Wire. (via savingpaper)
The single mother's manifesto, by J.K. Rowling
Read this, whether you’re a single parent or not, whether you’re British or not.
Al Franken kicks eleventy-million kinds of ass in health-care hearing - Boing Boing
My favourite part isn’t the sarcasm, it’s his point about cherry-picking statistics.
Americana That Barack Obama Has Made Un-American
Even though he didn’t deserve it, it’s still awesome that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, right? No, it’s not. It used to be, but now that Barack Obama has done it, it’s un-American.
It’s been getting kind of confusing keeping track of what’s truly American anymore, so Gawker came up with a handy list of things that are socialist and foreign because Barack Obama has soiled them, by doing them.
