Comment: Most people, even most really smart and accomplished people, express ideas for social reasons that have little to do with the rightness or wrongness of the idea. Often, this is about using your expressed ideas as a badge of team membership; sometimes it’s tactical (a politician positioning himself to be hard to attack from the right, say). We are probably evolved at least as much to win these social battles as we are to correctly understand reality.
This works fine until people start using these expressed-for-social-reasons ideas to think about reality. Then, suddenly, their decision about whether to vaccinate their kids is determined by what TV hosts they like. (Think of it as evolution in action.). Or worse, the whole country’s decision about whether to invade Iraq or what kind of education reform to implement falls out of ideas being expressed to achieve social goals.
