Why Intelligent Scientists Don't Suffer From Motivated Reasoning

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I think ideology trumps rationality or intelligence, in the sense that some of Dan Kahan's research on how people reason about problems. So if anything, intelligent, rational people are better able to rationalize what they want to be true for some other reason. And I do think this goes a long way to explain it like remember that book what happened to Kansas. People are not voting their self interests. You would think they would selfishly vote for whichever party is going to give them what they want for their personal lives but they don't sometimes faith and flag and family.

Shermer and Oreskes discuss: the myth of market magic • market fundamentalism • market absolutism • market essentialism • capitalism and democracy • well-regulated vs. poorly regulated capitalism • U.S. Constitution and capitalism • what the founding fathers believed about markets • what Adam Smith really said about markets and capitalism and how economists rewrote Adam Smith • why markets need regulation in the same way sports need rules and referees • rhetorical fallacies of market fundamentalists • child labor laws • bank failures • Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 • Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman • religion and capitalism • think tanks • collective action problems.

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many other outlets. Her TED talk, “Why We Should Trust Scientists,” was viewed more than a million times. Erik M. Conway is a historian of science and technology and works for the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of seven books and dozens of articles and essays. Their new book is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.