Another School Shooting

dennishoddy said:

The kid was using a commifornika compliant .45 ACP with the regulation 10 round max mag in a gun free zone, carried in his backpack until from what I understand he walked up to a group of students in the "hour before school" and opened fire shooting 5 times, using the 6th on himself. He is dead now.
From what I can see, there is nothing that could have prevented this shooting other than metal detectors at a single person entrance where students are admitted one at a time in a secure area to pass through the detectors.
That would have been impossible because there are over a thousand students at this school, but if it was that way he would have opened fire at those grouped up at the gate entrance. It would take hours to get that many into and away from school every day.

Click to expand...

...politically motivated cognitive gymnastics are the subject of an important new paper lead-authored by Anup Gampa and Sean P. Wojcik that’s just been made available as a preprint (and due to be published in Social Psychological and Personality Science). Specifically, Gampa and Wojcik, working with a team that includes the open-science advocate Brian Nosek, decided to test the effects of politically motivated reasoning using logical syllogisms, a type of logical argument in which premises are assumed to be true, and arguments proceed from there.


The syllogism the researchers use as an example at the top of their paper nicely shows how this sort of thing works:

All things made of plants are healthy. [premise]

Cigarettes are made of plants. [premise]

Therefore, cigarettes are healthy. [conclusion]

By the rules of logic and the conceit of logical syllogisms, this argument is logically sound (even if factually incorrect). But because “cigarettes are healthy” clangs loudly against people’s beliefs about the world, some people will reject this syllogism as false, even after having the logical rules of syllogisms explained to them. This example isn’t a particularly political issue — no one really thinks cigarettes are healthy at this point. What the researchers wanted to know was whether logically valid or invalid politicized syllogisms (pertaining to abortion, for instance) would be more likely to be misinterpreted as false or true, respectively, based on readers’ political beliefs, even though these beliefs should be irrelevant to interpreting the logical soundness of the syllogisms.

So, in a series of studies drawing on thousands of visitors to YourMorals.org and Project Implicit (the first two studies), and a nationally representative online sample of Americans (the third), Gampa and Wojcik asked a group of participants about their political beliefs and then presented them with a series of syllogisms designed to tap into either liberal or conservative sentiments, or no such sentiments at all — sometimes presented in traditional, formal syllogistic structure, and sometimes in more everyday language. The participants’ task was simply to determine which syllogisms were valid, and which were invalid.

From Gampa et al, 2019
As prior research and theory on this subject would suggest, in the first study both liberals and conservatives were more likely to wrongly evaluate syllogisms whose conclusions’ clashed with their politics....

Summing things up, the researchers write, “participants evaluated the logical structure of entire arguments based on whether they believed in or agreed with the arguments’ conclusions. Although these effects were modest in magnitude, they were persistent: we observed these biases in evaluations of both classically-structured logical syllogisms and conversationally-framed political arguments, across a variety of polarised political issues, and in large Internet and nationally representative samples.”...

“A takeaway from this research… may be that reasoners should strive to be epistemologically humble. If logical reasoning is to serve as the antidote to the poison of partisan gridlock, we must begin by acknowledging that it does not merely serve our objectivity, but also our biases.” That is, people should dispense themselves of the notion that when they sit down to reason a problem through carefully, the act of doing so automatically shields them from the effects of political bias. Because bias isn’t a problem endemic to any one political movement: It’s a problem endemic to having a human brain.

Click to expand...