re: #321 Timothy Watson

We were talking yesterday about why Americans can’t get into engineering schools. Maybe because white people have an anti-intellectual attitude that mocks anyone who does well in school?

The USA at least has a strain of anti-intellectualism that goes back to the days of the colonies. In that strain, the combination of conservative authoritarianism combined with religious faith creates the space for anti-intellectualism.

It’s opposite is “facts have a liberal bias.”

Conservative orthodoxy can be summed up (crudely) as “keeping things the way they are” or nostalgia for the past. As such, when some new fact is learned, if it cannot be incorporated into that orthodoxy, it is rejected.

Religious orthodoxy is the same. It does not matter how much evidence piles up for evolution by natural selection, since many (but not all) faiths cannot pretzel-twist what evolution means (no god required), they reject it out of hand. Consider the Scopes Monkey Trial, primarily based on religious faith written into Tennessee law.

The two orthodoxies make affinity fraud an easy task for someone who insinuates themselves into such groups (libertarians are notorious for being scammed). Affinity fraud depends on trust between the fraudster and the target.

Once that trust is achieved, it becomes easy to scam the target - the target is predisposed to reject any new information (I am gullible) in favour of orthodoxy (members of my group are moral and would never scam me). Bernie Madoff and prosperity gospel pastors are notorious for this, as is Bitcoin.

Because facts cannot penetrate the orthodoxy of whatever belief the person holds, they become convinced that “others” are out to “get” them. It leads to everything from science-denial to outright tinfoil haberdashery.