Facts and Reality

[Fau Teixeira]

I've been meaning to write this or something like this for a while. It's a simple concept that I don't think a majority of people recognize or follow. Much to the detriment of us all.

We as a society, have no respect for facts or for reality.

This is a massively huge problem, and it permeates every aspect of our lives. As human beings we have a few things that we do incredibly well. We are fantastic pattern seekers and we make incredibly fast decisions based on gigantic amounts of data, and all this is done mostly at the subconscious level. This has served us extremely well in our day-to-day existence, but is an immense liability when we are faced anything we perceive as going against our existing notions of the world. We rush to judgement, whether we are wrong or right, we stick to our guns and then make as many excuses or deflections or denials to validate our original stance.

I'm not going to go into every instance where I see this happening, I don't have time to post a 15000 essay on this subject. But i'll leave a bullet point list of issues where i see it in our daily lives and hopefully people can expand and discuss.

 - the social contract
 - personal right and responsibilities
 - climate change
 - religions
 - politics
 - health and wellness
 - giving up and the concept of potential

[Dave Gray]

- giving up and the concept of potential

Please elaborate.

[Fau Teixeira]

Please elaborate.

we lack a good understanding of opportunity costs and we put too much value on "time invested"

sometimes the best thing people can do for their future is to give up on whatever isn't working and pursue something else that will work better.

[Landshark]

- giving up and the concept of potential

Please elaborate.

we lack a good understanding of opportunity costs and we put too much value on "time invested"

sometimes the best thing people can do for their future is to give up on whatever isn't working and pursue something else that will work better.

Excellent points.  A perfect example of this would be young people's attitudes towards the job market.  A 21 year old college graduate can't find a job in their field and refuses to take a job in a low paying industry such as food service, retail or home health care.  Instead, they think they've invested a lot of time in pursuing their degree so they will just camp out on mom's couch for a little while until a job that validates their degree comes along.  Not only is that unlikely to happen, but even if it does, they would fail at that job because they would be missing out on learning the fundamental skills required of ANY job.

[Dave Gray]

In general, I agree with your statement, Fau.  It's something that I, personally, really try to improve on. I am always trying to question myself and challenge my own positions.  Occasionally, I'll run into something where my "gut" tells me one thing, but I logically come to the other side by looking at evidence.  It's a constant struggle that humanity faces, I think.