Ordinarily intelligent people become flawed thinkers

To The Daily Sun,

Oh, us poor stupid victimized white people! Golly, we have had it rough, haven’t we? Blonde hair and blue eyes have been a living Hell for me! Save us from the brown people and ourselves, Ryan Murdough!

Racists and xenophobes make all kinds of bizarre and unfounded claims about Jews, Muslims, minorities, and immigrants and cognitively are little different than anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, chem-trailers, Moon landing deniers, flat Earthers and young earth creationists. They have it all wrong. They are cognitively myopic. We have to be reminded what the Dunning-Kruger Effect looks like in action. These are people who think they are far more informed than they really are and put on a good puppet show of confidence.

One only needs to understand what is termed “motivated reasoning” to understand why some people proudly strut their stunning ignorance publicly and back it up with even more nonsense. Motivated reasoning is powered by all kinds of flawed cognitive approaches like confirmation biases. The person has made up their mind on something and only accepts ‘evidence’ that supports their conclusions. They search high and low for confirmation, rejecting all else including any mountains of evidence to the contrary that they might dare to read. This is self-brainwashing and humans are experts at it due to the plasticity of our brains. Their reasoning is solely motivated by a held belief, not critical and objective analyses. Everything possible, including lying, is in play to shore up their point of view. They have a world-box already built and if something doesn’t fit into that box, it is discarded. They act and write as if they are supremely confident, like every Dunning-Kruger example.

Everything they write about their targets is mostly rubbish and is in the province of the self-delusional. Their worldview is not congruent with reality. They delude themselves by mistaking their own alleged ‘knowledge’ and perceptions of the world for objective analyses and conclusions. They live in a closet. They can’t see past their noses. Confirmatory biases make an ordinarily intelligent person into a flawed thinker desperately looking for confirmation, rejecting all other explanations, and passionately hoping that their little box contains the truth.

According to the Brookings Institute, Demographic projections confirm the importance of racial minorities as the primary demographic engine of the nation’s future growth, countering an aging, slow-growing and soon to be declining white population. The new statistics project that the nation will become “minority white” in 2045. During that year, whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations.

The shift is the result of two trends. First, between 2018 and 2060, gains will continue in the combined racial minority populations, growing by 74 percent. Second, during this time frame, the aging white population will see a modest immediate gain through 2024, and then experience a long-term decline through 2060, a consequence of more deaths than births.

This trend is also occurring with religious belief. The General Survey which has been conducted since the early 1970s has just found that the “religious nones” have just inched passed both Catholicism and Evangelicals in numbers. In 1972 they numbered 5 percent. Now they stand at over 23 percent. And in England, atheists outnumber Christians, which will eventually happen here.

Ryan Murdough, Steve Earle, Don Ewing, and the rest of the Lakes Region Dunning-Kruger Gang of pseudointellectuals can spend the rest of their lives attacking non-whites (and non-Judeo-Christians) and writing their petty Jeremiads but it is a wasted life because there is no chance for success. Think Sisyphus. What they want is not in the cards.

James Veverka

Tilton