by Patrick Appel
Digby reflects on this article:
It turns out that our brains are designed to create "cognitive shortcuts" to cope with the rush of information which I'm guessing is more important than ever in this new age. I'm also guessing one of these "cognitive shortcuts" is trusting in certain tribal identification and shared "worldview" to make things easier to sort out, which is why things are getting hyperpartisan and polarized in this time of information overload. (And sadly, one of the effects of that would be more confirmation of whatever bad information exists within the group.) So politics becomes a dogfight in which the battle is not just between ideas, but between the facts themselves.