Flimsy beliefs

Brilliant post by Andy Masley as usual:

I’ve been in a lot of conversations with people who are seemingly structuring their whole lives around a belief, but when I poke them and ask them simple obvious questions they act like they’ve never thought about it before. This happened a lot in education and pedagogy, a field where notoriously few practices replicate, and a lot of fads take over. I would sometimes meet people who were spending years promoting a specific pedagogical idea as an important key to completely transforming American education. When I would ask simple but specific questions about how the idea compared to others, they would get hand-wavy quickly and not have clear answers. This doesn’t make sense if they decided the belief was important via a lot of exploration of different ideas and evidence, but it does if they want to be associated with something they sense is important and good and high status. I and my friends have had similar experiences talking to people about their deeply held beliefs about politics, religion, and their own careers and longterm life plans.