Wishful thinking

(Difference between revisions)*[[Atheists]] engage in wishful thinking when they disbelieve in God because they do not want Him to exist, rather than because they have any direct evidence for the nonexistence of God.*[[Atheists]] engage in wishful thinking when they disbelieve in God because they do not want Him to exist, rather than because they have any direct evidence for the nonexistence of God.*[[Homosexual]]s engage in wishful thinking when they accuse those who oppose and criticize [[homosexuality]] and [[Same-sex marriage|homosexual "marriage"]] of being "[[homophobia|homophobes]]" and "secretly gay" because, despite having no evidence to prove their claims, they want to believe that their opponents are "self-hating homosexuals", even though those homosexuals who make such accusations are not mind-readers, and they delude themselves into thinking that their opponents are the "opposite" of what they really are because those homosexuals do not want to believe that there is no such thing as "homophobia" or that their opponents have legitimate reasons for not supporting or agreeing with the homosexual lifestyle and its [[Homosexuality and disease|resulting]] [[Mental Health and Homosexuality|consequences]].*[[Homosexual]]s engage in wishful thinking when they accuse those who oppose and criticize [[homosexuality]] and [[Same-sex marriage|homosexual "marriage"]] of being "[[homophobia|homophobes]]" and "secretly gay" because, despite having no evidence to prove their claims, they want to believe that their opponents are "self-hating homosexuals", even though those homosexuals who make such accusations are not mind-readers, and they delude themselves into thinking that their opponents are the "opposite" of what they really are because those homosexuals do not want to believe that there is no such thing as "homophobia" or that their opponents have legitimate reasons for not supporting or agreeing with the homosexual lifestyle and its [[Homosexuality and disease|resulting]] [[Mental Health and Homosexuality|consequences]].  They also [[fallacy of invincible ignorance|completely ignore]] the copious evidence of the harms caused by same-sex "marriage" to both individuals and society.*Believers in discredited scientific theories such as [[evolution]] and [[global warming]] cling to their beliefs for the same reason.*Believers in discredited scientific theories such as [[evolution]] and [[global warming]] cling to their beliefs for the same reason.

Wishful thinking is both a cognitive bias[1] and a logical fallacy.[2] It consists of believing something, or believing something to be more likely than it in fact is, because one wants it to be true.

As a logical fallacy, it it similar to the appeal to emotion, except that the appeal is to one's own emotion rather than only to the emotions of the audience. The fallacy makes a desire for the conclusion to be a premise; that is, it takes the following form:

I want P to be true. Therefore, P.

A person engaging in wishful thinking almost never states it so bluntly, however. Instead, that person may cherry-pick the evidence or otherwise distort reality to support the desired conclusion.

There is also reverse wishful thinking, which is Murphy's law as a cognitive bias.

Atheists engage in wishful thinking when they disbelieve in God because they do not want Him to exist, rather than because they have any direct evidence for the nonexistence of God. Homosexuals engage in wishful thinking when they accuse those who oppose and criticize homosexuality and homosexual "marriage" of being "homophobes" and "secretly gay" because, despite having no evidence to prove their claims, they want to believe that their opponents are "self-hating homosexuals", even though those homosexuals who make such accusations are not mind-readers, and they delude themselves into thinking that their opponents are the "opposite" of what they really are because those homosexuals do not want to believe that there is no such thing as "homophobia" or that their opponents have legitimate reasons for not supporting or agreeing with the homosexual lifestyle and its resulting consequences. They also completely ignore the copious evidence of the harms caused by same-sex "marriage" to both individuals and society. Believers in discredited scientific theories such as evolution and global warming cling to their beliefs for the same reason. ? SideWise Thinking? Logical Fallacy: Wishful Thinking

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The ‘Veronica Mars’ Movie Kickstarter And Why Fans Need To Start Thinking Of Themselves As Investors

The news yesterday that Warner Brothers had given Rob Thomas, the television writer who created Veronica Mars (he’s also an extremely strong young adult novelist whose work is well worth a look), permission to crowdfund a movie continuation of the show, was met with some disgruntlement that viewers were being asked to be the investors in a corporate product from which they’d recognize no profits, and, at the point of this writing $2.761 million in donations, more than enough to get the movie made. Willa Paskin is obviously correct that consumers’ ticket dollars already fund the production of movies. But in between her argument and the view of critics of the project lies an important point: if consumers are going to get asked like investors by mainstream media companies, they should think about what they want out of the bargain other than the simple creation fo the product.

The idea that investors deserve something more than the existence of whatever product or movie or show they’re funded is embedded in Kickstarter’s rewards system. If you give at different levels, you might get a t-shirt, tickets to a premiere party, or even an opportunity to name a character or appear in a film or game. Those rewards tend to be set by the people who are proposing the project, based on what they think they can manageably offer (though a considerable portion of crowd-funded projects ship their core products late, and some developers are running into problems when demand or unexpected costs for rewards means higher burdens for delivery than they expected). Where consumer choice enters into the process is the selection of the reward level, rather than the offerings themselves.

One thing that’s striking about the Veronica Mars Kickstarter is that you have to give at least $35, more than four times the cost of the average American movie ticket in 2012, to get a digital download of the movie. You have to give $750 to get a ticket to the premiere of the film in Los Angeles. If the Kickstarter was really inverting the process by which ticket sales fund the production of movies, going from taking the profits from one project and plowing them into the creation of another, to letting people put that ticket money up in advance, then the campaign would have to get tickets or downloads to all of its donors. It would be a method that would be fair to fans, who after all, want to see the thing they’re funding, and it might make a lot of sense for both the studios and for third-party retailers like Fandango. Nothing sells tickets like advance buzz, and getting people to commit to see the movie in advance is probably a good way to get them to bring their friends along as well. And while tickets and downloads require initial coordination with Fandango or iTunes, they’re less costly and work-intensive than say, printing and mailing t-shirts.

That’s a small example of the sorts of material things that fans could and should express that they want out of projects like this. But there are a lot of other ways to think about these kinds of investment opportunities. I might have been more excited, for example, to invest in buying back the rights to create new work in the Veronica Mars universe for Rob Thomas, if Warner Brothers could have been persuaded to sell it. I’d love to see a block of fan investors who prioritize projects that commit to work with union crews and pay actors union wages.

And I’ve written about this before, but I’d frankly love to see fans move beyond investing in single projects. Given all the discussion we have about the whiteness of movies and television, and, as Ta-Nehisi Coates and I have written, the lack of black investors who are willing and able to lose money financing projects, I’d be excited to see a crowd-funded film investment fund that only backs projects by creators of color or featuring non-white actors, perhaps that’s structured as a non-profit*. Ditto for an investment fund that could back projects by women. There’s nothing wrong with passionate attachment to single franchises, or single creators, but those aren’t the only ways that fans think about popular culture. And limiting our demonstrations of investment power to single artists or single projects ultimately limits our reach, and our ability to affect the culture. I don’t think fans are ever going to put together Megan Ellison money, for example. But I think ordinary viewers, over time, and perhaps through subscription, could put together enough to fund a series of projects that would be good enough to attract notice at places like Sundance and SXSW.

All of these approaches mean thinking through an awful lot of logistics and organizational questions. But those are all much less difficult to do than that getting fans to think of themselves not as supplicants but as an economic force. It’s easy to feel disempowered in the face of show cancellations and fired showrunners and huge delays in movie adaptations. But at a moment of extraordinary chaos in the television industry, and of new and emerging distribution models in both movies and television, this is the perfect moment for viewers with money to spend to assert ourselves, and not just to buy a speaking part in a Veronica Mars movie.

*

I should note have no objection to the idea of fans making money off such funds. I just think that a non-profit structure might help alleviate expectations for first-time investors, given the number of film and television projects that end up generating losses.

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Denial River: Conspiracy Thinking In The Climate Blogosphere In Response To Research On Conspiracy Thinking

By Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky via Shaping Tomorrow’s World

There is growing evidence that conspiratorial thinking, also known as conspiracist ideation, is often involved in the rejection of scientific propositions. Conspiracist ideations tend to invoke alternative explanations for the nature or source of the scientific evidence. For example, among people who reject the link between HIV and AIDS, common ideations involve the beliefs that AIDS was created by the U.S. Government.

My colleagues and I published a paper recently that found evidence for the involvement of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of scientific propositions—from climate change to the link between tobacco and lung cancer, and between HIV and AIDS—among visitors to climate blogs. This was a fairly unsurprising result because it meshed well with previous research and the existing literature on the rejection of science. Indeed, it would have been far more surprising, from a scientific perspective, if the article had not found a link between conspiracist ideation and rejection of science.

Nonetheless, as some readers of this blog may remember, this article engendered considerable controversy.

The article also generated data.

Data, because for social scientists, public statements and publically-expressed ideas constitute data for further research. Cognitive scientists sometimes apply something called “narrative analysis” to understand how people, groups, or societies are organized and how they think.

In the case of the response to our earlier paper, we were struck by the way in which some of the accusations leveled against our paper were, well, somewhat conspiratorial in nature. We therefore decided to analyze the public response to our first paper with the hypothesis in mind that this response might also involve conspiracist ideation. We systematically collected utterances by bloggers and commenters, and we sought to classify them into various hypotheses leveled against our earlier paper. For each hypothesis, we then compared the public statements against a list of criteria for conspiracist ideation that was taken from the previous literature.

This follow-up paper was accepted a few days ago by Frontiers in Psychology, and a preliminary version of the paper is already available, for open access, here.

The title of the paper is Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, and it is authored by myself, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and Michael Marriott.

I enclose the abstract below:

Conspiracist ideation has been repeatedly implicated in the rejection of scientific propositions, although empirical evidence to date has been sparse. A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation was associated with the rejection of climate science and the rejection of other scientific propositions such as the link between lung cancer and smoking, and between HIV and AIDS (Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Gignac, in press; LOG12 from here on). This article analyzes the response of the climate blogosphere to the publication of LOG12. We identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 and that questioned the validity of the paper’s conclusions. Using established criteria to identify conspiracist ideation, we show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking. For example, whereas hypotheses were initially narrowly focused on LOG12, some ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors of LOG12, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. The overall pattern of the blogosphere’s response to LOG12 illustrates the possible role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science, although alternative scholarly interpretations may be advanced in the future.

– Stephan Lewandowskyos Winthrop Professor at the School of Psychology, University of Western Australia. He has published nearly 140 papers, chapters, and scholarly books on how people remember and think. He received a “Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award” from the Australian Research Council in 2011.

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