When I was younger, I believed all we needed was to give people information to get a better grasp on reality. That was my optimism about the potential good of the internet: the ability to access a wealth of information.

Now that I'm older and have spent a lot of years reading discussion boards, my stance is people will predominantly gravitate towards sources that justify their position regardless of whether their source(s) have been wrong before.

Alas, it's true - people are not perfectly rational reasoning machines, because we aren't superintelligent with the ability to weigh every fact we've ever encountered at once. We rely on heuristics to get by.

But the imperviousness of obviously wrong beliefs in the face of what you consider rational evidence should not be taken as license to give up! Consider - if people tend to want to stick to their wrongness in the face of contradictory evidence, the wrongness still had to come from somewhere. All beliefs are caused by something, even if the cause would not meet a scientifically rigorous definition of "evidence". There's always logic in it, even if the logic isn't immediately apparent. For example, "Hard-code the beliefs of the people around you when young" and "Reject evidence that upends a large proportion of your worldview" are both highly logical heuristics that, incidentally, probably aren't nearly as likely to get you stuck in dysfunctional local attractors when attacking problems like "hungry tigers" as opposed to "gigascale global realpolitik".

All I'm saying is - don't be too cynical. At the end of the day, the truth still matters, and all we can do is keep plugging away at it. The wall is thick but not impenetrable, and we have come a long way already.

No, the vast majority of Americans think covid-19 is real. Vox had a poll saying it was in the area of 1%. The issue is many don't want to be forced to wear masks, which is dumb and selfish, but not what you are saying.

Meanwhile as of 2019, over 20% of Americans doubt climate change, a much more significant number. This is far too high in my opinion, but it is steadily improving.

About 34% of all Republicans say that the theory that the outbreak was intentionally planned is definitely or probably true.

> About a third of those who have heard this claim (36%) – a quarter of all U.S. adults – say that they think it is “definitely” (8%) or “probably” (28%) true.

https://www.journalism.org/2020/06/29/most-americans-have-he...

72% said they would not get a coronavirus vaccine:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/21/most-americ...

72% say they would get vaccinated, you aren't reading your articles correctly.

You're correct that I overstated my case. I wasn't making a meaningful distinction between people who say the virus is fake, or not dangerous, or not wearing a mask, or not social distancing in a reasonable way.

How were they sampling? I could totally believe 1% of Vox readers don’t believe it while 30% of the US also doesn’t.

Climate change is hard because nothing easy can be done. We would have to dramatically change our life style, world population would have to decrease.

Don't see a "trillion dollar financial interest", it's the lifestyle of you and me and also the media/politics which both avoid difficult questions (why e.g. allow/encourage migrants from countries with totally irresponsible population dynamics?).

“In 2014, there were 1,469 oil and gas firms listed on stock exchanges around the world, with a combined market capitalization of US$4.65 trillion”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel