http://digg.com/science/Democrats_and_R ... tudy_Finds
It's an interesting philosophical discussion relating to how our brain reacts to new ideas, old ideas and how it might change ideals. One person on Slashdot posted a summary from a book called The Eight Common Errors in the Thinking Process:
1. Your brain uncritically accepts the first information it gets in any new subject area as correct, whether it is or not.
2. Subsequent information that is in keeping with the information already present in your brain is uncritically accepted as correct, whether it is or not.
3. A new item that is contradictory to the information present in your brain is automatically rejected as incorrect, whether it is or not.
4. Your brain considers every item that is compatible with the majority of its information in a given subject area to be correct and every item that is contradictory to its information to be incorrect. As a result, the brain has no internal way to know which items of its information are correct representations of the real world and which are not.
5. Your brain has no way to know whether or not it has all the information required to respond appropriately to a given stimulus.
6. Unless your brain has additional information to the contrary, it interprets similar items as being identical.
7. Your brain cannot measure anything directly. All measurements must be made by comparison against an appropriate standard, which is often done incorrectly.
8. Your brain continues to interpret the external world as it was when the last sensory signal about a given subject area was received. As a result, the brain is not aware that some of its formerly correct information is now incorrect.
It makes a rather good amount of sense (to me) now that I've read it over. The only way to avert this process of thinking is to think in stoic terms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoic
I'll post my ideas I've tried to conclude from this, but only after I hear your arguements and/or discussions