Dan Ariely, alleged fraudster

I've read several books by Dan Ariely, and came to appreciate him as the seeming dean of a younger generation of behavioral psychology researchers, standing on the shoulders of giants like his mentor, Dan Kahneman and Danny's collaborator, Amos Tversky.

I'd even referenced him in an newspaper column about 18 months ago in the early days of coronavirus, specifically citing his "Predictably Irrational." Extended thoughts in that vein are here. A non-Goodreads/Amazon review is here.

The one book of his that I have reviewed at Goodreads is ...  wait for it below ...

And, now, he has been accused of research fraud. And, if this finding is correct, simple and childish research fraud. (For a deeper dive, here's the blog, with the particular blog post, that first discovered this.)

"WHY?" comes immediately to mind.

My best guess is that he'd gotten himself up a creek without a paddle on some previous claims, hitting the rapids or even the full waterfall version of Replication Bias, and decided to fix things.

But, really? Just adding numbers to a column in an Excel spreadsheet? Wow.

There's also a fat-assed Irony Alert. The allegedly fraudulent research was used in a 2012 co-authored paper about ... 

HOW TO REDUCE DISHONESTY!

And, that one book of his I reviewed? "The Honest Truth about Dishonesty." AND, a paragraph of the review needs quoting:

He also notes that, short of sociopath types, while most of us cheat, most of us don't cheat that much. For instance, on matrix-completion tests where people are paid based on personal claims of number of tests completed? They'll claim to have done a couple of extra, but not double what they actually did.

AND AND AND!

The alleged fraud was in 2012. Guess what year that book was published. So, that just confirms things. He had said shit in the book that wasn't true, I presume, had now learned that it wasn't true, and was in CYA mode.

And, the #fail was indeed childish. Beyond just adding numbers to an Excel column, a different font was used for these new numbers. (Sadly, it was Calibri, then Cambria; no Comic Sans involved. That said, that's like a modern version of one of the classical manuscript errors. I most font sets, Calibri and Cambria are adjacent to each other in a scroll list; this is like a medieval scribe either skipping or reduplicating a word.)

And, it's not like Ariely was a scrubbeenie. He was a tenured prof at Duke; he'd taught there before and came back, per Wiki.

Beyond the link above? Story is now in the Economist, which also notes the 2012 hypocrisy squared book publication date. Wiki says he's asked for the paper to be retracted.

So, the "alleged" is in the title and the body only for purely legal reasons.

Per Proverbs?

"The guilty flee when no one pursues."

 

==

 

As far as his overall writings? "The Honest Truth about Dishonesty" is obviously trash. I assume that anything later also is. "Predictably Irrational" is enough earlier it may well be OK. But, maybe not. And, shouldn't we just start calling Ariely himself "Predictably Irrational"?

 

Since Ariely wants the paper retracted, after first tweeting Retraction Watch during the day yesterday, I posted a comment on their most recent post last night. It went into moderation, I guess because of the link. And, as of this afternoon, it had NOT posted. So, I posted a comment on their FAQ / comments policy page. And, it went into moderation.

Anyway, the story has now metastasized, whether Retraction Watch runs anything or not. Samuel Goldman, going beyond the replication bias, argues that what we have is a clear case of "star professor" sucking up the oxygen of grants, etc., and having incentive to Lather.Rinse.Repeat.

Manipulation to produce favorable results is exactly what behavioral economics would predict in this situation. So it's ironic that one of the leading practitioners of the field seems caught in a trap that his own ideas help explain.

Goldman also goes "there" with Ye Old Petard Hosting reference:

The solution isn't gimmicks like honesty statements. Reforming social science means changing funding and professional incentives that encourage dishonest behavior by concentrating rewards on the biggest names, most charismatic personalities, and splashiest arguments. In other words, the benefits enjoyed by Ariely himself.

Well, it's true!

And, backed up by the Daily Mail. (If they're doing a story, we're officially in dogpile time.) It says that one co-author expressed concern about the data at the time, but Ariely said "We're all good."

And, NEW shit has been dragged up. His Wiki page, newly updated, references an Israeli journal that says while Ariely was at MIT, without institutional review board approval, he used electric shock on participants in an experiment.

And, via the "fonts" link above, I don't need to be harshing Retraction Watch's mellow. It reported earlier this year about ANOTHER Ariely issue: a 2004 paper that got an "expression of concern."

 

BuzzFeed has a piece that documents more replication issues. And, per that, we probably should just cut to the chase and call Ariely an outright liar. Ariely is, indirectly, trying to blame the insurer for whom he did this study. But, he's done that in the past — until busted. In a study a little over a decade ago about dentists allegedly themselves not always knowing when a cavity is a cavity, when issues arose, he blamed Delta Dental. Problem? Delta said it had never given him the information he was talking about.

And, with all of this new information? The note of concern is for work from before Predictably Irrational was published. So is the unauthorized electroshock. So is the fake cavities research. So, we can't trust it, either, can we? And, personally, having referenced it in a column, this is kind of like a source going bad.

Per Goldman, academia is also very political, and I suspect some long knives have been laying in wait for Ariely, re why this is so popular. And, I think a lot of people have probably had suspicions for a long time. That said, will Duke put him on some sort of probation?

That said, maybe we should thank Ariely in a way. He's shown that, if the emperor of behavioral economics and psychology isn't totally naked, it's probably about as thinclad as that of evolutionary psychology. After all, others, including one of his aforementioned mentors, Dan Kahneman, have had their own replication problems (though they didn't make up data to try to hide that, as far as we currently know).

That said, outside of academia, through jobs like "chief behavioral officer" at Lemonade, he's been laughing all the way to the bank, and the statute of limitations for suits over some of this have certainly expired.

Libertarians AND neoliberals versus behavioral psychology and economics

Reason magazine, the closest thing to a "house organ" for small-l libertarians and read by many in the party as well, is "interesting." But not interesting enough to sniff my blogroll.

I'd say I'd largely agree with 15 percent of what it rights, fairly agree with 25 percent, fairly disagree with 35 percent, and think 25 percent is batshit. And the same person can write in all four categories.

Take Radley Balko, a great guy on things like police brutality and militarization.

But, also one of those libertarians who believes on many issues that "the lawsuit is the answer for everything."

Like DWI checkpoints. He has in the past called for them to be abolished on the grounds that they violate civil liberties AND that the threat of lawsuits is a deterrent.

Dude? There is SO much wrong with this.

First, to the degree that driving is a right and a privilege, it's not an absolute.

Second, to the degree that even libertarians will admit the state has public health regulatory rights (tho many libertarians are wingnuts on masks, shutdowns, etc. on COVID), driving is surely one of those. Just as the rights of your fist (or your germy cough) end at my nose, even more so, your rights behind the wheel of two tons of metal end when you're on the same highway as me.

Third, lawsuits don't bring dead people back to life.

Fourth, re the War on Drugs, alcohol is deadlier than any illicit drug.

Fifth, the biggie for purposes of this blog post?

Libertarians refuse to wrestle with, let alone actually consider, the implications of behavioral psychology and economics for the false idea of Homo sapiens economicus as a rational actor. No surprise, though. From what I can tell, they fail to consider that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" comes from his Enlightenment Deism, even though there's proof on Smith's pages, and that said Enlightenment Deism has had things like quantum mechanics "put paid" to it.

But, neoliberals are problematic, too. With them, with the likes of Cass Sunstein, it's been an overeager, uncritical, still capitalism-based acceptance of the interlocked disciplines.

Sunstein has never asked whether a capitalist nudge is the best way — as in either the most productive or the ethically best way — to actually effect long-term changes in behavior. Ditto in spades on whether it's the best way to effect changes that work well within long-term societal, not just individual, needs.

Lottery: Take the cash option after all, especially in times of currently low inflation

This is an instance of a case where behavioral economics and behavioral psychology, exemplified in a book like Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational," can actually guide you to the wrong decision. (This isn't the only case. You'll see frequent claims that on pre-packaged foods, the larger size always will have the lower per-ounce price. If you check the shelving stickers, you'll find that is not true.

Back to where we were at, though.

Per the picture at left, and simple math? I can tell you that, at least right now, you should take the cash option on a lottery.

That's $30 million in inflationary adjustment for the annual payments. And, $30M divided by $115M is? 26.1 percent.

BUT, that's over 30 years!

Gotta divide again by 30.

Real answer? 0.87 percent. Yeah, it was that low in 2014 and 2015, but it's been almost twice that much every other year since the Great Recession. (More on inflation rates of the past century-plus, including monthly rates, here.) And, actually, the real answer isn't even 0.87 percent, because I didn't want to do the extra work of allowing for compound interest.

A quick teh Google to this site and dropping in the numbers of 115 and 30 years, then playing with percentages? It's actually 0.77 percent, compounded.

Uh, 2008 and 2015 are the only years since 1955 to have annual inflation rates below that.

Take the cash option.

And, if you win? Spare a brother a dime, or 0.775 percent?

Like food companies playing on a not always true truth, maybe lottery companies are doing this.

Or maybe they're banking on the post-coronavirus economy being that crappy for that long.

If THAT's the case, and actuaries are telling them that, you need to be doing other things. Maybe I do, too.

Coronavirus, science literacy, math, and behavioral psychology

A number of people have shared around that New York Times article of a few days ago that claims the COVID19 version of the coronavirus could kill as few as 200,000 Americans. Over the hours today, I've done some mental gestating, and realize that people need to think this through better. (And no, I'm not linking to the story, for several reasons, some of which will become apparent below.)

First, reactions to the story illustrate two things.

One is that Homo sapiens as a species is NOT "rational" by nature. Our australopithecine ancestors weren't and we didn't involve any hugely greater degree of rationality. Nor, contra the hopes and claims of some philosophies like Stoicism, has cultural evolution promoted a much greater degree of average rationality growth. That's simple fact.

Two is that the basic principles of behavioral psychology, per Dan Ariely's excellent book of that name, that show humans are "Predicably Irrational," are quite, quite true.

Specifically, per it and its related behavioral economics, humans do (on average, this is a social science) show predicable — and predictably irrational — behaviors in many scenarios. One of these is loss aversion. That means that we tend to overreact to many of our fears of losses. A related behavior is "loss attention." And, obviously, death is a loss. A huge loss, whether it's our own medical diagnosis or a statistical estimate.

With that, let's dig in.

(Update: Let's have some common sense while you're out shopping and other things, too, folks.)

First, you may say, "I heard about a New York Times story that coronavirus could kill as many as 10 million Americans."

That's the same story.

But, because of your loss aversion and related psychology, you noticed the 10 million. And probably read past the 200,000.

I also noticed the 200,000.

I had already, previously, based on estimates of both the virulence and lethality of COVID19, estimated 250,000 deaths.

That's not nothing, of course.

But PUBLIC health is about social statistics, not individual anecdotes.

Since seasonal flu kills an estimated 50,000 Americans a year, that puts this into some context.

Turns out I am not the only one spreading the "lessen the alarm" stance. Georgetown U. psychology prof Dr. Jelena Kecmanovic has some good stuff. She includes: Accept uncertainty, don't underestimate resilience, and, per what I've said, don't overestimate threats.

Further context?

Alcohol, from DWI fatalities to workplace fatalities to suicides to liver cancer to other cancers and ultimately to cirrhosis, kills almost 100,000 Americans a year. (That's more than all illicit drugs combined, and that number may be low; I suspect it is.)

Cigarettes kill almost 500,000.

So?

If you're overreacting to COVID19 while either smoking a Marlboro or else drinking one too many Buds or shots of Jack Daniel's, I don't want to hear from you. (And, in case you're wondering? Exact numbers are even harder to come by, but stroke, heart attack and other similar deaths, the numbers of them preventable from better diet and exercise, slot between alcohol and tobacco. So, if all the exercise you do is walking out the door to your car, I don't want to hear from you, either.)

Let's continue.

There's one other thing many Americans don't know about the experts estimating death rates of between 200,000 and 10 million. They probably think that means an average of 5.1 million. And they'd be wrong.

But, if they think of a simple brainteaser that stumps many of them, they'd maybe think they're wrong without knowing what the actual median might be, which I'll tell you in a minute.

That brainteaser is a simple one.

If bacteria in a petri dish double every minute, and the dish is filled in one hour, when is it half filled?

Most people divide one hour in half and say "30 minutes."

The correct answer, of course, is "59 minutes." It's half full in 59 minutes and in one more minute, with another doubling, it's full.

Many growth, or decline, and change issues in the natural sciences work by this "geometric progression" that involves multiplying growth, rather than an "arithmetic progression" that involves additive growth.

This is how half-lives of radioactive elements work.

It's also an issue in social sciences, as it's how compound interest works.

The geometric mean between 200,000 and 10 million is 1.4 million.

NOT 5 million.

That is still a lot of people. But it's a lot less than 5 million.

Personally, I think odds are less than 10 percent the US even hits 1 million, for a variety of reasons. That's still a lot of people. But it's a lot fewer than many people will expect.

But, I'm promoting your loss aversion.

So, let me give you MY geometric mean estimate. I think there's a 50 percent chance COVID19 deaths in the US stay below 400,000.

==

There are other factors at work.

Globally, elected politicians, once they see a critical mass on coronavirus worries in elective democracies, are going to tilt toward overreaction.

In the US, there's also an ignorance of population densities and population demographics.

If one takes the "Acela Corridor" and extends it 100 miles inland, that part of the US is as densely populated as the Benelux countries.

Elsewhere? Even at 327 million people? Not so much. Nationally, the US population density is about the same as Venezuela. See here. Cut out the Acela Corridor and, though more sprawled, the Southland of SoCal, but to be fair, whack Alaska as well. The rest of the "lower 48" is probably about the same as Peru on average.

Per state rankings, Texas is about the same as Columbia. East Texas is about the same as Iran, which has had some worries, yes. Or maybe halfway between Iran and Spain. But it's far below Italy, far far below Northern Italy where the coronavirus worries hit there, and WAY below South Korea.

OK, the biggies? Since both have densely populated coastal areas, but lost of mountains and deserts? US at 34 people per square mile vs China at 145 people per square mile? No contest. Going more granular? Wuhan itself is 8 million people or so and the metro area is 19 million and it's more densely populated than US metro areas, with the possible partial exception of a NYC or Bay Area. It's in Hubei province, which at 78,000 square miles is about 12-13 percent bigger than Oklahoma, but with 58 MILLION people. Understand?

Population density is no guarantee in offering a measure of protection, and of course, I'm not claiming that it offers anywhere near full protection. But, in much of less-populated America, it DOES offer a measure of protection, in my guesstimate.

===

Update: Per a Facebook discussion which I just exited, this is part of why it's not totally fair to compare "the West" to "Asia." The person is, for now, still a FB friend but he's been moved to "acquaintances."

As far as Asian countries controlling it well? China's been lying since the start and I wouldn't trust its numbers. Singapore and Hong Kong are city states, one still semi-authoritarian and the other under the thumb of Beijing. South Korea is, it seems, doing a good job, but it's the size of Indiana with 50 million people. Taiwan is the size of Maryland. So, that alone isn't fair.

Nor is looking at only the US and Italy and saying that's "the West." As I told said person before exiting the conversation, that ignores countries like Germany that are handling it well.

Move over, Pop Ev Psych, you may have a new bedfellow

The "replication" phenomena in social psychology, and first cousin behavioral psychology, depending on your phrase of choice, is getting to be bigger and bigger. The latest problem, or casualty? Research claiming to have demonstrated the priming effect.

Nearly as big a problem? The way supporters claim there's no problem. Or maybe a bigger one?

Bargh, Dijksterhuis and their supporters argue that social-priming results are hard to replicate because the slightest change in conditions can affect the outcome. “There are moderators that we are unaware of,” says Dijksterhuis.

Geez, this sounds just like psi phenomena researchers!

More evidence that's bollocks?

Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego — a long-time critic of social priming — notes that the effects reported in the original papers were huge. “If effects were that strong, it is unlikely they would abruptly disappear with subtle changes in procedure,” he says.

Bingo.

Then, there's more special pleading:

Dijksterhuis says that “focusing on a single phenomenon is not that helpful and won’t solve the problem”. He adds that social psychology needs to get more rigorous, but that the rigour should be applied to future, not historical, experiments. The social-priming debate will rumble on, he says, because “there is an ideology out there that doesn’t want to believe that our behaviour can be cued by the environment”.

You don't venture much closer to at least junk science, if not pseudoscience, with a Red Queen comment like that.

Now, the Nature story says there's no suspicion of fraud at this time. But, this did come from the Netherlands, and Nature mentions the name of known Dutch research fraudster Diederik Stapel.

I, like Daniel Kahnemann, would like (in part) to believe that priming is real. It fits with some ideas I have about subconscious or semiconscious subselves. But, my thoughts on subselves aren't dependent on ideas of priming. And, the whole idea of "pliability" behind priming may be more iffy in general than some would wish.

Per Kahneman's phrase, "fast thinking" is possible without any such pliability in general or priming in particular.

And, since both behavioral and social psychology are partial spinoffs and developments from good old fashioned B.F. Skinner behavioralism, there's other reasons to be skeptical, eh?

Even worse, they and ev psych are arguing the same issues from other ends of the stick. And they're both apparently making inflated claims, tho ev psych, especially in its pop version, still appears worse, and has started most of these tempests.

That said -
A: Two wrongs don't make a right;
B: This shows just how little we know, yet, about human mental development.

Thinking, fast and slow (and often irrationally)

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An excellent summary of what's the latest thinking and findings in the worlds of behavioral economics, behavioral psychology and related areas.

Kahnemann shows that, and more importantly, how and why, we don't always know what will make us happy, how long it will make us happy or how much it will make us happy.

Other than showing how we don't know ourselves very well, he also shows how we don't act rationally around money and financial issues. The primary reason for this is loss aversion, which carries over into non-financial decisions.

The basis for this? We're really "two personalities," he says, based on long work of him and his peer, Amos Tversky.

System 1 acts fast, intuitively and largely unconsciously.

System 2 acts slow, with brain energy consumption, but rationally. However, it can get "lazy" at times, Kahnemann notes, in what should be a word of caution to scientists, skeptics of various stripes and others.

There's nothing new that's earth-shattering here. Rather, this is a "magnum opus" summary of Kahnemann's life work, along with that of Tversky, and connected to Robert Thaler, Dennis Gilbert and others in a younger generation of behavioral psychologists. It's valuable as that summary, though, valuable indeed.



View all my reviews

Ego depletion and advertising

John Tierney has a very insightful article on these issues in the New York Times Magazine. While I don't agree with all of it, I do agree with a fair bit, I'll summarize its main points.
1. Our ego (as in our central "executive authority") has limited energy.
2. Making decisions, at least to some degree due to the brain's energy use in this, depletes some of this energy.
3. Multiple demands can increase this depletion, and the rate of it.
4. Modern society often tends to be heavy on demands for decision-making, often under the rubric of "choice" and accompanying trade-offs.
5. That demand and depletion can fall heavier on the poorer, or (I infer from the article) the more time-stressed.

This all relates to advertising and marketing issues.

In the recovery world, one often hears the acronym HALT as a warning to be especially on guard about one's inner strength when one is Hungry, Angry, Tired or Lonely. (Some add an S for Sick.) The overwhelming amount of "choice" inflicted by modern varieties of food, clothing, etc, plus the ads that run off that, all would seem to similarly prey on those four acronym points.

That's why behavioral psychologists tell us not to shop for food while we're hungry. I certainly suspect we shouldn't shop for heavily "branded" items like clothes when we're lonely.

That said, this isn't just a matter of income disparity and rich advertising and marketing companies, or companies that rely heavily on branding, like Apple, getting richer at the expense of the rest of us.

We do have decision making ability ourselves. And, we need to consciously decide more often, and internally reaffirm the decision, to "drop out" of the shopping rat race more.

Period.

Eventually, the CEOs of these companies will finally realize they've pushed the envelope too far. It may take years, but, since the actual manufacturing of the products these companies sell, outside of branded food, is all outside the U.S., it won't affect a lot of jobs.

Just how irrational are we? Very?

Very, or potentially very irrational, defining "irrational" and "rational" in terms of the great project of Descartes and followers, it seems.

In a blog post at Discover, in follow-up to his column last week at Mother Jones, Chris Mooney notes that the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences has devoted an entire issue to what he covered at Mojo, with links to summaries of key content.

Here's a couple of key outtakes:

First:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions.

And more, from a response to some of the issues:

When people reason alone, there will often be nothing to hold their confirmation bias in check. This might lead to distortions of their beliefs. As mentioned above, this is very much the case. When people reason alone, they are prone to all sorts of biases.

In short, as Mooney notes, classical Cartesianism appears m ore and more dead in the water. First, Dan Dennett (and others) said there is no little man, no Cartesian homunculus, making magic rationality decisions inside us.

Now, BBS et al say that, even if there were such a critter, he wouldn't be a disinterested rationalist anyway.

(The argumentative theory of reasoning is explained more here.)

But, not all commenters on Mooney's post want to accept that, it seems.

I responded to one:

Nullius, (you seem to present) a great defense of the “traditional” view of reasoning or whatever …

BUT, I’m going to argue with you.

First, the “reasoning as argumentation” model I think explicitly says this is NOT, NOT, NOT, a “human failing.” Rather, it is, if I may, “human ISness.”

I won’t propose abandoning “rationalism,” but I will say that it is even more unnatural than you may want to admit.

And, that IS a conflict with Cartesianism, which postulates rationality is a cornerstone of homo sapiens.

Sorry, but, either you don’t get the degree of implications this involves, or …
You DO, unconsciously, understand precisely what is up and by your conscious argumentation, actually support the fact at hand.

Of course, maybe I have reasons for my argumentation. And, I do.

One is to get people to accept that a Cartesian, or Platonic, idea of humans as homo rationalis simply doesn't exist. Not even in the most notable of today's skeptics. Witness Lawrence Krauss defending his billionaire hedge fund buddy.

That said, should we stop trying to be more rational? No. But, we should recognize that even apparent growth in rationality may have ulterior motives.

That said, Nullius has responded to me, and I offered some thoughts in return:

Since, contra certain Pop Ev Psychers, we evolved various mental skills over different environments and different times in the past, I would say it can't be called a "failing" today either. We didn't evolve *for* any particular time in the future, just to better adapt to the time at hand.

So, in light of human "reasoning" and today's issues, I don't consider the relative lack of rationality a "failure" primarily because I think the concept is unapplicable. So, to that, per Doug Hofstader, I apply the Zen Buddhist "mu."

Next ...

As you note, rationalism is a skill. And, per your note on Descartes, the question is, how easy to learn, or difficult to learn, is this skill? Is it like learning to throw a bowling ball at a set of pins, or to hit a major-league curveball? More like high-school algebra or advanced differential equations? I opt for the latter. (Of course, it may be some point in between.) Where you, and others, fall on how you understand this relates in part to the "failure" above and to broader issues about how much we should expect from rationality.

One implication, per the link on the argumentation view of reasoning, is when two groups both come to a theoretically well-reasoned decision within their group, is asking about how likely we can apply "metarationality."

Examples would be global warming and vaccination. In both cases (largely for mercenary reasons in the first, but largely for sincere reasons in the second) "doubters" have focused on the uncertainty issue, while to some semi-deliberate degree, at least, the scientific side has downplayed the issue.

Some examples are already at hand. Kahnemann et al in behavioral economics have *hugely* debunked the idea of man as a rational actor there. There's many implications, but basically none of them have made it to the level of changing political policy.

Reasoning within a group, vs. alone, vs. "to" another group has implications for sociology and out-groups, and how much or little we can expect people's behavior, and more, attitudes, to change.

I'm sure the dialogue will continue.

Meanwhile, this SciAm blog explains some of the reasons for our irrationality, in terms of motivators.

And, Stanley Fish's column is partially relevant, even:

(C)hanges of mind tend to be local and piecemeal, not systemic. Wholesale conversions like Paul’s on the road to Damascus do occur, but more often a change will affect only a small corner of one’s conceptual universe.

So, even if rationality spreads, it won't grow by leaps and bounds.

Here's part of how the vaccine fears took root among antivaccers

Straight from the pages of behavioral psychology, it's a classic case of overestimating the likelihood of rare events.

Of course, that was exacerbated by Dr. Andrew Wakefield's pseudoscience on thimerosal, further exacerbated by Nature actually printing that.