This is sad, really - Slate - "Facts Don't Win Arguments...Emotions Do"
It’s Time to Give Up on Facts
Or at least to temporarily lay them down in favor of a more useful weapon: emotions.
By Jess Zimmerman
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/02/counter_lies_with_emotions_not_facts.html
Several years ago, when my last name was different and my politics were less entrenched, I worked for a nonpartisan fact-checking site. We analyzed falsehoods in political speeches and ads and email forwards: No, there won't be death panels. No, Sarah Palin didn't cut funding for special education. Yes, Obama was born in America. No, he wasn't in the video for “Whoomp, There It Is.” We called many of these “zombie rumors”—we would try to smack them down, but a few months later, there they would be again. Over the three years I worked there, more and more zombie rumors massed at our door. We just kept plugging away, calmly stating the facts, because that was our job, but inside our well-insulated office we were screaming. What was the point of working so tirelessly to uncover the truth when the falsehoods never died?
In fact, by trying to stem the tide of untruths, we were probably making everything worse. Repeating a falsehood, even as part of a meticulously researched article that debunks it, actually reinforces the falsehood; the human brain seems to experience fact-checking as a statement followed by a bunch of Charlie Brown teacher noises. We knew this even then: I can probably designate a Washington Post article about the lie-repetition phenomenon as my first “lol nothing matters” moment, six years before the phrase became a meme. My most memorable illustration of this concept was the time that someone emailed to ask about a rumor on Snopes.com, forwarding along the page. It said “FALSE” boldly at the top. The person had forgotten that part but remembered the claim.
In the years since that Post article, which discussed research stretching back to 1945, psychologists, linguists, and philosophers have continued to explore why and how our brains cling to lies. And all the while, those lie-loving brains have kept at it, allowing the stream of email rumors I dealt with a decade ago to metastasize into an entire fake news industry and eventually a White House that traffics in “alternative facts.” Now all of us, not just the fact-checkers, are faced with the challenge of trying to reckon with a dubious alternate reality filled with fraudulent voters, pizza-joint sex rings, and massacres in Bowling Green. As linguist George Lakoff was still trying to tell us even as of last month, the more we correct them, the more ingrained they get. And yet we’re still trying to fact-check our way out. It’s an impulse we just can’t seem to kick.
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