Most Beliefs Aren’t About What’s Real, They’re About Conforming to Tribal Mythology

Posted on Monday 22 September 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Three more core principles today, illustrated by an essay by a “former creationist” and how she found “following the science” clashed with her culture — and how this conflict is born of ancient biology;
  • How universities would like to teach how to think;
  • Paul Krugman on the Trump administration’s undermining American expertise, the latest play being the charge for H-1B visas;
  • Robert Reich on how the Trump administration “no longer has the smarts to publish facts”;
  • And JMG items. No, Kat Kerr did not ascend to Heaven to see God and Charlie Kirk.
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Here’s a piece, apropos of the debut of the TV miniseries mentioned in the first paragraph, that illustrates three more core themes, or principles.

1, Honest appraisal of the evidence for disputed topics in science, from evolution to climate change to the global Earth to the efficacy of vaccines, is overwhelming that the consensus views on these topics are correct.
2, Rejection of or resistance to these conclusions is driven by any of various psychological biases, mostly the need not to challenge one’s community and its beliefs.
3, You can’t expect anyone to be convinced, or to change their minds, just by showing them the evidence and expecting them to understand it.

(And this is why ‘wisdom’ is a personal project, as I’ve said, and not the result of any group activity taking place in a sports stadium, a religious congregation, or a concert hall.)

Washington Post, Ella Al-Shamahi, 22 Sept 2025: I’m a former creationist. Here’s why ‘follow the science’ failed., subtitled “The moment I finally admitted that Darwin was right didn’t feel liberating. It felt like grief.”

As an 18-year-old Muslim missionary, I enrolled at University College London intent on destroying the theory of evolution. Today, I host a global television miniseries about it.

I arrived on a mission: I wanted to prove that Charles Darwin was wrong. Like so many other creationists, I believed scientists were either lying to us or they were so biased that they were unknowingly refusing to read the data accurately. The only way to dismantle their theory was to inspect the data for myself and prove it wrong.

Two decades later, I am an evolutionary biologist. Working on a documentary about our species’ 300,000-year story made me reflect on my own evolution — and how, when you ask people to do something simple such as “believe the science,” you might actually be asking them to pay an almost unimaginable price.

That is, there are psychological reasons people can’t just “follow the science” and accept what the evidence implies.

Accepting evolution meant more than just accepting a scientific theory. It meant leaving my community, almost every friend I had ever known, and was the final nail in the coffin of my arranged marriage.

And of course this is very difficult.

Those tears were a response forged in the Paleolithic era. We are not meant to find it easy to leave our tribe because, back when caves were prime real estate, leaving your tribe was a death sentence. My anguish was biologically ingrained over hundreds of thousands of years. That ancient biology explains why so many people still reject “the science.”

They “reject the science” in order to remain in favor with their tribe.

By and large, we share the opinions of our tribe. So when we ask people to believe in climate modeling or vaccine science, what we are really asking people to do is choose between their community’s beliefs and an abstract dataset. It’s a direct referendum on the people they know and love. Most people will not betray their tribe for a stranger in a lab coat.

Followed by more about the writer’s personal situation, then:

Understanding these dynamics can illuminate the current quagmire of science and politics. When people of faith and political conservatives see their views mocked, dismissed or ostracized, they begin to see science not as a method but as a tribe they’re not a part of. And once science becomes just another tribe, its authority collapses.

So it’s partly about trust.

Too often, people debate skeptics as if facts alone will convince them. But data is not more important than other factors. You can’t overturn a worldview in one sitting, nor should you want to. In these conversations, I often find myself going beyond the science — wanting to talk about their life and mine. In 30 minutes, I can’t debate someone into believing the science, but I can show them a scientist who isn’t a shill, and they can show me a skeptic who has reasons for their doubt. I also point to people from within their community who accept the science. I explain that scientists are highly incentivized to overturn established theory. If I had disproved evolution, I would have undoubtedly won a Nobel Prize.

I’ve made this point more than once: scientists are competitive. They’re not a conspiracy group driven by a need to fool the general public.

Evolution is the underlying assumption of biology; nothing in the field makes sense without it. It should trouble us that so many people still reject it. But paradigm shifts are possible, although parting with the beliefs of one’s tribe is an enormous decision. Empathy for that hesitation, not scorn for it, is the way forward.

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This always sounds like a good idea, but conservatives resist this kind of instruction even more than they resist instruction about the reality of the world. (Don’t think, believe!) The writer is the president of Dartmouth.

The Atlantic, Sian Leah Beilock, 19 Sept 2025: How to Think, Not What to Think, subtitled “College is not just about transmitting knowledge—it’s also about learning and practicing the skills that connect us to one another.”

Across the country, people are questioning the value and role of higher education, and institutions—particularly the elite ones—are experiencing a crisis in public trust. On top of that, tech titans are convinced that AI will break higher education, while many observers lament its corrupting influence and ask whether the “mind-expanding purpose and qualities of a university,” as one historian of education put it recently, are gone forever.

The idea that higher education has outlived its usefulness to society, however, requires taking an astonishingly narrow view of the true purpose of the university. Higher education is not merely the transfer of knowledge. We live in an age of informational opulence; we are awash in readily available data but lacking discernment, communication skills, and empathy.

As a cognitive scientist, I have studied the negative consequences of excessive information. We are in a state of constant information overload, under assault by relentless alerts, updates, and notifications. Research shows that the cognitive burden of lots of information coming at us simultaneously can negatively affect our brains and, ultimately, our performance—especially when we are not experts in the topics we are bombarded with.

All good stuff, but I’m wondering if a prerequisite to lessons in critical thinking are lessons in media literacy. Understand what sites are just telling you what you want to hear, and what sites are honestly trying to be objective. (Don’t get your news from social media.)

The goal of a college or university is to impart, and allow the opportunity to practice, the deeply human power skills—critical thinking, emotional intelligence, ethical discernment, collaborative leadership—that are required to successfully and happily move into adulthood. But those skills need practice. And right now, students are getting fewer and fewer opportunities to develop them.

And so on: social media, AI, polarization.

You might be surprised to learn that I am a tech optimist. The field of “artificial language intelligence” began at Dartmouth, after all.

…

We are embracing AI, but only because we are simultaneously embracing what we are exceptionally prepared to do in our college environment: focusing on what it means to be human. That’s why, even before classes begin, every incoming Dartmouth student embarks on a hiking, canoeing, or camping trip led by an upperclass student. I will admit that having 1,200 students off in the woods with no faculty gives a college president nightly worries. But no phones, no adults, just peers learning to talk, think, and connect with people they’ve never met is worth it. It’s a tradition rooted in the belief that community begins with conversation. I hear regularly from alumni who graduated decades ago who formed friendships for life, relationships that started on these trips and shaped who they are today.

This is what the home-schoolers miss. And this is what I missed, though not through any design; my experience at UCLA, commuting there by car from home, was basically just an extension of high school. I had no focus. It wasn’t until a couple years later, going to CSUN and living on my own, that I found a purpose (and became a straight-A student).

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Do these people understand what they’re doing? Perhaps they do and all they care about is prioritizing the worldview of the likes of Charlie Kirk.

Paul Krugman, 22 Sept 2025: Hey, Let’s Undermine America’s Technology, Education and Research!, subtitled “H-1B visas: The latest front in a campaign of destruction”

A helpful review of the story so far.

It often seems as if Donald Trump and his minions are engaged in a systematic campaign to undermine America’s preeminence in the world.

We attracted investment from around the world in part because we had rule of law: Businesses trusted us to honor property rights and enforce contracts. So the Trumpists turned us into a nation where the government extorts ownership shares in corporations and masked government agents seize foreign workers, put them in chains, and imprison them under terrible conditions.

We lead the world in science thanks to our unmatched network of research universities and globally admired government agencies like the National Institutes of Health. So the Trumpists are doing their best to destroy both university and government research.

And our economic success — the way we have pulled ahead of other advanced nations over the past generation — rests almost entirely on our leadership in digital technology. So the Trumpists are pulling the rug out from under tech, too.

This is about the new fee for H-1B visas, used by experts from around the world to work in the US, and advance our technology rather than that of China, say.

H-1B visas are a critical ingredient in America’s success. They allow the best and the brightest from around the world to teach in our universities, do research in our research institutes, and work in our tech sector.

The rollout of Trump’s new $100,000 fee for holders of H-1B followed what has become a familiar pattern. …

And Krugman describes how Trump will announce some new policy then gradually walk it back based on criticism. (Trump never thinks these things through in advance.)

But why would Trump want to make it harder for such skilled workers to come to the US? As far as I can tell, it’s the naive, jingoistic belief that Americans must be the best at everything, and so we don’t need no stinkin’ foreigners to help us out.

Krugman goes on, explaining how technological spillovers work.

Although I have focused so far on the U.S. tech sector, the same set of phenomena underlie the success of the American educational and research sectors. Top universities such as MIT, Stanford and Harvard are made immeasurably greater by the ability to hire the best faculty from around the world. Likewise for the unparalleled National Institute of Health and our research clusters in biotech and applied engineering.

Like the Nazi refugees who built the atom bomb and our space program.

If you read the White House proclamation on H-1B visas, however, it’s clear that whoever devised the policy — Stephen Miller? Steve Bannon? — understands none of this. They clearly imagine that there are a bunch of highly paid technology jobs whose existence can be taken for granted, and that these jobs can simply be taken away from people they don’t like and given to native-born Americans.

That is not, in fact, how it works. America’s strength in tech isn’t the result of some inherent, indestructible natural advantage. If natural advantage determined industrial success, Silicon Valley would still be growing apricots. Instead, as I said, our tech industry rests on a virtuous circle of self-reinforcing success, which depends above all on the industry’s ability to attract talented workers from around the world. Cut off the supply of such workers, and you risk ending that virtuous circle, maybe even turning it into a vicious circle of decline.

Because the Trump administration seems filled only with xenophobic Christian white-nationalists, who know nothing.

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AlterNet summarizes remarks from Robert Reich on MSNBC, which I don’t regularly read.

AlterNet, Adam Lynch, 20 Sept 2025: ‘Couldn’t do it’: DC insider fears Trump admin no longer has the smarts to publish facts

It hasn’t been that widely reported, but one important Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, the Survey of Consumer Expenditures, has been — it was scheduled to be released. They have now postponed the release,” Reich told MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi. “We don’t know for how long. We don’t know why, although a good guess is that this is not manipulation. It’s just that they’re so starved of resources.”

“They don’t have enough people. They don’t have enough money that they just couldn’t do it,” said Reich, referring to massive layoffs across government that Trump instituted upon entering office in January. “Trump just fired the commissioner of labor statistics because he didn’t like the numbers. And that’s very much the route to a third-world [economy].”

Reich explained that accurate numbers are what sets the U.S. economy apart from blundering dictatorships run by leaders who control the statistics.

“There are countries like Turkey and Venezuela and in times past, Argentina. These are not role models,” said Reich. “… Nothing in modern economic history says that this is anything but a really terrible idea.”

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JMG items from recent days:

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