Sometimes a more interesting way to find out how people truly view the world, is not to have them tell you where they stand on certain issues.  Another informative way to analyze someone’s critical thinking skills is how reflexive they are to disbelieve facts that counter their world view or agree with facts which confirms their world view.

Seeing their reactions to overly simplified answers which not only confirms their world view, but also their ego, you can use it to analyze that person’s tendency towards confirmation bias.

Before going further, a general disclaimer:  we all, every human falls for confirmation bias.  We want an ordered world and want to understand things and want to be right.  So patterns of random events become, after the fact of course, a series of events who destiny is their present state.

However, for those claiming to know more, claiming to impart important information to the masses, the truth as they see it – for those people, confirmation bias shouldn’t be as obvious.

For our example of people who lack critical thinking skills this time, we have Marcella Mroczkowski, a self described lawyer, activist, and Huffington Post Citizen Journalist.

Now I know – looking for critical thinking on a site like the Huffington Post is much more difficult than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, but I still thinks it’s useful to remind us all of the tendency.

In her February 9th piece titled Why Americans Must Defeat the Right’s Culture of Hate: Understanding the Science And History of Demonizing Hate gives you a pretty good idea of her logical consistency, but for some reason, I read further.   To save you the trouble, I’ll summarize:

Using one poll, which she claims proves a large, but minority, percentage of Republicans are prone to believe things like Obama isn’t a natural citizen.  From there, she lumps the birther movement in with those who believe Barack is a socialist.  Tie that to the freedom-increasing destruction of the Fairness Doctrine, or in her parlance, the end of untainted free press and equality and an increase in corporate slavery.

Tie that to talk radio, through it, use nominal facts like people tend to get more fanatic during recessions and hate is a primal emotion.

Jump from there to leaders who can exploit man’s primal tendency to hate others through dehumanzing, such as Hitler!

& viola – people who don’t believe like Marcella are not just Republicans, but hate filled Republicans who are being exploited by Hitler’s reincarnation.

So with that said, I think objectively we can say that if this sample is her normal standards, then Ms. Mroczkowski’s skills in critical thinking are demonstrably lacking. We can also say, again, assuming this piece of hers is representative of her other writing & analysis, but with that assumption, she’s also a little full of herself.  Narcissistic even.

I mean even I try to assume the role of her – try to think, a liberal would agree – what do they see worth agreeing to?  Her non-familiarity with logic becomes apparent, as even if I agree with all her logical leaps, to believe the underlying assumption that her beliefs are perfectly right and her opponents are evil and full of hate is just too perfect to be believed by any nominally objective person.

I mean seriously – when the snake oil is packaged and marketed that it will grow your hair while shrinking your waistline and increasing your cognitive abilities – critical adults are naturally and rightfully and forcefully skeptical.

Or as others have said before, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence… or at least should for those pretending to provide “truthful” claims.

The interesting thing however is the polling data itself.  The data she uses to springboard her attempts to conflate Republicans and their mouth pieces with evil hate speech, is completely flawed.   First, it comes from Daily Kos, which should be an obvious sign to anyone approaching or attempting to approach objectivity.  They have an obvious bias and a quick check on their facts demonstrates it.

With simple math, we can take DailyKos’s own figures, 2008 voting records, and see if the percentages of respondents coincide with the actual percentages in the last election.

So in those states they label the NE, in the 2008 Presidential election, a total of 28,836,059 were cast for President, roughly 40% for McCain, or 11,458,616.

Those 11 million votes for McCain in that region, were out of the 59,948,240 votes cast for him nationally.  So the 11 million represents 19% of the total republican vote.  Not exactly a perfect measure of the percentage of Republicans living in the NorthEast, but likely more accurate than DailyKos’s attempts to minimize that part of country’s respondents to only 11%.  & my numbers were also two years ago – I think one can objectively say the Democrats aren’t doing as well as they could be and are in less favor now that prior to the election.

Regardless, they not only undervalue the opinions of those Republicans in the NE, but they also exaggerate the weight of the south, giving them 42% of the weight of the poll questions, whereas using the same basic analysis, those same states only made up 36% of the total Republican vote cast for McCain.

There are other signs in there as well, but ones I didn’t feel like researching… but to the eye, I’m not sure if 89% should be white or that 56% should be men, though I’ll admit both might be possible.  Using a full 70% of respondents aged 45 and up however, defies logic.  A cursory glance shows voter registration for that age group making up a little less than 50% of all registered voters and while I’ll be more than happy to concede the idea that the makeup of the Republican party isn’t a complete demographic mirror of the national population, I’m pretty sure we can safely say the 70% is exaggerated as well.

With all the inconsistencies, it’s hard to even subscribe to a benign notion such as incompetence.  It appears much more likely that they moved the numbers around until they could get results which showed what they wanted.

Of course to normal people, hearing or reading “A poll from the Daily Kos showed….” could be followed by “the Earth is round” and be right to be skeptical.

Using that poll as evidence of something however is another story entirely.  Here again, I’d like to think this is an innocent mistake, but I think hiding the poll through another link (she linked to Huffington Post site which discuss the poll, which linked to the poll), picking only two questions out of the litany asked and acted as if the rest of it was overwhelmingly convincing of her basic point, then logically stumbling about to equate Republicans with hateful, primitive thinkers who are just following Hitler’s rise to power…. well, that might say more about her motives than even her reflexive belief.

The problem is that only slightly off people like me will dig around for all those numbers to prove or disprove our assumptions.  & that percentage of people currently testing their assumptions versus those voting… well, let’s just say it’s probably pretty small.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that mind you – our marketplace of ideas is full of different people with different opinions and tripe like this will always be seen by objective people for the hollow and shallow self-confirmation it truly is.

The only real sad part is some people, probably more than I want to admit to, will read and blindingly believe.  Not because they don’t have an extra hour to research voting numbers and compare then to polling – they will believe it for the same reason it was written – it will confirm something for which they already believe.  Republicans are primitive & evil.

Yep, using a big dose of self-delusion for courage, they will believe completely in such a hateful point, without even noticing the hateful point is being stated in an article decrying hate.