I just did a quick review of the entire thread and I would say this post and it s comments helped me reason better about recent emotionally charged events. Among other things:
1) That the Turkish president goes public with the theory that it was Mossad tells me how "mainstream" in what I might call median-rational Muslim countries is a wrong interpretation designed to protect Muslims from what other Muslims are doing in their name.
2) This thread reinforces my belief that staying away from discussions of emotionally charged recent news makes as much sense as not discussing controversial interpretations of quantum mechanics. I look at this discussion and think that things that are emotionally charged are generally quite important, and that it is important to understand them. That the point of learning how to be "lesswrong" includes being less wrong about things we get all heated up about. That, essentially, the idea that tabooing discussion of things that are emotionally charged is a way of tabooing a valuable part of learning to be less wrong .
Great idea asking this question a few weeks after the heat has died down.
What do you think of my conclusions? Is it important to learn how to be less wrong when people are so emotionally involved that their emotions drive them to distortion? Is doing "case studies" like this discussion a way to get there?
staying away from discussions of emotionally charged recent news
That's a strawman. Nobody argued here that it's bad to discuss recent news in general.
That, essentially, the idea that tabooing discussion of things that are emotionally charged is a way of tabooing a valuable part of learning to be less wrong .
That's not what "politics is the mindkiller" advocates. It advocates not using emotionally charged examples to make points that you could make with examples that are less emotionally charged.
If the OP wanted to specifically talk about...
After the terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo, conspiracy theories quickly arose about who was behind the attacks.
People who are critical to the west easily swallow such theories while pro-vest people just as easily find them ridiculous.
I guess we can agree that the most rational response would be to enter a state of aporia until sufficient evidence is at hand.
Yet very few people do so. People are guided by their previous understanding of the world, when judging new information. It sounds like a fine Bayesian approach for getting through life, but for real scientific knowledge, we can't rely on *prior* reasonings (even though these might involve Bayesian reasoning). Real science works by investigating evidence.
So, how do we characterise the human tendency to jump to conclusions that have simply been supplied by their sense of normativity. Is their a previously described bias that covers this case?