The Anders Brevik thing is interesting. That the west got the story correct within about 24 hours in my opinion leaves my point largely intact. Particularly in that I am opposing my point to the idea expressed by the Turkish president that the Charlie Hebdo attack was perpetrated by Israeli's trying to make the Muslims look bad, or the claims soon after 9/11 that 9/11 was either Israeli's or was a lie or whatever. One guy at the Brookings institution getting it wrong for one day, I'm happy to agree that my statement could be modified to something like "the mainstream west upon reflection has not attributed anything to Islamic Terror which is not Islamic Terror, although certainly plenty of individual's in the west have come up with plenty of misattributions both in favor of and against Muslims."
I agree that it's very unlikely that Israeli's share any responsibility for Charlie Hebdo attack. The point I wanted to illustrate that it's easy to make straightfoward claims that aren't fully true.
"the mainstream west upon reflection has not attributed anything to Islamic Terror which is not Islamic Terror, although certainly plenty of individual's in the west have come up with plenty of misattributions both in favor of and against Muslims."
I think claiming that Palestianens bomb an Israeli embassy in London, is an attribution for Islamic ...
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?