Comment by teddyh
6 years ago
Crackpots can be filtered out using logic, though. But people don’t do that; people filter based on how hard it would be to change in the proposed way.
People might say that they want security, but when some logical person takes this literally and respond “Use PGP”, they might be logically correct (since as bad as it may be, there might not be any secure alternative to PGP), this advice will always be ignored because what people want is not actually security. What people want is to feel secure while not changing anything about what they are doing or how they are doing it.
> Crackpots can be filtered out using logic, though. But people don’t do that;
For an excellent argument of why most people shouldn't do that, I recommend the essay "epistemic learned helplessness": https://web.archive.org/web/20180406150429/https://squid314....
The gist is that most people are so bad at evaluating logical arguments that they are more likely to be swayed by false arguments rather than correct ones, so the winning strategy is to simply ignore everything that sounds strange.
Better URL: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
If the headache of dealing with PGP is greater than the headache of dealing with a hacker and dodging google targeted ads, it's not remotely illogical to choose the latter.
In some cases, the logical choice and the actual choice may coincide. But people still aren’t, and never will be, logical.