slatten49 wrote:
I dare say that any/all of us are guilty of willful ignorance to some extent or degree.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."—Richard Feynman
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."—Aldous Huxley
Willful ignorance is the state and practice of ignoring any sensory input that appears to contradict one's inner model of reality. At heart, it is almost certainly driven by confirmation bias.
Willful ignorance differs from ordinary 'ignorance' — when someone is simply unaware of something — in that willfully ignorant people are fully aware of facts, resources and sources, but refuse to acknowledge them. Indeed, calling someone 'ignorant' shouldn’t really be a pejorative, but intentional and willful ignorance is an entirely different matter. In practice though, the word 'ignorance' has often come to mean 'willful ignorance', and indeed, in many non-English languages, the word based on the same stem ('ignore') actually carries that meaning.
Willful ignorance is sometimes referred to as tactical stupidity.
Depending on the nature and strength of an individual's pre-existing beliefs, willful ignorance can manifest itself in different ways. The practice can entail completely disregarding established facts, evidence and/or reasonable opinions if they fail to meet one's expectations. Often the willfully ignorant will make excuses, claiming that a source is unreliable, suggesting that an experiment was flawed or asserting that an opinion is too biased. More often than not this is simple circular reasoning: “I cannot agree with that source because it is untrustworthy because it disagrees with me”.
In other slightly more extreme cases, willful ignorance can involve outright refusal to read, hear or study, in any way, anything that does not conform to the willfully ignorant person's worldview.
With regard to oneself, this can even extend to fake locked-in syndrome with complete unresponsiveness. Or with regard to others, to outright censorship of the material from others.
I dare say that any/all of us are guilty of willfu... (
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"It often seems that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be said or written to convince zealots from either side of the ideological/political persuasion of facts they absolutely refuse to believe. One may as well attempt pi**ing on a raging forest fire to put it out."