Why Do We Choose Our Opinion Over Evidence?
Man made Climate Change has been proven, without a doubt, to be real, yet here we are, in an age of science and reason, with people stating its not real, with no concrete evidence as to why, just their belief. The last time I checked, someones opinion does not trump facts, yet people have this new notion that their opinion can outweigh the facts. This turning point has give rise to the age of “anti-intellectualism”, which is a movement that is fine with denying science, reason and logic, as if they are all a belief system.
Kellyanne Conway even furthered this idea that belief is better than facts by stating that there are “alternative facts”, which is just saying that she doesn't have to agree with real facts and can just make up her own. Alternative facts are really falsehoods. How can people trust whats real or not, when we have our top leaders telling us that facts don't matter anymore? Its a simple answer, we must engage in critical thinking. Ive debated with many people, and when it always comes down to evidence, they fold and start spewing their opinion, which leads me to believe that people just arent taught how to critically think.
Now there is a distinction between an “opinion” and a “valid opinion”; one is just your perception of the world, and the other is your opinion backed up by evidence. Its your opinion that you like a certain song over another. Its your opinion that you like chocolate ice cream over cherry. Now if you were to say that Facebook isn't a good choice for our youth, and you provide actual data on why its not good, that is a valid opinion because you backed up your opinion with evidence. Just saying that vaccines cause autism, without any evidence to support your claim, is not a valid opinion. We must know this distinction to understand that you cannot just throw your opinion out there and shrug off any actual evidence.
Before you decide to spew your opinion on someone, I would suggest researching your topic, and by researching I don't mean confirmation bias, which is when you only look for certain information that confirms your view. Searching “Why vaccines are bad” is not research, it is you trying to confirm your beliefs; instead search “Systematic review on the safety of vaccines” as this will give you an unbiased look at the research. Confirmation bias can really keep you in an echo chamber, not letting you see another side to something. Now this brings me to another point, sometimes there isn't another side, and something is just wrong; i.e., vaccines don't cause autism, and we have tons of data to back this up. We know creationism is wrong because there are galaxies that are millions of light years away, so there is no debate on that. Some things just don’t have another side to them.
Evidence matters, no matter how much you want to deny them because they don’t fit with your world view. Evidence is the reason why we know that antibiotics cure bacterial infections. Evidence is why we know that evolution is real. If we didn’t start looking for evidence we would still believe that the entrails of a chicken stop a demon from entering your body. Always look for the evidence before developing an opinion on something, or else that's all it will be, is an opinion.
