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Read other letters about this article
Amazing. Never before have I seen the very effect that a blog posting was talking about evidenced so quickly in the response to the very blog posting.
This article was about how our biases color our perception of various bits of evidence. This is not a new theory, as the post itself notes there were studies done showing this at least as far back as the 1950s. But now, in this world of the internet, around the clock news, and cameras all over the place, we get so much more information to process. Photos, video, news artciles and opinion posts all come flowing at us. And it all comes in through our biases. Once it gets in your head in a certain way, it's amazingly difficult to change that perception, and any new information is going to either be viewed as supporting the point of view or discarded as something made up from the "other side."
In this letters post, we've got lots of people, keyed off of "9/11" in the title, all displaying how their own reality is entrenched in their minds. It doesn't matter if you believe the official accounts of what happened that day, or the alternative accounts. All are pretty much committed to their point of view, no matter what. An excellent example of exactly what the post was talking about.
