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Do you believe false things?
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".
It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.
The short xeet that went viral:
Until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:
How To Believe False Things - by request, this is an explanation of how I got 38 years old believing a match of World Cup men's team vs World Cup women's would be fair.
TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.
I'm sure we all believe false things but tbh, to have reached this conclusion, this guy must be quite underdeveloped in certain aspects of intelligence, curiosity, and yes, even rationality. I think he comes across as blaming the world for giving him a false impression and thinks the world should change to fit his neurotype, whereas he might consider holding all his beliefs more lightly and questioning his assumptions a lot more. His argument might go a bit better if he gave examples of 'experts lying to his face'; rather, all his examples are Marvel-type movies and video games, which he should never have expected to map the real world in the first place.
You're wrong to dismiss cultural background as a purveyor of what one ought to believe. It is in fact more normal to take your cues from the celebrated myths of your culture than to evaluate them critically.
The conceit of the barbarism of reflection is that all men have it in them to construct their values from scratch, when in truth no or very few men have the ability.
It may be normal but if you are a truth-seeking type of person, taking fiction to reflect reality in this way feels like accepting that it should do. But should fiction accurately reflect the world? I would tentatively say no, though art is perhaps best if it's authentic to an earned worldview or moral sensibility of some kind.
Picasso said it most plainly as "Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth."
Insofar as we're talking of an actual exploration of the human condition and not mere propaganda, there are things art can teach you that no exhaustive study is able to touch.
I like to use the 1995 film Hackers as a good example of this. Widely panned by IT professionals as the epitome of "hollywood hacking", it nevertheless is a cult film among those same IT professionals because it managed to capture the essential experience of being part of a specific community at a specific time.
Every CS grad worth his salt had made fun of the 3D Vitruvian Man viruses and associated iconography. But when ThePirateBay was fighting the Man, it's clips from this movie they would post on their website. Because despite their catastrophic failure to be specifically accurate Hollywood still got the human experience right. And that's what art is uniquely good at capturing anyways.
All this however is besides the point, because what I'm saying (and you seem to agree) is that being a truth seeking person is not normal. And perhaps ultimately not even possible in extremis.
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