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Does this seem like a fact that you should be unaware of, given your basic assumptions and expectations of how society operates? Like, if I had claimed last week that the murder rate could do what it did, and you'd be completely unaware of it for years after the fact, would you have thought, "yeah, that seems like an accurate description of how the world works", or would you think I was booing my outgroup or waging the culture war?
...At some point, it seems to me that Gell-Man Amnesia stops being a curiosity, and needs to actually be engaged with. I think this conversation demonstrates a fundamental disconnect between fact and perception that is pervasive and lasting, and that should pretty clearly have decisive consequences for everything relating to the culture war.
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