Tribal Epistemology

Humans didn't evolve to be truth-seeking machines — they evolved to be coalition-maintaining machines. Believing what your group believes is not a bug in cognition but a feature of social survival, because being right but ostracized was more dangerous than being wrong but belonging. This means that presenting better evidence to change minds often backfires, because the belief was never about evidence in the first place — it's a loyalty badge.

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