Write a summary of Elizabeth Kolbert’s article, fill out the RNF of Kolbert’s article and write a response of question 3

Why facts don’t change our minds?Question 1: Your third summary is to be over an assigned reading from this week, specifically, Elizabeth Kolbert’s pice from the New Yorker titled “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds”. Please follow the Summary model and the summary instructions to write this summary. At least 500 words. Please kindly review the Grade points rules. The article’s link is blue highlighted.

Question 2: In Elizabeth Kolbert’s article “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds”, she summarizes any number of studies that have proven we humans may not be as logical or rational as we might like to believe ourselves to be. In the two Sagan chapters assigned this week, we first read a summary or history of alien sightings and abductions before Sagan explains why continued belief in alien visitation and abduction is likely and why such beliefs are clung to in the face of overwhelming evidence that what is being reported could not possibly have happened. Sagan then tackles the phenomenon called hallucinations. As he explains, many of us will have one or more visual or auditory hallucination in our lifetimes, and there are scientific, medical reasons for having them, but as he goes on to point out, a hallucination is imaginary in that the thing seen or heard is a construct of the mind, and not real in any physical sense.

So, the question for the week is this: Based on the assigned readings for the week readings:(Carl Sagan Chapters 4 “Aliens” and 6

“Hallucinations” and Kolbert’s article), There are three assigned readings this week. The first is an interesting New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert. In her piece, Kolbert offers several studies which help explain why, even when confronted with irrefutable factual information to the contrary, many of us will cling to our original, erroneous belief(s).

As companion pieces, the other two assigned readings are chapters 4 and 6 from Sagan’s book, “The demon-hunted world.” In Chapter Four, Sagan deals with “Aliens,” or more correctly, he gives a bit of background to phenomenon of the widespread belief in alien visitation and abduction in this country before offering his own reasons why people continue to cling to the belief that not only are aliens visiting us regularly, but a fair number of Americans also claim to have been abducted by them. In the sixth chapter titled “Hallucinations,” Sagan continues his discussion of aliens before getting tying the belief in them to his main point about hallucinations. As he explains, hallucinations are not that uncommon and can be explained scientifically/medically. Nonetheless, as he takes some pains to explain, by definition a hallucination is not a real, that is it is not a tangible thing; it is a trick of the mind. He does this as a means of trying to understand why people insist not only on believing in their own hallucinations but in those of others as well.

Write a response to this question: how might what you have learned from these readings help explain those persons Andersen identifies as living “untethered” from reality? In other words, how could one use this week’s readings to explain why people cling to the ideas that Andersen lists, ideas that are not based in reality and which, most of them, anyway, can be proven false? I have attached Kurt Anderson’s article below. (AT LEAST 150 WORDS)

Question 3:Please fill out the RPF form of Kolbert’s article Why facts don’t change our minds?. I have attached the blank RNF.