> Most of the time there isn't anything to discuss or dig in to.
Yes. It took humans centuries, millennia, or a couple hundred millennia, depending on how we think about it, to slowly, as a group of millions of people, develop the systematic checks and filters on our thinking that we call mathematics and science.
The surprise is having inherited that, some of us think checking our own beliefs this way is natural. We are healthy skeptics of ourselves.
That many people honestly (and I believe it is generally honest) don't "get it", don't understand how easy it is, for each of us to fool ourselves, is the unsurprising thing.
We did not evolve to discover solid truths. Just to navigate natural and social environments full of correlations, unlikely ever to be well understood, and statistically survive. Natural "beliefs" were/are simply imprinted correlations, adopted heuristics, or social identification, that upon being fixed, let us stop wasting time rethinking the incomprehensible. The pinnacle of innovation until recently.
> We did not evolve to discover solid truths. Just to navigate natural and social environments full of correlations, unlikely ever to be well understood, and statistically survive.
This is the important part. Evolution prepared us to build and maintain social groups that help us hunt for food and survive. Maintaining that social group is much more important to our nature than our ability for rational thinking.
Thus our rational thinking will readily make way for any beliefs that are required to maintain the social group, even if they are entirely contradictory and easily disproven.
I think beliefs are an optimization of brain resources first. Flexible thinking by an individual without recent structural thinking, likely has diminishing returns on any topic.
Magnified by the high cost of further experimentation in traumatic but survived experiences.
But then, as you say, where the subject has strong social implications, survival weighs in strongly for consistency.
wrong, so so wrong, surviving in the pre technolgical stone age world required the ability to comunicate very very precisely, and self evaluate, and also for elders to make decisive decisions that were constantly and neverendingly central to the groups survival, a shallow dive into the size and composition of neo lithic tribes, there environment, and the very sophisticated use of the resources spread over wide goegraphic areas is nessesary, before comenting on what those people were capable of, and what was important and central to them bieng able to thrive. there truths were tested in inumerable ways,and our existence is the proof of there rationality, and nothing less