We tend to absorb the things we read that follow our own perception and bias. Cherry picking. Anything else just doesn't register. Heuristics. That's why so many people talk like sound bites. You can't learn new things if you don't know how to listen.
People may think I'm an idiot, but be damned if I'm gonna open my mouth and remove all doubt!!
Sometimes we show our knowledge by talking, sometimes by knowing when to shut up!
Giving things that support our beliefs more weight than things that don't is an issue all the way to the thinkers influencing the world. There was a string of weather stations documenting global warming. These were remote unmanned stations. Best I recall there were between a dozen and thirty. One broke, the rest documented the mini cooling cycle the world was going through. Can't have that, the funding was for finding the opposite results.
All of the working stations showed the consistent patterns as would be expected. The broken station was shown as being wildly inconsistent with every other station, the only way to show global warming in the midst of a cooling trend.
Frustrated me to no end to have my boss, the company president with a PhD in Chemical Engineering, make me dedicate all resources for a week, money and time on a hard money project, to demonstrate that a seemingly simple path wouldn't work. It was as simple as A+B+C! The problem was just like many a discussion on here, the real variables were A+B+C plus over a dozen minor variables.
Those tiny parasite variables over time defeated the main elements. At least a dozen companies had tried this same path. I presented documentation from three companies that had went down the same path and found that the parasite elements prevented the idea from working. I had researched that path months before when we were just past the brainstorming stage. Didn't matter, the company president wanted to see for himself!
Incidentally, I loved that job! I could be staring out the window for hours without the wheels complaining. No way to tell if I was working my ass off or daydreaming, well except Friday after lunch. Unless something was truly urgent that four hours was dedicated to fishing strategy for the weekend. Priorities you know!
Hu