My latest essay says,

The great mass of people form their political beliefs with little regard for facts or logic. However, the elites also have a strategy for avoiding truth. Elites form their political beliefs dogmatically, using their cleverness to organize facts to fit preconceived prejudices. The masses’ strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites’ strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.

What I call the high-investment strategy for avoiding truth is a phenomenon that interest me a great deal. After I assimilated this idea (from Jeffrey Friedman’s piece in Critical Review, I started seeing example after example of people (sometimes myself included) following the high-investment strategy.

For me, this is an important phenomenon, and that makes this an important essay. Read the whole thing and comment.