Some web links I found to be of interest:
Despite their continued failure to understand how psychiatric drugs work, doctors continue to tell patients that their troubles are the result of chemical imbalances in their brains. As Frank Ayd pointed out, this explanation helps reassure patients even as it encourages them to take their medicine, and it fits in perfectly with our expectation that doctors will seek out and destroy the chemical villains responsible for all of our suffering, both physical and mental. The theory may not work as science, but it is a devastatingly effective myth.
Judge Richard Posner in a 1985 Columbia Law Review article wrote:
This means that the criminal law is designed primarily for the nonaffluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law. This may seem to be a left-wing kind of suggestion ("criminal law keeps the lid on the lower classes"), but it is not. It is efficient to use different sanctions depending on an offender's wealth.But according to Yale law professor Dan Kahan, it's easier than we think for reasonable people to trick themselves into reaching unreasonable conclusions. Kahan and his team found that, when it comes to controversial issues, people's ability to do math is impacted by their political beliefs.
As an academic, I've often heard that "the facts speak for themselves", or that one need only to "look at the data" in order to see the truth. Unfortunately, experience has taught me that neither of these statements is correct. Facts are always colored by the context in which they are presented, and data can be massaged and molded to tell almost any story you want. And so what if you're correct, if nobody will pay attention to you in the first place?
When things go wrong in assisted living, people can pay with their dignity, and sometimes with their lives.
If critics are too pessimistic about what the future holds, they are right about one thing: over the past decade, neuroscience has become overprivileged as a method of examining the mind. Journalists, courts, and sometimes even scientists seem to believe that a brain scan can be more telling than a profile of an individual's behavior. Perhaps as neuroscience progresses, it is possible for objective, physiological assessment of the brain to win out as the ultimate arbiter of truth when it comes to the mind. But that's a long way off, if it ever will be possible at all.
... if you look at the studies conducted over the past century, you will find that those with religious beliefs will, on the whole, score lower on tests of intelligence.