&gt; Any thoughts on why we, a subset of the population that tends to be defined by priding itself on its intelligence and rationality, can be so egregiously head-up-its-own-ass like this?<p>Hi, I think about this sort of thing often and have come to the personal conclusion that humans&#x27; chief vice is stubbornness. Please allow me to explain because the stubbornness is more of an effect than a cause.<p>Humans couple identity &amp; belief very tightly. For example, people say things like &quot;I am Republican&quot;, which doesn&#x27;t imply that there is a subspecies of humans called Republican as an alien might think, but rather that they generally believe in the republican party&#x27;s views. This is the start of it.<p>Somewhere along the line of growing up, identity becomes a very big deal and puberty hits you with &quot;Shutup mom &amp; dad, I believe in [this] stuff cause that&#x27;s who I am!&quot; This is actually rather healthy as the teenager is becoming autonomous and self-reliant, but is accompanied by the damaging effect of My Beliefs = Who I am. For a teenager that does not know <i>not</i> to believe in self-debilitating thoughts, they can quickly wind up on the road down to depression.<p>Furthermore in this world, specialness is generally coveted. A lot of the nerds around here might know Enders Game in which a kid kills a civilization that is arguably more peaceful than our own -- the society worked like a bee hive and did not understand personal dogmas or behavior that centered around the individual. While it&#x27;s scary to imagine a queen bee ruling over all of us, there&#x27;s still something to be said about if we focused on working together.<p>However, that&#x27;s not this world so what you end up with is people equating their specialness (and therefore value, and therefore self-value, and therefore self-esteem) with their identity, which is defined by their beliefs &amp; physical appearance. If they only could stop caring so much about special, it wouldn&#x27;t <i>matter</i> if you were right or wrong because you would be on a natural hunt for goodness and knowledge in all its forms. Yet, from the competition to be special comes this behavior.<p>It&#x27;s not that people <i>want</i> to be stubborn, but in linking their identity with their belief &amp; thought, they now feel literally attacked if they are wrong. Nerds, who many already suffer with self-esteem issues, thus feel good to be a mental champion because it reinvigorates their self-esteem.<p>For some of us, we hold our identity in spirit and therefore feel detached from the human existence and do not let it bind us in this manner. I&#x27;m not perfect and saying everyone should follow me, but generally speaking, I do believe if people truly evaluated where they get their feelings of self-esteem from, they might be a little startled to see how much of it revolves around petty things like the need to be right.