Facts don't matter as much as we wish.
No matter how you feel about the topic that Tali Sharot hinges her talk on, I hope that you will take a look at the root of her message:
Confirmation Bias (Science Daily)
Confirmation Bias (Psychology Today)


I disagree about all falling prey to confirmation bias equally. This is a trainable skill, to be able to closely analyze one's own position on any topic.

https://youtu.be/kyioZODhKbE


At about the 2 minute mark she talks about how (further) polarization crept in in an experiment about beliefs regarding climate change. Confirmation bias!
She also talks about gun control, but not in a way that reveals much; just that it is a divisive issue.

This is what we have to fight. Telling people they are wrong doesn't work well usually.

Trainable skill, taught by few, largely to a self-selecting audience as rare as...really rare things.
https://xkcd.com/1827/
https://xkcd.com/258/

What happened? I'll tell you what happened by using a hash tag!

#ITWASSUPPOSEDTOBEHER

There is a difference between being educated, and being intelligent. Seattle and the Puget Sound region have one of the highest levels of education in the country. But it's full of a bunch of idiots.

I don't think that education or intelligence shield anyone from being led down foolish paths.
I believe that this has way more to do with early indoctrination. It's very difficult to educate someone out of an early indoctrination, at least entirely.
We lose generations to parent apathy and a public school agenda that has seemed to weaken critical thinking skills.

Had my parents and adult relatives not taught and constantly challenged me to think critically from a young age, it's quite possible I could have been indoctrinated by my teachers and friends' parents. I was politically apathetic until I reached the age of 27, so I am very grateful that when I finally entered the fray, I was well-equipped to separate fact from fiction and recognize logical fallacies in an instant.

As an aside, my favorite undergrad class was Philosophy 101: Critical Thinking. It's funny to look back on the schoolmates I helped study for those exams; the ones who I remember struggling with that course also happen to be the same ones whose illogical political rants crop up from time to time on my Facebook feeds (I know, I know...correlation =/= causation and all that). I still have my lecture notes from that class, and I have been known to offer them as a political debate resource, but so far no one has taken me up on it.

Several years ago she gave a TED Talk about optimism bias (video available here -- https://www.ted.com/speakers/tali_sharot -- for anyone interested). I wonder how much these biases are related or rely on one another.

I believe Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark should be taught or at least required reading in high school, or perhaps even earlier.

I once met an older PhD who was getting ready to move to another house. He was arguing with his daughter about having to leave their phones in the old house, because how would the phones know they were in a new house and use the new number? (This was in Olympia).

One of my favorite books.
I have several copies of what I feel are important books to loan out. This is one of that type.
Glenn Beck's book Control is another.

How Not to Be Wrong is worth a look: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Not_to_Be_Wrong

yeah that is not as uncommon as you might think, years ago while working at a gas station (I was 16 or 17 at the time) I had to explain to a bewildered woman why I could not sell her gasoline when the power was out....seems she thought the gas traveled from the underground tank to her car on good thoughts and rainbows.

I once watched a science teacher try to use a level on a boat

I just kept walking from one side of the boat to the other until he got it

God help our children

Yep

And oddly deep down they all want to be conformists led by controllists. They seek protection in a group, which is fairly normal human survival behavior - but they essentially brag about be the most unique (and intelligent people) to the point of allowing some real nut bags into positions of power (gay perv mayor, charming savant, sleepy jay for example)