Your worldview is more important than facts

At least for most people. While probably not a surprise for everyone, this interesting blogpost also links to a paper which formally conforms this.
What i'd consider quite alarming though is the conclusion drawn from the research, that people who have to contradict parts of science in order to keep their worldview intact, will tend to increasingly disbelief in the scientific method as a whole. This would mean that crackpot ideas are actually contagious in way.

efkelley said:

Heh. Wonder what brought this on?

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Actually, nothing here, i was just crossposting from a different forum since i thought this might pique the curiosity of some folks here too.

The link linked: http://www.badscience.net/2010/07/yeah-well-you-can-prove-anything-with-science/

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Whoops, misplaced the brackets there. Thanks for pointing it out, the OP is corrected now.

No really, it isn't. FTL travel doesn't even belong here very much, since there are some imaginable possibilities for it (letting causality go to make FTL possible causes headaches, but is not necessarily against known physics) and few people are passionate enough about their belief in FTL travel.
Better examples of this would be that firm believers in telepathy will rather believe that sceptics emit telepathy blocking negative energy or double-blinded tests were manipulated just to suppress them than accept that there is no such thing as telepathy. And they will as a result of this experience be less willing to accept the reliability of the scientific method when it comes to other things, even if they're not passionate about those.