People are not generally as self-reflective as you might think; when someone settles upon a core belief, they tend to stick with it for the rest of their lives, with any challenge to it being treated as a threat rather than as a potential opportunity for growth. You might think that when a core belief is completely wrong and leads to disastrous negative consequences that this might at be enough to lead someone to give it up, but strangely the mind does not actually work this way.

(I mean, I am not saying that these people are not also evil and/or oily snakes, but I think that there is value in observing the mental fallacies at work in others so that we can better spot them at work in ourselves, since our own mind is the one thing that we have at least some limited control over.)

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

In fairness, the deer population is way out of control, so I’m just doing my part to reduce it.

In fairness, the holodeck computer seems generally prone to go way overboard when constructing extrapolations of people, since that is how it also gave us a fully sentient Moriarty.