Autumn is mating season for spiders, it’s when a lot of them come out of hiding in search of some sexy times.

This just seems like good old cognitive dissonance to me. This article calls this specific kind of cognitive dissonance “belief perseverance”, which seems very apt: https://philosophy.institute/epistemology/addressing-unjustified-beliefs/

*A reasonable question arises: if unjustified beliefs are so clearly at odds with the evidence, why don’t people simply change their minds when confronted with facts? The answer lies in understanding that rational belief revision is not merely a matter of receiving new information. It requires that the evidence be recognized as relevant, assessed without distortion, and allowed to actually alter the existing belief structure – each of which is complicated by the mechanisms described above.

Confirmation bias means that contradictory evidence may not even be registered at full strength. The availability heuristic means that striking supporting examples continue to feel more representative than they are. And the psychological costs of belief revision – the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, the threat to identity – create a strong motivational force pushing back against change.*

The entire article is well worth a read imo.

I got a déjà-vu from last week. Same person I think, but I’m not a 100% certain since they deleted their old posts. They’ve already been told extensively that this is not age related.