Ask HN: How does one convince people and change minds in a post-fact world? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does one convince people and change minds in a post-fact world?

21 pointsdejawu22 comments

This post was spurred on by this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/5ntjh2/all_this_fake_news/dceozzo/

We've reached a point where factual evidence is no longer sufficient to convince someone of something. Did modern discussion platforms fail us? Is there something that can be changed about them to stop this?

...Can this even be undone?

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No. You were living in a contrived bubble of manufactured consent that was already post-fact. For instance did Saddam have nukes? No. But it was validated by a controlled mass media. The century of self guaranteed this sort of outcome. And there are other political crises looming mainly due to the way that mass psychology has been programmed and encouraged by business interests and the establishment.

People are presuming their desires in what they want to believe. How they want reality to be. They don't really care about your or the elite's opinions. It's getting more and more difficult to control people's irrational behavior and erratic thought patterns because they are fed by desire to believe. Not what is true, because who determines the truth? Their leaders? They don't trust them. Business interests? They don't trust them. The Church? You get the idea.

Putin is simply catching up to the West in terms of propaganda. All the stuff described has been going on in America and the rest of the West for a century since Sigmund Freud turned the establishment on to the subconscious. It's been down hill from there. It's just when the playing field is leveled then the possibilities are scary.

Unfortunately I get what you are saying and its bleak, I try to avoid the trap with the media by reading lots of different ones and finding their sources, other stuff helps like listening to a politicians speech directly rather than opinions on that speech (YouTube * 1.5 speed is useful).

I still question whether my worldview is an accurate inference from the evidence prevented but that slaps bang into philosophy and navel gazing.

People have never made decisions based on facts. We decide based on emotions, and then rationalize our decisions later if ever.

Evolution did not optimize us for accurate understanding of the world. It optimized us for having offspring that survive. The latter by and large does not require the former. Indeed, deception plays a big role in human reproductive strategies.

One of the sales guys where I work has a piece of paper hung on his cubicle which reads: "All purchasing decisions are emotional."

It's wrong only in having too narrow of a scope :)

Reminds me of something Putin said to journalists regarding global balance of power:

"International Relations is much like mathematics — there is nothing personal about it."[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/kqD8lIdIMRo?t=11m25s

> We've reached a point where factual evidence is no longer sufficient to convince someone of something.

Has it ever been? This whole talk about a post fact world is bollocks anyway. It's a heavy-handed device contrived to explain things like a President Trump or Brexit that according to conventional political wisdom aren't allowed to happen.

Well, guess what if people on either side of the political spectrum hadn't been so bloody arrogant we'd have neither Brexit nor Trump today. More importantly, people wouldn't believe some nonsense they read in the news if they were treated as actual, thinking human beings.

>we'd have neither Brexit nor Trump today

That's just it, though. Was that ever realistically avoidable? Or was the momentum of arrogant politics such that that was inevitable?

In 2016 it was too late already but it's hard to say when the exact turning point happened. In terms of Brexit it possibly was two-fold: The hurried Eastern enlargement (which ironically was expedited by the UK) and flaws in the design of the euro.

After Trump's victory there were some signs of humility and contrition, which unfortunately were very quickly replaced by the "post fact world" meme and an arrogant "See? We were right all along." stance again.

Developments like that are no one-way road. If people come to their senses the pendulum might swing the other way again.

>After Trump's victory there were some signs of humility and contrition, which unfortunately were very quickly replaced by the "post fact world" meme

This chafes me to no end.

This belief that Trump/Brexit is some kind of disruption to the natural order of things and if we just get rid of "fake news", things will go back to the way they're supposed to be. We just need to bring back the "real news", like pondering if airplanes get sucked into black holes or gossiping about Clooney getting divorced. Then Hillary & Co can be in charge like the gods intended.

It seems to me that the sense of entitlement to the office is one of the things that people found so repellent about Hillary.

Exactly.

And this doubling down that they're doing is only burying them further.

Humility and contrition weren't exactly the route the Republicans used to get the pendulum to swing back their way again.

In UK politics Labour is a veritable orgy of soul-searching about what they did wrong after a slightly-less-narrow-than expected election defeat, which Brexit hasn't exactly improved. The SNP has a clear "voters were cheated by the lies of the London media" grievance narrative and hasn't shifted an inch on the desirability of an independent Scotland. One of these parties has seen the political pendulum swing back towards them.

Ultimately, if the Democrats are to win office again they'll do it from capturing votes from people angry enough about Trump to change their voting intention (and from having a different candidate) not from conceding he was right about a huge number of things. Sure, it might be a comfort blanket for their own mistakes, but the "Trump and his supporters deceived voters!" narrative is also at least as likely to succeed at winning over disaffected Trump/non-voters than trying to reinvent themselves by borrowing his policies or tone.

I don't think Trump won based on people thinking he was right, or that his positions (what positions?) were correct. There were some people who believed that, but not enough for him to win. Trump won because there were enough people who voted "not Hillary" to put Trump over the top.

You don't persuade people like that with facts. You persuade them by running a candidate less flawed than Hillary.

"Well, guess what if people on either side of the political spectrum hadn't been so bloody arrogant we'd have neither Brexit nor Trump today. More importantly, people wouldn't believe some nonsense they read in the news if they were treated as actual, thinking human beings."

Arrogance didn't create this. Racism and Xenophobia? Yep. The destruction of confidence in government and the politicians who work there? Yep. A willingness to believe anything that confirms your current worldview? Yep.

The idea that people believe in things like "Pizzagate" because "they're not treated nicely" is nonsense and an attempt to shift blame onto those who don't deserve it.

I agree with others that everything has always been post-fact in a certain sense.

The real problem now is that opinions and attitudes are being driven so much by ideological group membership. That is, people are explicitly or implicitly making decisions on the basis of "is this the sort of thing that X sort of person would or should do?" rather than "is the sort of thing that is in my best long-term interests?" They're taking for granted what is consistent with their ideological identifications, which often aren't flexible or nuanced enough to deal with the real world.

To be clear, I see this as happening on both sides of the political spectrum, although I admit in the US I see it as becoming more extreme with social conservatives.

I definitely see this happening on the left as well (with identity politics). Makes sense that the response on the right follows suit.

I'm very optimistic that we can solve this problem with better tools. That's not to deny, as others have pointed out here, that emotions drive our thinking and that a post-fact world is as old as the art of rhetoric. It is, rather, based on the observation that we have an incredible ability to crowdsource information--including of an opinionated / normative variety--thanks to the internet, and yet we're still using the same rather rudimentary tool we started with: threaded comments. Threaded comments have their virtues, to be sure, but one of their downsides tends to be a lack of structure in the body of the content.

Sequiturs (https://sequiturs.com) is my attempt at a tool that solves this problem, of how to collaboratively reason and change people's minds about something. I've written a bit more here about why I think the answer is better tooling: https://sequiturs.com/blog/post/introducing-sequiturs/

I just read a book about writing science proposals. You would think that writing a proposal intended for an audience of scientists the advice would be 'stick to the facts' and make a 'scientific' argument. Yes, sort of. But it turns out that if you want to convince people of the importance of your idea, you need to invoke emotion and the best way to do this is with a compelling story. So to convince people, even scientists, of the importance of any idea the best way to do it is to use a good story.

Interesting, and not obvious to me. Though I'd guess standard knowledge for people in marketing and sales.

Well, scientists often consider the two factors of relevance and rigor. A scientific study must be rigorous in its methodology in order to pass peer review. But it must also be relevant to a question or problem that matters. So you often start a paper with a few paragraphs about "the problem" and how/why your contribution is important. This would be even more important if applying for a grant, because funders want to make sure there's a good reason for the study.

In sales and marketing, the job becomes orders of magnitude easier if the product is actually as good as promised. When your product is lower quality than the competition, advertising it is possible but difficult (and I would say ethically questionable) and you're not going to succeed with everyone.

It's the same with "convincing someone of something". The job becomes many times easier if the thing you're trying to persuade them of is actually true. If it's true, you can use plain facts and clear logic. If the thing you're trying to convince them of is false, you'll have to make increasingly more effort and will see a lower success rate. You'll also have to use dishonest tactics, like changing the meanings of words and declaring certain lines of argument taboo or unacceptable in polite society (i.e. political correctness).

A corollary is that, if you (from your POV) find it increasingly difficult to persuade People of Things, it might be worth considering the possiblility of whether those Things might in fact be wrong, rather than jumping to the conclusion that those People are deficient. You should at least consider it, and maybe take some time for personal study of the issues and arguments before redoubling your advertising budget.

The "post-fact" issue is one thing; convincing people and changing minds is another.

As for the latter, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". And keeping in mind that a big part of convincing others is keeping yourself open to having your mind changed.

Going back to the post-fact issue: people are rarely convinced based on evidence or facts alone to change their mind, so in some sense the facts are secondary. That said, finding a common ground of ideas or facts to agree upon is important. Figuring out how to find this common ground is an important skill. This is what I think the crux of "post fact" comes down to. And a lot of this means granting people the benefit of the doubt, engaging in good faith, and refusing to let yourself get dragged into "point-scoring" and other lesser forms of argumentation.

We've know the solution for decades. We need a credibility/reliability/trust score. I will blindly trust what a highly trusted person will claim.

At the moment, it's impossible to accurately determine if someone is trustworthy or not because we don't keep track of commitments, faults and lies. It's a lot easier to give the appearance of trust than to be trustworthy.

Today, those who lie the best in interviews get jobs. Tomorrow, I will hire a person without needing an interview thanks to those scores.

It's unavoidable. Why wait?

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