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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

How about "why don't facts change people's minds about global warming"?

or "why don't facts change people's minds about gun control?" (this is an issue with both the left, they are both wrong about many aspects of gun issues!)

These are just two cases that came to mind, where I have friends/family who I talk to about it, and I can explain some facts in great detail that I'm familiar with, and in that moment they will seem to change their mind a little bit. But a couple months later they are right back to their old thinking. Maybe people tend to forget the stuff they would rather not believe.

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"Do humans cause climate change?" is a question of fact. "What type of gun control should we have?" is not a question of fact, so you shouldn't expect that simply stating some facts relevant to the issue would automatically change someone's opinion.

I agree, but there are facts about gun issues that make that gun control question harder to answer. People who believe strongly that guns make a country much safer. People who don't understand what assault rifles are, or that you can shoot up a school 99% as well with a `regular` rifle, people who think lack of guns will make a country MUCH safer. There are plenty of empirical evidence to refuse those kinds of beliefs but people hold on to them pretty strongly.

> people who think lack of guns will make a country MUCH safer. There are plenty of empirical evidence to refuse those kinds of beliefs but people hold on to them pretty strongly.

Well, I look at it this way. Both the left and the right (including our current administration in the US) as well as those who financially and politically support the current administration (such as the NRA) agree emphatically that gun control works, and lack of guns in the hands of laws abiding citizenry is safer. So when both the left and the right agree through words and policies, and it's demonstrated through safety and security, it's hard to argue otherwise. The question really then becomes one of scope.

Perhaps the appeal of an assault rifle in this situations is the emotional charge a spree killer feels in wielding one. The marketing of the weapons - in fictional media as well as in gun magazines is that these are tools of power, probably something that appeals to the kind of a spree killer. So... maybe assault rifles being banned would be a consequence of their great marketing. (And why they get a bump in sales after every mass shooting?)

>People who don't understand what assault rifles are,

Or don't care for pedants who try arguing that an AR-15 isn't an assault rifle... because the issue isn't about terminology. Although trying argue about that does deflect from the real issue though.

>or that you can shoot up a school 99% as well with a `regular` rifle

Are you trying to say a bolt action hunting rifle is 99% as effective at massacring large numbers of people compared to a magazine fed semi-automatic weapon? Since you seem to have some complaint about "assault rifles" being used colloquially you might want to define what is a regular rifle, technically.

>people who think lack of guns will make a country MUCH safer. There are plenty of empirical evidence to refuse those kinds of beliefs but people hold on to them pretty strongly.

What you mean to say is you can tolerate the tens of thousands of gun deaths each year. And your belief is that if we take all those guns away those same number of deaths will just transfer over to stabbings or poisonings. Well while I'm not a badass or anything, I'll take my chances with a knife wielding maniac over a gun wielding maniac.

So... all those developed first world nations that have strong gun control laws still have an equivalent amount of murder and weapon assaults because everyone who would have used a gun still picks up a less dangerous weapon and is somehow just as efficient as they would be with a gun?

The biggest problem the U.S. has with gun control is that there's so many guns in the country that it will take a generation, maybe a 100 years for anything but the most draconian laws to have a tangible effect. And the whole time you'll have 2nd amendment wonks crying every day for 100 years about how gun control doesn't work because it didn't instantly fix the issue. However doing nothing hasn't been working either.

You contradict yourself when you talk about the issue not being one of terminology when you say the opposite by saying a `regular` rifle is a bolt action rifle when the most common retail rifle sales are of magazine fed semi-automatic weapons.

Please come back with an internally coherent argument, and then we can start from there.

Most proposed "assault-weapons bans" ban features like magazines larger than ten rounds and bump stocks.

Whether you want to call a qualifying weapon a "regular" rifle or an "assault" rifle is not pertinent because neither of those terms is well-defined.

> Most proposed "assault-weapons bans" ban features like magazines larger than ten rounds

Magazines larger than ten rounds are OEM standard on the regular rifles that are in common retail sale.

You're still failing at being internally consistent.

> But a couple months later they are right back to their old thinking. Maybe people tend to forget the stuff they would rather not believe.

Or it could be that their follows/likes on social media tend to be an echo chamber and dominate the information they receive. As soon as you stop talking to them about something different than what they normally hear, it quickly fades from view as their social feeds bring the "facts" that support their current position to the front again 24/7.

> How about "why don't facts change people's minds about global warming"?

I have always thought it was either the lack of the ability to understand the facts, or the shear unwillingness to actually look at the facts.

What is the most compelling website/report you know of that one who is willing to have their mind changed should read?

What about the way the information is often presented to the average person as a justification for policy change. How often does the average person encounter information about global warming devoid of an attempt to change policy in relation to the information? That alone would cause reason for a person doubt the authenticity of the information since the source is seen as biased. Add in how badly news organizations butcher the actual science, and there is plenty of room for doubt that then can be exploited by those who specifically seek to do so.

Hmmm, interesting perspective. However, forget about the denialist fringe for a moment. The majority of people do understand that climate change is bad, and most feel paralyzed into inaction by all the doom-and-gloom messaging – welp, looks like we're all screwed, now let me get back to what I was doing.

Few understand that climate change is still very much a solvable problem, and that our success crucially depends on building the political will for new policies around carbon pricing and land use — and that, in turn, hinges on creating an understanding for the scales at which such policies must and can enact change. The current mainstream discourse, on the other hand, is half fatalistic cynicism, and half turn-off-the-lights-and-reuse-your-plastic-bags blather.

Ergo, talking about policy change is important, no?

Generally, because "something some guy said" is not a fact, and the article makes the very same mistake three times. For example, "95% of climate scientists agree" is not a fact about global warming. It's a fact about climate scientists, and at best a rumor about climate change.

What would be a fact? The GISS raw data would come close. But James Hansen doesn't release it. No, the data has to first be "cleaned", lest people misinterpret it. That reduces a fact to "James Hansen said", and I might simply conclude that Hansen is a moron and discard the rumor.

In short, to convince someone, it isn't enough to tell them what you think, you also have to give them the means to verify those claims. You can verify that particular claim by reading E. T. Jaynes: "Probability Theory---The Logic Of Science".

>>For example, "95% of climate scientists agree" is not a fact about global warming. It's a fact about climate scientists, and at best a rumor about climate change.

If 95% of climate scientists agree that something is a fact, that is not "at best a rumor" about climate change.

> If 95% of climate scientists agree that something is a fact, that is not "at best a rumor" about climate change.

True, but if you're a big enough pedant and chase down what is actually behind the "95% of climate scientists agree" claim, you'll discover it's not actually what it's sold as, which is a shame because I believe there's probably more than enough genuine evidence that resorting to this sort of thing is unnecessary to change people's minds. To be fair, it's worked very well on most people, but there are still plenty of others on (or on the wrong side of) the fence that I suspect could have their minds changed if the ~facts were presented in the right way.

What is the "right way" to convince these people? I'm genuinely curious about your research/experiential findings on this, because I'm at a loss.

I wouldn't know what to do with raw data about climate change and I'm unusually well educated. Just not in climate science. You can't expect a majority of people to educate themselves sufficiently in every relevant topic to make informed decisions. That's why we have scientists who study things for years and years and specialize in interpreting data. The rational thing to do for almost everything is to trust the majority of the specialists.

> The rational thing to do for almost everything is to trust the majority of the specialists.

Brilliant way to miss the point, which is that rational reasoning also tells you whom to trust. If you have two groups pointing fingers at each other while yelling "Those are not specialists! We are!", you gain no information about who really is. You need something else, and untampered data is something else, even if you can't analyze it yourself.

Well, only one of those two groups actually studied climate science, so my money is on them being the actual specialists.

You could just as well throw your money at any other group of advocacy scientists... say creation scientists.

Of course, I am not an actual creationist, so dont throw any money at my belief that the world is billions of years old.

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