People are “consistently inconsistent” in reasoning about controversial topics
digest.bps.org.uk
digest.bps.org.uk
I believe in global warming, but not because of research papers or books I've read on climate change. I've clicked on research papers but I often find the scientific terminology and information in them overwhelming. I think, "It looks like they know what they're talking about." Sometimes I don't even click. I look around at people commenting on it, and if an articulate person makes a case one way or another, it influences my beliefs.
I know this is wrong but frankly it would be impossible to be educated enough on all these matters to justify having an opinion. Imagine if everyone who felt strongly about global warming had read and understood at least one research paper on it. That would mean half my friends, family, and coworkers have read and understood a research paper. I'll take the under...
What makes matters worse is being around people socially who have strong opinions. Not having one can make you look boring or dimwitted. If the conversation wanders into an area in which you do have an opinion--based on facts and research--citing those facts can feel like reading off box score statistics at a Yankees-Red Sox game. No one gets excited!
That makes me cynical. I think, people just want to feel strongly about something, kind of like they want to have a baseball team. It binds them together. I guess that's fine, I just wish we treated it more like sports and less like religion.
In a related manner, I tend to judge ideas by who agrees with them. Be careful who you're standing with, they can tell you a lot about the validity of where you're standing. (Or, as a friend put it about politics, "If the racists think the candidate is a racist, the candidate is probably a racist".)
So, for something like global warming, if you're standing with people who believe in and work within the scientific method, you're probably good (assuming you believe in science), and if you're standing with people who believe the world was created in seven days 5500 years ago and corporations whose core business model is to put greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere... well.
As a consequence, when people have the gut feeling that something might be off many trust that feeling over whatever truth is them presented.
Also: >> (Or, as a friend put it about politics, "If the racists think the candidate is a racist, the candidate is probably a racist".)
is just amazingly simple minded. By the same logic all dogs are Nazis just because Hitler's dog (probably) loved him and Hitler was a Nazi after all.
The dog has no concept of "the bad elements".
> in the logic of OP, all other dogs who think this is behavior is okay
No. The OP did not talk about approval. They talked about specifically thinking the candidate is racist.
Now, it's possible that Candidate X is not a racist. But if the racists are confused about it, maybe Candidate X needs to be more clear. Because the racists look at Candidate Y and "We hate Candidate Y, because they're opposed to our beliefs". No chance of misunderstandings there.
Now, Candidate X will certainly have other supporters saying "We don't believe Candidate X is a racist", but I look at them sidelong and say "Don't listen to me, listen to the racists".
A dog isn't a reasoning human being. Using the dog, this way, in the argument is irrelevant and distracting to any of the issues.
I think we can say that EVERY person around Hitler was in fact a bad person regardless of whether they loved dogs.
It may be that people used fallacious reasoning to justify their own support of Hitler (ignoring his other qualities conveniently) for such reasons as "he likes dogs therefore he is a good person".
"I like X because he agrees with me in this narrow way therefore I'll support X doing terrible terrible things but justify it with this narrow reason."
That's a bad person supporting a bad person.
Person A prefers apple over oranges and potatoes over tomatoes.
Person B prefers also potatoes over tomatoes but does not care about apple or oranges.
Original poster now argues that it is okay for Person C to say Person B is an oranges hater, just because Person B prefers potatoes.
Replace Person A/B/C with your favorite groups of adversaries.
I honestly think ideas like this are one of the most problematic beliefs in the current political discourse. This type of thinking only means we look less and less at the merits of someone's arguments and more and more at the tribe they associate with, or even worse the tribe that chooses to associate with them.
We have absolutely no control over these associations. If some nutjob chooses to support my cause does that somehow means my arguments are less valid?
This is especially important because clever politicians can say things that seem reasonable on the surface, but aren't really.
What I'm talking about here is really an application of the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule. Support of nutjobs is 80% likely to be evidence of nutty ideas.
It doesn’t really work well for politics - it’s clear nutjobs support both major parties here in the US.
I find that kind of honesty refreshing in a politician, when they can set aside their own personal beliefs and actually represent the people who elected them.
There's a large empirical literature on the issue and the conclusion is that money is more or less irrelevant in politics. Political campaigns are entirely ineffective.
The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments [0]
"First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in general elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These experiments’ average effect is also zero."
Does Money Buy Votes? The Case of Self-Financed Gubernatorial Candidates, 1998–2008 [1]
"The apparent effect of spending on votes is severely inflated by omitted variable bias: the best candidates also happen to be the best fundraisers. [...] self-financed spending has no statistical effect on election results"
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1
> There's a large empirical literature on the issue and the conclusion is that money is more or less irrelevant in politics.
That's simply nonsense.
"We find no evidence that corporations benefit from electing their favored candidate, and we can statistically reject effect sizes greater than 0.4 percent of firm value. Contrary to the concerns of many observers, corporate campaign contributions do not appear to buy significant political favors."
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/spenkuch/researc...
So by logical extension, a highly virtuous person would ... donate money to racist causes? Because that is the exact opposite of taking their donations.
There is always going to be one politician who has policies that are more racist-friendly than the other. Targeting specific groups for exclusion from the political process, even at the social level, is a recipe for disaster. We want less of that, not more.
At most, ask for transparency about where the donations are sourced from so the polity can talk about it.
Trump is a good example of this sort of thing - a reporter just has to look at him sideways to get told that black unemployment is at a record low, and over the last 2 years he's pulled a couple of pro-black political stunts. About half the media will still call him a racist, because he has _no_ control over who he gets associated with.
I expect this point would come up in a debate so I'll address it - a 'Muslim travel ban' is only racist to someone who is very confused about what 'race' means. Given the pain Bush & Obama have delivered to the Middle East in particular, and the Muslim world in general, this is a distasteful but certainly not inconsistent choice for US foreign policy.
> politicians who accept donations from racist organizations are the racist politicians.
Maybe in the abstract, but who are there "racist organizations" that are making political donations to influence politicans? Assuming we are still talking US politics, the last scandal [0] involving the KKK (only racist organisation I know of) was in 1991! Everything since is literally throwaway one-line comments of no real significance.
I don't think racist organisations are active in politics, they'd make candidates unelectable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_United_States_politi...
The issue is that such a model is based purely on economic grounds rather than on messaging and rhetoric. Accepting money usually implies a form of condonation of the donor because the implication is that you want their assistance. If I take money from the US Nazi party and sue them back (for... something) with said money that’d be complicated but this has happened rarely enough that popular media appears to never show it. This isn’t like a corporate entity like Burger King donating money to a candidate. But it would sure be funny if Burger King donated money to PETA right?
On the flip side, refusing money is usually assumed as a form of demonstration of principle that is even stronger the lesser your wealth; that even if you are poor and destitute (as if our politicians are, yeah I know) you would rather not accept money from someone you disagree with. If a homeless person returns a large sum of money, that makes news (and an ironically higher-compensation Kickstarter / gofundme for the refuser but historically not so). Politicians and powerful people in general work off networks and money as their careers so taking money from someone when you have so much wealth / fame already carries a lot of weight there as well.
Come to think of it, I think I saw someone accept a donation and immediately donate the money to a diametrically opposed organization. But that’s rare enough that it becomes a headline is my point.
Scientific method revolves around hypothesis and tests.
Global warming science is based on something else entirely.
Edit: My wording seems to have provoked confusion as to my point. Apologies. My point is that not all science utilizes the scientific method.
Also, in case you haven't noticed, we're currently conducting a global scale experiment (though without a control Earth) that is already showing results.
By contrast, how would you propose falsifying a climate model? Each decade or so we gain another chunk of data we can use to try to trial predictions of the past and, to date, they've done quite abysmally except in the most broad sense of a longterm gradual increase in temperatures. For instance from 2001 and 2010 the warming slowed to 0.11C per decade. [1] For the 17 years before then was 0.17C. There was not a single model that predicted this and, in spite of a number of after the fact hypotheses for that apparent decline, there is still no decisive answer. In a science that was more heavily dependent upon testing, this would be a ground-shaking event. But it's effect on climate science has been relatively minimal.
[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-global-warmin...
I could build a cabin using basic reasoning. I can't build a skyscraper with just basic reasoning. Does that mean we shouldn't build skyscrapers? Or just that we should leave their design to someone who really put the effort into the "cognitive manageability" of it?
And really, when it gets down to it, a lot of the blatantly irrational opposition to the very idea of global warming comes from "cognitive manageability". For people who still think Sky Daddy made the world in six days and cavemen rode dinosaurs, the idea that their car is wrecking the atmosphere is beyond their "cognitive manageability", and it gets flatly rejected.
When I see the people who believe in the scientific method mostly lined up on one side of an issue, and people who reject the scientific method mostly lined up on the other side, it biases me. Which was my original point, that so many people have flipped out about.
To give an example of something that is not cognitively manageable, aside from climate, consider the stock market. We can create a million correlations to the stock market. And these correlations themselves all hold true. And there is an immense, literally unlimited, amount of profit to be made if somebody could combine these correlations into a way that could create meaningful predictive value. There's no doubt that billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been spent in pursuit of such. Yet prediction seems to remain impossible. And that's in a field with a fraction of the variables of climate change.
From a practical perspective, it doesn't matter if the subject is technically formal science or a rigorous phenomenology, what matters is that you can engineer systems using the knowledge of the field.
There's more to the scientific method than that.
The input data wasn't working with the expected results as well, so they came up with a flaw in the thermometers around the world which they used as justification to massage the numbers.
I dunno. I don't like pollution, but it's feeling a little hoaxie.
Anyway this doesn't seem like the appropriate forum.
Just because a group of misguided individuals support a specific idea, person, or ideology, doesn't mean that the thing they support should be judged based on the merits of those people. The things should be evaluated based on the individual merits of whatever it is.
Following your logic, I could easily say that Hitler was a vegetarian, so if you don't eat meat, you stand with Hitler.
The guilt-by-association rule is not a hard and fast airtight conclusion. This is the stock criticism everyone is making, and it simply doesn't follow. It's evidence of a flaw, but not every bit of evidence is incontrovertible proof of whatever.
Really, doesn't anyone study logic anymore?
I think this is a core counter-explanation for anti-vaccine and GMO as well.
What most believe is no-longer aligned with reality:
- Read Google’s research report for the jaw-dropping reality they uncovered without intent
- Study ice core data
- Understand the concept of planetary scale rate of change
- Understand the fact —FACT— that if we had Captain Kirk erase the entire United States from this planet by trasporting everyone and everything into space CO2 accumulation would continue
- Understand that if we erased all of humanity next monday it would take somewhere in the order if 25,000 to 50,000 years for CO2 levels to drop 100ppm
- Now explain how much in resources and energy would be required to bend the planetary-scale rate-of-change of atmospheric CO2 from about 100 ppm per 50,000 years to 100 ppm in 50 year (a 1,000 x improvement over the natural process)
- Now explain how this massive amount of energy and resources will not produce massively more CO2 (and more)
- If you said “renewable energy” go back to the top and read the Google paper
This global warming thing has been turned into a political football by both sides. What’s sad is the truth isn’t at either end of the scale. Most people who now believe “the scientific truth” are believing sonething as false as those who deny it.
The Google paper is the starting point of something that should have shifted the dialog on the subject years ago. However, their conclusion doesn’t lead to easy money and raises more questions than it answers; a real invonvenient truth.
The finding, in a nutshell, was that if every source of clean energy was deployed optimally at a global scale, not only would atmospheric CO2 accumulation not stop, it would continue to rise exponentially.
Convert the entire planet to the most optimized versions of “green” energy sources and you pretty much fix nothing.
This is a sobering realization.
I urge you to read the paper, there’s a lot more detail there. They set out to prove renewables could “save the planet” only to discover it would be an exercise in futility.
Here's a couple links you might be interested as well:
Audit of the main IPCC dataset: https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/52041/
More readable summary of the audit: https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2018/10/13/main-temperat...
Thanks again for the heads up on google's report!
I like socialism and communism. I think it can bring lots of good to the world. But people who propagate it are some of the worst people to have ever walked the earth. I think they were just mistaken. 100 million deaths with errors bars bigger than the number of people killed in the holocaust.
I don’t want to be judged for propagating social welfare just because some monsters committed horrendous acts.
Similarly in the US, I support left wing and sanders. But I won’t want to be judged as if I stand with cop killers, antifa, the Congress baseball game killer, etc.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to use this formula frankly. It’s also easy to manipulate.
1) Politicians who are greedy, self-centred and ruthless.
2) Politicians who are liars, greedy, self-centred and ruthless.
The big issue with "I like communism" (for socialism the argument changes) is that any time anyone tries it they try to appoint champions of the people to their ruling class and discover they have actually got liars and monsters. This doesn't happen because they got unlucky - this is because there are no champions of the people at that level of power. There are only people with incentives, and communism really screws up the incentive structure.
The best incentive structure, by far, is free markets and democracy, even if the people who rise to the top are all scum. Somehow, "by luck" (bah, people don't get incentives) it all works really well.
As soon as you want to make deep progress on anything you need to talk with people who match you on preparation and energy. This is true even on HN and core CS topics.
I can't imagine how it would be any other way. Only on the internet can people be experts on everything. The rest of us just kind of wing it and hope for the best.
Verify yourself that a few people seem both well-informed and unbiased, using your personal experience or research. Put a decent amount of trust in them.
When a person you trust appears to have high regard for another person's opinion, add some trust to that other person.
When you notice someone says dumb or biased stuff, reduce your trust in them by a lot.
Continue like that for years, mixing some independent verification here and there, and you'll have some idea of what's going on.
Agreed. This is something I think about a lot. I like consistency and am always trying to reconcile my personal beliefs with each other. It can be quite hard because it leads to questioning other beliefs that may be deeply held. The classic example is logic/reasoning and religion.
A simpler example that I recently went through was that I stopped drinking alcohol. I never had a problem with alcohol and would have beer or wine here and there. But, the evidence keeps mounting that it's literally just putting poison in your body with little benefits. I felt it was inconsistent for me to workout everyday, eat healthy, and then drink alcohol. So I stopped rationalizing and quit.
Isn't this an example of you being the sole reasonable one? Exactly the thing the parent post was suggesting we avoid writing about?
I viewed the parents post as to avoid "I'm the only smart one in the group, and everyone else is wrong." Which I agree is a good attitude to avoid. In a group setting, it is much too easy to let our ego get in the way of evidence.
This also makes me think of the book Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. Best book I've read in years. In it, he details thought patterns common to all of us that mislead us and cause us to misunderstand or ignore even basic facts. He's not talking about "dumb people". He's talking about smart people, and how utterly wrong they are most of the time. It'll fundamentally change how you look at your own way of thinking.
I find that being constantly confronted by the fact that I'm wrong in what I do for a living (and a hobby) sets me up to handle the same elsewhere in a more healthy way.
Example: I really like the intuitive explanation of what's actually going on with digital audio in Xiph's "Digital Show and Tell" and I often cite that when other people don't seem to understand - but this isn't because it was always obvious to me that's how it works. On the contrary, I find their explanation compelling because it directly confronts a common misunderstanding I had when I was younger. This misunderstanding was resolved by a friend & ex-colleague showing me more or less what Monty shows in the video (but with whatever gear he happened to have in his flat). Just like the video, he showed me that what I had believed was defied by the observable facts, and voilà my eyes were opened.
The book Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew B. Crawford, goes into this extensively. He's talking about more physical labor, but I find the substance applies to software as well. (And although I love the book, you can save a lot of time by googling his original essay, which is a much shorter and more concise read.) Crawford argues that labor against physical reality, as opposed to human interaction, drives both intellect and morality. It's a key to living an ethical life.
I think my favorite correspondence, though, is that the material we work with is the same material that our tools are made from. If my build scripts are broken, I fix them by writing code. If his mill is broken, he fixes it by fabricating a replacement part.*
---
*Not always, of course, but you get the idea.
This is too narrow. We shouldn't pretend that human beliefs are predominantly logical with a few strange exceptions. By and large we know incredibly little, most of what we "know" is because authorities have told us about it (e.g. I've never seen Africa with my own eyes), and most of what we believe isn't scientifically meaningful (i.e. justice/goodness being social constructs).
1) Whether or not such a consensus exists is somewhat orthogonal to the question "Would any evidence convince you to change your mind"
2) There is complete consensus that there are morphological differences between the sexes; this consensus extends to neurology. To what degree these morphological differences are genetic is up for debate (remember that brain morphology is absolutely environmentally affected), but most of the time we have studied traits for nature vs. nurture, the answer has been "both."
3) For some mental traits (e.g. IQ) it is well established that the difference, if any between the means of men and women is quite small. For other mental traits it is well established that the difference is quite significant, and the question is to what degree it is genetic versus environmental.
4) Many people on the left have argued that any investigation into innate differences between men and women should not be allowed, under the theory that any positive result would be co-opted by misogynists. That might be true and even be a good reason to avoid the research in today's cultural climate, but it's definitely fallacious as an argument that there are no inherent differences; this study was specifically about fallacious reasoning, not correct reasoning.
No, it's the opposite.
'Born that way' was a positioning effort discovered in tye 90's by gay advocacy groups.
When social conservatives believe that 'gay is a choice' - then they are against it, but if social conservatives can be convinced that people are simply 'born that way' i.e. inherently gay, and it's not a behavioural thing, then clear majorities of them are accepting of it.
It's the biggest factor in determining a social conservatives tolerance towards gays.
The science I think is still out on that, but there's no doubt that the community marketing objectives are oriented towards 'inherent'.
When Cynthia Nixon decided in later life that she was gay - and then virulently said that she was in fact straight before, i.e. not 'coming out' but rather 'becoming gay' - it upset the gay community a lot because this is inconsistent with the marketing by the gay community.
This is one of a few topics that tend to be twisted by all sides. The science is vague.
Why do you think that?
You are shifting the goalposts. We were discussing traits/personality differences.
Gender differences in the big 5 personality traits for example have broad scientific consensus.
Tying that to career choices isn’t really scientific AFAIK.
In your first paragraph you were clearly talking about traits and not outcomes:
> attribute sex-/gender-specific trait differences to culture/environmental
I missed where you changed to outcomes in your second paragraph.
The positive correlation between readily available long guns (i.e. non handguns) and violent crime (protip: the official stats tell the opposite story) is the equivalent to climate change denial (i.e. directly contradicted by pretty much all available evidence and pretty much everyone who is an expert in the subject) for the other end of the political spectrum. If you're looking for examples of illogical opinions this one is as good as any.
No, it's not though. It's cherry-picked political. Most instances of believing this contrary to evidence aren't just political.
They are individual (e.g. thinking one is smarter than they are), religious, social (glorifying founding fathers), or even ethical
Something like "regulation of long guns (shotguns, rifles, other things that aren't handguns) in various states in the US has had a non-negligible impact on crime in those states" would be more on par with climate change denial because in both cases you really have to pick a lot of cherries to back up the claim.
(cf forbes article which show death/kwh is even lower than wind / water energy)
1. http://theconversation.com/anti-vaccination-beliefs-dont-fol...
I've heard this, but it doesn't square with my own impressions, and a cursory Google search suggests that anti-vaxxers are not, in fact, predominantly liberal.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5784985/
[2] https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/conservatives-are-...
I'm not trying to make any kind of political point here. Someone asked >>What is a controversial scientific view that you wouldn't characterize as "conservative"?
It's a stereotype. Like all stereotypes, it's attempting to make a broad proclamation of a large group of people, something that I generally try to avoid. I don't even agree with this one being accurate, but it's out there in the world.
[1]https://www.precisionvaccinations.com/childhood-vaccination-...
McCarthy is clearly connected to Hollywood, but left? Basically her entire political activity is anti-vaxxers, and her brief foray into Presidential politics involved first trying to get McCain to take a meeting with her on the vaccine issue when he was running and, only when that failed, trying to do the same with Obama (who also declined.) Not exactly what you'd expect of someone committed to (or even inclined towards) the left.
(Which isn't to say there aren't Hollywood left anti-vaxxers, but McCarthy is an odd choice as an example...)
> I'm not trying to make any kind of political point here. Someone asked >>What is a controversial scientific view that you wouldn't characterize as "conservative"?
Anti-GMO would be a better example than anti-vax.
I don't think LA is a hotbed of Republicanism or conservatism.
[1] https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/vaccination-r...
Stereotypically vaccines are too 'unnatural and not flattering to their holisticism' for the left branch and the right are too scientific elite or government conspiracy for the right.
While conservatives who aren't anti-vaxxers like to point to anti-vaxxers as the left equivalent of whatever anti-science group on the right is involved in a conversation (most often climate deniers), but while there are definitely some anti-vaxxers on the left, there's plenty, and from what I've seen more of them, on the religious right, too.
- women having equal innate interest in Stem
- no mental differences between races
- gay,bi,trans being entirely genetic
just off the top of my head. scratches the surface.
The last is particularly interesting because its the opposite viewpoint with regards to protected classes of people and genetic psychology.
I strong object to this. Having been deeply involved both with this topic, skeptical advocacy, and having been raised deeply conservative: "GMO foods" is not a conservative anti-science issue. It's deeply "liberal", and generally stems from an inability to separate unethical corporate work and interests with the outcomes of technology. Similarly, many anti-vaccination misinformation peddlers are squarely aligned with what constitutes the "left" in American popular culture.
> This is too narrow. We shouldn't pretend that human beliefs are predominantly logical with a few strange exceptions.
Again, I think you're reading into both the study and the article. This is more a study of how people rationalize their beliefs and in some cases, political affiliations inform that. It's an important topic.
> By and large we know incredibly little, most of what we "know" is because authorities have told us about it
Science, of course, neither creates reality nor truly measures it. It can only measure our observations, and we can seek to make our observations ever more reflective of reality. The entire point of that process is for us to convince one another and survive each other's reasonable objections.
Understanding how people work themselves up to reject such a consensus-driven process, and how the mental techniques they use may be addressed. The stakes are quite high.
“Squarely aligned”? Nope, anti-vaxxers are not “squarely aligned” with any broad political movement.
Responsible politicians, party officials, pundits, etc. of all parties and ideologies are pro-vaccination.
But e.g. the Governor-Elect of Oklahoma is a GOP anti-vaxxer. It is incredibly dangerous when these views start to get legitimized: children will die.
It's a very bipartisan issue. People associate it with religious worldviews, but those folks actually make up only one faction.
Don’t forget that Trump was a prominent Dem supporter for decades.
> A study says Autism is out of control--a 78% increase in 10 years. Stop giving monstrous combined vaccinations
Trump in 2014:
> Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn't feel good and changes - AUTISM. Many such cases!
etc.
So if you ever scroll back through this, Google to see how wrong you were about this.
I think they are saying something much, much deeper and maybe this is just my confirmation bias kicking in here but it really supports my observations on a position I've held for a couple of years now.
I think what they are alluding to is that we are not logical and not rational in how we choose all of our beliefs as we do not try to seek out what is true (except for one edge case), instead we try to seek consensus within some political sphere (a group of any kind).
The so called controversial topics are where it's easiest to spot and easiest to study. But there is a stunningly deep implication that just because there is an uncontroversial consensus around something it doesn't mean the conclusion was arrived at by a sound process. So you actually really have to question everything.
For a while now I've been saying people don't argue for what is true, they argue for political affiliation.
It's close to impossible for humans to tell what's true. Often it would take trillions of dollars, millions of people or thousands of years to actually verify something as being the case. We take 99.99% of our existence on faith because it's simply not possible for us to fact check it. And if it's not possible for us to fact check what is true except for in the most basic of cases why would it ever be important to us as a social behavior? So that's why we see what this article points out. At least in my view.
We do do some degree of fact checking but it's usually the minimum viable fact checking to coordinate with our peers.
The interesting edge case they point out where some people do reason consistently is also signaling political affiliation. They are attempting to signal "I'm on team evidence-based". But the interesting thing about team "evidence-based" is they tend not to question or be skeptical so much of the fraud and other social phenomenon (replication crisis etc) present in science. They take it on faith that "this is the best answer I have whether it is true or not, but it's most likely true therefore it's true". Even team evidence-based isn't purely rational. And for good reason. They can't be. It's simply not viable to personally try to reproduce every study you read.
We are political animals that care about our survival and forming consensus. Not truth.
Actual secrets kept at some scale show the limits of what is possible, three of the best examples are from World War Two, a period that's near enough for us to have good records but distant enough that the secrets are long known to us.
Ultra is the most obvious. "The ultra secret" was the fact that Allied codebreakers could read some (though not all, at various points in the war) Enigma and other encrypted messages sent via radio by the sprawling Axis forces. Only a few dozen key people knew this secret, but of necessity hundreds, perhaps around 1000 more had some limited insight because their work was connected with the breaking of German messages (e.g. Hut workers at Bletchley engaged in translating broken messages or finding "cribs"). You will find people from the latter group who believed Ultra was protected well into the late 20th century, but in fact it ceased even to be an official secret after 29 years, and by the 1970s BBC documentary editors felt comfortable assuming that a general audience would know about Ultra in the television adaptation of Jones' autobiography "Most Secret War".
Second Manhattan. American development of a Nuclear Bomb could not of course be kept secret once the weapon had been used. But until then it was adequately guarded, there's no clear sign that Axis forces understood what the Americans were attempting or where. But lots of people tacitly knew about Manhattan, they just chose not to so anything until after the fact because "There's a secret military R&D base near where I live" is very obviously not something a patriotic person tells random strangers during a war...
Thirdly the Normandy invasion. Again after the fact this secret could not be kept. Within hours of making landfall the German high command were aware that this was not, as they had initially believed, a feint, and that all available resources must be diverted to defend against it. But that was far too late. Still in the weeks, and especially days, prior to the actual invasion, it will have been apparent not only to the soldiers involved but to nearby civilians that a massive naval landing was to be attempted. It just wasn't possible to hide from the people of Southern England that there were shitloads of infantry and boats making ready to depart in the next few days. Again the secret didn't get out, for a very short time, because it will have been obvious to all who knew that this wasn't something you should tell the enemy about.
Twenty Committee had successfully eliminated all German spies on the mainland (either turning them, imprisoning them, or as necessary killing them) so the only way for the secret to get out was for some idiot to tell the enemy themselves.
So those help you judge rough scale for a conspiracy. If a hypothetical conspiracy seems _harder_ to keep than, say, Manhattan, yet it seems to need more people to keep the secret than, say, Normandy, and for them to keep it longer than, say, Ultra, all because otherwise they might get sued, rather than because Actual Nazis are going to invade their country, well that's clearly crazy.
Georgii Flerov (Soviet physicist) figured on his own that the US had a nuclear program in 1942 when he noticed that all publishing on the subject. And nobody cited his studies about fission of uranium.
Manhattan project was so big that Germans could have figured it out from bits and pieces even with their ineffective intelligence, but they never put all the pieces in together. German intelligence officer came to Heisenberg at least three times and asked if it was possible that Americans were building an uranium bomb and he said no.
Put yourself in the position of someone that genuinely doesn't trust themselves to assess scientific evidence. One scientist article says one thing one week another the next, and they all feel vaguely related and unrelated.
If you can't trust yourself to weigh and understand the evidence yourself you instead look to the institutional pressures you think you understand.
In all the topics there is a well-constructed 'Them' * GMOs: the FDA is largely controlled by the agriculture industry themselves, across parties and administrations. It's not irrational to fear that the FDA is not adequately regulating food. * Vaccines: similar fears about the pharmaceutical industry are valid.
Both those industries have paid scientists, government regulators, and news organizations to spin data for their benefit and to avoid justice of different kinds.
*Global warming: the same people that seem to be overly concerned about cute owls and monkeys are "the liberals" which control the universities/research. Sure smog is bad, but (as one Denver taxi driver said to me once) "it smells like money." Sure they mean well, but they are likely to blow the issues out of proportion.
That's a system someone thinks they understand while who knows what an ice core really means.
TFA indicated that avoiding indicating identity/allegiance might help, but I'd like to see that study actually done.
The highlighted argument about profit-seeking by companies is clearly a valid concern when it comes to how technologies are actually applied. It's why we have regulation and independent oversight bodies. (It's also unfair and misleading to call it a conspiratorial argument in the first place -- it's simply pointing out that an actor has financial interests and may therefore be biased, there's no conspiracy involved.)
Maybe you'd want survey respondents to perfectly separate the concerns of applications vs. scientific consensus, but to be honest I think that's an unfair expectation.
(Often they are actually decent Bayesian "evidence", though I don't want to make that argument for the cases in TFA.)
This is the most troubling data from the study for me. It's natural that people will hold opinions for which they don't have evidence, since we can't be experts on everything (e.g. "I trust my friend, who thinks that"), but the fact that half the population hold opinions that they would not change, given any amount of evidence, is actually somewhat terrifying.
What would change your mind on this?
I know you're trying to be snarky, but come on.
In fairness, that opinion is not unprecedented in history.
Second, scientists can be just as obstinate as anyone. There is abundant evidence of scientists failing to modify their views in response to new ideas and data. Plate tectonics comes lightly to mind--many of those who opposed it never changed their minds. It prevailed in part because the opposition retired or died. [1]
If scientists themselves can be so resistant to rational inquiry, why do we uphold this as an ideal for ordinary citizens?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-continent...
It was a reasonable hypothesis at the time that you can make gold from other material. Indeed with particle accelerators you can do this [1, 2, 3]. Newton's methods were not powerful enough to achieve this, but this research hypothesis got refined, leading to chemistry as we know it today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
[3] https://glintpay.com/gold/modern-day-alchemy-making-gold-ato...
My answer is that humans--even really extraordinary ones like Isaac Newton--don't divide knowledge into scientific and non-scientific spheres.
Moreover, commonly used analytic tools like inductive reasoning that are helpful in science don't answer questions like what happens when we die in a very satisfactory way. Even in much more mundane questions humans tend to see patterns where they don't exist. [0] It's still an open question which types of problems are properly the domain of science.
>What information will make you change your mind?
In reality, you'll either get something ridiculously hard to show, or you'll get "Nothing!" I used to think it was a good way to realize you're wasting your time in the argument.
Over the years, my view has become nuanced. Those people who say "Nothing" or something outrageous are merely saying it because they themselves don't know in the moment what it will take. In practice, people do change their minds. So I wouldn't read too much into that 45% figure - it's more of a sign they didn't have an answer when they were asked.
Now in reality, social influences usually trigger a change much more than factual reasoning. If someone is adamant about a position and won't listen to you, but then he finds that a close friend he views as having similar values shares your perspective, he is much more likely to start looking at the facts. He is also much more likely to listen to that person than you.
I strongly recommend the books Influence by Cialdini as well as various negotiation books. The first gives the science. The latter puts them into practice.
The biggest mistake pro-science people make is in declaring others' opinions as wrong, and then follow it up with all the objective evidence they have to support their position that it is wrong. In the other person, this triggers a deep human sentiment "This other person does not care about my opinion". You get much further by listening and understanding the other person's perspective, and then signalling that you understand. Once there, present your facts, but not forcefully. End it with "Based on this data, my opinion is ..." Focus on why you believe what you do without explicitly invalidating the other person's perspective (no matter how insane).
That could be contrasted with products made of arsenic. Those are quite dangerous as a category because arsenic is poisonous.
Before targeted genetic modification there was atomic gardening. That was literally irradiating seeds and choosing what they liked of the mutant survivors - and a lot of seeds didn't germinate. Even doing something that 'randomizing' didn't cause those effects. As for health of food for people eating it I think we're technically already centuries if not millennia too late after repeatably breeding fruit for increased sweetness and lower fiber content.
People are right about their own beliefs. Their beliefs are not based on evidence, but cultural.
They could research one topic and report knowing it because of evidence (they researched it)
Additionally, there are non-scientific issues confused with "belief" in science. Does agreeing with the scientific consensus on GMOs entail a belief that corporations can be trusted to implement the science? That scientists, politicians and regulators haven't been bribed or coerced? That scientific and political systems in other countries can be judged by the scientific experts? Trusting in a practical use of GMOs is not the same as believing in the scientific consensus.
Another example:
> The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...
Yes, this! I've often thought that a lot of hereditary socioeconomic underperformance may be in some sense attributable to a self-reinforcing information deficit where people don't figure out which experts to trust, which life advice to take, which friends to make and keep. If your parents don't start you right it must be a helluva job to figure it out later.
Well, another reading of this is that "objective criteria" aren't everything.
Even if it's "scientifically objectively" better to do X, it doesn't mean it's what a person wants to do (or should do).
There's better as in "more efficient" (which is measurable and objective) and better as a value judgement.
"This fits better with my moral code, culture, food taste, preferences, etc." is a perfectly valid justification.
Perfectly evidenced by the use of science, for instance. You have something like a pro-life movement, which co-opts scientific "facts" to support their view of fetuses being humans. But then these same GOP voters ignore scientific "facts" when it comes to climate change. This is due to the Republican politicians, who cluster all of their supporter's views to match their own. It's the same on the Democratic side - look at anti-GMO protesters who are ignorant of the scientifically proven benefits of GMO's, yet who point to 98% of scientists reaching consensus on climate change.
Political party is stronger than reasoning or consistency.
Pro-life supporters aren't co-opting science when they claim a fetus is a human being, they are undermining a possible objection: obviously everyone recognizes that killing a 1 year old is not ok, regardless how the mother feels about it, so why is it ok to kill a fetus? What's the relevant distinction between the two cases?
In a former time people didn't have a good understanding of human development, so you might claim the fetus wasn't really human until it was born. Scientifically that doesn't hold up.
But you might still be ok with abortion on other grounds. Perhaps a rationale based on capabilities or intelligence, etc.
You can levy science to support a premise in an argument, but science can't decide the policy. That comes down to values, trade-offs, philosophy and ideology.
Climate change is a great example. What everyone talks about is a belief in a one sentence description of an idea. But the actual detailed contours of that belief, and the scientific arguments that led to its conclusion... who has those?
Climate isn't exactly easy to understand, even for an expert, and people have other priorities about things they care about.
For a Republican its mostly going to come down to trust in government, and its that ideology which drives the conclusion.
Anyway I don't think scientific shibboleths are all that valuable. I'd much rather people actually understand this stuff, but the truth is its asking too much. People live busy lives and not everyone can be a scientist.
Well, that's a bit how I feel now that I am reading The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, by Philip Fernbach and Steven A. Sloman. It's a book around the topic of this post. Might be of interest to whoever finds this topic appealing.
(FWIW, the rational belief to hold about GMOs is that they are a dangerous unproven experiment, and that's it's wildly irresponsible to apply genetic engineering willy-nilly without centuries of research. So... YMMV.)
A lot of science is based on procedures and theories that automatically create certain results. As long people do not see this, it makes no sense comparing one belief-system versus another.
Add to that the amount of effort we expend to protect our egos and it's a wonder we ever arrive at correct decisions.
However I doubt any non-scientist could enumerate serious counter theories to the scientific status quo for evolution, GMOs, vaccines, or climate change -- other than citing probability and the burden of proof as insufficient for their adoption.
Personally I know little evidence that GMOs are toxic, so I side with non-toxic. Same for vaccines (now that Wakefield is wholly discredited). Same for counter-theories to evolution, though that's such a big topic, it'd be silly to endorse all or none of it, especially at the fringes. Evolution's chief strengths are its longevity and that there's no viable alternative theory for speciation. The existence of global warming AND man as its cause also suffers from a lack of viable alternative explanations. But is this scientific thinking, or just pragmatism? I disbelieve unless you can convince me otherwise. That's just common sense.
The OP doesn't seem to address "burden of proof" in judging scientific theories, except to combine the three bases under "justification". But I think the distinction between the three is essential, as is their visible presence, in a rational mind, since science-based belief must reflect the sum of thought that assesses evidence for, against, AND vs. alternative theories.
Ignoring any of these three puts one on the road to faith.
That's a contradiction in terms. Science is not democratic; wide agreement doesn't matter. A single rogue experiment or even observation can upend an entire way of understanding the world.
Compare the following two statements:
"We consulted with the scientific community. Sound science shows that vaccines save many lives, not just the ones being vaccinated. Decades of history have not turned up any significant risks. Therefore, we recommend local schools give vaccines to nearly all students. We've set up a fund to help administer this for schools that need it, and resources for homeschooled children."
Versus:
"Our favorite professors determined that vaccines are good, so we're going to inject every kid in the country, including yours. There's nothing you can do about it because you are not a Ph.D.".
With phrases like "scientific consensus", people hear more of the latter and less of the former. Especially since the phrase is used to essentially sign a blank check, where the original claim can be stretched far into the political realm by whoever is speaking.
We should not be urging the point that "good scientists" are the one who don't question the consensus view.
I can give a good current example: Alzheimer's. Were now seeing the failure of the Amaloid Beta model in all clinical trails and preliminary evidence is starting to point to a herpes virus link.
the details regarding how for many people "reasoning" is about referencing the person's perception of their own identity is also very valuable. i wouldn't call this reasoning whatsoever, however. it's tribalism -- the opposite of reasoning. this suggests that many people simply don't think about controversial issues, and instead take cues from authorities of their identity subtype. i assume there is literature which supports this idea.
there was one thing which i took issue with, however.
>sceptical attitudes toward the scientific consensus on genetically modified foods (as safe) tended to involve fallacious reasoning of a conspiratorial bent (such as “I am hesitant to believe there are NO concerns because the multinational agricultural corporations such as Monsanto have profits as the basis of their existence so any information they put out is suspect”)
this is a poor example given the recent debunking of monsanto's "glyphosate is safe" fabrications. it isn't conspiratorial to suggest that X may not be Y because the proponent of X benefits from and encourages people thinking Y. that's basic critical thinking which recognizes that scientific results can be skewed or falsified to support a narrative.
given the rest of the article, i'm confident that the author's use of this example wasn't malicious... but there are many better examples.
This is not how science works. There are decreasing circles of confidence out from the relative certainty of a core curriculum - approximately an undergrad degree in a hard science - to various research topics. At the edges are pure research which is really just educated guessing. Far from being an invincible march towards knowledge, science actually progresses by throwing grad students at problems more or less at random. Some of them get lucky and find some key insights that match reality.
Most don't.
Unfortunately there's plenty of evidence from history of scientific reassurances being presented as certainties which were subsequently shown to be wrong - sometimes dangerously so.
Add the toxic influence of corporate interest and the unarguable reality that fact that some "evidence" is bought and paid for, and it becomes very hard to accept research as the proof science would like it to be.
So it's actually rational to be skeptical of extraordinary claims.
E.g. GMOs. The extraordinary claim is that GMOs will end hunger. Obviously only a total monster would oppose that.
In reality research into other farming techniques also increases yields, and in any case hunger is actually caused by bad politics, not lack of faith in science.
Articles like these conflate the difference between science-as-pure-research for the sake of knowledge, and science-as-policy-justification.
The standards for science-as-policy should be much higher than science-as-research, because the consequences of warping truth for profit or power can be so much more damaging.
On all four I happily defer to the experts in the scientific community who study the relevant fields.
On none of these do I suspect a breakdown of science because the sample of diverse specialists I have queried in each field reinforce the wider notion that there is a clear scientific consensus. Furthermore, the conversations I've had with specialists don't reveal any lack of consensus, while in my experience specialists usually seem quite happy to talk about scientific controversies.
On these topics let's call it "appeal to diverse set of authorities." Throw me a denier from any of the four topics and my only tactic will be to agree on a method of randomly choosing one of the thousands of experts to whom I delegate my opinion. The doubter must then either agree to argue with that expert or be forced to argue their position as the great conspiracy of the 21st century.
As long as you discuss these topics face-to-face, you'd be surprised how quickly even some of the hard core deniers' positions shift.
Edit: clarification
Granted ethics has many differing frameworks itself.
This is true for pretty much everyone - don't go and count yourself as the exception. The more intelligent you are, the more refined your reasoning, but there's evidence to show that intelligence will not lower the bias. Counterarguments from others as intelligent or more intelligent will. One of the curses of being more intelligent is that if you hold a biased view, you usually need someone as smart as you to change your mind. The smarter you get, the fewer people there are who can help remove your bias.
Some people are more objective than others, but often only in a limited domain - not in their whole lives.
>However, 20 per cent of justifications were subjective and involved making a reference to one’s cultural identity, personal experience.
The book also touches on this. In my personal experience, fact based reasoning is rarer than this. There are many reasons people believe something. Attempting to discern the Truth is usually in the minority. It is to be expected that all the other reasons will be more prevalent - they simply have more utility than merely gaining knowledge. It shouldn't surprise people that factual reasoning is rare - it has little utility in most spheres of life. Much less than social cohesion and tribalism does.
Consider the issue of intelligence, and its spread across various groups (usually race and gender). It's very common to find a very well educated person insist that everyone is born equally with the same mental/intelligence potential, and differences exist merely in the extent they foster it. When asked for their rationale/evidence, the answer is usually a variant of "I choose to believe it" (usually for ideological or cultural reasons). I'm not referring only to ordinary folks, but also to university academics, etc.
(I'm not saying that they are factually wrong - merely the reasons they believe it are not based on any facts).
>whether they agreed with the scientific consensus on climate change, vaccines, genetically modified (GMO) foods and evolution
Two of those items (vaccines and GMO foods) touch on a strongly cultural force on purity. The book shows that a lot of people value purity (likely a genetic trait). They associate food consumption not just with physical health, but also mental/spiritual health. So they are quite sensitive to "unnatural" or foreign agents going into their bodies.