Hacker News Reader

Comment by tacitusarc | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to me that this delineates between facts and personal experience as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts. Perhaps a more useful way to think about people's relation to truth is one of proximity. For a given individual, their personal experience is entirely factual, and because it is also most proximate to them, it is weighted the most highly. Intuitively, I think we understand this, so we tend to weight other people's experiences similarly, knowing that those are as proximate to them as our experiences are to us.

View on HN

If I understand it correctly, the claim is not that personal experience narration is a superior form of objective information to facts, it's that sharing personal experience is more likely to create a feeling of relational connection, which in turn is more likely to lead to a shift in position.

Tossing facts in an argument where people don't feel any personal connection is a bit like throwing stones at each other. Maybe the one with more and bigger stones gains a temporary advantage, but it leads to a retrenchment of positions, which doesn't help in the long run.

I think the aspect that spans between your comment and the one you replied to is this:

Why should “personal experiences” be a different category than “facts?” (even taking for granted the extra step you mentioned, where it is the use of these experiences within a discussion, not the absolute existence of the experience, at play).

For example, suppose I know you and you are honest and trustworthy, so if you verbally testify to an experience, I’ll believe it.

Why would there be a difference in you coming to me and saying, “I attended a BLM rally and just observed such a clear and obvious peaceful sense of non-violent protesting” vs you coming to me and saying “According to research institute XYZ, statistically almost none of the BLM protests involved violence.”

Both of those things are facts in 100% the same sense, in every way. But because you personally claim to experience one of them, I am likely to give it more weight.

Even though there are plenty of reasonable hypotheses why humans would rely on this heuristic, it is still a big problem and a big source of manipulation, from liars, deceivers, conspiracy theories, debunked cranks, folk wisdom, etc.

If our goal is to believe as accurately as possible then we should not feel accepting or accommodating of a heuristic quirk in which we regard one set of facts that have the door wide open to manipulation (anecdotes of others) as generally more compelling than facts sourced through research, compiling data, journalism and so forth.

If we let up the pressure to thwart this heuristic, the most likely outcome is that people use confirmation bias and folk wisdom to construct false realities - and indeed in the US we have been seeing that play out in a huge violent saga. That didn’t happen because people don’t like being confronted with hard facts, it happened because we have allowed much too weak of a sense of social obligation to align beliefs with accurate predictions, as opposed to merely letting people feel they are entitled to believe whatever they want.

> Why would there be a difference in you coming to me and saying, [ ... ]

because if I really don't want to agree with you, I can accept your story but regard it as an anecdote that does not contradict what I see/read from my media bubble.

I can't do that with the study from research institute XYZ, so I'll just dismiss it out of hand. This requires more cognitive effort (for example, I have to explicitly or implicitly assert that XYZ people are all liars, or idiots, or both).

It's much easier for me to accept your story because even if I don't believe it to be true or representative, my rejection doesn't require much effort, and doesn't require me being overtly negative towards you.

What I’m saying is that the heuristic you describe is perfectly understandable, but it’s a bad outcome for society. My comment is not about the “why” behind the existence of this heuristic. There are many obvious reasons that leap off the page in terms of evolutionary adaptation, confirmation bias, availability heuristic, halo bias and so forth.

Instead what I am saying is that if I approach a new conversation tomorrow and I say to myself something like this,

> “Boy, my friend Bob sure is not going to like to hear about the very overt evidence of Trump siding with white supremacists. He won’t like that so I’d better not appeal to facts where Trump’s quotes were compiled and analyzed by researchers. Instead I should tell him about my experience walking near a Trump rally and directly observing racist language going unrebuked by campaign staff. Then at least he’ll connect with the part that is my experience instead of immediately taking a motivated cognition biased position gainsaying the more official data.”

then that would be a very bad thing - much worse than directly confronting Bob with the actual facts and making it clear it’s not OK for Bob to inhabit a false reality where one type of fact (anecdotes) is accepted but another (data, research, journalism) is rejected. That cannot be left unchecked.

Mitt Romney actually said it quite well in the Senate inauguration proceedings after the Capitol riot,

“If you respect people who are disappointed by the outcome of the election and believe it was stolen, the best thing you can do is tell them the truth.”

Of course the election is just an example, but the point is more general. If someone is resistant to real facts, and you actually respect them and want to reach a positive conclusion, the best thing is absolutely always to confront them with the truth. If you instead deliberately mollify it and water it down to an anecdote they are more likely to accept while not adjusting their beliefs, you are only disrespecting them and hurting yourself, the other party, and discourse in general.

> That cannot be left unchecked.

While I agree with your goal, this approach relies on the idea that "not leaving it unchecked" results in some sort of change in the right direction.

Unfortunately, the evidence I've seen doesn't really support that "confronting them with the truth" actually accomplishes this. It would be lovely if this turns out not to be the case.

Why can't it simply be left unchecked? Why is it so important to you that Bob believe what you believe?

In many cases, there is direct, tangible existential crisis at stake when aggregated across all the individual disagreements. The rise of modern white supremacy, fascism, insurrection, environmental devastation, harm and denial of basic rights to trans people, and so on. If in every individual case, you leave it unchecked and figure “whatever, they can just believe whatever they want, who cares” then it adds up to rioters charging into the Capitol with Confederate flags and pipe bombs. Working backwards it creates impetus on everyone to not leave any of that unchecked, whether it’s your crazy uncle on Facebook spouting off about young earth creationism or anti-environmentalism or a white supremacist yelling claims that the presidential election was stolen.

If you’re just disagreeing about which potato chip brand is the best, by all means let it go and leave it unchecked, but it seems clear the general context is about disagreements on contested social issues with serious stakes.

In a lot of ways the main issue is that several generations of the developed world have completely wasted decades of prosperity, to the point now where it really, actually is true that “mundane” day to day problems for people actually tie in to serious existential problems that have to be collectively dealt with.

> to the point now where it really, actually is true that “mundane” day to day problems for people actually tie in to serious existential problems that have to be collectively dealt with.

The only thing this applies to is global warming. It is not an existential threat for Bob to think there was election fraud during the Trump election anymore than Ted the Bernie supporter to think the election was stolen from him twice.

Spreading the idea that the US government can afford to give $1200/mo UBI to each of its citizens by simply taxing the rich is more dangerous to the stability of the government/economy than some dipshit thinking the earth is flat.

Finally, as for climate change, we have the facts and people don’t care. They didn’t care in 2002, they didn’t care in 2012, and they didn’t care in November. At this point, convincing Bob has not worked, and frankly it doesn’t matter because it’s not a problem that can be solved through individual actions.

The solution is to legislatively fix it with intelligent people from both sides of political spectrum if it needs to have staying power (ala cap and trade). Or, if the Democratic Party is very confident in not losing the majority in the next 8 years or so, just ram a non-market approach down everyone’s throat (ala oil/coal bans) and call it good.

There are way too many people who still take the Bible/Koran /whatever seriously to clutch onto the notion that correcting people with facts is going to actually fix anything.

I do think the current rise of anti-truth fascism forking out of the Republican party is an extremely serious existential threat to the US. It does matter to challenge every false claim of a stolen election.

It sounds like you believe people can behave more in line with the Rational Human used to model older economic theories. I'm not so sure confirmation, affinity, or proximity biases can be held down. What we need is a system that is either immune to these biases, or is designed to thwart them.

My opinion: individual's actions and beliefs do not put a dent in the tsunami of bias that swamps our brains. We need systemic thinking (e.g. science has a decent structure with double blind studies).

I think a precondition of the entire discussion is that we’re talking about what’s more effective in resolving disagreement - which would be measured by whether a disagreement process approaches the conclusion that would be reached between two rational agents sharing their information.

Note that I am not saying I believe humans do act that way, rather that is the yardstick of outcome to decide if one disagreement resolution technique is better than another.

Maybe the issue is different views of what the disagreement is over?

I tend to view the disagreement as being over policy not over rationalism/facts. If at the end of the discussion both people agree on the policy I see that as successful even if they still disagree on the evidence that supports that policy.

I don’t think so. In fact there is actual theory about all this.

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem

- https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/agree-econ.pdf

and in particular,

- https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/prior.pdf

If your goal is just to manipulate someone else into doing what you want, regardless of what the facts say nor what their beliefs say about the facts or about your beliefs, then sure, that is pure manipulation and not related to strategies for effective disagreement resolution.

It’s also not relevant or useful to bring up the fact that humans are not rational Bayesian actors, again because we’re talking about how best to achieve unified shared understanding of the true facts and to ensure we only derive beliefs from that (anything else can only be manipulation, not decision resolution, by definition). We may fall short of the best solution due to our flaws and limitations, but that doesn’t render the best solution any less the best, not make some other seemingly more attainable solution better or more worthwhile.

>false realities

Or just other people's realities. You mention BLM riots, which affected me a great deal; tens of millions in damages to my city, destruction of local landmarks, one of the teachers in my local school district was arrested for assaulting a state politician for recording them burning a police car, and to top it off, they smashed the pharmacy where I get my wife's medicine, so she had to go without for a few days. This isn't some biased false reality/folk wisdom. This was my experience so when people tell me they were "peaceful protests" or the news says "statistically, they were 99.99999999% peaceful" but I look at what I saw with my own eyes, and also what was on TV in other cities... I can't be convinced that they weren't violent, destructive, and plainly, evil, no matter how much other people tell me what to think.

I am sorry you feel this way, and I hope you will find a way past the biases that are preventing you from accepting the facts.

And I'll say the same to anyone who supports BLM, that's my point.

That’s not much of a point. It’s really just you being on the demonstrably wrong side of actual facts, but acting like your extreme and indefensible take deserves equal validity or ontological status as a “right” belief, but it completely and unequivocally doesn’t.

You wouldn’t be saying this stuff to BLM supporters, only an echo chamber filled with your non-fact-based alternate world. There’s a complete difference of kind between what you’re saying and actual reality, one that can’t be overcome or mitigated at all just by your own gainsaying. Your stance just is, factually, invalid, and you calling the opposite stance invalid as if it’s just two sides of some coin is likewise just invalid all the way down.

I hope you understand how unreasonable you sound to me. You're telling me that what I both saw and experienced, with verified fact and video evidence, isn't real. Your conviction that you know more about me and my life, than me, and your insistence on how invalid it is, makes you sound, frankly, like some sort of political zealot.

I tend not to waste my time convincing other people of things to this degree. I will share my experience, but beyond that, it would be unreasonable for me to tell someone else that their experience isn't even real, which is what you're doing.

What you are saying is simply not ok. If your take away of your experience led you to believe BLM is responsible for significant violence, that is a manifestation of problems with you and your beliefs, not an accurate fact-based conclusion drawn from a legitimate interpretation of the BLM movement or any experience of BLM protests. You saying that I sound unreasonable by not letting your shit slide doesn’t change anything. You can say that. You can cling to racism-based biased refusal to accept the facts or accept your stated understanding of your experience is wrong and unduly biased, but it does not make what you’re saying any more legitimate or worthy of respect. What you are saying is just unacceptably wrong - it really is, really - in a way where you cannot just say, “well I believe different” and have that be treated like it’s valid or on equal footing.

You are starting off from a position so irredeemably far from acceptable fact-based reality, that for you to say my response sounds unreasonable is completely unsurprising and carries no weight.

It might sting to have your attachment to what you think is an acceptable interpretation of your experience called out for the unreasonable anti-BLM bias that it is. Oh well, the anti-BLM fantasy stuff is not OK, not going to slide.

I'm confused... it's verifiable fact... insurance claims from the riots are between $1-2 billion in damages... dozens of people died and between just a few cities thousands of police were injured, who knows how many protestors and bystanders... support for the movement dropped rapidly once things escalated... these are the facts. How can you look at this, and when someone says they witnessed just a small piece of it, say they're "irredeemably far from fact based reality" and you just can't let it "slide". Consider at least, that your extreme position harms your movement. What is your exact criticism of my opposition? Or at the very least, to what I witnessed?

Please stop.

Please do not perpetuate flamewars on HN and do not cross into personal attack yourself. It's not what this site is for and it's no ok here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm respectfully exchanging ideas. I challenge you to find my personal attacks. Please do not blame me for the content other users post.

You needn't look far—there was a personal attack in your GP comment: "you sound, frankly, like some sort of political zealot". Swipes like that are certainly not respectful, and they're definitely not ok in HN comments. Actually, every single sentence in that comment had some sort of swipe in it.

If you don't think that was crossing into personal attack and breaking the site guidelines, you're underestimating the impact of your comments. it would be a good idea to recalibrate by reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and remembering that this sort of comment always lands with far stronger impact on the reader than the commenter thinks it will. Objects in the mirror are much closer than they appear.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

"you sound, frankly" -addressing their extreme rhetoric, not them. How they come across is different than who they are. Every statement was a "swipe" at their disrespectful and unreasonable arguments, not them as a person. If I'm not allowed to defend my ideas and position, respectfully, in the context of discussion, within site guidelines, what's the purpose of discussion? It's enough that respectful, in-context posts I've made on controversial topics have been flagged and removed regularly here. Is this supposed to be another reddit/4chan echo chamber?

> addressing their extreme rhetoric, not them. How they come across is different than who they are. Every statement was a "swipe" at their disrespectful and unreasonable arguments, not them as a person.

That's not how internet comments work. If you tell someone they sound like a zealot, you're calling names. If you then say "I didn't mean it about you, only about how you sound", that's a distinction that makes no difference to the receiver, with whom your comment has already landed like a punch.

I'm afraid the problem is that your comments aren't as respectful as you think they are. This is a common problem, as I tried to explain above. Swipes that feel harmless or perfectly kosher to the commenter can easily land with readers, and especially with whomever they're replying to, as aggressive.

Because of this asymmetry, it's easy to end up with a flamewar in which all parties feel aggrieved, like they're the innocent one who did nothing, while the other is the one who behaved badly and escalated. Everyone ends up feeling like they're just defending themselves from unprovoked attack. In reality we're all subject to this cognitive bias, and if we're to avoid having this place go into a downward spiral and burn itself to a crisp, we all need to be extra careful to err on the side of being respectful and editing swipes out of our posts here.

I was writing about this in another context, in case or anyone wants more information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25995375.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's only demonstrably wrong if you're going to insist on the very literal "almost none of the BLM protests involved violence" and ignore that that statement, in isolation, is rather misleading. Sure, most of the protests were peaceful. But when they weren't, it was was very bad.

I was living in Downtown Chicago during the two major BLM protests that went violent last year. From my window, I saw people shooting out windows, starting fires, and looting. Even if it were a moot point to call 911, it didn't matter because you'd get a busy signal if you tried calling. Businesses I frequented, including the coolest camera shop I've ever seen, were destroyed. In the days following these riots, it took 45 minutes to an hour to enter my neighborhood because of National Guard checkpoints. The grocery stores and pharmacies were closed because their windows were smashed in, they were looted, and they were generally smashed to hell. And local BLM organizers infamously defended their actions as the "cry of the unheard" and the looting as "reparations."

I've read accounts similar to my own from people in Seattle and Minneapolis.

I get that some opponents of BLM want to use these riots to discredit what the movement stands for. But BLM proponents shouldn't try to gas light me and others who were victims of these demonstrations in defense. They were horrific. People died.

Nobody is gaslighting anyone. By your own account, the perpetrators of the looting, property damage, etc., were not part of the BLM protests, but clearly differentiated groups adding violence to something non-violent.

I live in NYC and in my neighborhood we also had windows boarded up after days of looting, cars smashed in the street, fires and more. Literally none of it was related to the BLM movement.

Similarly with Portland where many friends and coworkers live, the violence there was literally brought about by Trump and his false allocation of Homeland Security agents to “protect” federal landmarks, yet they abducted people off the street with no due process.

I’m certain looting happened, destruction happened, violence happened. It happened literally around the corner from my apartment.

That absolutely does not give anyone any entitlement to indulge racist or fascist biases to blame that violence on BLM or associate it with somehow representing the purpose of BLM, etc.

You assert that the groups responsible for the rioting were clearly differentiated from the BLM protests, but I don't see how one can differentiate them without making a no-true-Scotsman argument that the rioting somehow goes against the principles of the movement and they can be distinguished on that basis. At the time, some people were claiming that the rioting was the work of alt-right agents provocateurs, but that doesn't seem to have panned out. (Cf. the assertions that the Capitol rioters were antifa agents provocateurs.)

It's also not a good argument given there were loud voices claiming to speak for BLM that were justifying the rioting and looting. Reparations, smashing the racist capitalist system, etc. Maybe they don't represent the movement as a whole, but if so, the movement had lost its voice to extremists by that point.

An example of this kind of thing, posted by a friend who took part in BLM protests, in response to a status update I made: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnCI4_9W4AAAxDf.jpg

Bad actors doing embarrassing or destructive things is a real problem for ad-hoc decentralized movements. And that's why I'm careful to not hold the acts of individuals against a movement unless said acts are the whole point of the movement. But at the same time, "Black Lives Matter riots of 2020" is the most accurate label for the events in question that I can think of.

Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. That's not allowed here and we ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>This was my experience so when people tell me they were "peaceful protests" or the news says "statistically, they were 99.99999999% peaceful" but I look at what I saw with my own eyes, and also what was on TV in other cities... I can't be convinced that they weren't violent, destructive, and plainly, evil, no matter how much other people tell me what to think.

Your point is well taken. I live in a large city. The area where I live, while mixed, is majority minority. My own experience was quite different. No one assaulted teachers from my local school. I saw no businesses burned. I don't know anyone who was directly impacted by the months of daily BLM protests.

Those are my experiences. Why are you telling me what I should believe?

I mirrored my experiences against yours to point out that your anecdotal experience is not the whole of the story. Nor is mine.

Now for some facts that neither you nor I actually experienced:

Where I live there were a few instances of violence against police (and in every single case, nearly all the folks involved were both white and from out of town).

There were also numerous instances of police instigating violence against peaceful protestors.

There were a few instances of looting, and the police and local government addressed them quickly and harshly, as just about everyone, including the protestors (many of whom were captured on video chasing would-be looters away) was horrified and angered by such actions.

There were (and are) violent miscreants who should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However, those folks were a tiny group compared to those who peacefully protested.

When you hear folks say the protests were "mostly" peaceful, they are empirically correct. Something like 20,000,000 people around the US peacefully protested against police violence.

At most, a few thousand people committed acts of violence and vandalism. Let's say there were even 10,000 (a high number, I suspect) folks who committed violent/destructive acts alongside the peaceful protests.

If that's correct, 99.95% of people protested peacefully and 0.05% of folks were violent/destructive.

I'm not sure how that could be construed as anything other than "mostly peaceful". in fact, I'd characterize it as "overwhelmingly peaceful".

I'm most certainly not telling you what to think or believe. Just presenting my own experiences and a few facts.

Don't take my word for it. I'm just some random asshole on the Internet.

The facts speak for themselves.

Normally I'd agree, but I'll point you to comments elsewhere in this thread as to why this is misleading. The amount of damage is huge, and this was excused all the while by the group's leaders and other "peaceful" supporters with "people > property" and similar logic. Using this same logic, I'm sure 99+% of Nazis were peaceful during the holocaust as well.

>this was excused all the while by the group's leaders and other "peaceful" supporters

Who? Specifically. This is important. AFAIK, no reasonable, law-abiding people advocated for or excused violence and destruction.

In fact, such violence was roundly criticized and there were calls from all quarters for the apprehension and prosecution of anyone committing violent acts.

I've heard the same refrain over and over again. But no one ever actually names names. So. Who are these people who actually advocated for violence and destruction during the protests last summer?

That isn't a rhetorical question, friend.

I posted a status update the morning after a major riot happened in my neighborhood that consisted of a short summary of what happened, a statement that I was ok, and essentially "fuck the rioters." I could name names of friends who, in response, insisted on "people > property", "fuck the racist capitalist system", "rioting is language of the unheard", "looting is reparations," and "don't tell black people how to protest." I'm sure you can find examples of this on twitter and reddit if you look—it was unavoidable for a time.

Since I'm not willing to out my friends or comb through old social media, have an example from local media instead: https://www.wbez.org/stories/winning-has-come-through-revolt...

Also, an image macro posted to my wall, representative of the kinds of stuff I was seeing at the time: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnCI4_9W4AAAxDf.jpg

>I could name names of friends who, in response, insisted on "people > property", "fuck the racist capitalist system"

How many of those friends are elected or appointed public officials?

And what political power/social clout does Ariel Atkins[0] have? Especially given that over 100 arrests were made and as the mayor of Chicago said[0]:

"This is not legitimate First Amendment-protected speech. … This was straight-up felony, criminal conduct"

So some of your friends and an "activist" made incendiary comments.

No one with any real power or media reach condoned or encouraged violence during the BLM protests. Not one.

If a bunch of randos mouthing off is a huge problem, how much of a problem do you consider the statements encouraging violence by some folks with real power and media reach[1][2][3][4]?

[0] https://www.wbez.org/stories/winning-has-come-through-revolt...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz-zWeqtVo8&feature=youtu.be

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2021/01/02/gop-r...

[3] https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/die-for-something-arizo...

[4] https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/461498-why-are-we-t...

You asked someone to explain their comment about the "group's leaders and other 'peaceful' supporters." I gave you an example of both. If you want more, they're not hard to find by searching for the slogans I recited.

I am thankful that government officials and more respectable media outlets with significant reach have tended to condemn the BLM rioting. Outright endorsements probably would have made the situation worse. And even tacit support can have disastrous consequences, as we saw at the Capitol. But they're not activists and they don't speak for the movement (although who can?).

>But they're not activists and they don't speak for the movement (although who can?).

Exactly. Given the decentralized nature of BLM (dozens if not more local and regional groups), I don't think anyone can reasonably say that any one person or group speaks for the BLM movement as a whole.

As such, making the assumption that a few loud voices are representative of millions of people seems inaccurate at best, and an effort to discredit millions of people who desire positive change in the methods, focus and biases of US law enforcement, based on the violence and hyperbole of a tiny minority at worst.

And the same can be said of the vast majority of those who, however misguided, protested in support of the specious claims of a "stolen" election.

A vanishingly small minority of those people committed acts of violence and destruction too. And the millions who supported that point of view shouldn't be tarred with the same, broad brush as those who committed acts of violence and insurrection.

Both of those tiny groups should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

The difference between those two groups is that the public/elected officials who supported the BLM protestors right to exercise their First Amendment rights overwhelmingly condemned and decried the violence committed alongside those legal, lawful protests.

While many public/elected officials decried and condemned the violence and insurrection at the Capitol, a non-trivial number of public/elected officials who supported the Big Lie[0][1] of a rigged election encouraged violent action, and some may[2] have even knowingly conspired with violent factions to facilitate their insurrection.

That's a big difference. And we should acknowledge that. Not because it's a partisan thing, but because we're supposed to be a nation of laws -- and when those who are elected/appointed to make and enforce those laws actively work against our constitutional order, they must be dealt with directly and strongly -- or we risk the basis of our societal order.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

[1] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/the-capitol-mob-was-on...

[2] It's important to note that no elected officials have been charged with aiding the insurrectionists, there are indications that a few may have done so. Investigations should continue and anyone who provably (and that's a critical point) aided and assisted the violent scum who tried to subvert our constitutional government must be vigorously prosecuted -- but only if there is sufficient evidence. We are, after all, a nation of laws.

I'm not sure that my goal is to get people to believe as accurately as possible so much as it is to get other people to do the right thing. That is to say, my goal is persuasion.

Generally speaking, I also try to encourage people to believe as accurately as possible. However, as a practical matter convincing people to do that doesn't scale.

I think you are saying tbe same thing. “Do the right thing” means “their beliefs are accurate with regard to what is the best action to take.” Of course, it assumes you are starting out with the “right” action, which is why a much better goal is “ensure everyone believes as accurately as possible.” That way you aren’t just persuading them (and in fact you aren’t even looking at it as an issue of persuading them), rather you are taking the view of how best to ensure both parties are optimally persuaded by the facts.

A goal to persuade without a goal to induce accurate beliefs is just manipulation.

Anecdotally this seems true. Dick Cheney is a hard core neo con but having daughters who were lesbian made him a lot more understanding on the issue of gay rights.

John McCain was similar but his personal experience of being a POW made him a life long advocate against torture.

There’s a famous video of Christopher Hitchens who used to believe that water boarding people was justified in some cases. He volunteered to a mock water boarding session and immediately bailed and said it changed his view on water boarding.

Anti immigrant attitudes are sometimes found among those who have the least contact with immigrants. The cities which are cosmopolitan and full of immigrants are often very pro immigration.

This feels like a very HN zeitgeist where people are just data processors who come to conclusions by analyzing data.

Language is a broken tool. There’s a difference between reading about and seeing the floor plans of the Sistine chapel and actually being there and gazing up at it.

Occasionally it swings in the opposite direction. I've met immigrants who are staunchly anti-immigration.

This is an example of broken language.

Immigrants are never simply anti-immigrant, for example there might be nuance to their view as to whether it is okay to cut in line, especially if they waited the ‘legal’ way.

No, I truly mean people who are against any sort of immigration. A subset of which who say that they escaped from worse cultures and don't want the new culture to be diluted.

The vast majority of people who are "anti-immigration", and who are not immigrants themselves (or recent descendants thereof), are not "simply anti-immigrant" either. Most "immigration restrictionists" want to reduce the levels of immigration significantly compared to current levels, but very few of them want to drive it all the way down to literally zero with no exceptions whatsoever ever allowed. Also, many "immigration restrictionists" want to reduce immigration by certain groups (whom they view as "culturally alien" or "problematic"), but are quite happy for continued (or even increased) immigration by groups they like. So if it is true that "immigrants are never simply anti-immigrant", well that's true of non-immigrants too.

I agree with you, though it would have been nice if you listed a single view going the other direction ;-)

These are examples of an individual being sympathetic towards something that isn't traditionally part of their political affiliation's viewpoints. The study is about building respect between people with different political viewpoints.

Even Hitler was against employing gas warfare in WWII due to his experience with it in the Great War.

But your examples are slightly different. In those, the person changing their mind has suffered the consequences of holding a particular opinion. Have a billionaire live on the streets for a year and he will change his opinions about homelessness, subject a bully to bullying and he might stop bullying others, an anti-feminist dad with a few daughters might become a feminist, and so on.

If John McCain only had heard about others experiences being POWs had he become a life-long advocate against torture? Probably not. This has been explored in the context of political conflicts; between Boers and coloreds in South Africa, between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and between Israel and the Palestinians. The research indicates that merely talking to someone suffering from oppression or injustice does not change one's opinion about that oppression or injustice.

> If I understand it correctly, the claim is [...] that sharing personal experience is more likely to create a feeling of relational connection, which in turn is more likely to lead to a shift in position.

The last part is wrong. The authors are explicit on this point: they are not studying persuasion, i.e., changes in people's issue positions. (They never measure change in people's issue positions.) Instead, they are studying the effects of sharing factual claims vs. sharing personal experiences on respect: which strategy makes you more respected?

See especially page 3: "we leave aside the question of persuasion to focus on how best to foster respect in moral disagreements with political opponents."

Huh, this is an important point that I missed from skimming the abstract too.

Are they saying that if I share my personal experience with you, you will feel more respected by me than if I share facts?

No, it's the other way around: if you share your personal experience with me, I'll respect you more than I would if you instead shared facts. At least, that's the authors' claim.

But what it means to "share facts" in these studies is not what you might anticipate. In Study 5, for example, participants speak with someone who disagrees with them about gun control. In the article, we're told that these interlocutors "offered either personal experiences or shared factual knowledge to support that stance." But the Supporting Information (which is separate from the article) shows what the interlocutors really said:

> Well, I do think you’re wrong about gun policy. I am [for/against] gun control, and I feel pretty strongly about that. I don’t know how you can call yourself an American if you don’t think that guns [hurt people and communities/keep our communities safe]. I believe this because I have read many books and governmental reports on gun policy, so my factual knowledge has really made me feel strongly about this. [1]

The interlocutor claims to be basing his views on "factual knowledge," but no actual facts are offered. To me, this seems a bad way to study the effects of fact-giving in discussions. If you want to do that, you should...study discussions in which facts are given.

Study 4 is similar in this respect. Then again, in the authors' defense, there's more to the article than these two studies.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2021/01/25/200838911...

Narcissism. "I've read many books and governmental reports..." is (presumably) a fact. It's a fact about the person saying it and not about the issue. It's a way to claim "I know what I'm talking about" without evidence.

Unfortunately in today's world, you can be well read in any subject and still end up on either side based on what you've read.

> It's a fact about the person saying it

Which ironically enough, seems to be the definition itself of "personal experience".

Notice also how there is emotion thrown in: "it made me feel strongly about". How is this supposed to be an argument?

> How is this supposed to be an argument?

I agree, if heard that kind of argument then I would think it was ridiculous and narcissistic.

My personal experience is that people often argue in this way, and if I’m being honest if I don’t catch myself than I too am tempted to argue this way.

I think there’s a few factors going on, foremost perhaps an aspect of normal human psychology is that when humans process information and from that information come to a observation or conclusion, we tend to remember the conclusion we came to and not the process of coming to that conclusion. Also, I know that I personally (and also everyone else too I believe) think about myself quite a bit more than anyone else. It’s easy to live in my head and forget that not everyone knows what think I know.

So tldr - forgetting stuff and being selfish

Do they not control for "trust" that the person has genuine factual knowledge? So your personal doubting due to lack of sources is controlled for, I believe, in their "manipulation checks" on page 1.

So people who aren't presented with enough cues to create trust (and even the strongest rationalist has their own thresholds here, e.g. your heart surgeon, a Nobel laureate, etc) would be factored into account. Citation only matters to the listener when trust doesn't exist, esp when "determinations of truthfulness in the universe" isn't even what the researchers care to study -- but rather, how respect develops between the people who receive trusted facts vs trusted experiences :)

Thanks for the correction!

> as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts

There is some overlap but it is not the same space. Humans tend to extrapolate and generalize. For example based on your personal experience with one (or a few) persons of ethnicity1 you may generalize that all persons of ethnicity1 have attribute2. But this is not a fact.

Many facts are universal claims that are actually pretty hard to prove. It can take many scientific studies to establish a fact. It's often not easy to figure out what to believe.

It's also often the case the whoever is asserting a fact didn't figure it out themselves. They are repeating someone else's assertion. Often, they misunderstood or simplified.

With personal stories, it's simpler: do you believe the person telling the story or not?

N.b. in “An Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent”[0], John Henry Newman makes a distinction between real and notional apprehension that would, I think, be useful here.

[0] http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter4-1.html

> this delineates between facts and personal experience as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts

As a matter of neuroscience, from a quick search it appears that they do not, [0] although as a philosophical point sure, personal history narratives consist (at least partly) of beliefs of facts.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952732/ (or if you like paywalls: https://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2FS1355617710000676 )

It usually doesn’t. Most facts today are outside most people’s personal experiences. Many like scientific facts are outside their economic reach to experience or verify. This is one of the major roots of the “post-truth” thing. Since facts can’t be verified we rely on trust, which is collapsing.

In a literal sense, personal experiences (when accurately described) are a proper subset of facts.

Every “fact” contains an element of subjective interpretation. It is literally not possible to present a fact in a way that is unbiased by subjective reasoning. Or if it is possible, we certainly have discovered a way to do it.

Personal experiences are not facts- they can be cherry-picked, they can be biased, they can be exaggerated and even just made-up. When reporting a supposedly objective fact, you have at least the benefit of multiple independent points of view over it- something observable happened and multiple people reported on it. When you hear a personal experience, you're often hearing an unconfirmed and un-confirmable recount of things that are entirely outside of public verification.

Facts can very much be cherry-picked (there are infinitely many of them, after all), so facts alone don't get you closer to the truth. On the contrary, the way people use facts is by selecting them after the fact (no pun indended) to bolster a position they've already settled on. Everyone does this, and with a little self-honesty anyone can easily observe themselves doing it.

I’m a bit unclear on what the word “fact” means. Does it mean “known true proposition”, or “independently verifiable true proposition about an event”, or what?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com