Facts don’t change our minds (2018)
jamesclear.com
jamesclear.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_canvassing
The idea is basically that if you attack a strong belief head on, the person you’re talking to will reject your arguments instinctively. It’s a natural psychological defense mechanism. No one likes being wrong, particularly about things that are tied to their identity.
Instead of dictating facts, you start a dialogue and ask questions that encourage critical thinking. If you are empathic, patient, and non-threatening, they sometimes (sometimes!) start making realizations on their own that change their opinion.
And as many a good therapist has said, the patient has to want to change.
So with Russians, at the very least, you cannot be non-threatening if you are the one asking questions.
I also had the privilege to be a team lead for some short period of time. What I found being one is that simple propaganda tactic works quite well - if you tell the same thing several times, almost literally word-for-word the same, people start to show understanding. This is almost miraculous, getting from blank stare to collaboration in three repeats of the simplest problem explanation.
What all that means to me is that I cannot be non-agressive or non-authoritharian inflicting change in people's minds. That's a deduction for me, at the very least. May be someone can be non-agressive changing people's mind, but even Jesus bore that proverbial sword.
2. Wouldn’t then noticing repetitive use of concepts and sound bites a good Litmus test for propaganda?
If 2. is correct then what are we going to do about the massive incessant brainwashing of our own population with divisive, dehumanizing. And extremely dangerous propaganda?
1. What you actually do - modeling.
In terms of relationships- How you act toward them or how they see you act toward their sibling or your partner.
For example if you reward or punish them, the lesson is not the particular goal of the rewarding / punishment, but to use reward and punishments to get people to do what one wants.
All rewards and punishments are a form of bullying, violent in nature, leading to loss of trust.
2. Observed actions are the top influence, followed by instruction, but very far behind. So if you ask them to do something they don’t see you do, or see you, or your partner or other adults do differently, then the repetition won’t make much of a difference.
Also, kids are placed in circumstances without much autonomy which leads to a lot of frustration and resistance.
The natural state of learning is play directed by one’s own interest and environment.
Sitting still in school and for homework, for over 6-8h/day is a completely unnatural and obviously not spontaneous. The willpower a child needs to exert to twist themselves into these normalized but unnatural circumstances, day after day, depletes the executive function as a resource.
These are just some vectors of influence to consider with kids :)
By repeating something to people a few times you can get them to start to absorb it and eventually understand it.
That former colleague of mine, being student, once had to make presentation for Sociopsychology (some complex area outside of tech student typical field of expertise) class and he has two days to do so - he was that lazy. And all he got for his work were two dictionaries, one for Psychology and another for Sociology and nothing else. Frustrated, he repeatedly read dictionaries' definitions of keywords from the theme of his presentation, for three hours straight, as he told me. At the end of that third hour he started to somehow connect these two things together and started to look for other things that he felt are connected to the theme. Next day he had quite solid presentation sprouted from definitions from the dictionaries and common sense and knowledge. He got hard 5 for his work (top score).
I myself experience something like that when I tried to understand video compression standard - intermittently reading just glossary for several days brought me enough understanding that actual text of the standard just filled some of the not quite important gaps.
Repeating the same thing allows my vis-a-vis to connect dots he or she missed the first time, if the answer is clear misunderstanding. It allows him or her to link what I am trying to convey to his or her experience - with life, code base, user experience, etc.
And, of course, repeating not quite sensible things that cannot be ruled outright as nonsense is a propaganda tactic - and this make regular people to fall to a propaganda as they manage to connect dots that were missing.
But changing a deeply held belief, one tied to a person’s identity, is different than teaching a new concept or selling a product a shopper is reluctant to buy. It is more closely tied to political propaganda, but as Hitler proved with the Big Lie, it can change minds there as well.
I still prefer deep canvassing. It might not be a good fit for Russia, but in many places, it’s a healthy and mutually beneficial process… assuming of course the mind you are trying to change would actually benefit from the change, e.g., a dialogue that opens up a qanoner to the possibly that they have been duped.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_(belief_revision)
Challenging a deeply held opinion whether with logic, examples, or facts only reinforces the prior held belief. Most typically this has nothing to do with perceptions of wrong, but rather negative social stature associated with ones beliefs called loss of face where on the other hand reinforcement results in positive social statue described as pride. The social repercussions of face and pride are dynamically and mutually reinforced within a social reference group.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride
Given these dynamics the best way to change a person's opinions is to provide a connection that benefits their presence within their social reference group whether by enhancing a person's perceived status within their group or by modifying/redefining the group. This line of thinking works the same whether you are selling soda or convincing people to join an underage sex cult.
For context: If you look into street epistemology, it's similar to what I was doing. From the other side, so to speak. We then played doubt (I think the SE creator calls it the pebble in the shoe) into action, and as long as we could suggest the action, in the absence of other suggested actions, the actions we suggested were taken.
Pray in this way, listen for the answers we tell you to listen for, act as if God told you to do this, add this new structure to your life, keep this one, subtract that one. Review what you're grateful for and be happy feeling content with all these amazing blessings...BTW did we mention that you have successfully changed your life, the thing you told us you wanted?
You spread this across months of friendly visits against a backdrop of loneliness in a chillingly pragmatic society...I mean we taught people how to visit, respect and take care of their elders, which is STILL not something that's exactly on blast in modern society.
Cults have pros in addition to the cons, those pros are where followers come from, the followers look at the cons and say "everything has faults," bada-bing, they're in, and that's the simple truth you have to come to terms with.
It's infuriating to think about now in a lot of ways, but this is also a good lesson in how human psych works in general.
Using these techniques I was told that I got doubters into the church at about 9x the average rate for our first-world region. I gave all credit to the big guy.
There's this power of location and meeting context in your example too. When I was young and not yet even part of leadership, we were taught to invite people to come to our favorite spiritual locations with us. Then, while there, we would gently and firmly declare our beliefs and ask the other if they could deny that they felt the truth in it...and by that point they are, even just relationally speaking, posed with one hell of a problem.
BTW organizing funerals for people you don't know very well is stressful AF.
I don't see that what you were doing is all that close to what they do in street epistemology. Sure, you're both canvasing, and you're both attempting it instill doubt in people by asking questions, but the SE folks are trying to teach people better epistemological skills to evaluate any belief they hold or claim they come across. You were just attempting to fill the doubt void with some new claim, without teaching the people you talked to anything about how to evaluate the truth of a claim.
SE is in large part based around the metabolization of logic, specifically subjective-contextual logic, which I think the founder did a good job (humbly) showing has important boundaries as well. With some psychologies it will be like bringing MMA skills into an aerial dogfight. You have to decide if you want to win by holding out somehow or reassess the situation and toolset, maybe even ditching the win/lose idea if that's the way the situation started.
Check out Street Epistemology if you haven't already, as this is exactly what they're doing. They ask random people on the street if they'd like to pick a belief and discuss it. Any belief is acceptable, often it is politics or religion, but sometimes people want to talk about ghosts, or seat belt laws, or karma, or whatever. If the person is interested, they ask questions to try to get them to think about why they hold the belief, how confident they are, and if that may or may not be justified.
There are a ton of videos on YouTube of these conversations and many of them are fun to watch. They really do get people to think about things, and most of the time the people leave still on friendly terms, which is a difficult thing to do when questioning people's beliefs.
Unfortunately, a lot of the time the person who is trying to do the convincing is just as unwilling to let go of their desire to be proven right, so they aren’t willing to employ more effective but less satisfying approaches like this.
Often being willing to settle for the first can keep you out of a lot of trouble.
Tony starts going off on a homophobic rant, the therapist asks the right questions, and Tony slowly realizes that he doesn't really care about a person's sexuality.
"Most" seems adequate because many adults do have preconceptions, for many of us being quite sure that "don't be an ignorant" is a requirement, and concluding that "knowing about everything" also is.
So, when presented with a fact that contradicts a preciously-held belief, there are several purely rational actions you can take:
- give up the old belief
- believe that the fact is false (either mistaken or a lie)
- believe that the fact doesn't actually contradict the belief (that there is some missing context that would make the belief compatible with the fact, even if you are unable to see it now)
None of these are irrational, tribalistic, feeling-based reactions, in general. Sure, there are some cases where a fact is simply overwhelmingly obviously true (e.g. it's raining outside), but those are an exception.
The vast majority of facts we have to build our worldview on are not directly confirmable without huge amounts of personal effort - everyone would have to become a world-class experimental scientist, investigative journalist, jurist, l high-level diplomat and many others, to be able to get a true first-hand confirmation of many of the (potential) facts they are presented with. In the absence of such confirmation, we have to choose who to believe based on a complex web of tribalism, perceived history, social cues, emotional intelligence, and priors that have served us well.
Moreover such a 'tribal mode' mode often impedes the ability to perceive/understand, therefore 'facts' aren't even perceived/understood. You are right: overwhelmingly obviously true facts are very rare, and even less are decisively convincing (only one possible conclusion, without any counter-argument), therefore most facts aren't convincing.
This 'tribal mode' seems natural to me because we learn thanks to analogies, and therefore are prone to imitate the most-enforced beliefs/behaviors: our tribe's.
An analogy is, in effect, a definition. And a definition is not a fact, but which definitions people accept determine which facts they accept.
Except that surely you don't have the time to do that most of the time? What about cases where the other person is being dishonest and shifting the burden of proof about a claim, or trying to offer more and more arguments which detract from making the original point?
While drilling down is possibly indeed what you should do, it's also easy for it to derail any average discussion, if done wrongly and either of the participants don't have honest intentions of having a discussion and finding out the truth.
«Tribalism» vs «priors».
That family became rich when the curse placed on the husband had him always lose money at gambling: the wife bet double on the complementary option.
You do not have close friends you ask for advice in order to help decision - towards the opposite? Some people are more consistently right, some random, some wrong. This includes friends.
Almost all major facts that people disagree on are, essentially, indisputable. It is indisputable that:
- The Earth is round
- The Earth is at least millions of years old
- Evolution occurs
- Vaccines generally work
- Politicians are not secretly lizard people
- Humans walked on the moon
These things are all extremely clear and obvious to anyone with a healthy mental model of how the world works. They are all interconnected with tons of evidence from a huge range of disciplines; any one of them being wrong requires a mind-bogglingly huge amount of commonplace and easily verifiable evidence to be flat-out wrong.
It's actually very hard (if not impossible) to be self-consistent without being true. How many made-up stories have plot holes? Essentially all of them. Statements that are backed up with thousands or millions of data points and shown (through simple, followable, verifiable logic) to be consistent with the rest of our understanding of how the universe works can essentially be called "facts". Again, this is the vast majority of things people disagree on.
> The vast majority of facts we have to build our worldview on are not directly confirmable without huge amounts of personal effort
Only if you're persnickety about what exactly "directly confirmable" means. For some definition, literally nothing is "directly confirmable". It's actually extremely easy to confirm most facts that people actually dispute in a political debate.
> we have to choose who to believe based on a complex web of tribalism, perceived history, social cues, emotional intelligence, and priors that have served us well
Do you have a list of individual humans you have chosen to believe, and you ignore everything else? I don't think you do. I think you have a complex mental model of how the universe works and you constantly try to fit new ideas and concepts into it and see how well they fit. If you're good at it, you keep that new idea quarantined for a long time while you search your mental model in-depth for anything that might dispute that new fact, and then you arrange a contest of ideas where you seek out other information to clarify the situation. Based on the outcome of that contest, you update your mental model appropriately, making an effort to flag pieces of information that may not fit for further review in the future.
People who don't do this have chosen not to. They've decided that they don't care about their relationship with truth. And any time we talk about these people, someone comes along with their false equivalency and claims everyone is that way. No. Some of us have decided to care about truth.
What evolution and the moon landing have in common is that they (a) are facts about history, which is much easier to rationalize being different, and (b) they have little to no impact in people's lives whichever way they believe.
The vast majority of relevant facts are ones that affect everyday life, where there is either broad agreement (basic physics, social cues etc) or complex disagreement (actual political matters, such as the root causes of poverty, politicians' track records on various issues etc).
And especially looking at day to day political facts, it's very very hard to tell who is lying and who isn't, who is massaging the truth etc. An exception here were Trump's election bold-faced lies, but most political facts are complex and multi-faceted.
Let's take a look at "Russia-gate". We know for sure that there was an FBI investigation, and it found some collusion. But, the FBI is a secret service, notoriously hard to trust, with a history of lying to the public. Also, the amount of Russian interference they found was actually small - direct money investments were small, and "troll farms" are very hard to quantify. But, there still was something, and some Trump associates were actually indicted, which doesn't tend to happen for pure propaganda reasons in general.
So, what should you believe? How close were Trump's toes with Russia? If you vote for Trump next election, will you expect him to collaborate with Russia or actually fan the flames of war?
This is much closer to the vast majority of facts I see in my day to day (note, I am not American, but if I gave examples with Romanian politicians are unlikely to be well known to others).
“My feelings” > “Your rational points”
We simply evolved like that and next step of evolution was to become more rational. We are somewhere in the middle.
If the idea is to survive and thrive, the “rational” approach is to continue with what our species has always done - stick with the tribe.
I think you are advocating for herd mentality here without realizing it, and to be honest the effect that fitness has can also be upended in large scale conflicts: consider how many died before being able to have children in large scale wars (like WW2) because they felt their charismatic leader's cause was more righteous than the other guys.
Their is safety in numbers, if looked at solely via a predation model but as a Human (with supposed elevated faculties than other animals) their is also a need for self-reflection and introspection that I think most people in modern Society simply will never value (because it's not rewarded much) even when the perils are clear to judge--COVID's ongoing malaise that has caused rift in Soceity highlighted so much of what is wrong with it at it's core, which in my view were their all along because it was better 'not to rock the boat.' Being th eoptimist that I am I simply had thought we could collectively realize we are sooner to perish as a Species from this Earth than have this model we have been coaxed into correct itself, which warrants a global effort to restructure how we engage with one another and the environment we share.
Social cohesion doesn't not mean to be intolerant of contrasting views, and in my view it's best viewed when people accept that the Social Contract applies to all, including those whom you vehemently disagree with and are not of 'your tribe.'
Why? Because solely sticking to the tribe would stagnate and create a mono-culture of not just ideas, but likely a genetic pool where a single unpredictable variance can wipe most of it out completely: European migration into the Americas being an apt metaphor here.
If you're going to follow models that rely on ecology like fitness, you also need to understand that genetic variation is as crucial for survival as replication itself.
Therefore there is no selective pressure towards being rational.
I'm pretty sure there is selective pressure towards being rational, it's just really hard to select for and even then probably not the most important thing.
I remember when I met my first evangelical fundamentalist I couldn't for the life of me figure out why he earnestly believed this nonsense about the world being 7000 years or whatever. It was only when he said that he used to be a homeless drug addict and he was helped out of addiction by a Christian group that it twigged - they showed him kindness that the rest of the world had not.
I'm pretty sure being rescued not only rearranged his whole world view such that the world is 7000 years old. I'm pretty sure it also rearranged his world view to view facts as less important than kindness.
I'm pretty sure there is selective pressure against being rational. Take your drug addict. The flexibility to rearrange his whole worldview likely increased his fitness significantly. Now he has a support network and community, not to mention the help with addition.
To put it differently: While joining rationalist tribe may confer more fitness than joining the irriationalist tribe, the best fitness is having flexibility to adapt to any tribe you can and not be alone.
If I was a strident atheist and my life was saved by a Christian fundamentalist, it seems plausible to me that I would subsequently be less prejudiced against such people and less concerned about the areas in which I thought they were incorrect. But not that I would believe whatever they do.
Now, you may feel that's a ridiculous belief. But your belief it's ridiculous comes mostly from your own intuitions about the trustworthiness of institutions, perhaps some personal experience or intuited cost/benefit ratios, etc. It's not something that can be portably summed up in a neat box labelled "facts".
Yes, that's a false belief of this tribe that is directly contributing to their mortality
> and thus being in the vaxx-all-the-time camp could also literally kill people
No, because that belief does not conform with reality.
> Now, you may feel that's a ridiculous belief.
It is.
> It's not something that can be portably summed up in a neat box labelled "facts".
It can be. For reasonable definitions of a word 'fact'.
Thing is, responses exactly like yours were being posted all last year to try and dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. It was a crazy fringe conspiracy theory that only people not grounded in reality could believe ... right up until the moment it suddenly wasn't anymore. At which point the deniers were forced to accept that it had never been a crazy belief, in fact it had been the most obvious and logical belief all along given that a novel coronavirus emerging right next to a lab studying coronaviruses is staggeringly unlikely to be a coincidence. Actually, the crazy thing had been the over-abundance of trust in scientists.
How certain I am about anything has no bearing on whether it is true or not. What I said is true regardless of what anyone believes (me included). Reality comes first and is what it is. Beliefs follow (in case of people who follow the evidence) or they don't (in case of people who are choosing to ignore the evidence or believe liars or clueless but confident).
> but can't sum up why in any kind of coherent or legible package for other people
I didn't attempt it. I have done that it the past, but since then I learned that there are plenty of coherent legible packages and other people still don't care.
> It's just this big ball of interlocking faiths and trusts in authority that cause you to say that.
Sure, exactly the same thing that causes me to exit my apartment through the door, not my window on the third floor.
Again, what I believe and why, doesn't influence truthfulness of anything. I may only do the best I can to try to believe only truthful things.
> but this is little different to a religious person asserting that unbelievers are wrong; why, well because you've got to have faith, obviously
not really, if you are correct
If I say 'addition of real numbers is commutative' it's not a religious statement. And if you say it's not, no matter how much proof you demand from me, and how little I provide you'd still be wrong and I'll be right even if only because I trusted the right authority and you trusted the false one.
> Thing is, responses exactly like yours were being posted all last year to try and dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.
The responses will get increasingly dismissive as the people who are correct run out of ideas how to provide arguments that unconvinced people will be willing to honestly engage with. I won't pay for a ticket on Jeff Bezos rocket to show you that Earth is round, because if I did you'll conclude that windows were screens displaying computer graphics, and you've been drugged to feel weightless and start listing indisputable evidence of all that, where indisputable here means, you won't be willing to discuss it in detail.
> lab leak hypothesis ... crazy fringe conspiracy theory ... right up until the moment it suddenly wasn't anymore
I'm sorry to inform you, but it still is. No new evidence was discovered. The fact that more people started to believe it and repeat it doesn't point to any additional truthfulness despite what you might feel (due to mere exposure effect).
> staggeringly unlikely to be a coincidence.
Very improbable things happen all the time. Because there's a lot of very improbable things that could potentially happen. Unlikely is infinitely far from impossible.
> Actually, the crazy thing had been the over-abundance of trust in scientists.
Seriously? Do you think some other group has better idea on what reality is? How did they get it? Scientist are literally the people who dedicated their lives to learning tools that let you tell truth from falsehood. You statement sounds like, we should listen less to music made or played by musicians.
Or do you think we shouldn't trust people at all? But we ourselves, are people too. To operate in reality you need to seek knowledge about it from best sources available. And if you have trouble determining the best sources, you should look for sources that will help you to determine what the best sources are.
"Seriously? Do you think some other group has better idea on what reality is? How did they get it?"
Often, a really good disagreement when studied turns out to be a disagreement on the exact definitions of words.
When I said "over-abundance of trust in scientists", I was using the word scientist as it's normally used by governments and media, to mean primarily academic modellers, public health officials and so on. The people that are in control and get presented to us as "The Science". It doesn't mean (in this context) literally all working scientists and it definitely doesn't mean "people who use the scientific method to study a question".
So does some other group have a better idea on what reality is? Sure, in my view, absolutely. However that group is difficult to precisely define because it isn't affiliated with any particular institution. It's the mishmash of people who are studying the data using logically and statistically rigorous approaches, and writing up their findings online, mostly to be found in a collection of Substack blogs these days, but also elsewhere. This group of people has no institutional credibility because they're not united under any particular institution and a few of them choose to or have to use pseudonyms, but they do have a lot of methodological credibility, because they're actually following the rules of logic, reason and indeed, science. Whereas many of the presented scientists turn out not to be, on close inspection. They are "The Scientists" but not scientists. No surprise that many of the people disagreeing with them actually do have scientific training or employment, just from different fields.
In the end then we agree that at some point you have to trust other people, and no, I'm not arguing for some kind of dystopian trust-free world. It wouldn't work indeed. But in this case we have a big problem: a group of people calling themselves scientists, people who society allows to use the title, but who objectively are not following the scientific method. Their results are consequently poor (the scientific method isn't perfect but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing!) but people refuse to accept it because they over-generalize and assume all scientists are viewable as a single blog with a uniform level of trustworthiness. If our institutions functioned well that would be the case, but they don't, so we're back to having to evaluate trust on a one-by-one basis. Very problematic.
Not to mention other tools they don't have access to like ability to conduct work that requires multi-year effort of teams of people or necessitates the use of top of the line equipment.
Personally I prefer to listen to what scientists with large budgets and a lot to loose if what they are saying turns out to be crap.
Pseudonymous rouge loner that has nothing to loose doesn't instill in me great faith about his capabilities, honesty of his process and his findings.
Whole modern antivax movement spawned from misplaced belief in one such loners scientist.
Unfortunately, peer review is pretty worthless. I've read a lot of papers that passed through peer review yet had basic errors in the first page, in one case, one was saying something false about public statistics in the very first sentence! If you don't trust particular fields then peer review isn't a very convincing upgrade because it's bad scientists reviewing other bad scientists.
I'm not sure who you mean by "one such loner scientist" - do you mean Wakefield? He was peer reviewed and it took years for his paper to be retracted! That's the sort of problem I mean.
For COVID stuff, for better or worse the arguments are mostly about data and everyone is working off the same datasets. So you don't need fancy equipment. A computer is sufficient.
I find the pseudonymous person to in some ways have more to lose. One thing that you realize very quickly reading bad COVID papers is that the people who write them never suffer any consequences. It doesn't matter if the predictions are wrong, or if the scientific method is violated, or even if they just flatly lie in the text itself. It seems universities will let their academics get away with almost anything. Look at Ferguson for a good example of that. The man has made an entire career out of being always wrong and nobody in Imperial College London seems to care. The non-affiliated researchers on the other hand are trying to build an audience, some are selling their analysis to readers. They know they can lose that income stream if they screw up. Plus the open comments sections works wonders - they are effectively being peer reviewed in real time by far larger numbers of people than there are in the academic process. I've seen mistakes caught that way a few times now and it usually leads to a quick admission and apology, something I never saw coming from academics even in the rare cases their paper was retracted.
Maybe that's because I have much trouble picturing who exactly do you have in mind. I don't know about any major thing solved by unaffiliated scientist. Sure, there are some of the not well regarded discovered some pretty important thing. But they still were operating in the same environment, and once they proven their case sufficiently were embraced by that environment.
> Some of those people do publish peer reviewed papers.
Some? And that's supposed to make them more trustworthy for me than scientists that other scientists trust?
> Unfortunately, peer review is pretty worthless.
As all tools by themselves are. That's why we have the scientific community and that's why you can make a career of mastering all the tools of science. Reputation among colleges has some value as a tool too.
> do you mean Wakefield?
I mean exactly him.
> He was peer reviewed and it took years for his paper to be retracted!
Yes. It takes time. It took even more years of solid journalistic investigation to show how much of a fraud he was. Meanwhile no other better source stepped forward to provide us with better insight on that case. And many "citizen scientists" did their own "research" and found much confirmation for Wakefield claims which they happily pronounced to vulnerable people.
> For COVID stuff, for better or worse the arguments are mostly about data and everyone is working off the same datasets. So you don't need fancy equipment. A computer is sufficient.
Not quite, because data is just the base level, from data you need to extract information, from that knowledge and from that insight. At the level between data and knowledge you need to have a pretty solid understanding of context of given field, like virology or epidemiology or immunology, because without it, from that data, you'll be able to create only mistakes and confusion.
> The man has made an entire career out of being always wrong and nobody in Imperial College London seems to care.
Sure, scientists usually don't spend their careers debunking others that are clearly wrong. They are usually more focused on developing the ideas of the ones who are right, because that's better use of their time. There are ton of garbage science around. That makes me even less confident about things that are not even science.
> The non-affiliated researchers on the other hand are trying to build an audience, some are selling their analysis to readers.
That's a horrible argument. Truth doesn't sell. Lies sell best. Also lies are somewhat resilient and still sell very well in the presence of information debunking them.
> I've seen mistakes caught that way a few times now and it usually leads to a quick admission and apology
I've seen way more doubling down on the lie or mistake than apologies. Apologies usually come from real scientists that have internet thing on the side while having usual fulfilling scientific careers.
> something I never saw coming from academics even in the rare cases their paper was retracted.
That's because retracted papers usually don't come from people who made honest mistake. They come from over liars, who wouldn't apologize or even admit if someone caught their hand while they are stealing. While random person (or non-afiliated scientist) on the internet is more often just misguided and/or incompetent.
Your argument, or world view, is that you can determine what's true by looking at who scientists trust and the peer reviews of these scientists. I've just named a man who is by universal academic consensus a scientist, but who - as you're aware - produces garbage science without any pushback. In fact, as far as epidemiology is concerned, ICL are the bees knees. One of their worst most obviously garbage papers has over 1300 citations!
And so your answer is that scientists don't spend time rebutting it (and never have) because it's so obviously bad they don't need to? Why do they keep citing it then? Where are the initial takedowns that established so strongly this guy was a fraud that scientists don't feel a need to write any more, and why do no governments seem to be aware of this?
Put another way, how can you determine which scientists are doing good work vs bad if all the available evidence, like citation counts, suggests they don't care and confuse bad work for good all the time? Remember that scientists are always "selling", which is why they complain about the grant application process so much. They are selling interesting claims to governments, not exactly known for being discerning buyers.
"It took even more years of solid journalistic investigation to show how much of a fraud he was."
Yes, it was hard work. Do you think current mainstream journalism is solid? I don't. The average science journalist would apparently rather die than argue with a scientist about anything, let alone allege fraud. They see their job as amplifying 'expert' voices, not investigating them.
But such journalism does exist and can be found outside of the large media institutions. You just have to look for it. Here's a small selection:
https://dailysceptic.org/ - news and analysis from the UK, they often do reviews of scientific papers and find flaws in them. For example this review of a paper by Ferguson's group:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-pap...
All the content on this site is free and there are no ads. Mostly donation driven with lots of user submitted articles. Many readers and guest article writers have an academic, scientific, engineering or data analysis background.
https://eugyppius.substack.com/ - a mix of data analysis, fact checks and political analysis. Some paywalled content but not much.
https://bartram.substack.com/ - very deep analysis of the UK data (which is the best quality in the world) by a pseudonymous "former academic and senior UK government scientist".
https://alexberenson.substack.com/ - a former NYT investigative reporter who did a science beat in the past. He has a more US-centric approach, and mixes data analysis with links to other news stories and various journalistic hot takes. He's a regular writer rather than someone with a data background, but he still does a decent enough job and the comments section usually picks up pretty fast when there's a risk of statistical mis-analysis.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/ - a weird one but has some good articles: lots of data analysis mixed with populist "rise up" style political exhortions and amusing cat pictures. Very different to anything you'll find in a newspaper but there's still lots of thought provoking data here.
https://greenwald.substack.com/ - this is mostly analysis of media coverage rather than scientific papers e.g. https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/the-nyts-partisan-tale-... but it can be useful for fact checking. This is one where some content is paywalled.
So now you'll go through and find reasons why you don't like these sources, or don't find them credible enough. Fine, but I don't find outlets like the BBC or NYT or Nature credible because there were too many times they published things that were clearly untrue and agenda-driven, then ignored all feedback about it.
Anti-vaxxers would be spreading disease, sure. Although it would lower their survival rates, they also affect the survival rates of the out-group by spreading it to vulnerable folks. So being stupid doesn’t affect them exclusively.
Next, once you’ve become an anti-vaxxer and burned bridges with sane people there’s no turning back. At that point becoming “rational” and accepting vaccines is the irrational choice because you lose your only community, and you are all alone. Like I said, loneliness kills.
This is moot because the psychological pain of admitting they’re wrong is too much anyway. So they’ll stick to the group. But my only contention is that post-bridge burning, the rational thing to do is to stick to the community that will care for you.
While I'd never call myself agreeable, as I really enjoy argument as a means of engaging communication and establishing bonds with others. I have found this lack of rationality to be a widely spread defect and when reduced is as simple as you describe: I've never been steadfast in even my deepest held beliefs, I often question them myself and look for ways to validate their merit when given the opportunity. Whether that be engage with people who hold opposing views, or simply analyze them to exhaustion on my own.
This philosophical outview is what I felt the Sciences would laud as it is the crux of what Scientific model which relies on and tries to achieve via the highy touted peer reviewed model wherein experiments are meant to be replicated and derive their credibility on these criteria: instead after my experience in undergrad in the life sciences and then having spent time in graduate level courses (not enrolled) and befriending two professors I soon realized it's really a petty, tribal, and often passive aggressive environment where it's less about merit of your experiments results and more about 'who knows you' and 'who they know.' On top of that, most experiments are never replicated and when they are they seldom get the same results.
I'm not sure which dismays me more, but either way, we need to get past this and I fear social media's optimization models has entrenched this defect deeper into the Human psyche than anyone will ever admit. I think it's less about evolving and more about halting the regression of base feelings and reactions in the Human Condition to be honest.
Also the most hardcore rational science people will do things based on feeling in their everyday lives. If you feel like drinking 5 beers on a Wednesday, that might not be the most rational thing to do, but knock yourself out. Where we as a society however need to be rational, is when it comes to the fate of populations (e.g. during a pandemic) or the entire planet (e.g. climate change).
The need for rationality changes with the scale of the problem and whether we are dealing with individual topics or collective ones.
If we really needed it like we need air, more action would be taken to move towards better circumstances.
I'd argue that it's not "really needed" for most people - almost no one alive today will experience the worst possible outcomes of climate change. Many of those who disregard epidemiological safety also won't experience the worst personal outcomes for themselves. Thus, they're free to disregard these, or even oppose them entirely, regardless of how far their arguments or feelings are detached from what would be best for the next generations and probably even believe that they're right in doing so.
People's ability to ignore anything that they don't like is easy to overlook.
I do agree with the actual point that you're making, though. We need more rationality in life.
Yet, at the same time, we're all just human and it's easy to have similar shortcomings ourselves, because if we spent all of our days worrying about every minuscule thing, we'd never get anything done (of course, that doesn't excuse the behavior, i'm merely pointing out this human cognitive limitation).
For example, i got some cheap running shoes for running in the evenings in my countryside home. The only factor that mattered to me when i got them, was that they'd be cheap enough for me to be able to throw them away once they get worn. Of course, the price point essentially meant that i'm probably supporting businesses in countries where the working conditions are oftentimes very poor, as well as ones where the human rights situation has problems in some cases. I don't doubt that the way my phone was made was all that different, nor were the circumstances surrounding it. Similarly, i support unethical corporations whenever i pick up a box of cereal at the store, or when i buy a cocoa drink that i want to enjoy. I'm also contributing to the furthering of unsustainable farming practices almost whenever i buy meat at the store, as opposed to sourcing it locally (e.g. smaller farms or hunting).
Of course, the impact of many of those is lower than the aforementioned things, yet the principle of the human mind being fallible is the same. So i think we should all remain self critical and watch out for things like that when we can.
Tribes with a misguided person at the top used to get decimated pretty quickly. But hey, now "we live in a society"
If you expect people to not make fact-based decisions, you will associate with people who frequently fail to make fact-based decisions. Do that too much, and your life will be at the whims of people who do not even aspire to manage their emotions wisely.
———
Seek out the scout mindset in everyone you meet.
Expect and bring out the best in those around you.
If X assumed that 'facts do change people's minds', again X would fool himself and need more accurate representation and tools.
Incidentally: the article (also) fails to point out clearly, "some people do not actually care about changing their mind (irregardless of facts, and even of tribe)" - inner statuses are so important to them, that not even tribalism shakes them.
Of course the point is with defeatism, and its absiological and practical consequences: if one gave up (consequences), or resorted to paternalism (other bad consequences)...
But do not forget the pars construens of TFA: "to change people's minds, there can be better strategies".
many decisions we make are shortcuts in life. Maybe at one point something was a rational data decisions. But you can turn that into a 'gut feel' very quickly with little thought.
Changing someone's opinion with facts almost rarely works. Unless they do not care about the outcome. Then you can easily change their minds. Something like 1+1=3 'hey you got that wrong' 'oh yeah you are right its 2'. That sort of fact decision is easy to 'fix'. But which steakhouse is the best one on the market? You will get lots of opinions and anecdotes. But there are known and sometimes manipulative methods to change someone's opinion on those things. Edward Bernays methods are usually manipulative and use extensively in politics and marketing campaigns. I usually personally use a more questioning methodology. You also have to get past the idea of 'right vs wrong' also, and be willing to change your own opinions. If not fact methodology usually makes people dig in and ignore you.
Is this really relevant? This is only a pertinent question if there was some fact that challenged his dinner decision and he decided to ignore it. Why would think that's the case?
I do usually choose what to eat based on proper caloric intake, nutritional value, and my mental model of human health based on research that I've done. Most people do. Most people fret all the time about what they're putting in their bodies. If I "cheat" and eat something I know is bad for me, that's not a case of a fact failing to change my mind -- my mental model is still correct. I know that the sugary treat is bad for me, and I am correct. Never in this situation has any clear fact been rejected. Never has an incorrect mental model been used when a better model was readily available.
Some questions are “is” questions: objective truths about the world and how causality operates within it.
Some questions are “ought” questions: choices about what we enjoy, want, or consider unjust.
I ate dinner last night because my biology is such that I feel sluggish and distracted if I forget to eat and I ought take care of myself to keep from feeling sluggish and distracted.
Facts won’t change people’s minds on “ought” questions. Only stories can do that. But if people aren’t muddling their is-oughts then facts can change their minds on “is” questions. If they couldn’t, then science and engineering would make no progress.
What matters is how do we want to live life ? Do you want to accept that everything is pre-decided, and that we are puppets to our own biases, or do we want to believe that the power of our destiny is in our hands, that we change in every fleeting moment, and we can decide to change for the better version of ourselves ?
Because what you believe influences deeply what you become.
Already done- many, many times
"Diamonds are forever", "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day", "Bacon for Breakfast" etc etc.
The "humble" origins began here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio...
In addition, humans are not completely rational creatures. The concept of not knowing why you feel the way you do is common. And yet we are primarily driven by those things we feel but often cannot understand. Beliefs arise from emotions, not the other way around.
At the present time in the US we live in a society which increasingly divided into two parts because the experiences of those people are distinctly different. We have the concept of social inequality - the Gini function - but we often do not realize that the higher the Gini function the more likely it is that we will have divided belief fabrics. As we do. Many people in the US (I'm only speaking for what I know ) live in a far different world than the readers of HN. They work just as hard if not harder than the readers of HN.
The belief fabric of those people is far different because their experience sharing the benefits of our society is far different. The emotions of being treated unfairly give rise to a rejection of the predominant belief fabric as a whole. Imagine that you have repeatedly lost friends and family who sailed off the edge of the world because they accepted the official line that the world is round? Not a great example but perhaps a bit useful.
So when we say "tribal" or "friendship" we need to understand that tribes or friendships tend to cluster around belief systems. Trying to change someones mind by thinking about a scale of 1-10 does not work when they are using a completely different numbering space. (edit changed "because they are using" to "when they are using".)
If you read a research paper by some John D, that spells out a hypothesis, study plan, results, and summary, the written summary of results (even the the actual results themselves) is not the "fact" of the study topic.
The facts are:
- John G wrote these things down into a report paper
- John G claims to have followed the proposed plan properly
- John G claims to have accurately recorded the results
Even with replicated research, you are merely improving the statistical odds that the two people aren't putting out bad information, intentionally or otherwise.
If I tell someone that type 1 diabetes is a genetic disorder, there is only 1 fact from the receiver's perspective: I claim that type 1 diabetes is genetic. I have provided no way of verifying that information to them. If they look it up, they are trusting some source or trusting someone else's information. That is still a tribal following, as they have a set of sources that are going to be more likely to trust than others.
Most "facts" aren't shared through well vetted, replicated research. They are given though casual conversation or short internet comments. I'd say you'd be a madman if you take anything you've ever read or heard as fact. The closest you can come to fact is observing things yourself, and even that is flawed.
I think a big issue is that people (including me in my original post) conflate the term fact with the term truth. Many things people say are indeed facts, but that doesn't mean they are true (or provable to the receiver). A fact is merely something that is possible to be proven (or disproven). A truth is something that is true; a verifiably proven fact.
Simply telling someone facts does not make them truths to the receiver. You have not provided them the ability to prove the facts to be true. You've merely asserted them.
So put another way: I may say that it is possible to change people's minds with facts, but you also need to provide the function of turning the fact into a truth. Facts are easy to claim and very abundant. Truths are extremely rare, and for nearly everything we merely work with statistically likely truths.
Overall, I very much dislike hearing the phrases:
- "Science says..."
- "Scientists say..."
- "THEY say..."
Considering the amount of information available to cherry pick from, or people to ask a question to, every one of those is no better than just saying: "this one random person on the internet said...".
This goes back to the theory that 80% or more of any population of humans are going to be followers. You can't have a tribe of nothing but chiefs, because eventually those chiefs are going to pontificate too much and fight over their decisions. Every group needs a majority of its members to follow along no matter what, and as humans are a communal species, we developed as such. Groups don't have time to have every individual understand and debate the facts. To be efficient, most will need to just do what the chief tells them to do.
The tragedy of our era is that we've told ourselves that everyone will make better decisions if we all were educated and knew the facts. The result is we've told unremarkable people that they are really intelligent, and we've wasted the time of the intelligent by telling them that humans aren't the programmable species that they really are. Pointing out facts is simply a sport of one-upsmanship that has no accountability for how someone acts upon that information. The chiefs, so to speak, are free to reason themselves into any contorted belief to the point of religious zealotry, and the followers are only more glad than ever to join these new religions.
For facts to not only change our minds, but change enough minds, we may need to move beyond the model of the tribe. At the very least, the chiefs need to be knocked down a peg.
It gets even worse than that, those followers climb the ranks parroting whatever the previous people said, and after a while you have organizations where there are just followers all the way to the top. In those nobody cares about facts.
Learning these analytical skills doesn't have to be boring or tedious either especially if their concepts are pitched to the kids' age. Whilst I wasn't lucky enough to be introduced to these subjects in primary school, I vividly remember the time that I was - and that was being thrust headlong into reading the great master himself - Plato.
And there's no better starting point than Book I of his Republic - and Plato's subject 'What is justice?' is as both lofty and as meaningful as it can get. Here we see one of the great dialogues of all time played out - a formal argument between the philosopher Socrates and the sophist Thrasymachus. To watch Socrates methodically and systematically demolish Thrasymachus' proposition that 'Justice is evey man for himself' through logic and force of argument is a sheer delight - I get goose bumps on my neck every time I read it.
And Plato delivers even more: as James Clear points out Facts don't change our minds - for that we first must get people on our side, which is exactly what Socrates does, as he eventually convinces Thrasymachus through friendliness, logic and pursuasion of argument of the error of his ways - thus the sophist is converted to the philosopher's much more powerful and just view (right, James Clear will have read Plato too!).
There's more to developing analytical skills than just reading Book I and that's why it has to be an education-long process (and I'm appalled at how little attention we pay to it in our present-day education systems).
Analytical skills work not only at the obvious level of the decision-making process but also when one is confronted with having to overturn a firmlyheld belief or fact that is wrong. When in possession of proper analytical skills one cannot simply ignore the issue and hope it will go away - thus, like it or not, one is confronted with having to deal with it.
There have been times in my life when I've held what I have believed to be almost absolute fact - 'fact' that's turned out to be completely wrong. When finally confronted with (proof of) real fact my analytical training not only allowed me to switch position almost immediately but also it helped me understand why I was wrong initially.
What that training does not do is to relieve one of the pain and smarting that comes from the realization that one was so very wrong in the first instance.
This often bothers me about commentary on TV. They say that this and that politician believes that ... But no. The TV commentators have no way of knowing what anybody actually thinks or believes. They can only know what people say they believe.
Some people say they believe the election was stolen. Then it gets reported that this percentage of people believe the election was stolen. But there is no proof of that. There is only evidence that certain percentage of people SAY they believe the election was stolen. We don't know what they truly believe, only what they say they do.
I have had a lot of success with this approach when people are trying to feign ignorance or muddy the waters. People often know the right answer and just don't want to cop to it. I'll say team A has all the best players and they are clearly going to win.
Well this stat isn't the whole picture, anything could happen, that player is pretty good too...
Ok if I gave you $100 to bet, which team would you put it on?
Sure, you could still "silence" me with that because I am not going to bet my $100 on "showing you I am right", but I'd happily take your $100 and put them on a bunch of things people resort to "betting" on to get out of the discussion. I admit that my general knowledge is mostly in the "more likely", and as long as I am aware of that, that means that I am not willing to bet on it.
So what this "betting" approach gives you is to get out of the argument from risk-averse people, without proving anything. Don't ever take it as "I am right", because you have most likely failed to convince them of anything. It's akin to saying "you are right" without meaning it to get out of the discussion.
(I would do and I did bet with friends, where the bet was usually for an expensive lunch or something, but since I'd be willing to pay that lunch regardless and I find it amusing even if I am made fun of for "being wrong" by my friends, I wouldn't consider this actual betting :)
Maybe the GP is just more well-off than their interlocutor, who might not make rent this month if they'd lose a $100 bet they're 99% sure they'd win, whereas the GP is only 90% sure, but would find losing $100 a minor inconvenience.
I think X.
There are many details and complicating factors.
If I gave you $100 to bet on X or Y, which would you bet it on?
...
> I'd be willing to pay that lunch regardless and I find it amusing even if I am made fun of for "being wrong" by my friends
Delightful. It brings to mind the Seinfeld where someone bets Elaine a dinner that Dustin Hoffman was in Star Wars as a way to go on a date without having to ask. Or perhaps Stephen Hawking's bet against black holes. If he won his life's work would have been wasted, but he'd get a subscription to True Detective, or something close to that.
For a bet to work youd need some sort of authority everybody agreed upon as an arbiter of objective reality.
We do have some trust in courts. There are kangaroo courts but only in corrupt countries. We do need to trust in some authority. It is another bet, do you believe that scientists are deliberately trying to mislead you?
That is possible and it is also possible that scientist are wrong by mistake. But how much would you bet that scientists are wrong?
Point is we trust some authorities more than some others.
If A win gives 1.2x, and B win gives 3x, the betting house probably has the probability of A winning something like 90% of the time, and B winning 10% of the time. They want sufficient people to bet on either so that in the full picture, they'd be at net positive whatever happens. That's also why they adjust the winning odds as the bets come in (they don't care about winning big, just winning consistently).
However, for an individual bet, you're more likely to keep your money if you go with the 1.2x choice.
I have often the feeling that people "believe" in certain things to be edgy or interesting.
Majority of our beliefs are vulnerable to "peer review". There is nothing negative about that, because otherwise, we'd all be spending time verifying everything anybody says.
The only thing I am saying is that you should not try to discredit anyone for holding a set of beliefs, because we are all guilty of similarly not vetting the truth. Very rarely do we dive into establishing the facts fully, because it would be impossible to talk about anything.
If you disagree, let's go through an exercise. So your car says it's now going 60km/h. I can't trust you or your car, let's put side markers on the road, and I'll use a stopwatch. We'll also have to do like 100 runs, and change the surface a bit so we control for skid (non-slippery, slippery...). Ok, for those side markers, how do we measure them? What about the time? I'll drop by Paris to get 1-true-meter and compare my stopwatch with their atomic clock to ensure the error is within, say, 1%.
All this is the vetting required for a basic, easily measurable "fact". Anything involving the human mind, it's nigh impossible.
> We can just say that the fact is that the speed meter reads 60.
(As an aside, my car needs software recalibration at the dealer if I switch to differently sized wheels: if I don't know to what wheel size software was calibrated to, I would need to verify it)
"Just say" is a manifestation of a "belief". The question is how do you, in a grand scheme of things, establish if it's not a "false belief"? You are, ultimately, putting your trust in somebody else doing the verification (of a speedometer in a car, in this example)!
Basically, it is our hope that actual facts will "surface" through this chain of trust between people into majority of people's heads, but throughout periods in history, that was not the case: eg. think Middle Ages; or any of the propaganda initiatives by the modern media.
As an obvious example of such a modern media play, I am sure you'd find most of the people in the USA before the Iraq invasion believed Iraq had been actively developing WMD. A quick search gives me this (I have no idea how trustworthy the source is, but such caveats should be assumed in human communication):
> Moreover, the share of the American public that believed it was “very likely” that U.S. forces would eventually uncover Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fell from 59 percent in early April to 39 percent in late April.
(From https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rally-round-the-flag-opin...)
As far as we know, at least 59% of Americans had "false beliefs" prior to the invasion, and even after troops were there, 39% still maintained them!
In accepting that it's too easy to have false beliefs promulgate, we open ourselves to an ability to develop tools and processes to combat that. But I truly wonder what are the practical tools we have to do that today? How is a "regular" Jane or Joe going to do that?
You should discredit the beliefs (if they are not factual), and discredit people who knowingly spread misinformation. AND you you should question at least privately whether they truly hold those beliefs or merely say they do.
Rumors. Think why spreading rumors is considered bad and unethical? It is because many people will believe them and thus get mislead. And whoever spreads the rumors typically somehow gains from doing so, perhaps simply by getting the attention of other people. When you get people to listen to you, and "believe" you, you are in a better position.
However, on the topic of "if they are not factual", how do you practically check that? Seriously, do you exclude all prejudice, and if I give you two contradicting sources, how would you establish which one is "factual"?
Of course with some people you would assume that they are only pretending to believe but that means simply that you don't trust them generally.
People who use "believe" when they should say "I pretend to believe" should not be trusted, and are not trusted when it becomes clear what they are up to. Like say pretending to believe that vaccines are bad and not helpful and then getting the vaccine yourself.
Its point is "a large number of people are tribal - truth is secondary to them, as they live in an inner world of familiarities, not of "intellectual"¹ structures: if you want to change their mind, to use obstensions and theorems is inefficacious: you can change their mind more easily - and painlessly, for them - with methods from the mental functions they live in".
Note: unfortunately, some of us think that using a non-objective language is manipulation, and call that morally inappropriate. There is a difference between "treating children like children", and "treating children with awareness".
The author of the article is not intentionally² saying that you, andi, or people you probably would call "normal" (or mathematicians who know about non working theorems, or engineers knowing that engines work or not work through facts and not social cheers and frowns), believe or not absurdities: it is advising you to be careful when breaking the bubbles of entities that you think should follow logic and facts, and instead are living a completely different inner world "of sensation". They do exist.
¹"intellectual": term to be read here in the common acquired sense, not in the pure one
²..."just factually".
The entire article resonates with me, but I worry that it's because I am part of that tribe and it's "others" who can't change their opinion. To dispel the notion that this is tribal "knowledge", we'd still want sufficiently large studies that (dis)prove that people change their opinions in face of facts, and that they are more likely to do so based on similarity of the views and friendship level (my side observation in real life is that people change their opinions but sometimes won't admit to it too :)). People have observed it throughout the history, true, but that does not make it a prevalent behaviour (is it just the behaviour we notice? similar to Murphy's law, which I call the law of observation/attention: you are more likely to notice/remember when just the worst thing happens).
While it sounds hard to construct such studies, it's not impossible (compared to eg. controlling for level of love we give to children while they grow up from infancy and then establishing correlation or causation).
It's easy to come up with opinion-changing studies (eg. this article references a bunch which do not support a simple view like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180622-the-surprising-r...), so it'd be good if there was scientific evidence that this happens (which means, statistically significant correlation). But even if it happens in, say, 55% of the studied situations, that's hugely different from, say, 95% of the situations.
We already know that some people are irrational, tribal, quasi-impermeable, "reasoning" to faculties that are not that of reason. It is evident under the language they use. You will find that literacy is 77% in Snowdonia and 55% in Drizzland (but 99.9% in that building): it is present and variable, and objectivity is similar.
If the poster wanted studies meaning "is the author of the article really sure": by experience and just pre-facto stochastics, some people are like that. But no, not all people are like that. And for those making (here) statements about "the inescapability of human condition and matters of degrees": the difference between the doctor and the brick is radical, even when the doctor cannot find Niue on the map and cannot cook.
Studies: of course they would be interesting, but not that different from the studies that count regional literacy, (so-called) "human development", and other similar factors. They are indicative, and normally Finland and South Sudan are contrasted, but they are also of relative worth, because (apart from the frequent difficulties in measuring the real value - e.g. do not expect a random high IQ individual to be rational, reasonable, controlled etc.) aggregation is myopic and you will not in fact be sure in the evaluation of your individual Finn or South Sudanese, using just prejudice.
Indeed, but it's the best we can do with many fields of study. This is why it's important to qualify all of our statements to the best of our ability. "Finns from urban areas aged 12-65 are like this 78%+-6% of the time", for example. That's usually the best any study can give us, but they drive the prejudice, and it's on us to not cave in on that. In a normal conversation, I think it's fine to even say "Finns are like this" as long as you understand all the nuances at play, and don't really believe it (otherwise, communication becomes too bothersome).
But we should not disregard the result of the study because of the qualifiers: we should accept and embrace the "qualifiers".
The article contains a "just so" origin story, without any proof, but with a lot of social cues and nods to authorities that are likely to be unquestioningly trusted by the target audience. An actual mythical origin story is told, with lots of handwaving and name dropping, about how we lived in tribes and needed to signal our membership.
Then, in a giant logical leap, the hand-wavy "just so" origin myth is presented as the true reason why we don't have a strict adherence to "facts" as the author thinks we should.
The proper way to understand why facts don't change minds, is to understand that there are no such things as "facts". Our minds carve out blocks of meaning from the sea of chaos in front of us. There could always be a different way to carve up what lies before us. This is not to deny that what in front of us is real, or to claim that we can make up whatever we want. Not at all. But it fails to understand that the reality we see is much more like a mythical or narrative structure at its base. We are completely integrated into it and can't separate ourselves from it.
You can see that what I'm saying is true, by simply examining the article itself. Although it purports to be about "facts", the article is a narrative. It even has a mythical origin story from beyond the mists of time which can't ever be "proven" using "facts".
I don't know what use the article is. Perhaps it can make a certain type of person feel superior as they sit at the family Christmas dinner and silently judge their relatives' differing beliefs as being somehow inferior because they don't meet this imaginary criteria of being "fact" based. How do "facts" even motivate a "fact based" person to want to change someone else's ideas?
The slightest amount of critical thinking shows that we are all deeply immersed in narrative, value judgement and goals. This false concept of "facts" is merely a weapon for a certain worldview in its attempts to coopt other worldviews.
I don't think facts are necessarily objective, because we don't have access to the levels of absolute omniscience required to know whether or not an observation is absolute for all qualified observers.
Even so. Facts remain persistent for us, and that's good enough for many useful things.
The article is just reiterating the difference between science and rhetoric. Science is not particularly persuasive because it's difficult, it requires special skills and knowledge, and leading edge research is always tentative, by definition.
Rhetoric is persuasive by definition, because it has been engineered to be persuasive. Lawyers buy books which teach them how to craft persuasive arguments. Veracity is not required, and may be deprecated. It's a completely different process.
The problem is that STEM-trained types do not understand this. Because so much STEM argument is about data and credible interpretations, STEM types are always blindsided whenever an opportunist/charlatan/crook turns up spewing obvious bullshit, but somehow still manages to take the public with them.
The solution is to educate STEM people about rhetoric.
Tribalism is just one aspect of it. There are many others.
- I trust what you say, and the best camera for me will depend on those factors
- I trust that you like those headphones, that does not necessarily mean I will too.
I might not say that it’s difficult, since it’s easy for me, or to trick you to buy it, it’s still a fact.
Headphones might be the most subjective but I’ll say they produce the most accurate sound (to me). You don’t have a way to measure if you like them or not.
"Facts will also be unbiased. They do not support only one perspective and present the information in an objective manner"
Of your examples only "Processor is the best at these benchmark" is a fact.
You said "does it matter that the benchmark favors it" and I don't think that matters. You aren't saying "This processor is the best processor" then using the benchmark as evidence, you are saying the processor is the best at the particular benchmark which is true even if the benchmark is bias, manipulated, or whatever.
Lets say you program a fuzzy logic controller that returns large=true for numbers > 100, and i program mine to return large = true for numbers > 10. Like you say, its subjective.
These rulesets are chosen as truth in the same way the grenwich meantime is 0* lat, and we dont use the paris meantime because we arent french revolutionaries and also the brits had stronger empire.
If i came off as joking its bc i am aware of the lunacy of my take. To call "normal" good is a strong position, but who was norm?? And why do we all have to measure up to him?
I think most people feel this way - but it's the very notions of "reliability" and "significance," and how personal they are, that filter out an awful lot of possible mind-changing facts.
Even if we assumed both would tell you the same facts (bold assumption, I know) the way they make feel during hearing these facts plays a role as well. If you met the same doctor semi drunk in his holiday outfit on a beach telling you the same thing, wouldn't it change the way you treat these facts?
If you trust science as an institution the white garment of the doctor standing in the hospital which is an achievement of science will play in favour of whatever the doctor says. What if you don't has that trust (or even active distrust)?
I trust science as a method for gaining knowledge, and I understand that it has its limits. In most things concerning humans, it's is loosely based on mathematical statistics. If you've ever had a serious illness and immersed yourself in understanding medical advances in it, you'll probably be surprised by the level of guesswork and unknowns of the operation of the human body (let alone of the mind).
If you have a mathematics background, it can be frustrating to sit across a doctor who lacks such understanding, while you are trying to extract all the useful snippets of knowledge they do posses, so you could correlate that with your symptoms, since they are usually dead set on a diagnosis without sufficient proof simply because it's... the one they've seen the most (it might not even be the most prevalent one). But even in the simplest cases, you won't hear a doctor say that this is something with a high probability. Eg. give them a bloodwork with CRP, and they'll immediately tell you if you should be prescribed antibiotics or not. It's a bacterial infection, not with 92% probability (I made that number up), but 100%. Sure, it'd be hard to get the exact probability, but actual medical studies are getting into that (correlating all the symptoms and such).
Sure, for a vast majority of cases, following an easy algorithm just works: that's the value of science being applied, and this is the reason we are getting our lifetimes extended and a number of sickness eradicated. On average!
But bringing up medical doctors as the pillars of science (oh, and they are stressed out too? that will surely make them better at logic) is quite a surprising stretch.
You seem to be assuming that people are fools... Blinded by symbols and holding Ideas. That is very much not necessary.
Experience, education and wisdom naturally put every input into perspective. Actually, you are pretty much required (deontically, for intellectual fitness) to vet your ideas, so you should be well trained not to be fooled by a garment or by capital letters ("Science" - or Whatever Big Word).
No, I am actually coming at it from the other direction. The human is an social animal, as such feelings play a big role in our daily lives (for some more, for some less). My point here is, that it is pretty much impossible to switch this off even if we try very hard – which btw. also aligns with most of what psychological science tells us. Of course there are differences (people who just follow their feelings vs people who try hard to use facts instead), but these differences don't change that everybody can and regularily will be influenced by feelings.
Facts are not decoupled from their packaging. The two podcasters who work in science and whoose whole careers and lives you followed for years will enjoy a different trust than a piece of paper that you find on the street, written in Comic Sans, even if both tell you the exact same words. This is normal. To pretend we "just look at the facts" is naive – because we don't. We learn about the world and see how things fit with our current image of the world. If the new information fits neatly we don't feel a big urge to check the facts, especially if it was delivered by a source who we learned to trust.
The question however is: *Do we listen to facts when the new information _does not_ fit our image of the world and it _feels_ wrong"? All science around that topic I have seen suggests we go with the feeling more likely in that case. This doesn't mean we are idiots, it means our image of the world lags behind the information we get. Otherwise it couldn't be stable, change all the time and we would require enourmous amounts of energy/thinking to just exist. It is the price we pay for having a more or less stable image of the world around us.
This is an entirely different thing: neither of these would be facts, but claims (hypotheses, statements, beliefs...). Building trust will make you more likely to believe someone's claims are factual, but the only facts are the ones proper scientific studies base their interpretation on. Even conclusions of most scientific studies are usually premises and hypotheses, more or less supported by the facts in those studies. As such, a scientific podcaster would be twice removed from the actual data: they'd be interpreting the interpretation of the facts a research team has collected. You trust them at your own peril.
Facts are provable/observable things which can be reproduced by others. That's why we've got the reproducibility crisis in science since the introduction of "metrics-based" science: papers are published for career advancement (sometimes with falsified data, which is why reproducibility is important before we call them "facts"), and science now comes second.
In short, it's all quite simple. But it's all so elaborate, draining and time consuming, which is why we practically must trust others' interpretation of facts. As long as you are aware that we are mostly working with interpretations and not facts, once you really want to drill down for a topic you deeply care about, you can. And that opens up your mind to changing your opinion easily.
I am sorry to hear that: you really should do something about it.
> it means our image of the world lags behind the information we get
In a way correct. It is explicit even in the actual formal study in epistemology (before the side of brain science): theories of foundation note the cost to "keep track". Nonetheless, there exists formation that installs the reflection module without adding more power consumption costs to the brain.
> It is the price we pay for having a more or less stable image of the world around us
Why should the image of the world be stable?! It should be dynamic - it's part of its purpose, it's not just deontic. And careful, also in order not to have to perform revolutions on the body of knowledge and relations in some future.
> Facts are not decoupled from their packaging
People who have dealt with people know out of experience they have to be skeptic... Packaging: it's even traditional wisdom running in popular proverbial locutions: "A beard does not make one a philosopher" (Plutarchus) - cowl and monk, book and cover... Children repeat it, adults know it, through experience! They sometimes fall? Well they utter "Should have known better" as they raise, not (normally) "But the garment!".
> Loving the films of the Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino, I thought he’d be easy to chat to. But a maestro is a maestro, as I was reminded when I interviewed him in London last week. Masked and communicating through a translator, I semaphored my admiration for his new film The Hand of God, starting with its spectacular opening shot. Like a bird, the camera flies over the sea, then focuses on a vintage car tooling along the promenade, before panning over the city again. But he rejected my praise: “It’s not complicated. It’s a normal shot by helicopter”
(Skimmers: the post is about the preference of Sorrentino about adherence to facts, instead of going for contributing to sustaining the interviewer's emotions. No, not all people are tribal.)
Online comments, even non-political ones, can still get so heated. Etiquette seems to be better followed in the real world than in anonymous comment section.
A number of people are tribal in belief-change, probably a large number. "Normal" (according to norm) people are not. Educated people who have been through Euclid and post do not believe that triangles eat turtles (or any false property) because doing otherwise offends their mates.
The author of that article is tribal: non-tribals, objective people never write 'we' and 'our' in those contexts, as per the title, «...our minds». 'Our brains have glias', yes; 'We pick our nose', no.
Edit: And it is not a matter of quantifiers (some, many). The author of the article wrote: «Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome» - universal quantifier. Following that, that author is a lunatic (or a criminally sloppy writer). No, James Clear, there exist people who do not accept cretinous assertions, absurdities, to be part of any group - they find "loneliness" (in fact, quite relative) preferable to absurd (which, by the way, also has a functional cost). Some people are not beasts.
We derive our allegiances and enemies not from facts, but from our goals and values. It is completely reasonable that (minor) facts have relatively little influence on our larger goals.
The author is confused about this Is/Aught difference. Or attempting to manipulate the reader towards prioritizing Kindness without a single fact, scientific study or example anywhere in the article. Ironic.
If you tell someone they are wrong and tou want them to recognize it, you need their (ideally) voluntary corperation. If you condict yourself like an asshat, most people will not do you that favour out of purse spite.
If the people know you as a tolerant person with a rational mind and a kind spirit, that is mostly driven by curiosity about the world, they will be much more likely to listen to you, because they won't assune you are just being mean. You still have the option to speak a harsh truth now and then and even this is more effective, than if you are a constant cynic that is known for this type of stuff.
If you care more about making others better you should stop caring about being right in a triumphant way. Sometimes I'd love to tell people how wrong they are, but giving them the escape hatch of feeling like they had the ideas themselves has shown to be much more effective.
https://leversofpersuasion.medium.com/pacing-and-leading-133...
American Heritage dictionary has this definition for manipulation:
>Shrewd or devious management, especially for one's own advantage.
Lastly, if you try to convince me of something "just to see if you can" that would definitely be perceived as negative to most people. You did it for your benefit, the enjoyment or education of doing it.
Even if the manufacturer just picked the cheapest possible dinging bell sound, that's also going to persuade you of something even if the manufacturer had no intention to persuade you. That would be passive, unintended persuasion, which we do constantly.
A microwave's tone could be chosen by the manufacturer to signify quality, true. However the primary meaning of the ding itself, to me is that it is signalling that my timer has run out and I might want to attend to it. Persuasion does not seem like the right word.
I would rather be known for my sincerity rather than always wanting smiles. I get more meaningful connections that way.
I think you may have misunderstood the message: I think he is warning (as some psychologists like to stress) that causing discrepancies in one's world view can be very stressful and painful, and that showing facts may not be productive and effective with some people¹ - so he is warning about awareness for politeness and effectiveness.
¹(to the arm-tossing author of the article, seemingly (indiscriminately) you, janto, and your unknown neighbour - and you would be right in protesting against him for the insinuation)
When we are in the moment, we can easily forget that the goal is to connect with the other side, collaborate with them, befriend them, and integrate them into our tribe.
Where the article is advocating kindness as a manipulation tactic to avoid stirring up their partner's defenses, while pursuing a specific perspective change... that is being slimy.
Even that "integrate into the tribe": there exist plausible interpretations, such as "creating a communication that spreads truths, creating further building blocks for further commonality and keys for further communication".
It is also true that to play squash, spending hours to throw balls at a wall, will get frustrating if you wanted them balls to reach the other side. If you want to be understood by someone specific, you have to understand that - unfortunately - there exist a large number of people who will only understand a limited number of message forms. It's warning you about the inefficacy of flooding an HTTP server with SMTP messages. And sometimes, it's that Joe exactly you have to speak. At work, you will not be able to override that.
"I'm showing them truth and they aren't listening" should be "I'm listing things I believe are true, and they believe different things are true". If you put it that way, it's fairly obviously a naive and solipsistic way to think.
You get into these bizarre pokemon battle-discussions where both sides are throwing out "facts" but it's never effective.
"But I'm showing them science!", you say. Let's be honest here. It's demonstrably true that science isn't guaranteed to be correct. May the ghost of Karl Popper haunt and expound the ideas of scientific fallibilism to anyone who doesn't agree with this. It is perfectly reasonable to doubt scientific claims until you are convinced by them--not by who is saying it, but what they are saying. This is central to the scientific principle to do so.
A prerequisite for knowledge isn't merely being correct, but understanding why things are correct. "Because it says so in this abstract" is not sufficient. If you do not understand why a statement is true, you do not know it is true.
If anything, the reason people get stuck in these intellectual trenches is because they too are conflating the existence of an abstract with sufficient reason for knowledge. They too conflate their opinions about the truth for facts. All these fringe science groups like anti-vaxxers and 5g-conspiracists almost always have "sources" for their claims, and a superficially plausible story about some big cabal of mainstream science trying to suppress them.
The art is to recognize when somebody is not open to arguments. There is no need to argue e.g. that your country has plenty of resources and it is the ethical thing to do to accept refugees, when the other person just places zero value on their lives and is openly racist. What is completely rational for that person is insane for you and vice versa.
In that situation you can switch away from discussion on eye level and it just becomes a power play. Try to "win" the discussion in any way, look good to bystanders, convince those who can be convinced. Amplify the voices that you want to amplify and silence the others. It sounds horrible to write this out loud, but so much of political discussion realls is not a scientific exchange of facts, but just power games.
Moreover, (2) before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.
To exercise my tribal gene I've followed one football club since childhood and I can tell my opinion is different from what commentators say after the game.
About the risks, damaging world representation and individual's proper function, of those who "shout slogans", Charlie Munger spoke really worthy words (the Psychology of Human Misjudgement speeches) - transcript of the speech at Harvard in 1995 at https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-mi... , revised version at https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/
> Well what I'm saying here is that the human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can't get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort. And here again, it doesn't just catch ordinary mortals, it catches the deans of physics. According to Max Planck, the really innovative, important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard. Instead, a new guard came along that was less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. And if Max Planck’s crowd had this consistency and commitment tendency that kept their old inclusions intact in spite of disconfirming evidence, you can imagine what the crowd that you and I are part of behaves like
> And of course, if you make a public disclosure of your conclusion, you're pounding it into your own head. Many of these students that are screaming at us, you know, they aren't convincing us, but they're forming mental change for themselves, because what they're shouting out they're pounding in. And I think educational institutions that create a climate where too much of that goes on are in a fundamental sense, they're irresponsible institutions. It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out
> And all these things like painful qualifying and initiation rituals, all those things, pound in your commitments and your ideas. The Chinese brainwashing system, which was for war prisoners, was way better than anybody else's. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations, and then they'd slowly build. That worked way better than torture
1) This tribe never was and never will be large enough to meaningfully influence most decisions in any society.
2) This tribe does not control access to nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, or tank or infantry divisions.
Einstein as a young fellow certainly did not change Planck's mind, and Heisenberg did not change Einstein's.
Doesn't matter if we talk about Magellan, Newton or Darwin. They changed the world one death at a time.
The reason is that logic is based on very few things(usually binary statements, true or false) and it can focus only on those things. They can dissect and understand deeply something very small and dead(static) but could have real problems understanding the whole system(big and alive[dynamic]).
You only can focus on 5,6 things at a single time and need to invest a ton of time to get results. The world is not pure binary, like mathematics usually study it,the world have shades of gray and billions of things interacting all the time.
In fact, without tools like cheap access to books that make it possible to complete the work someone else has done,and networks that share the knowledge like Universities, cities or the Internet, this process of analysis is so slow that it is completely useless.
For understanding complete systems intuition is just much better and faster. Because it is an stochastic process that could integrate millions of things at once.
For changing your mind you need proper training in the scientific process, and it takes a lot of work and effort to do, because it goes against our primal instincts. You need to be humble and train a beginner's mind all the time.
The fact is that most people believe they are logical while everybody else is dogmatic. But they are not.
They can not do something as basic exercise as proper debate in which they believe and defend only temporarly the opposite of what they really believe.
Really logical people can see their own flaws as a human(illusions and biases) and only then compensate for them.
I bet you,hilyen, believe your thinking is logic based. Hah!
>“People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.”
>We don't always believe things because they are correct. Sometimes we believe things because they make us look good to the people we care about.
"This study was badly done", etc.
I'm merely saying that people who consider themselves "logical people who will change their mind when the facts change" will still ascertain veracity of facts and how much weight to give them in a tribal manner, even if they are not consciously aware of it.
Then, anyway, will «definitely change their minds when new evidence arises».
"Educated bets" are part of the intellectual game.
I believe that no one should go hungry, that everyone deserves health care, and that everyone should have a place to live. No 'fact' is going to change that belief, but for some people that belief translates directly into an ideology. For me, facts could change how closely aligned I am to more market-based or socialist views to solve these problems. I don't believe in market-oriented solutions because I like competition or want people to suffer(whereas for some the idea of winners and losers is attractive) I like market oriented solutions because I think given the whole system it's more effective.
And this is one of those weird ingrained personality things. Some people can't understand and think my _beliefs_ waffle. I similarly can't understand why those who have closely aligned beliefs and ideas can't see that an idea that seems to solve a problem on it's face doesn't actually solve that problem.
Nah. Logical people will happily simplify world ad absurdum and proceed ignoring all the facts that point to nuance.
At least some of the times.
(:
It's hard to understand how wretched and empty a person you must be to get off on playing Lenin with other people's thoughts.
I don't want to ramble or off-track this thread, mbti just seems like a really interesting tool, one that has allowed me to get profound insights into minds I'd not have had without it - validated insights.
Astrology is hokum, too, but it randomizes who gets which bit of advice on which day, and gives everybody different advice at different times. That birthdays and planets have no meaningful role beyond randomization does not lessen its usefulness at keeping people who follow it out of ruts.
MBTI is a lesson in other valid ways to perceive and act in the world than what you are used to. Other people do, and it would be a poorer world if they didn't.
Many times I have seen someone present a fact to me or someone else that has no effect on the logical argument the other person has - and rightfully so since it is unrelated or not useful. Or they completely miss the context of the fact they are presenting, like not knowing the number is "good" or "bad", or not knowing what it actually represents (looking at you, gender wage gap).
Then you have the the complexities of multiple arguments in different perspectives for or against a policy involving n-order impacts. One perspective/discipline might have a solid argument, but another might have a solid argument going the other direction. Then it's up to the individual to weigh which is more valuable to them. This sort of brings us to how scientific fact is not the same as policy, but the people need to decide if and how they want to implement a policy based on it.
When I get new facts, I research them and my existing position.
This also reminds me of some stories I've read about black people working to befriend racist people. Often it just takes a racist white person to get to know a black person on more than a superficial level, and then they realize their racism is based on bullshit. I say "just", but of course this isn't a trivial thing to do, and it puts the burden of effort on someone who shouldn't have to expend that effort, and potentially put themselves in an extremely vulnerable position.
Something I always try to do when making decisions (don't always succeed, though) is to think about outcomes rather than what seems logical or just, or would make me feel the best. "Taking someone down" with the most logical argument ever might sound amazing in theory, and have some really feel-good vibes, but often that just won't work to persuade someone. What really matters in the end is the outcome: we want to "win friends and influence people"; that should be the driving motivation. Certainly we shouldn't compromise our ethics to do so, but often persuading someone of your point of view might involve more emotion than logic.
I think the big challenge, covered in the article, is that you need to not only appeal to someone's emotions to change their minds, but you need to somehow convince them that leaving their "tribe" (full of close friends and often family who have the wrong idea) is safe and won't result in alienation and ostracization. It's a really tall order. And, frankly, often they will end up being alienated from many of the people they hold dear. It's really hard to get someone to accept that. Sure, you can try to pull them into your tribe, and make them comfortable with that. But what if doing so means they'll lose their closest friends and family, people they have been close with for years or decades?
[0] Efforts to combat vaccine hesitancy and outright misinformation haven't been going so well. I think a big part of the problem is that people are trying to throw facts against emotion. That just doesn't work most of the time.
Oddly, I have noticed the exact opposite: an incredible and unduly resorting to emotional, sketchy, manipulative language - not only in fact, but also theorized by articles "do not speak to them using rational arguments", and from academicians (e.g. The Conversation) - which of course, had "alarm bells ring up to eleven" in "normal", rational people.
Nobody¹ concedes trust when manipulative language is perceived.
¹(finally, a rare almost legitimate universal quantifier)
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> we want to "win friends and influence people"; that should be the driving motivation
This probably needed much better expression.