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Comment by ARandomerDude | Hacker News Reader

> Let's start from the main domains where we know people don't change their minds—politics or religion.

> In politics and in religion, the main driver is social. We believe what the people we love and trust believe.

Except I've changed my mind on both, despite enormous pressure by people I love not to.

Also this article seems to be self-defeating: if we don't change our minds, why attempt to convince us of that fact? If we truly don't change our minds, no amount of evidence will help us change our minds about this topic.

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I’m in the same boat as you, having changed my mind on many big, cherished ideas. Obviously, people change their minds.

Having some familiarity with Kahneman, my guess is he means this is a general, but not absolute rule. Sort of like “You can’t convince someone of a wrong if their paycheck depends on them seeing it as a right.” It’s a helpful general, but not absolute rule.

To be truly free, we should be paid by no one.

I don't think it was meant as an absolutist assertion.

Then it shouldn't have been titled as so.

The actual title is "Adversarial Collaboration: An EDGE Lecture by Daniel Kahneman". "People don't change their minds" is just the tagline, and he doesn't even actually say it in the lecture. The focus is much more on adversarial collaboration and why he thinks it is a positive thing for science.

...does that change your mind? ;)

Except he says things like:

> To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters.

> Let's start from the main domains where we know people don't change their minds — politics or religion.

Perhaps people familiar with his work interpret his statements differently. It's also understandable if this was a lecture for peers. But I'm a layperson whose only context is this article and the things he says sound absolute.

It's already an era of misinformation and low attention. We don't need content published in a way that may add to it. If there are conditions and nuances involved here, I think writers, especially scientists and professionals, and editors should include them and avoid saying anything that risks misinterpretation.

How do you interpret “To a good first approximation” in this context?

This is called a “rhetorical device” and you’d struggle to find a lengthy article that does not employ rhetorical devices. It’s a big part of how communication works.

I wonder if there is a term for this kind of objection. I’m starting to see more and more people demand quantifiers or conditional disqualifiers on statements that shouldn’t reasonably be considered as absolutes. And, the fact that bringing up that whatever assertion is being made is not a universal absolute doesn’t really add anything to the understanding.

Which statement is better, “people don’t like the smell of skunk spray” or “the vast majority of people do not like the smell of skunk spray”? The latter is more correct, as I am sure there is probably someone out there who is an outlier. But I can’t help but feel like my communication has been made less precise and has been made subject to interpretation as a result.

I advocate for everyone to use basic declarative statements when they are not completely certain, with uncertainty left implied and up to the reader to figure out.

If the writer is certain about something or wants to make an absolute statement, then that's when the verbosity comes into play. That's when the writer can start to add all the fluff words.

That's a convention that's way better, because the large majority of statements and propositions aren't known with certainty. I am exhausted at having to read long winded prose with endless "maybe" "mostly" and so on, with the obligatory "we don't know this for sure" at the end. I don't come away thinking you're humble, I am just annoyed that you've wasted my time when it was blatantly obvious you were saying something not absolute.

I hear you, but I'm also the type of person to admit my own uncertainty. And the people around me get way more uptake of their ideas by just leaving out those words, even when they have less or terrible foundations.

It's a cultural thing. The cultural norm in academic or technical circles is extreme precision as well as fear of being held to account by enforcers of that norm. It's a spillover of rigorous academic publishing norms into general conversation. It's a fool's errand given that speech is intrinsically imprecise, and given that everyday speech is just a communication tool and not a vehicle for perfect applied epistemology.

We should hedge statements depending on whether the context makes it self-explanatory that there's uncertainty. Any less, and we're being deceptive. Any more, and we're adding words without adding information.

You know what would be a cool? Some notation to denote the level of certainty that doesn't take up horizontal space in the sentence. Or an API to a fine tuned GPT-3 that can strip out caveats and hedges from text on a screen.

I know very little about it, but it's my understanding the conlang Láadan has ways to express degrees of certainty and degrees of "handedness" to the information (first-hand, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1adan

Check out the tenses, things like, "Known to speaker because perceived by speaker, externally or internally" vs "Assumed true by speaker because speaker trusts source".

https://laadanlanguage.com

Personally, I am glad that culture is moving away from rewarding confident certain statements that are simply untrue.

Citation needed.

Also - relevance?

The tagline being questioned here is—

“People don't change their minds”

— the problem with which is not that it’s “simply untrue” but that it requires qualification, e.g. in the prose of the linked article it’s written:

“To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters”

> Citation needed.

Citation for personal preference? Or for claim that currently confidence is rewarded more then accuracy?

> the problem with which is not that it’s “simply untrue” but that

The statement is untrue, because people do change minds. People change minds also about stuff that matters. They dont do it often, but they do it.

> is moving away

I think the citation would be for "is moving away" as that's the most bold claim.

That was the premise of the comment I reacted to. It says: I’m starting to see more and more people demand quantifiers or conditional disqualifiers on statements that shouldn’t reasonably be considered as absolutes.

Seeing more and more people demand such qualifiers is culture moving away.

What you call a "rhetorical device" I call clickbait, and frankly I'm getting tired of it.

If the response to every title should be "You shouldn't judge us on the title, everyone knows titles are bullshit", then maybe folks should stop making bullshit titles, or else not feign innocence when they are judged on them.

(Note I understand the submitted title is not the title of the article, which I think is a valid defense in this instance, but my general point still stands)

There's a difference between using a broadly true generalization as the title and using a bullshit statement as the title.

I disagree. What we need less of is endless caveats and hedges in writing that make it impenetrable for no added value. Leave it to the reader to exercise common sense. It's extremely obvious he didn't mean it as an absolute assertion.

You’re doing the caricature attack thing. It’s a safe bet Kahneman is aware both that people sometimes change their minds on everything and that we often change their minds on small things.

What everyone is missing is that changing of the mind is a spectrum process, not a single binary process.

It happens over days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the subject. People who expect that if they refute a single then should then refute the entire opinion are the problematic ones (with binary thinking).

There are always edge cases, if all it took was a single counter-example, I would be a nihilist with no actual opinions. People change their minds when the bigger picture demands not, not because some young jackass decides binary logic should fully and completely apply to life.

> Also this article seems to be self-defeating: if we don't change our minds, why attempt to convince us of that fact?

I don't think the point was to convince us that we don't change our minds but rather to convince us to do adversarial collaboration instead of angry science.

You changed your mind yourself. Not because someone pleaded you to.

Isn't a big point of the whole discussion that you may change your mind because you changed the group you associate with?

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