Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Enough messengers saying the same faulty message over and over and you distrust the message just because it's been repeated so often.
This is an easy thing to do with conversations on subjects like guns where the key of slanting the message is based on subtle wording changes that allow you to leave out some data or include other data. The person presenting their information thinks they have "facts" because they see numbers that support their point of view without knowing what's been left out.
I seem to remember a github repo that was posted to HN a couple of years back that did exactly that. They showed the same data set and presented 3 different ways with 3 entirely different conclusions.
Not to mention that citations are not all they are touted to be.
Just because something has been written by someone somewhere doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
Just because something has been published on a peer reviewed journal doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
Just because something has the consensus opinion doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
Just because something is supported by the numbers given by some government, state agency, NGO etc doesn't make it an objective reality fact.
And in many cases someone with actual "skin in the game", who knows a subject empirically can be right, and know they are right, against "citations" from all of the above.
When that is a known reality you're left with breaking things down into logical positions or acting emotionally.
Case in point: Sugar is great, sugar is bad, fat is great, fat is bad, red wine is bad, red wine is good... blah blah blah.
A fact is a fact, indisputable. Yet many of the facts when chased back to first principles seem to have enough ambiguity to beg questions over just how much we really know and how much we just think we know. I have whole days where I question everything I think I know and am still no wiser at the end of the day.
There is always the possibility the findings of a peer reviewed, journal published, replicated study are wrong. They are just more likely to be correct than assertions without such support.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fact
Fact: a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true.
So... are you saying that a fact isn't something that's known to be true? Because my understanding of the word "fact" is that it means something indisputable, an underlying truth upon which you can base other truths and know them all to be true. If this is the case, then what can we possibly know with any sense of conviction?
What becomes a fact for you depends on how tolerant you are for uncertainty. You're probably going to die. That's almost 100%. A solipsistic universe is likewise very unlikely. Those are pretty good bases for facts, but they're not indisputable.
Facts are not a simple structure. They are a conclusion of a series of comparisons after which we have considered many things and at the end decided that the evidence satisfies our threshold for uncertainty. People regularly make assumptions on which facts are predicated, and so we can say that we only have access to contingent facts, because they will always lead back to some assumption sooner or later.
If you want facts that won't change after 15 years, you should study Mathematics.
I was just watching The Man Who Knew Infinity the other night and I would dispute that even Maths won't change after 15 years.
Once in a generation, someone like Ramanujan comes along and manages to change something even as fundamental as Mathematics.
But still,....
Sometimes, a theorem is proven to be inconsistent and thrown out. My point was this happens a lot less often with mathematical theorems than it does with scientific facts because facts are based on our inductive study of the universe, whereas mathematics only makes statements about syllogisms. Unlike the real world, math is an area of study where incontrovertible facts are at least possible, because we make everything up, and just have to make sure we're consistent about it. We do not have access to such a priori knowledge about reality.
It's true, of course, in a sense, but a great book to get some perspective on the development and "historicity" of mathematical fact is Imre Lakatosh's great Proofs and Refutations.
It's a great read, as a fictional dialogue of students and teacher on Euler's "simple" formula
V - E + F = 2
That's science the abstraction, though.
Actual science as practiced, and scientists, claim to know what's really "a fact" all the time.
No. They are accepted as a scientific theory [1].
A scientific fact is "a repeatable careful observation or measurement (by experimentation or other means), also called empirical evidence" [2].
The media and general public doesn't really understand the distinction, and tends to call widely-accept scientific theories "facts" and treat them as if they are proven true -- when in the reality is the best science can do is just not yet prove something false.
Unfortunately, there are also a ton of perverse incentives such as when the sugar industry pays to fund science that 'proves' fat is the cause of problems[3], not sugar.
This doesn't mean science can't be trusted. Even flawed scientific theories can still be useful: for example, school children learn how to do basic quantum physics using the Bohr-Rutherford model before learning that model is actually disproven, because the model is still adequate to explain what's necessary at that level of education.
You have to judge the source of the study, who funded it (and why), and if it has been reproduced enough to be widely accepted -- especially in cases where there are contradictory results or theories.
It turns out Science, like many things, is hard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact#In_science
[3] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/...
Thanks for clarifying that... indeed, I agree with that adjustment.
The problem you highlight is that most people aren't exposed to anything but "this is fact" spewed by the media and don't have the benefit of time or contradictory evidence at hand to decide what is true and what isn't... so even with the ability to think critically, they're bombarded with so many alternative-facts that eventually they begin to believe it too.
Using their critical thinking skills they can then apply this knowledge to non-scientific situations, so when a politician say something is a "fact" they can figure out if it's a "fact" like empirical evidence, or they just mean it's a theory they believe in.
Through this lens, "alternative fact" must mean either "alternative theory" -- which is fine, and can be tested against another theory by figuring out a way to prove one false -- or "alternative empirical evidence" -- which is not possible, and therefore is just a fancy way of saying 'lie'.
That Popperian view (published 1934) is itself somewhat problematic, and I'd say obsolete. The distinction between pure unambiguous observation statements and the edifice of theory on top (concepts, operationalisation, hypothesis, test, theory, etc.), stemming from Positivism even before Popper, is also problematic. Even the distinction between analytic (logical, "by definition") and synthetic (empirical, "by observation") statements is problematic, see Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951). Newer approaches see scientific theories as a "web of beliefs" - basically, "empirical facts" and "theory" and "auxiliary theories" are all intertwined.
The question, then, whether science can give us real facts about the real world (beyond what's immediately observable) is subject of an ongoing debate between instrumentalism and scientific realism.
Personally, I come down on the realist side - I think there are electrons and there were dinosaurs, even if I haven't seen them.
And thus, I think it's legitimate to call very well established scientific theories "facts"
(also, btw, because of the "oh, but it's just a theory" response of various anti-science trolls (not you, mind you!)).
As the main said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
That's the flavor of the decade, yes, but back in the 70s there was "zero population denialism" which is roughly equivalent (there was a big scare that the earth's population was unsustainable and we were rapidly running out of resources and couples needed to stop having more than 2 babies and if you disagreed you were a zero population denier)
Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no citation. Peer review is better than no review. There is probably a higher correlation for a statement from an official state agency being true, than a random statement with no attribution.
So yes, a statement can satisfy any of the things you mention, and still not be true. But that doesn't mean those factors can't be helpful in assessing the likelihood of a given assertion.
Yeah, in the sense that all you are saying is its possible to have degrees of trust on difference sources of "facts".
That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people.
>Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no citation. Peer review is better than no review.
That's the problem: we can't even say that.
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...
(Of course we shouldn't trust this paper either: it's, after all, published too).
I think David Hume was quite good on this subject. If chance of being right is all there is to knowledge, then maximizing your chance of being right is what knowledge is. So all the peer review, the numbers and statistics, for example, contribute to knowledge even if it might be wrong. And if you dismiss, as you do, statistics because they just might be misleading or biased, and are thus not "objective reality fact", that does damage to your ability to know things, because you are discarding data without considering it, and that damage should be avoided. Whereas the proper thing to do is consider it on merits, whatever the actual merits are.
When all you have is that newspaper headline, your knowledge has gone down rather than up.
Of course, in real life, we do have this constraint
Which IMO is what causes confirmation bias. But science should strive to get rid of confirmation bias as much as possible.
Any scientist will be subject to cognitive bias at some level (if only by choosing the core principles and axioms on which their reasoning is based), but there are systematic ways to mitigate it. Applying more resources to a particular problem will get rid of at least the superficial levels of cognitive bias.
In my experience, people tend to use this phrase as a bludgeon to exclude ideas they don't like. It's a way to stop a discussion, not help promote understanding and find real facts.
> That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people.
It's certainly not lost on the millions of newly minted epistemic skeptics, who all of sudden over the last few months feel a calling to publicly argue against the knowability of objective facts.
I took an epistemology class in college, and I do agree that there is a sense in which facts are never truly and finally knowable to us. But I vehemently disagree that we should import this philosophical doubt into matters of everyday life. Even if our ability to capture facts is imperfect, throwing up our hands and saying "nobody's ever actually known a single fact, so why bother trying to agree on the terms of debate, lets just agree to disagree about the facts" is a transparent gesture towards legitimizing ignorance.
Why is the alternative to "throw our hands up.." instead of just becoming more skeptical and scrutinizing sources more rigorously? These days, people cite sources like they are gospel, often having not read through the sources themselves.
The paper you cite says that most published research is false.
You infer from this that published research is no better than no source.
But this is wrong! If published research is true 30% of the time, but people's intuitions (on questions research is published on) are so only say 10% of the time, then going with published papers is a better choice.
I'd like to know if people feel, after reading TFA (or the psychology literature), how likely it is that people are wrong most of the time on important questions.
Only if "people's intuitions" are true on a less than a "published research" percentage.
I think it's a safe assumption.
Many people assume intuitively there's a "why" to their existence. Many people assume from their day-to-day experience that the Earth is flat.
Without rigorous method, "people's intuitions" is just that, "intuitions".
The article we're commenting on (which you can discard more easily than I) describes a study you can reproduce easily to prove it to yourself. Why don't you?
Not if the "well regarded source" has a clear motive to lie.
"There is probably a higher correlation for a statement from an official state agency being true"
Not when the statement conveniently exculpates the agency or high ranking members of the agency of wrongdoing. Then there is probably a higher correlation for a statement being false.
For example, when Jean Paul de Menezes was gunned down by the London Metropolitan police almost every claim made to defend themselves in the succeeding three days turned out to be false. They said that there were wires visible from his jacket. They said he was wearing a heavy coat. They said he vaulted the turnstile. They said that they shouted "armed police!" and he turned and walked towards him. None of it was true.
Then it is not a well regarded source any more.
"THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a police officer’s are slim to none."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-...
The reason I would like to know more, is because I learned so many years ago of the importance of doubt in criminal cases in the US. As Wikipedia tells it[1]:
>Beyond a reasonable doubt is the highest burden of proof in any court in the United States. Criminal cases must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
If it's currently the case where all that's needed for a suspect to be found guilty, is for a police officer to say they are, then the entire justice system needs to be reworked.
Who gets to decide who is "well regarded" and who is not?
Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[5] He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.
Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practiced and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died at age 47 of pyaemia, after being beaten by the guards, only 14 days after he was committed.
Galileo also comes to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
I am sure there are many others, those are just ones I readily remember off the top of my head. Current "experts" are really terrible about defending their current belief system, and actual evidence be damned. Their jobs and whatever depend on them being right, so don't confuse them with the facts LA LA LA NOT LISTENING. (And because they are experts, many other people simply defer to them.)
This does not appear to have changed in the modern world.
It completely ignores the many times experts knew things, and applied them and improved the working of their field.
You are absolutely overfitting an example used to highlight a pitfall. Instead you are using it to dismiss experts.
In other words you are re-broadcasting the anti expert propaganda which is constantly being spread for the past several decades.
Do note: if this was a modern news channel, The usual next step would be to bring up a total hack and have them repeat some truly outlandish claim, and state "the experts are all in cahoots, and are against homeopathy/AGW/etc. they have a monetary interest!"
Of course experts have a monetary interest. Expert Programmers are experts in their code. They earn a living off of it. Does that stop them from making rational choices.
Less empirical sciences rapidly change (or worse, simultaneously holds contradicting) views and thus, generate distrust.
Experts, except the truly groundbreaking ones, are only good at touting the status quo. They're just more likely to be correct because, well, the status quo in science is the most "unincorrect" knowledge we have. So far.
You're just bringing up a strawman with the homeopathy "example".
I was diagnosed with Atypical Cystic Fibrosis at age 35. It is genetic, thus incurable. Having managed my condition without a diagnosis for decades, I had my own ideas about what was going on with my body, different from the current scientific consensus.
Armed with a proper diagnosis, I began to get myself well. My CF doctor's response was to express zero curiosity and schedule me fewer appointments because "other patients needed him and I did not."
I have been shit on left and right on multiple internet forums for trying to talk about my experiences. I have been called a quack and accused of being mentally ill and had uglier personal attacks made against me. I have had "sciency" people tell me that "13 years of consistent forward progress is a wild coincidence, stranger things have happened, it isn't evidence that you know anything."
No one has yet locked me up in an insane asylum or beaten me to death, but I have absolutely experienced firsthand that this has not really changed. I am currently homeless, which I guess is a slightly better fate than being essentially murdered for trying to share new information, but the way I get treated doesn't speak well of society at large.
While it is true that Semmelweis could have communicated his ideas better than he did, his true problem was that he had the brilliance to see and test the correlation he could not show causation: There was no direct evidence of the germ theory of disease. We had to wait a few more decades for Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch.
Which is to say, that what ever being said isn't a fact in the absolute extent people tend to mean when they talk about how facts should change one's mind, and thus why it doesn't change our mind (well one reason at least).
> But that doesn't mean those factors can't be helpful in assessing the likelihood of a given assertion.
But what of the likelihood that the one presenting the information (or someone further up the chain) specifically picked information that would meet all the criteria will being misleading? I've seen this behavior from think tanks on every side of the political spectrum. They begin with a view they want to push and then go searching for the best back information that lets them push it. Unless you are an expert, you don't hear what is left out, which bits are using very precise definitions that are being confused by the layman who is the intended recipient, or what similarly backed information outright calls into question the information being presented. Add in people's own biases to ignore their side when it does it while focusing on the other side, and it creates this view that the well back information from the other side is of far less value than the the poorly backed information from their own side.
In a way yes, but if we include the summaries of findings that scientists deliver to the public/governments/etc as "science reporting", then science reporting is 100% of science as we know it (unless we happen to practice it).
Consider dietary advice that has since found to be BS, that was passed in the 70s and 80s as "scientific fact", not just by the press, but by scientific advisory boards (to governments etc) comprised by actual scientists.
Newton's theory wasn't proven wrong -- just inefficient at larger units / speeds, and was superseded by a more accurate theory that still gives the same results (more or less) for regular everyday observations.
Contrast with the kind of dietary advise of the 70s/80s which has been totally reversed. It wasn't "correct, but not entirely accurate", it was irrelevant, or worse, opposite, of what actually holds (according to what science says today).
Facts always are true or false forever. If something can be considered true one day and false the next one, it never was a fact. It's just a theory.
I'm not a luddite, I think everyone should believe in what is most likely true, I mean what else can we fucking do right? What I'm saying is don't turn "science facts" into a religion and believe it blindly. I think actual scientists do a good job at this, because they're actually testing it.
We fail when we convert science reports into articles and then into policy so quickly simply because it feeds into the biases of the people in charge at the time.
Then perhaps it wasn't a field that should feel confident enough to give public policy/health suggestions?
>That we know different now doesn't mean the scientists then should have acted on information unavailable to them.
Most of the issue was because BS studies, referenced but not replicated papers, assumptions and the like. Not because they lacked some more precise instruments or such.
It's not like Einstein's theories, which complete Newtons, giving more accurate predictions at edge cases, while Newton's are still accurate enough for everyday calculations (e.g. ballistics).
It's like claiming X (e.g. on fat) and finding out that it's actually -X, or that X is irrelevant.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in...
One 'fact' I remember was men are more likely to physically harm their spouse, women are more likely to kill their spouse. [used as an example, may not be correct] If it's true that means domestic violence is biased in both directions. In other works Men are not more, less, or just as violent as women. Instead violence is a insufficiently complex model for the behaviors being discussed.
The hardest part of science is our desire to simplify past the point of accuracy. Consider, cities albino alter their local climate in more ways than just temperature. However, temperature is easy to model and complex interactions with various layers of the atmosphere and wind patterns is so guess what's ignored about this interaction. You don't teach middle school students about chimera when they study DNA, but it's a very real thing that actually happens.
This seems to extend in every direction. Do we want trade policy for today, next year, our children's future?
It sounds like you're just reading some news article's terrible summary of an already terribly summarised abstract.
(I actually love coffee and just finished my latte).
Or, maybe, it actually is good. Why do you assume some agenda on behalf of the 9, not the one?
Otherwise, there are more Starbucks so does that mean they have the best coffee? McDonald's has the best burgers? No. They are numerous because they pander, and because of ethically questionable but not illegal business policies.
Why would anything else be different? How often is the popular or loudest choice the right one?
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fact&allowed_in_fra...
Just because something can't be known for certain doesn't mean it can't be known to a high probability.
The opposite scenario can be true as well,where the literature is correct but the expert is wrong, for any number of reasons (including random distribution of experience).
In the end, without some probability distribution between the scenarios, which is likely wildly different based on field, we can't use this information to any useful effect beyond acknowledging that the consensus can be wrong, which is useful in itself.
In the end we are left having to decide whether following what we hope is usually careful scientific consensus has left us better off than alternatives, to which the answer is I don't know, but I sure hope so. :/
Even then, as you point out, there are other things to consider. For example, if a scientist publishes something controversial in a peer-reviewed journal, you still have to wonder what his or her motivations are. Who is funding them? Have their personal biases, or those of their benefactors, tainted their results?
I tend to strive for scholarly citations in my arguments, but in the end, I realize we are all emotional beings, and personal biases and emotions tend to trump knowledge, wisdom, and logic more often than we'd like to admit.
There are dark ugly forces that benefit from the destruction of trust in the press and democratic institutions. You have to maintain a balanced world view. The government and the press have their biases but they are not always in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy. Many times they are on your side.
So special interests can pay the money to tell their opinions on TV and in newspapers so they get to be "legitimate", but people who use cheaper channels accessible to the poor are "conspiracy theorists".
No, but they often are. And not just in easy to point fingers at regimes.
Not that long ago, the might NYT were writing about the fabled "WMDs", were independent bloggers (no YouTube existed yet) were speaking against that BS. To a third party those would have looked like conspiracy theorists.
Guess which side turned out to be true?
---
Q1: For black people, how many times have you mugged a white person?
Q2: For white people, how many times have you been mugged by a black person?
Conclusion: There's a one-sided racial problem!
---
It's not always that simple, but too many times it is. I've found the various social sciences to be the worst at this. All of the popular media tropes of "X people are like Y!" are generally not just wrong, but biased and often opposite to well-done studies.
Does anybody remember what repository this was? I'd be interested in seeing it.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/upshot/the-er...
2: http://www.nature.com/news/crowdsourced-research-many-hands-...
But if you tell them they have to give up this or that lifestyle, or pay more in taxes, or support a one child policy or whatever else you come up with, they instantly become allergic to the facts.
Really? Care to provide any factual evidence for that statement?
The part that wasn't spelled out is how any appeasement helps those who want more extreme measures. I think that is explained somewhat by allowing them to then point out that you've capitulated on gun control for safety reasons, so the argument is no longer whether guns are unsafe, but how unsafe they are, and being able to reframe the argument in that manner is likely to result in further restrictions later as current events are used to pass more stringent laws.
I'm not sure how true that is or not in practice, but that's what I assume the GP was referring to.
"All we ask for is registration, just like we do for cars." - Chuck Schumer
Look at Australia - first they registered, then they confiscated (go down the list, knock on doors).
edit: upon reread, this comment seems like partisan fluff. I am for common sense gun control, but unfortunately our political climate punishes compromise -- so I just wanted to point out, yes, there are in fact people who want to take 'em all away, forever.
IIRC you're still allowed to have (some types of) guns, as long as you keep them in a gun safe.
Part of this is that if you argue against the first position you might be labeled as uniformed or ignorant, but if you argue against the second position, its supporters will tar you as immoral, evil and generally a bad person.
""The experiments show that small payments for correct and "don't know" answers sharply diminish the gap between Democrats and Republicans in responses to "partisan" factual questions. Our conclusion is that the apparent gulf in factual beliefs between members of different parties may be more illusory than real. The experiments also bolster and extend a major finding about political knowledge in America: we show (as others have) that Americans know little about politics, but we also show that they often recognize their own lack of knowledge.""
(I should note that I have not actually read this paper, only news articles purporting to describe it.)
This seems like a really bad heuristic: it will mislead you any time the consensus opinion actually managed to get it right. It also leaves you wide open to confirmation bias.
You know, it might be just my experience. Sometimes, it is like a game people play, where they present an incoherent argument for an idea they believe in, and then say "well, there could be a better argument, why don't you look for it?". That's something your comment reminded me of, even if it went in the direction of agreeing with consensus.
My point was simply that a flawed argument for "X" should not lead me to think "not X" is more likely. Otherwise, I can get you to think any "Y" by presenting flawed arguments that "not Y" - I have an infinite supply of them regardless of whether "Y" or "not Y" in fact.
A bit of information from a study, means that under these very specific set of conditions, this happened. Your ability to generalise that to a 'fact' which is true in all cases is pretty limited.
All citations do is add support for or against an argument, they aren't statements of fact.
In reality, this makes sense if we think of knowledge in a Bayesian sense; we don't have absolute facts, we have little bits of information we gain over time. When a new bit of information comes in, we have to determine our new reality - what is the chance that our current views are wrong versus the chance that the new information is wrong. If we keep getting new information saying our current beliefs are wrong, we might end up changing out view eventually.
A lot of so-called facts are just blurbs intended to support someone's manipulative agenda. Sadly, this is even true of this article. Towards the end, it begins making ugly political commentary instead of sticking to psychological phenomenon.
The people who claim to have science on their side are often merely claiming to be intellectual elites and implying that anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot. It isn't scientific at all. So, it is unsurprising that it does not go over well with people who are basically being called stupid by people more interested in winning the argument themselves than in trying to have a meaningful discussion of good information.
Probably this one: http://guns-vs-homicide.github.io
No, no, no, absolutely not, no, it doesn't. No. A feature can maintain itself in a population for a number of reasons:
- it's neutral or not detrimental enough to drive affected individuals to extinction (ie, to get them killed before they have a chance to reproduce)
- it's linked to some other trait that provides actual benefits
- it's so recent it didn't leave time to be selected against
- or, yes, it actually has some adaptive function.
But just because a feature is found does NOT "prove" anything in and of itself.
> Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.
Excuse me, what?? There's little advantage in reasoning clearly while hunting prey and making tools and building traps to catch huge mean animals that can and will kill you if you do anything wrong?
And there's much to be gained from "winning arguments" in a cave, while pondering about one's social standing?? Come on.
* * *
I suggest a more simple and straightforward explanation for the limitations of "reason": our brain is, in fact, write only.
We usually don't notice it because it also has a huge capacity and so we can always write more, it never gets full.
But to one given named item corresponds a unique value, that cannot be overwritten.
If you want to store a new value you have to create a new name to store it with.
To "overwrite" something you can create lookup tables of sort, that tell you that the old value is in fact "wrong" and that said item should be associated with another, newer item. But this is costly, and so is avoided whenever possible (because the first rule of life is to be lazy, ie to conserve resources).
If you don't see the merit in winning arguments over being correct, uh... I dunno broaden your social circle maybe?
That seems to be inconsistent with the research described in the article where subjects were asked for an opinion, then in some way required to explain that opinion, and then asked for another opinion on the same issue. People apparently did weaken in their convictions, but only when forced to confront them by examining the details.
> A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems...
then no. While I don't know the exact content of the experiment or the wording of the questions, a reasoning problem isn't an opinion, it's a process.
A process (a function) can indeed yield a different result when some parameters are tweaked or a different input is used.
But my theory is that opinions, once formed, are difficult / impossible to change, not for some unfalsifiable evolutionary explanation, but for a very simple structural reason that the brain is a WORM system.
Also, my theory is just that: a hypothesis, a thought experiment. I don't pretend to know how the brain works; I'm just asking the question, if we think of the brain as WORM, can we explain more behaviors?
How can you explain that this completely contradicts my experience, down to basic everyday experiences like: "I didn't like this album initially, but it has grown on me"?
Look at the different titles for British peers for example - from Baron, through Viscount and Earl, Marquis, Duke, Prince, King, plus the female versions of all of these, plus that all peers above Baron are also Barons, and all of these titles means different roles and privileges. Then you go down the ladder and you get knights and dames of the various orders, awards, and so forth. Then you can start looking at the middle classes...
It's an extreme example, but it isn't hard to see similar in other places. Take a 'new world' anglo country, and compare how seriously people take the word of a senator versus a teacher versus a homeless person.
The simple counter to the statement in question is: "people in agrarian societies are primarily concerned with social standing, making sure they're not the ones doing the back-breaking work in the fields". Field work is gruelling, and requires a lot of labour. In comparison, hunter-gatherers historically only needed to work ~2 hours/day to meet their needs.
I doubt it. Coming from neural algorithms, it would seem the current theories point more to extreme compression algorithms. After a point, your brain stops or at least reduces the amount of "new data" and instead starts to represent new experiences as composites of fragments from the existing memory base.
Memory drift or fabrication could be explained as the existing set of fragments becoming altered either by loss or the natural re-weighting of the brain.
For instance, we all NEED to believe we're the 'good' guys. Whether the 'we' is our religion, our job, our state, political stance, etc... This prevents existential angst from realizing we're in the wrong, and then needing to change our behaviour which would disrupt our everyday lives.
This is also the reason why we stay in failed relationships, keep toxic friends, jobs we hate, etc... It's easier and more conducive to our survival instincts to keep the status quo, whatever it is. Only when things get extremely bad do we ever change.
On the flip side, let's say popular opinion about a particular topic flips. When it becomes expedient to change our opinion, then we're very quick to do so. When keeping an archaic opinion begins to cause friction in our everyday lives, we change to the prevailing opinion because again, staying with the tribe is easier than going against it.
But of course, realizing all of this would be to reduce human existence to base survival instincts, which would also ruin our self-narrative. So we think we're all special, enlightened, unique and think for ourselves no matter how much the evidence points to the fact that we all devolve into holding the same popular opinions.
And even deny that ever had any other position.
Maybe that's because I'm thinking from the side of the individual. The selfish genes, however, must be pretty happy with the result.
Well, there is no engineering at all involved, so not really unexpected.
(There's a joke where people argue about the profession of God, based on his creation of man. The punchline is someone suggesting he must have been an architect, "because who else would send the sewer pipe through the amusement park.")
IMO, the better question is: why is peace of mind more important to us than actually being right? If we really are enlightened (unsuperstitious), why isn't it more important to each of us that we know what we do/don't know and then assess risk and reward accordingly and rationally?
Why so little faith in reason?
Because more important than attending directly to the growth of knowledge is guarding the conditions under which it can grow.
The desire to be right is often used against us -- as embodied in traditional ideas about Satan, who brings light (hence 'Lucifer') and uses the truth selectively to accuse.
They won't save us, but statistically, we won't need either to save us. Even defenseless animals often survive in herds or schools. We want to believe the police will save us to not lead a paranoid existence, just as the herd animal isn't betting on it being dinner.
> IMO, the better question is: why is peace of mind more important to us than actually being right?
Because doing things necessary for survival doesn't require a correct worldview. Witness how many people who hold archaic beliefs manage to survive, gain importance in society and reproduce.
Edit - a good example is religious beliefs. They give some people a sense of purpose, a sense of kinship, and a belief that they'll personally succeed. Even if a religious person succeeds on their own devices, they'll attribute it to their deity as the psychological boosts from believing are more important than the validity of the beliefs themselves.
This can even be seen in scientific studies on the brain while praying/meditating, and the practical benefits have been observed across religious lines.
Fool me once and it's your fault, fool me twice and it is mine.
You mean, selfish like everyone else is?
Is it even appropriate to use a broad attribution like "selfish" to a specific case of selfishness?
I know both pro and anti-vaccines. I can definitely assert that some of the anti-vacciners are less selfish than the pro-vacciners I know.
I'd like you to examine your need to make a statement like this. It's a wonderful path of discovery (I am not being facetious here).
You could have said that the anti-vaccine folks are reducing the herd immunization, and are benefiting from said herd immunizing without calling them selfish. Why the need to moralize? What was the purpose?
The reason I "moralise" it is that it is but an instance of a prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons. Same applies to signalling while driving, not stealing in stores, jumping the queue, lying on your CV, etc. etc.
As in the tragedy of the commons, we have a lot to gain by cooperating, but individually have an incentive to defect/cheat. I personally think that there is no karma or god imposing justice or preventing cheating, thus it is incumbent on us to police compliance and discourage cheating.
Furthermore, there are good arguments made that we have evolved capabilities to detect cheating and a tendency to punish cheaters (even to our cost).
So, I'm both viscerally and, I think, rationally opposed to that and other forms of selfish cheating, and it warrants opprobrium and moralising disapproval, to minimise it. That's the purpose.
Is that what you're asking?
> I can definitely assert that some of the anti-vacciners are less selfish than the pro-vacciners I know.
Not entirely sure what you mean - do you mean to say that the anti-vaccine stance is not selfish (which is in a sense a scientific issue), or that (while it is) there are people that are (in other ways) not selfish?
So my question: Why use words like "selfish" and "cheating" when many/most of them do not believe they are gaining anything without contributing?
>and it warrants opprobrium and moralising disapproval, to minimise it. That's the purpose.
Forgive my skepticism, but if you are trying to tell me you are using such words in the hope of minimizing the behavior, I have trouble believing you. Two points:
1. Such behavior is more likely to cause dug heels and less likely to change people.
2. When you study the field of morality (scientifically, not just mere philosophy), you find that almost all such acts are for selfish purposes, with post-hoc rationalizations. I mean your selfish acts. As in you feel a need to criticize and ridicule, and your justification above is an attempt not to make it appear so.
There are ways to persuade people. The method you cite (opprobrium and moralising) is amongst the least effective. If your goal was very strongly driven by trying to persuade people to use vaccines, you would focus more on other techniques.
>Not entirely sure what you mean - do you mean to say that the anti-vaccine stance is not selfish (which is in a sense a scientific issue), or that (while it is) there are people that are (in other ways) not selfish?
My point is that the label is broad, and you applied it to the person, and not just the act. Any neutral person who hears this will simply find it false. Put another way, if someone wants to dispute your claim, it is trivial to do so - I just did it in my original comment. I know at least one anti-vacciner who is less selfish than pretty much any pro-vacciner I know. And in general, I find the anti-vacciners that I personally know to be less selfish.
You do not come off as one who is trying to cause change, but one who wants to sit and criticize. As I said:
>You could have said that the anti-vaccine folks are reducing the herd immunization, and are benefiting from said herd immunizing without calling them selfish.
Why didn't you? The point is as valid when phrased my way.
Nope: everyone else gets vaccines, they are clearly more selfish in this regard
From their perspective, they are not getting a benefit. How are they selfish?
Great of you to take one piece of my comment and ignore the main point of it.
They are gaining benefit. Ever wonder why non-urban menengitis outbreaks tend to happen in churches that preach some non-sense about vaccines being bad and not to groups that vaccinate?
Can you be selfish if you do not believe you are gaining something from it?
From Webster:
>concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself : seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others
They do not believe in vaccine's efficacy, so they are not concerned with themselves any more than others.
>arising from concern with one's own welfare or advantage in disregard of others
Same issue here.
My question is not being answered: I gave an alternative phrasing that maintained the facts, but eliminated the word selfish. Why the need to add that label? Ultimately, it's not even whether they are selfish or not. In the debate, what useful information did that word add? If I want to increase vaccination rates, will that word help me?
They are gaining benefit with vaccines and are causing harm without. They are safe and effective. Other people's children die when enough people choose not to vaccinate. I still don't see a grey area, no amount of mincing words adds a grey area, this should be mandatory.
Selfish is not a broad term. It is an adjective used to describe a person, usually in conjunction with some action they are taking.
Your anecdotal experience with both pro- and anti-vaccination supporters has no real backing beyond ignoring the above and generalizing the term selfish to something it is not.
The purpose of moralizing is to shame those that ignore our struggle as living organisms. It would be tragic if a ton of people died because of the movement. If it goes unchecked, it could happen given enough unvaccinated people.
Maybe there is more to be said about how these vaccines are scheduled but that warrants some scientific data I don't have.
So how is that working out?
Think of all the campaigns that have effected change. How often did shaming work? Sure, you have a few cases like the fight against Apartheid, but in general? Not effective.
Here's the thing. I'm as pro-science as they come. However, I've been blessed to come from communities that fall prey to anti-vaccine and other "nonsense". And one thing I know is that fact based ridicule and moralizing has a low success rate.
As someone who somewhat understands both communities, I am already not on your side. If a pro-vacciner like me is turned off by such rhetoric, imagine it from an anti-vacciner's side.
Think I'm an outlier? I'll hazard a guess that most pro-vacciners are close to someone who is not (family connections, etc).
There is comfort in being "right". But being "right" does not in itself translate to right outcomes.
The Righteous Mind (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...) is a very worthy read. A few things it points out:
1. On a polarized issue, facts will increase the polarization (and I'm guessing justifying shame with facts will exacerbate the issue)
2. To persuade someone, you will have a lot more success appealing to emotions than to the rational mind. This does not mean playing games where you manipulate people.
However, I do think it's important to try to get into the minds of how others think, to be able to come up with a strategy.
Before reading this thread, I always thought anti-vaxxers were just bad at science. But now another possibility has been shown - they understand the odds well enough, but simply prefer a very small advantage for their children over a large advantage for society.
It doesn't mean pro-vaxxers should tell them that.
I agree that shaming people isn't a good way to argue but they're still selfish by definition and morally in the wrong.
Your original conjecture wasn't even about what you are talking about now. You kept complaining about the terms used by someone else. Your previous assertions were all based on bad definitions and anecdotes.
(I have more experience with these people than I'd like. I missed out on a bunch of childhood vaccinations because of it, and still know a bunch. I'm certain it's no coincidence that the same group of people also believes in chemtrails, UFOs, UFOs destroying chemtrails, and one I just saw yesterday, that root canals cause cancer.)
Around my location they are all claiming that vaccines cause autism or deferring to Jesus for his medical opinion like he actually exists.
EDIT - Downvote away, but I would prefer if you demonstrated I was wrong by presenting a sensible reason to allow mass anti-vaccination.
I understand there legitimate reasons for an individual to avoid a vaccine, like immune deficiency or allergies, but that is not a pass for the whole population.
Probably downvoted due to the swiftness by which you call someone an idiot...
It's a broad term. I'm sure I can find someone who believes in the things you listed who can do several things better than you (be it mathematics, programming, etc). Who would the idiot be?
Put another way "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason into", so you need to use something else. I like peer pressure, sarcasm and shame. Even just a tiny cheap laugh can dislodge all but the most strongly held beliefs if those laughs come from their close peers.
"Idiot" is not particularly funny, but was the word already chosen and followed nicely with the idea that people who believe dumb things should feel shame for feeling dumb things.
I have no regret caller anti-vaxxers idiots, and I hope they feel shame for their dangerous ideas not matter how good they are at math or programming.
>I like peer pressure, sarcasm and shame.
Interestingly, when you read influence/negotiation books, all of these are listed as tactics that create resistance, and all recommend not using these tactics.
One of the golden rules is to criticize the idea, not the person.
>Even just a tiny cheap laugh can dislodge all but the most strongly held beliefs if those laughs come from their close peers.
Agreed. But the reason you have so many anti-vaccine folks is that their peer group thinks like them.
If you say it works for you, great! Not been my observation, and definitely not the observation of folks who do this stuff for a living.
>I have no regret caller anti-vaxxers idiots
This comment speaks to the reason I went off in this thread.
Who is asking you to feel regret?
For example: compulsory vaccination via mandate, coercion, exclusion, or otherwise. While there are compelling motivations to pursue such ends for the greater social good, doing so is a slippery slope fraught with the risk of trampling individual medical freedoms in the process, such as informed consent.
I've seen people on the latter side of that argument treated as if they were analogous to axe murderers for even suggesting anything but 100% compliance, all the while being shouted down by the angry mob.
The fact is, vaccinations carry the risk of very rare but sometimes serious adverse reactions. As long as that remains true, there can be no absolute moral high-ground when demanding compulsory vaccination.
In the current climate however, stating such a position outside of tiny civilized bubbles like HN is tantamount to heresy. I suspect when the autism link was debunked, many people conflated this to mean vaccines were completely safe, when in fact they're simply very safe.
It certainly seems like that has become the case though I wonder if it's always been like that and modern technology just exposes it better.
> "Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance"
I saw a stand up comedian misquote that as "Tyranny is the absence of nuance" which I think I actually preferred.
As for your point on the vaccination thing, yes there are absolutely is a debate somewhere in there about compulsory vaccinations and medical freedom, that debate should always be on-going since in such issues there are rarely absolutes, I wouldn't want them to be settled since settled issues never get revisited.
This is something I've noticed with politics, people hold a position, that position comes to dominance and then they are surprised when it back tracks from their point of view, I'm not sure why they find this suprising it's not like the arrow of progress is one way and while we are talking about the 'arrow of progress' whos arrow and what is progress.
Politics (and the vaccination thing runs slap bang into it) is absolutely messy and chaotic, that's just how the sausage gets made I think.
Children, plural, Children have died in my home city because of this anti-scientific attitude and the "serious side-effects" are either non-existent or so rare as to not be worth discussing.
There is no link with autism, and this is the main point that most anti-vaxxers use. Once you get to real side-effects you get to things that literally have around a 1 million chance for mild side effects, and much less frequent for serious.
The risk of most diseases is much higher than the the risk of its vaccine, so it makes sense for that individual and it makes for the population. I really don't see any wiggle room on this one and I don't understand this recent softness towards anti-vaccination.
When real deaths are on the line in much higher percentages than any real side-effects there is definitely a moral high ground. Let's revisit the vaccine issue one the diseases are gone, I don't see a need to vaccinate in North America for smallpox or polio and if we organized well we could make that the case for many other things we vaccinate for.
This article is Pro-vaccine and agrees with the reported death count in 2014, for example at 122. In the case of vaccines I live completely in the gray areas. For example, there are something like 80 vaccines automatically given to children. Why don't we limit that to the vaccines that are absolutely necessary?
Also pet vaccines, totally important to not over-vaccinate. Many of them include adjuvants that have a high correlation to sarcomas that appear in the injection site, cause cancer and kills the pet. My wife worked in vet hospitals and there was a much much lower rate of pet killings in the clinics that use adjuvant free vaccines.
However, I think that you may be a bit out in some of the views you have written here. Have a look at this site : http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vaccinations/Pages/mmr-side-eff...
1:1000 for a seizure is a long way from 1:1000000, and yes I would and did prefer to run that risk rather than the risk of Measles which is an appalling disease, and I would prefer to sleep knowing that I've not only protected my child but also other children. But I did this with the honest knowledge that there was a risk.
My brother suffers from seizures - this is a bad thing to have happen to anyone.
I believe my fellow citizens deserve the same chance, and I believe that they will come to the same view as me if given the opportunity.
>When real deaths are on the line in much higher percentages than any real side-effects there is definitely a moral high ground.
One thing that changed my views here was holding my child in my arms; things stopped being about percentages and trade-offs and became centred on the welfare of the small person who could not protect herself. We are asking parents to be altruistic; in society we are not obliged to be altruistic as we are obliged to be moral - it's a gift, not a requirement. For example you could say that parents are obliged to make sure that all the children in the city have eaten before they feed their child, but human society and human rationality just don't run that way.
We are neither angels, nor automata.
Having said all this I can assure you that, as an egoist, I have most vaccinations and have had my young child get all the normal vaccinations. Not for some greater good, but because it's in our self interest.
From this article to my comment to current events: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/opinion/the-enlightenment...
From my own experience as a reluctant religious agnostic, I see the faith/doubt-freedom issue as less clear-cut.
Some Christians I know appear capable of doing things that I, as an agnostic, cannot. The first thing that comes to mind is showing care for people I find unlovable.
For those Christians, either their faith or (if real) the Holy Spirit in whom they have faith allows them to act in a selfless way towards such people. Those Christians have a freedom that I don't.
OTOH, their faith (or the Holy Spirit, if real) also constrains their actions and thoughts in ways mine aren't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white_hat_symbolism_...
So when our side makes a mistake we defend and spin till it is okay for us to still think of them as wearing a White Cowboy Hat. Anything good will also have conspiracies and spin so that they always wearing a Black Cowboy Hat.
If you want evidence ask anyone with a strong feeling for Trump/Clinton and you will see this in action.
The issue is when people change their minds (with a binary worldview) it isn't accepting a small fact but it is a whole worldview change of astronomical proportions. I feel that people have gotten more and more binary and we need more shades of gray where it isn't world changing to accept a problem with a fact.
From Asia thinking about American Worldview: http://www.atimes.com/article/americas-binary-worldview-kill...
In my experience a lot of misunderstanding comes not from lack of facts, but a lack or difference in perspective. Hardly anyone even feels the need to justify their actions, let alone squeeze it into some bizarre cowboy metaphor.
Which aligns with what the studies seem to indicate. Often the strongest objections arise in a subject that we hold very dear as part of our identity.
What about people who think we need more binary thinking and fewer shades of gray? How do you even form a nuanced (gray) argument against that kind of dogmatism? Where do you draw the line against line-drawing without being hypocritical?
This isn't just rhetorical: this is a problem we're struggling with as a society. People are intellectually exhausted and are drawn to ideologies that answer their questions for them in a clear, unambiguous way. We're in an ideological arms race, becoming more polarized and less rational merely as a survival mechanism.
"Four legs good, two legs bad." is already past the point of no return and there is no "a society" as you quote but two battling for supremacy.
Historically we have little evidence of solutions other than civil wars.
Asking how to roll back identity politics without a physical war is like debating strategies to avoid nuclear war after the missiles have launched but before the mushroom clouds form. Its a little too late for that and there really isn't any point in wasting limited time in trying to roll back or blamestorming in circular firing squads.
You challenge their support. Continue to push them to draw more lines, until they've drawn so many lines that they're all alone inside their fence. Try to convince them that no one matches up to their worldview, not even their family and not even themselves.
The reality is confirmation bias is probably deeply rooted in many other elements of human psychology. My (completely worthless) conjecture is that your "opinions" are deeply associated with your own sense of self-identity and self-worth, and therefore they register as very much worth protecting, regardless of external data. Opinions also often overlap with tribal affiliations, which makes them even more deeply rooted in evolved primate cooperative behavior, and therefore even more worth protecting.
Of course, your background beliefs are never going to be perfect, so sometimes you will reject the wrong things, but that's not because our reason is "broken" per se, it's an engineering trade-off: we have to take certain shortcuts, make certain assumptions, apply certain guesses, because working everything out in full mathematical detail just isn't possible.
(That said, I'm certainly not claiming that most people are brilliant thinkers — the line "Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking" would come as news to everyone from Aristophanes to Zamyatin.)
This is every conversation ever in my extended family.
So maybe we try to elect leaders who can win arguments, not ones who reason clearly. Then you'd find that we get politicians who favor expanding the military while having avoided being drafted and fighting, who have illogical ideas of how government can be expanded and paid for without increasing taxes, who will get us all a better deal while sticking it to those other countries/states/cities, and they'll protect us from others who are not like us. I can see how this idea would run wild in politics.
For instance, imagine a world where every bit of text you encounter — every news story, every tweet, every statement, every message — had no attributions AT ALL. Meaning, you have no idea if something was written by a celebrity, a politician with a (D) or an (R), your best friend, or your worst enemy. At that point, quite a bit of bias should start to filter out!
Or, there could be a middle ground, a kind of “anonymous key” to recognize statements by the same person. Say you read a story last month, and “agreed” with that person; this month, maybe there is a way to find out if something else you read is from the same person but NOT a way to see exactly who that is. Then, you can start to build a sense of trust in sources but are still not able to be influenced by other factors.
The complete absence of self-knowledge and high level of unintentional irony here is astonishing. "Confirmation bias and groupthink happen to other people, not me."
So my conclusion was that our reasoning is very restricted. We tend to simplify our thoughts, our memories. And all this stuff is highly dependant on emotions we feel. That's why we like to make our memories brighter than they are, make them more romantic and ideal. Everything in the past was better, etc. That's why we remember facts which are easier to remember and close to our beliefs, sometimes no matter are they true or not.
The solution? Reason. I just ask myself: Ok, that was the good part. Now, try to remember the bad ones. Oh you can't? So it's obviously a fake memory pal. There were no such time in my life without difficulties.
I don't think you should be calling what continues to be the subject of heavy debate a myth.
If we were to present a 19th century carpenter with a nail gun he would agree upon demonstration; "that is very nice and all, thanks but i'll stick to my hammer". He would have neither a compressor, gasoline and a long enough hose, nor a wall socket and extension chord. The nail gun has no place in his toolshed because he doesn't have the required infrastructure and context to put it to use, and therefore the utility of the nail gun to him is close to zero.
Beliefs are the same, and a relation to "facts" or "truth" is not a requrement for their utility. When presented with new facts and truths we always evaluate their utility before we ascribe to them. We might fool ourselves that this process is somehow "rational" but rationality is just a social preference with some second-order effects with regards to science and the developement of technology (which indeed has "utility" but is far from the only "utility" beliefs can achieve).
If your beliefs about the world are entirely false then you are going to have a bad time.
You are interpreting belief in a very narrow and mysterious way. If you believe that poison is food, or that bus impacts are healthy, then you are going to have a bad time. There are many beliefs that must be correct in order to ensure survival. It isn't all relative.
That's more about being crazy than about having false beliefs in the casual (and not "narrow and mysterious") sense of the word belief.
Or you could say, you know, that beliefs must hold some utility. There are a lot of utilities that we need from our beliefs. I believe that the front of the bus is a portal to hell that threatens to damn me to eternal suffering, so I'm quite terrified when it approaches to engulf me. This shares utility with realizing that an impact with a bus can result in awesome momentum transfer, causing a sudden acceleration preventing my soft body from containing my precious bodily fluids. The point is the utility, not the rationalization (this term is loaded pretty heavy at this point, sorry).
Is that statement true?
> When presented with new facts and truths we always evaluate their utility before we ascribe to them.
Did you evaluate the utility of that "fact" before believing it?
I'm not trying to be rude here, but the problem with this sort of postmodern view is that it's ultimately self-refuting.
I do not agree that the view is particularly post-modern, but since you called it first i guess i must concede. The point was not "all is subjective and nothing is true", rather "whether or not i take on this belief (or fact or whatever) presented to me is a function of the degree to which i understand it combined with my intuition of the ramifications of me holding this belief". We don't have truth-seeking minds, we have "value-" or "utility"-maximizing habits.
We understand things and we underestimate things. We prefer things and we reject things. Not always knowingly and sometimes intentionally.
Let's apply a little recursion here, shall we? I gather that you believe what I quoted. But you admit that your belief does not need to have any relation to facts or truth. You believe what you said, because that belief has some utility to you. But why should I believe you?
That is, your view, applied to itself, destroys itself.
Maybe what I should say is that, if your conclusion is correct, we can never be certain that it is. The "formal system" problem that I pointed out only means that we should maintain a certain level of distrust for the conclusion, rather than proving it incorrect. (At least, that's how it seems to me at the moment. I reserve the right to re-think this.)
> "This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up."
How can we as a society fix this? If we educated our kids about confirmation bias (and some other cognitive biases) and taught them how to compensate for shortcomings of their minds, would next generation grow up to be more reasonable? If so, shouldn't this be a high priority of educational system?
But objective reality-based reasoning is a skill that has to be taught, learned, practiced, and promoted. And even then a lot of people won't be particularly good at it.
When you add the fact that there are obvious political and financial advantages to lying to the public then it becomes very fragile indeed.
I suspect the only practical answer is to reinvent society's reward functions - e.g. by making the intellectual/political/media equivalent of poisoning the well as much of a criminal offence as dumping a dead body inside a school water tank.
Don't mate with irrational people.
The value of being the first to form an impression of an event, law, etc. on someone even if that impression will later be proven false just can't be overstated.
There is: have them been born outside the US. Those two beliefs are specific to Americans; hardly a good example of "humanity" as a whole.
It's reasonable to look for reasons why Trump won but this is really stretching it all.
People often care more about fighting against something they don't like than they do about being 'right'. If the author needs a scientific study to tell her that maybe she's a little out of touch herself...
Seriously, not trying to inject politics or my opinion on Trump, but there do seem to be a lot of these "why do people make act so crazy" articles lately. I too am trying to make sense of it all and failing.
> If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.
Not even being subtle.
If you believe in the right/left dichotomy then over more than a century the right tends to respond to dissent with force, isolation (camps), and criminalization, whereas the left tends to respond to dissent with indoctrination medication and mental hospitalization. "Anyone who would disagree with world communism must be mentally ill, lets treat them in a special hospital ward". So a natural concern troll against the right is to insist they're just taking the wrong pills and with the right mix of benzos they'd be happy to see their civilization annihilated. Which, technically, is true, if you get people high enough they don't care anymore.
That is, unless you are in marketing, advertising, or public office - then its probably your job to exploit all our irrational foibles for profit or power.
Either way, I think its important to get a better handle on just how rational we are vs how rational we think we are - and on ways to push us towards the more rational side of things.
With enough study, maybe you can become an expert. Mostly we don't. Reading a few articles and playing "instant expert" is just a bad habit.
Remembering your ignorance is good; try not to forget that you knew nothing about the hot topic of the day before it became news and you suddenly became interested. Unless you have personal experience to share, we're really just sharing links here.
I fundamentally disagree with this. For one, who gets to decide who the 'actual' experts are compared to the experts that aren't actually experts?
The stuff you're saying is specious; on the surface it looks plausible but it actually doesn't mean anything.
Anyone can develop expertise in a topic of interest if they follow it ardently and have good critical thinking skills. One obviously needs the ability to read and comprehend more than just an abstract, but that's not what separates an 'expert' from an 'actual expert' anyway.
So, we should admit (to ourselves and others) when we didn't actually study anything, we're just borrowing other people's analyses that we read online. One way I do that is by sharing links.
One of the ways you become an instant (not-really) expert is by relying too much on your supposed "good critical thinking skills." They exist but are overrated - it's not a substitute for studying or for real-world experience.
I don't know, so I can't tell you when or if the climate will hit some unrecoverable precipice, but I can tell you reliably that adding more CO2 doesn't help.
I don't know, so I can't tell you whether punctuated equilibrium or the selfish gene imply better statistical models for distribution, bit I can reliably tell you evolution is definitely real and maybe one or two of the effects it has.
I don't know, so I can't tell you the exact odds of a vaccine having the maximal effect or meaningfully compare two new potential vaccines, but I can tell you why the USA doesn't have polio and smallpox.
Just being able to say "I don't know" helps, so many people out there make up their mind then won't change with the facts because they are uncomfortable going through that "I don't know" mental territory. Don't try to be an expert in fields you aren't, but try to understand what little can be understood with the information at hand.
Moving to something in the social realm, it's like a laser hitting a geode. When I see a talking head like Ann Coulter on a "news" program, they are often quite adept at providing facts and statistics to support their argument. But ironically, this usually does nothing for me to strengthen their argument or change my mind. To start with, are these facts and statistics true and accurate? Is there really some subjectivity in these "facts"? Are they just outright rumors? Even if these facts are true and accurate, does it tell the whole story, or does it simply support their position? That's a pretty loaded question; no one really goes to the effort of presenting all relevant information and interpretation--nor would you want to listen. Denying facts and falling back on beliefs, ideally wisdom, is a defensive mechanism against information overload. To aggressively change your mind again and again when presented with new information is similar to the problem of overfitting a neural network.
I think you hit it on the nose, I mean look at our Supreme Court.. like the TOP court, a set of people that are supposed to do their absolutely best at leaving out bias. I mean that's the resume - NOT BIASED PERSON JUDGING THINGS. Yet almost like clockwork, each Justice is delivering carefully crafted prose fully backed up by legal jargon to explain their final judgement. 90% of the time when the judgement falls into some political trap, the court is split down to the R or D President that got them there (with exceptions of course). Shouldn't those opinions basically be identical? Why are we not FIXING that, instead we let them die, and feverishly get a new president that matches our worldview more so the new Justice can fix our world.
I remember watching some news program like 60 minutes or 20/20 back in the day. They put on two fake trials, but I think the jury thought it was all real. In one they presented the defendant as a old man that had probably looked ugly. In the other they presented the defendant as a young man with good posture in a suit. All of the orchestrated words in both trials was the same. In the end they fried the old-ugly man and let the suit go. Why don't we change anything? Why is this acceptable? I can think of countless other crazy things in this planet that we shockingly let slip by.
Given that THIS is the world we live in, I'm absolutely not surprised the talking heads can easily just push completely biased information and everything goes unchecked. In the end it's simple really, it's just a big war of who's right and wrong, but we all lose. The EGO has taken over this planet.
Reasoning is the human process of deciding what one ought do. Deduction is a mechanical process of discovering what follows from axioms.
Human reasoning is often fails by not being perfectly deductive.
I'll grant that you might think I'm nitpicking on definitions.
Who's actually been to Iraq or Afghanistan? Who has actually seen first hand evidence of global warming or water pollution or of anything?
Most facts are too detached from ordinary reality. That's why the person in charge of relaying them can alter them as they see fit.
We're not to the point where we're faking wars (I don't think), so there are starting points. But the story, the narrative, and the facts of the matter are all subjected to manipulation. Even the "honest" media is guilty of sensationalism and clickbait.
But the point is, when these are your "facts", you can't turn around and tell normal people to be more scientific or to choose your sources more wisely. You saying that just makes you another channel, waving yet another banner that says science, and a proponent of your version of the truth.
Many people have, they just may not have known it.
Personally I've seen the retreating glaciers of New Zealand's south island as a stark example of global warming. As an example of water pollution, I've seen dead fish floating in rivers after storms had caused the overflow of a tailings dam at a mine here in Australia.
These are pretty extreme examples, but the evidence is everywhere if you know what to look for.
As long as we are being "told" we can change the channel and choose our preachers. There is nothing that can stop anyone from doing so in a "free" country.
The point is, normal people have no way of knowing about most things anyway, that it isn't just fake news that is fake, it's that news as we know it is unreal. That's why they need that story of a cute cat or a new study on coffee at the end.
The battle against fake news isn't the hard part. It's the battle to legitimize their own that is turning out to be an uphill battle. And when you know you go for the cookie jar once in a while, it becomes even harder.
Even if you had never heard of "global warming" you'd look at these two signs and have suspicions that something fairly significant had caused a largish area of an entire country to increase in average temperature. You'd probably not initially blame it on human carbon emissions, but, if you had some understanding of global climate patterns in the short term, you'd probably assume that this wasn't happening as just a local effect. It's pretty difficult to locally melt all the glaciers in a few thousand square kilometers of land without changing the rest of the world's climate.
With the internet we can go directly to the source for evidence. Sources can be completely open and transparent regarding their motives and research. And anyone who wishes to learn should be able to start with learning how to identify the bubbles of fake news and alternate facts. Then we'd be talking. Until then, most everything you hear is just somewhere on the BS spectrum.
Here is an excerpt from the researchers who proposed the theory:
> the argumentative theory of reasoning—proposes that instead of having a purely individual function, reasoning has a social and, more specifically, argumentative function. The function of reasoning would be to find and evaluate reasons in dialogic contexts—more plainly, to argue with others.
Citation: https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/theargumentativeth...
A good frame of mind or world view to have, is to be open to the possibility that you don't know everything. That we are in a constant state of figuring things out and ratifying what we know, and accept that at some point, if we are tolerant and listen, we may learn something new. Hell, maybe modal window hijacks ARE the best way to try and get people to subscribe.
“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective."
Once awareness of the game becomes more common, than playing that new game including that new awareness will replace the old game. (Just like saying someone else ate the cookie when caught as a child, gets replaced with more elaborate things like, "you ate the cookie after you came home from drinking 2 nights ago."
Reason evolves.
Of course this has the political implication that people should be governed by enlightened rulers - Plato didn't trust democracy either. Now i think that people are perfectly competent at deciding if they are better of now rather than they were four years ago; maybe I am fighting against a strawman here, but no, democracy still is the best of all systems out there.
The dissident songwriter Alexander Galich has a song about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuXx6gU5wRc (In Russian)
http://songpros.ru/1/Aleksandr-Galich/tekst-pesni-Boytes-tog...
"don't fear neither praise nor blame / don't fear hunger nor thirst / only fear but the one who says 'I know how it ought to be' / the one who says 'follow me i will teach how it has to be done' " (my attempt at translation)
The fact that some people claim that they are devoted to science and reason doesn't make it so. The French Revolution claimed it was scientific; they gave us SI units everybody is so fond of. And Marx's "Capital" looked very reasonable for a very long time and even now many people still believe in its reasoning (or think they do; most don't understand it anyway). The Soviet propaganda and education made it a point that the communist theory was, you know, the only "scientific" theory of progress and everything. And it did look convincing, especially if you were exposed to nothing else since childhood; I'm talking as a survivor here :) And I say: no. Thanks, but the reason is not enough.
Edit: typos.
If the sampled facts that give rise to the models are random, then the models will tend to be similar.
However, if the facts that make up the models are selectively placed in the models there can arise dramatically different models pulled from the same facts.
Since all models are simplifications or subsets of all facts in reality they will always be prone to this fact selection bias.
Our minds are conditioned by appearances and the conditioning is based on the fact that things does not change too often in the physical environments - almost everything stays the same most of the time.
The visual system, for example, has a lot of hard-wired heuristics which reflects this assumption. The cues which a brain machinery of visual cortex is utilizing to decode scenes is a perfect illustration how an evolved brain structure reflects actual physical environment in which it has been evolved.
The mind, it seems, utilizes simple frequency-based machinery which strengthen (or weaken) the representation (whatever it might be, close to what we would call a weighted graph, perhaps) with each new impression. There is , obviously, no probability calculations going on in the brain, just simple weighted structures. Similar approach is in the very core of the classic machine learning.
To alter the representation dramatically there must be some impression with a big weight, and this is what emotions are for. A dog getting sick after eating drugged food would learn to avoid it after just one single exposure. An emotionally charged experience is the simplest (and still the most effective form of persuasion, readily exploited by memes) because a brain has been evolved in to reflect the physical environment (its laws) and be adaptive-enough to survive mostly-stochastic, partially-observable environment.
One single mention of a supposed fact is not enough to change one's internal representation of reality (which, perhaps, is a structure trained with thousands if not millions of impressions). Even direct experience sometimes is not enough, because one cannot completely trust ones senses.
Only a rigorously trained mind could consciously deliberately alter its own model of the world (which is not that simple and cannot be accomplished at a whim) when it meets a single contradiction with "proven" or implicitly encoded in brain's heuristics laws of nature, leave alone a logical contradiction which is hard to notice given the default way of thinking we have evolved with. The non-verbal mind is much more ancient and much more powerful, and it does not understand the language of a newer parts.
Alfred then tells Bruce that during his performance as an actor he paid far too attention to minor details of the characters played including dialects, diction, consumes, makeup etc. just because he was terrified that people will see the person behind the mask. Only after some experience he learned that people pay to see the mask and not the face. They very willingly will refuse to see the face behind the mask because in their hear they want that mask to be real. People will not want to find out who is Batman.
Of course this is all fiction but it does ring a bell especially in today's super-heated political environment where we cant even know if a fact is a fact. Even when something becomes an obvious fact or an obvious lie it does not seem to matter to most people because in their heart they have an alternate view of the very facts.
1: The researchers tell the students "X is true".
2: The researchers tell the students "statement 1 was a lie".
3: Many students report they still believe X is true.
It seems risky to read anything much into that.
Maybe at step 3 the students, who know they've been lied to at least once, were reluctant to assume that step 2 provided reliable information.
However, it remained useful to lie to others, and so we evolved to be able to still do so. If we first lie to ourselves, trick ourselves into believing a falsehood is true, we can then spread this to others as if it were true, and therefore without consequences. In historical societies, it seems this was the right balance between generally telling the truth to others, while still being able to lie when it is important to do so. I wonder if it is time for the balance to swing the other way again, and for lying to again be selected against.
They started with a negative bias, which was then contradicted by a neutral fact. The outcome was a negative leaning estimation.
The others started with a positive bias, which was then contradicted by a neutral fact. The outcome was a positive leaning estimation.
A logically sound conclusion, a "mean" outcome. This doesn't seem like some kind of eye-opening revelation... am I missing something here?
The test seems like "I will screw with your sense of reasoning a bit and call you irrational when you don't respond the way I think you should"
I'd argue that there is only 1 useful fact that persuades us to open our minds and learn and that's realizing that we know nothing. This is the 1 truth Socrates held onto and helped him to learn so much. He'd never assume he knew something well enough and instead assumed there was always more to learn and used socratic method questioning to show contradictions in his own knowledge and world view. I think that is really the only way to persuade someone, by asking really good questions that cause them to question their own world views and biases.
[1]Monty must always open a non-winning door based on his insider knowledge and always give you the chance to switch, and of course the prize has to always remain behind its original door.
For me, the most important statement was as follows: "If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views."
In other words, more information doesn't help people. But asking people to understand the implications of their thoughts, and encouraging to consider those implications, will lead people to be more moderate, thoughtful, and deferential to experts -- who have spent lots of time considering the implications.
"Facts" aren't, news at 11.
(Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)
If this is written for an American audience, the odds are good that most of us not only don't know where the Ukraine is, we don't know where Kiev and Madrid are relative to each other. It would have made more sense to use two U.S. cities to give some perspective on how far off people were.
I still don't find it to readily be a good comparison for a mostly American audience. If the point is to elucidate, I don't think it is a great example to use. If the point is to be all superior and imply or emphasize the idea that "if you don't know where these things are, you are dumb," hey, it works well.
But trying to make your audience feel stupid is not really a great place from which to start. I mean, unless the point is to be toxic. Then, sure, go with that.
When you stop arguing and start agreeing, it's a whole different game.
That's why the whole political paradigm is obsolete. Rallies and speeches are mostly emotional drivers. They amplify the problem naturally (it's a nice form of competition).
This almost seems natural based on my viewing of code. Sometimes you don't know who wrote the code, or made a change, etc. Every line is suspect. I find that I'm best at debugging when my code when at the end I say "who wrote this crap? oh it was me."
Why would that handle be depressed?
This means I totally suck when it comes to debating anything. Sometimes I wish I could just be a rock and not sway around so much.
How much does being right really help one in their day-to-day life? And there are many ways it could hurt them.
There's also a fairly high risk of actually changing your mind towards the more wrong conclusion. Anything you already believe is likely rooted in something relatively deep, like childhood experiences, experiences in general, and a long, involved chain of partially logical, partially emotional reasoning that you can't even remember most of anymore. The incoming "facts" are often disembodied, not actually connected to anything, and often not that hard to fabricate because of how disconnected they are.
Now take these two concepts together, and consider what an attempt at making a person believe something different from what they do usually looks like. They're going to be told some disembodied facts, given some rough evidence or appeals as to why those facts are true, and then told that the only reason they don't already agree with those fact is because they are dumb, mean, uneducated, or otherwise undesirable.
https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/
#93, #94, #95
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/25/071530
"False report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature. In light of our findings the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience."
I have been reading 'Mental Models' by Philip Johnson-Laird where the author argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relations among objects and events that concern us, and then we act according to these models.
This book tries to argue against the idea that we think in terms of logical propositions. Take for instance this example Steven Pinker in this lecture[1] presents a logical problem which stumps a lot of people. However, when people are presented with a 'real world' version of the problem they do a lot better. Phillip Johnson-Laird uses the same example and some other studies to claim that it is because people think in terms of mental models and not in terms of logical/deductive propositions.
Another example:
If J Edgar Hoover was born in Russia, then he would have been a communist.
If J Edgar Hoover was a Communist then he would have been a traitor.
Therefore if J Edgar Hoover was born in Russia then he would have been a traitor.
Clearly the transitivity doesn't follow here, and this is not the only example of apparent transitivity failure, but nearly everyone can point out the logical problem with the transitivity inference in the third statement, but a lot more people would fail it if presented in abstract terms.
This has been a very ameliorating book for me. It explains many things regarding people's beliefs. When people present moral outrage, this must mean that they need to have that mental model in their minds. Take for instance if you started to work in a store, and the manager informs you of the following rule:
> If the receipt is for more than $30 worth of goods, then it must have manager's sign on it.
Most people would have no problem in understanding and following that rule. But if the rule was following:
> If the receipt is for less than $30 worth of goods, then it must have manager's sign on it.
To most people this is confusing and non-sensical. To most of us, we would try to think for a reason behind this rule. Most probably come up with the explanation 'There must be a lot of theft/fraud going on for smaller receipts', or something which explains this anomaly.
This is the same reason why everytime it snows in the middle of April, conservatives are like "Oh god, the Global Warming is killing me", and whenever there is a hot day in winter, it's the liberals who take it as a proof. Because to all people, the data which doesn't fit into their mental model is noise. And all theories which people ascribe to, somehow fit in their broader mental models.
tl:dr; It isn't that there are limitations to reason, rather everyone uses mental models to separate signal from noise. '10 Photographs which prove that ghosts exist' are just noise to us unless the photos come with reasoning which provides 'patches/updates' to our mental model.
Very funny and real.
^_^
The second are more unpredictable.
I am, however, not very impressed with the statement from the medical science that the authors use as "a fact". Facts from the medical science that are debated have changed into lies: did you hear about the fact that cholesterol is bad for your health and one should eat eggs with moderation ? That fact is now a lie: (see http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/19/health/dietary-guidelines/) and the Dietary Guidelines now contain "Cholesterol is not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption". Another example where yesterday's truth is today's lie: there are many scientific reports that say that the herbicide Roundup is safe, but the court in California recently decided that a warning must be put on the Roundup package: "THIS MAY CAUSE CANCER". For decades the truth was "Roundup is safe". In 2016 the new truth is "Roundup causes cancer". The new research is so overwhelming that the old research funded by the producer of Roundup is no longer considered truthful and that research from the producer did not convince the court.
I think that the authors walk on a slippery road when they state that vaccinations are good and not hazardous since they ignore the fact that there is considerable debate about the subject and do not look at the arguments of those who are opposed. Yes there is scientific research that says that a vaccine given at birth is safe because the researchers observed babies for four days and there were no adverse reactions. Other scientific studies follow children just for a maximum of 90 days. One who argues that four days is not enough and labels the report 'unscientific' has a good point. One who shows that autism is linked to vaccinations does not present hard evidence but raises a valid point of attention. What is the truth? safe or unsafe? Currently it is debated. Most likely there will not be hard evidence soon about unsafety because nobody funds research for this.
There is also an other argument to make: if we find autism a terrible disease that must be avoided at all costs, and there are mathematical indications that vaccines are not safe, and there is scientific research that says that they are safe but do not investigate the relationship between vaccines and autism, and there is no scientific research that shows that vaccines do not cause autism, then why do many persons accept "vaccines are safe" as a truth ?
I suggest that the authors write a new book with a title like "What happens to people when that facts and truths that they believe in are no longer true ?" and do not make the mistake to believe everything that others say but to critically verify it.
I think this is a very poor conclusion, an article by a professional journalist who just is trying to make money by posting something dumb. It's obvious why people are "irrational". There is so stinking much information in the world, not to mention the pressure our own minds put on us in the form of wants and needs. We have to sift through that to make decisions. The fact is irrationality comes from not sifting through the information correctly which is a difficult task that takes time and training.
There are all kinds of reasons we don't sift through information correctly, and as machine learning shows that takes time. Plus we often have pride which keeps us from acknowledging the truth.
The of course even if we have the facts sometimes it is difficult to make predictions based on those facts. This is in my opinion often because we don't really understand the facts. The only way to make predictions is based on past experience of some sort. If you don't understand the past well you can't make a good prediction, so once again it comes down to not understanding the huge amount of info in the world.
The article mentions ACA so my proposal should not be too off-topic.
The government should be in the healthcare business since the nature of the service precludes a functional market.
That is nonsense. To claim to focus solely on 'outcomes' is to simply make the ideology behind the recommendation implicit and outside the bounds of debate.
So you're right that talking about rights is unhelpful, I'd go further and suggest that just making healthcare provision better, rather than more/less market-based should be the main discussion to further avoid the conversation bogging down into "reasoning about ideology, rather than outcomes".
I think the definition is a very important distinction, although you're right about outcomes being a binding agent.
I don't believe that health care is a right. A right is something that another person doesn't provide. This "me" movement has really clouded everyone, thinking they are entitled to everything, even if what they want to be entitled to compels another person to provide it, thereby infringing on that person's rights.
So while I don't think it's a right, healthcare is a good idea as an investment and is a social good.
So I agree on the positioning you suggested to get both sides to come together. It's the right thing to do and look at all the tangible benefits we could get from it....
For instance, if you believe that we have a right to live, and healthcare has some relation to life, then haelthcare might arguably be a right.
Another might be an analogy, such as with law enforcement. Some might say we have a right to a life free from crime. Most jurisdictions prefer to run and staff their own police departments, or contract with another government-run police department. Only as a last resort would privately-run police departments be acceptable. Additionally, police officers, given their mission and tools, have the power of life and death over the citizens they serve. This is a typical reason given for government-run law enforcement.
Healthcare, to a certain degree, also has the power of life and death. Therefore, one could argue governments should run healthcare.
You can fall into the trap of assuming your "right to private property" means that taxation is theft or you can start with a "right to privacy" and decide law enforcement should never be able to access the contents of your smart phone, rather than discussing the reasons for private property or privacy.
And in case case, rights tend to never be justified, just asserted and treated like true axioms.