Objective data doesn't go deep enough to engender trust | Hacker News Reader

Objective data doesn't go deep enough to engender trust

davidneely.wordpress.com

7 pointsdavidkneely8 comments

Completely off-topic from the article, but objective data doesn't go deep enough to engender trust for another reason: If I don't agree with your position, and you show me objective data, I have to trust your data (or the source of your data), and that you haven't cherry-picked your source. Essentially, I have to trust you to be able to trust your data. So your data isn't going to make me trust you.

I used to think that objective data would make people believe in the truth and they would in turn mend their beliefs. The Google’s ethis of @data is always correct” seemed to confirm my belief. However i see that stories also move people in ways that data cannot. For example, I cannot understand why inspite of the available data people do not believe in vaccination. Instead, they believe in stories of kids getting autism because of mmr vaccine.

Is there an evolutionary benefit to believing in stories than in data? Maybe it helps save mental/psychological energy. Even the religions have mythological stoies. Or have we moderns changed so much that we want to believe in data than in stories?

Data is just as much a story you choose to believe as mythology is.

Which data? Where did you get the data? What was not included in the data? Did the participants know they were observed when the data was collected? How biased is the data? Is this data specifically prepared in such a way so that a person without a statistical degree would not be confused by the numbers?

There's a really useful paper called Datasheets for Datasets about this sort of questioning

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09010

>Is there an evolutionary benefit to believing in stories than in data?

Evolutionarily (in the jungle) there are no "data", just stories. Animals don't read reports.

Data itself is a kind of a story (the story being: "this information was collected correctly, by an impartial source, it's representative of the situation, there's no error, and their interpretation of what it means is also correct". Often this is more of a fairy tale than whatever Hans Christian Andersen wrote).

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Metadata.

the three-legged stool of rhetoric is comprised of logos, ethos, and pathos, and if you think that just because you’ve got a really really strong logos leg that it’ll work out fine and everyone will agree with you without any trouble or difficulty, you are sorely mistaken.

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