Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> That cannot be left unchecked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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