Is there any scientific study (facts...) to this article? Generally I think I change my mind if new (reliable and significant) facts come in.
Its point is "a large number of people are tribal - truth is secondary to them, as they live in an inner world of familiarities, not of "intellectual"¹ structures: if you want to change their mind, to use obstensions and theorems is inefficacious: you can change their mind more easily - and painlessly, for them - with methods from the mental functions they live in".
Note: unfortunately, some of us think that using a non-objective language is manipulation, and call that morally inappropriate. There is a difference between "treating children like children", and "treating children with awareness".
The author of the article is not intentionally² saying that you, andi, or people you probably would call "normal" (or mathematicians who know about non working theorems, or engineers knowing that engines work or not work through facts and not social cheers and frowns), believe or not absurdities: it is advising you to be careful when breaking the bubbles of entities that you think should follow logic and facts, and instead are living a completely different inner world "of sensation". They do exist.
¹"intellectual": term to be read here in the common acquired sense, not in the pure one
²..."just factually".
The entire article resonates with me, but I worry that it's because I am part of that tribe and it's "others" who can't change their opinion. To dispel the notion that this is tribal "knowledge", we'd still want sufficiently large studies that (dis)prove that people change their opinions in face of facts, and that they are more likely to do so based on similarity of the views and friendship level (my side observation in real life is that people change their opinions but sometimes won't admit to it too :)). People have observed it throughout the history, true, but that does not make it a prevalent behaviour (is it just the behaviour we notice? similar to Murphy's law, which I call the law of observation/attention: you are more likely to notice/remember when just the worst thing happens).
While it sounds hard to construct such studies, it's not impossible (compared to eg. controlling for level of love we give to children while they grow up from infancy and then establishing correlation or causation).
It's easy to come up with opinion-changing studies (eg. this article references a bunch which do not support a simple view like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180622-the-surprising-r...), so it'd be good if there was scientific evidence that this happens (which means, statistically significant correlation). But even if it happens in, say, 55% of the studied situations, that's hugely different from, say, 95% of the situations.
We already know that some people are irrational, tribal, quasi-impermeable, "reasoning" to faculties that are not that of reason. It is evident under the language they use. You will find that literacy is 77% in Snowdonia and 55% in Drizzland (but 99.9% in that building): it is present and variable, and objectivity is similar.
If the poster wanted studies meaning "is the author of the article really sure": by experience and just pre-facto stochastics, some people are like that. But no, not all people are like that. And for those making (here) statements about "the inescapability of human condition and matters of degrees": the difference between the doctor and the brick is radical, even when the doctor cannot find Niue on the map and cannot cook.
Studies: of course they would be interesting, but not that different from the studies that count regional literacy, (so-called) "human development", and other similar factors. They are indicative, and normally Finland and South Sudan are contrasted, but they are also of relative worth, because (apart from the frequent difficulties in measuring the real value - e.g. do not expect a random high IQ individual to be rational, reasonable, controlled etc.) aggregation is myopic and you will not in fact be sure in the evaluation of your individual Finn or South Sudanese, using just prejudice.
Indeed, but it's the best we can do with many fields of study. This is why it's important to qualify all of our statements to the best of our ability. "Finns from urban areas aged 12-65 are like this 78%+-6% of the time", for example. That's usually the best any study can give us, but they drive the prejudice, and it's on us to not cave in on that. In a normal conversation, I think it's fine to even say "Finns are like this" as long as you understand all the nuances at play, and don't really believe it (otherwise, communication becomes too bothersome).
But we should not disregard the result of the study because of the qualifiers: we should accept and embrace the "qualifiers".
The article contains a "just so" origin story, without any proof, but with a lot of social cues and nods to authorities that are likely to be unquestioningly trusted by the target audience. An actual mythical origin story is told, with lots of handwaving and name dropping, about how we lived in tribes and needed to signal our membership.
Then, in a giant logical leap, the hand-wavy "just so" origin myth is presented as the true reason why we don't have a strict adherence to "facts" as the author thinks we should.
The proper way to understand why facts don't change minds, is to understand that there are no such things as "facts". Our minds carve out blocks of meaning from the sea of chaos in front of us. There could always be a different way to carve up what lies before us. This is not to deny that what in front of us is real, or to claim that we can make up whatever we want. Not at all. But it fails to understand that the reality we see is much more like a mythical or narrative structure at its base. We are completely integrated into it and can't separate ourselves from it.
You can see that what I'm saying is true, by simply examining the article itself. Although it purports to be about "facts", the article is a narrative. It even has a mythical origin story from beyond the mists of time which can't ever be "proven" using "facts".
I don't know what use the article is. Perhaps it can make a certain type of person feel superior as they sit at the family Christmas dinner and silently judge their relatives' differing beliefs as being somehow inferior because they don't meet this imaginary criteria of being "fact" based. How do "facts" even motivate a "fact based" person to want to change someone else's ideas?
The slightest amount of critical thinking shows that we are all deeply immersed in narrative, value judgement and goals. This false concept of "facts" is merely a weapon for a certain worldview in its attempts to coopt other worldviews.
I don't think facts are necessarily objective, because we don't have access to the levels of absolute omniscience required to know whether or not an observation is absolute for all qualified observers.
Even so. Facts remain persistent for us, and that's good enough for many useful things.
The article is just reiterating the difference between science and rhetoric. Science is not particularly persuasive because it's difficult, it requires special skills and knowledge, and leading edge research is always tentative, by definition.
Rhetoric is persuasive by definition, because it has been engineered to be persuasive. Lawyers buy books which teach them how to craft persuasive arguments. Veracity is not required, and may be deprecated. It's a completely different process.
The problem is that STEM-trained types do not understand this. Because so much STEM argument is about data and credible interpretations, STEM types are always blindsided whenever an opportunist/charlatan/crook turns up spewing obvious bullshit, but somehow still manages to take the public with them.
The solution is to educate STEM people about rhetoric.
Tribalism is just one aspect of it. There are many others.
- I trust what you say, and the best camera for me will depend on those factors
- I trust that you like those headphones, that does not necessarily mean I will too.
I might not say that it’s difficult, since it’s easy for me, or to trick you to buy it, it’s still a fact.
Headphones might be the most subjective but I’ll say they produce the most accurate sound (to me). You don’t have a way to measure if you like them or not.
"Facts will also be unbiased. They do not support only one perspective and present the information in an objective manner"
Of your examples only "Processor is the best at these benchmark" is a fact.
You said "does it matter that the benchmark favors it" and I don't think that matters. You aren't saying "This processor is the best processor" then using the benchmark as evidence, you are saying the processor is the best at the particular benchmark which is true even if the benchmark is bias, manipulated, or whatever.
Lets say you program a fuzzy logic controller that returns large=true for numbers > 100, and i program mine to return large = true for numbers > 10. Like you say, its subjective.
These rulesets are chosen as truth in the same way the grenwich meantime is 0* lat, and we dont use the paris meantime because we arent french revolutionaries and also the brits had stronger empire.
If i came off as joking its bc i am aware of the lunacy of my take. To call "normal" good is a strong position, but who was norm?? And why do we all have to measure up to him?
I think most people feel this way - but it's the very notions of "reliability" and "significance," and how personal they are, that filter out an awful lot of possible mind-changing facts.
Even if we assumed both would tell you the same facts (bold assumption, I know) the way they make feel during hearing these facts plays a role as well. If you met the same doctor semi drunk in his holiday outfit on a beach telling you the same thing, wouldn't it change the way you treat these facts?
If you trust science as an institution the white garment of the doctor standing in the hospital which is an achievement of science will play in favour of whatever the doctor says. What if you don't has that trust (or even active distrust)?
I trust science as a method for gaining knowledge, and I understand that it has its limits. In most things concerning humans, it's is loosely based on mathematical statistics. If you've ever had a serious illness and immersed yourself in understanding medical advances in it, you'll probably be surprised by the level of guesswork and unknowns of the operation of the human body (let alone of the mind).
If you have a mathematics background, it can be frustrating to sit across a doctor who lacks such understanding, while you are trying to extract all the useful snippets of knowledge they do posses, so you could correlate that with your symptoms, since they are usually dead set on a diagnosis without sufficient proof simply because it's... the one they've seen the most (it might not even be the most prevalent one). But even in the simplest cases, you won't hear a doctor say that this is something with a high probability. Eg. give them a bloodwork with CRP, and they'll immediately tell you if you should be prescribed antibiotics or not. It's a bacterial infection, not with 92% probability (I made that number up), but 100%. Sure, it'd be hard to get the exact probability, but actual medical studies are getting into that (correlating all the symptoms and such).
Sure, for a vast majority of cases, following an easy algorithm just works: that's the value of science being applied, and this is the reason we are getting our lifetimes extended and a number of sickness eradicated. On average!
But bringing up medical doctors as the pillars of science (oh, and they are stressed out too? that will surely make them better at logic) is quite a surprising stretch.
You seem to be assuming that people are fools... Blinded by symbols and holding Ideas. That is very much not necessary.
Experience, education and wisdom naturally put every input into perspective. Actually, you are pretty much required (deontically, for intellectual fitness) to vet your ideas, so you should be well trained not to be fooled by a garment or by capital letters ("Science" - or Whatever Big Word).
No, I am actually coming at it from the other direction. The human is an social animal, as such feelings play a big role in our daily lives (for some more, for some less). My point here is, that it is pretty much impossible to switch this off even if we try very hard – which btw. also aligns with most of what psychological science tells us. Of course there are differences (people who just follow their feelings vs people who try hard to use facts instead), but these differences don't change that everybody can and regularily will be influenced by feelings.
Facts are not decoupled from their packaging. The two podcasters who work in science and whoose whole careers and lives you followed for years will enjoy a different trust than a piece of paper that you find on the street, written in Comic Sans, even if both tell you the exact same words. This is normal. To pretend we "just look at the facts" is naive – because we don't. We learn about the world and see how things fit with our current image of the world. If the new information fits neatly we don't feel a big urge to check the facts, especially if it was delivered by a source who we learned to trust.
The question however is: *Do we listen to facts when the new information _does not_ fit our image of the world and it _feels_ wrong"? All science around that topic I have seen suggests we go with the feeling more likely in that case. This doesn't mean we are idiots, it means our image of the world lags behind the information we get. Otherwise it couldn't be stable, change all the time and we would require enourmous amounts of energy/thinking to just exist. It is the price we pay for having a more or less stable image of the world around us.
This is an entirely different thing: neither of these would be facts, but claims (hypotheses, statements, beliefs...). Building trust will make you more likely to believe someone's claims are factual, but the only facts are the ones proper scientific studies base their interpretation on. Even conclusions of most scientific studies are usually premises and hypotheses, more or less supported by the facts in those studies. As such, a scientific podcaster would be twice removed from the actual data: they'd be interpreting the interpretation of the facts a research team has collected. You trust them at your own peril.
Facts are provable/observable things which can be reproduced by others. That's why we've got the reproducibility crisis in science since the introduction of "metrics-based" science: papers are published for career advancement (sometimes with falsified data, which is why reproducibility is important before we call them "facts"), and science now comes second.
In short, it's all quite simple. But it's all so elaborate, draining and time consuming, which is why we practically must trust others' interpretation of facts. As long as you are aware that we are mostly working with interpretations and not facts, once you really want to drill down for a topic you deeply care about, you can. And that opens up your mind to changing your opinion easily.
I am sorry to hear that: you really should do something about it.
> it means our image of the world lags behind the information we get
In a way correct. It is explicit even in the actual formal study in epistemology (before the side of brain science): theories of foundation note the cost to "keep track". Nonetheless, there exists formation that installs the reflection module without adding more power consumption costs to the brain.
> It is the price we pay for having a more or less stable image of the world around us
Why should the image of the world be stable?! It should be dynamic - it's part of its purpose, it's not just deontic. And careful, also in order not to have to perform revolutions on the body of knowledge and relations in some future.
> Facts are not decoupled from their packaging
People who have dealt with people know out of experience they have to be skeptic... Packaging: it's even traditional wisdom running in popular proverbial locutions: "A beard does not make one a philosopher" (Plutarchus) - cowl and monk, book and cover... Children repeat it, adults know it, through experience! They sometimes fall? Well they utter "Should have known better" as they raise, not (normally) "But the garment!".