Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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> In June, she said, police began watching Paré's Facebook page, where he regularly posted about Quebec's record-breaking forest fire season. Among those posts, which remain on his public Facebook page, were claims the fires had been deliberately set by the government to trick people into believing in climate change.

>..."At this point, the accused admitted he was the one who started the fires and, as his main motivation, claimed he was doing tests to find out whether the forest was really dry or not," Charron said.

Spoiler alert - they are really dry.

My father in law only finally came to believe climate change last year. He had some sickly trees on his property and he called up someone from the state forestry department. The guy came out, took a look, and had a good, long, and healthy conversation about how my FIL needed to start thinning out his trees to keep the healthy ones alive because there was just not enough water for them all anymore. Some of these trees were hundreds of years old - my FIL really took it to heart and changed his mind.

It's easy to think people are being obtuse and sticking their heads in the sand, but this was the first time someone with expertise he trusted actually came out and showed him first hand.

Poor farmers in India and other third world countries have noticed many phenomena since 1990: (a) unpredictable rain falls, because of which (b) people started to drill wells to fetch ground water, which was abundant at 100 ft. After drying up all ground water for 30 years, now one has to drill 700 ft deep to get drinking water, let alone water for agriculture. Also, population increase and demands for quality of life improvements are other factors. 100 years ago, many would have been happy with subsistence farming. 30 years ago, even poor farmers started to grow commercial crops (cotton, paddy, sunflower)--there is a shift away from subsistence.

Average people in 1990 would never have explained these effects using climate change. Now, average folks in the third world know more about climate change, global warming, droughts, intensity of and unpredictability of storms, depletion of aquifers, abuse of water usage, scarcity of drinking water, even human migrations due to droughts, etc.

> It's easy to think people are being obtuse and sticking their heads in the sand

It's easy because it is the case. You don't believe in facts: you either recognize them or choose to ignore them.

Maybe you can look at a peer reviewed study and conclude that their methodology was sound and that their sample size justified their p-value every single time, but for the rest of us we generally have to trust what we read or the experts that we pay for their assessments.

There's a reason why rhetoric is divided into 3 parts - assuming that you can just bombard people with logos and win them over is intellectually lazy.

People are not one fact-checking article away from changing their minds on most subjects - so if you actually want to change people's minds on a topic and not just score points in a debate, you need to approach them on their terms.

> for the rest of us we generally have to trust what we read or the experts that we pay for their assessments.

Rest assured, I'm in with you in the rest of us. As you said, we have to trust the experts: that's why we pay them!

I do concede that, concerning climate change, too many articles and reports switch perniciously from science to politics, with no warning. E.g. "Global temperature are rising [science], and fossil fuels are a big part of it [science], thus we have to cut off fossil fuels [politics]".

Now, if you decide to fight for your petrol guzzling pickup that you objectively don't need, I'm not sure I'll side with you, but I'll get your point. And if you insist on flying on your holidays instead of going to the local pons, I'll get your point again. In general, I'll side with you that people at large must have the last word on what actions to take and which part of comfort to give up.

But you don't believe in global warming, and you don't believe in the role of fossil fuels: those are facts, this is what experts have been screaming for decades. If you don't feel your daily life reflects what experts are saying, you are welcome to ask for help in understanding what you are getting wrong. But you don't put your limited experience over the enormous corpus of studies that have been performed for decades all around the world: that would be idiot!

I really appreciate this angle, but I have a few counter-arguments:

- The ongoing replication crisis has shown that experts and entire areas of study can be completely wrong for a long periods of time. People are rightfully distrustful when economists put out a "model", so it shouldn't be so crazy to expect natural skepticism elsewhere.( I don't think that applies to climate change - you should be able to look with your own eyes and see that it's real. )

- There are actually several distinct arguments people have to accept for climate change: 1) It's really happening 2) It's caused by greenhouse gases 3) It's man-made 4) There are bad consequences 5) There are achievable solutions. People are often expected to "buy in" to all of these arguments at once, but some experts do not even buy into all 5!

- At this cultural moment, facts do not matter. Or they only matter when "our side" wants them to. This is true for climate, but it's also true for other topics like gender, diet, economics, guns, nuclear power, etc. There are a lot of areas where people willfully ignore or set aside "facts". So it should be no surprise this one gets treated the same way.

I myself do not live my life according to the best paid experts - I drink, I eat red meat, I listen to music too loud, I stay up to late. So I will act with a touch of grace when other people don't listen either.

It sounds like you're saying we all have a fundamental awareness of which assertions are true vs. false, and acceptance of the true ones is basically a matter of character / psychology.

That might be true for some persons and assertions, but I don't think it's true in all cases.

People mostly rely on social proof and what other people believe around them. This isn't a character flaw, it's just the reality of not being able to know everything.

I tend to agree, but the flip perspective, which I am continually trying yet failing to achieve, is radical empathy towards the goal of maximum effectiveness in action.

We need a critical mass of people to accept reality to make progress together. So if our goal is to achieve action, we need to find out the best way to get more people on board with reality. And the best psychological research shows that a focus on being right, morally or technically or factually, actually gets in the way of convincing people to abandon delusions. Radical empathy is the best way to make progress, putting aside that these people are being obtuse, selfish, and threats to us all.

Like I said, I am not yet to the point of being able to practice this effectively. But it achieves greater efficacy in many parts of life, not just climate change

I often try to take a position of asking questions and avoiding presenting my own opinion. This works better face to face. Sometimes on the internet people are just looking for a fight no matter how cordial you are.

The trick is to let them reason their way out of it themselves. You have to remember, political beliefs are a much worse predictor of someone's intelligence or amount of information consumed on a subject, than you might expect. Usually people are biased by their immediate surroundings and have incomplete or inaccurate information. It's tempting to score easy points with rhetoric, but that only serves to insult their intelligence, and they'll get defensive.

The more time you spend listening to someone, the more "socially indebted" they are to you, the more leeway you get to poke some small holes.

Nothing too big. You don't want to destroy their whole position, because that feels like an attack on their intelligence again. You just wanna plant some seeds of doubt, so that they can figure it out on their own, away from the embarassment of being proven wrong in front of everyone.

And yeah, it ain't easy. Sometimes you end up hearing some rather vile stuff, and it's really hard to resist the urge to make a visceral response. Not saying I successfully do this all the time. But it is the only strategy that has ever made any progress at all.

I agree that's probably a good approach. It's very time/effort intensive though. I imagine it's much better when dealing when real life people you know because internet randos may even have been hired to spread disinformation and waste the time of people trying to educate others on the facts.

This is one of those times where we have to choose between being right in absolute terms and making progress. The right-wing disinformation apparatus has had billions of dollars and decades to spread lies and doubt, and you’re not going to change that overnight – especially if you storm in saying “you’re wrong, admit it!” From the sounds of it, the key here was getting someone this guy trusted to say it – and probably not dwell on every detail as long as they get the idea that they need to make changes – just as we’ve seen trusted doctors and nurses overcome vaccine resistance in ways which a stranger could not.

> It's easy to think people are being obtuse and sticking their heads in the sand, but this was the first time someone with expertise he trusted actually came out and showed him first hand.

Because he obtusely refused to trust all prior experts because he thought he knew better than them.

“It’s not real until it affects me personally” is a disgusting attitude

It's also extremely common though. We have to deal with the limitations of the people we want to educate. It's hard to convince someone that they've been lied to and manipulated by a group they trust and identify with. Even if we know someone has let ideology and pride compromise their judgement it's unlikely to be effective pointing that out to them. Not everyone has the temperament to engage with someone who has willfully blinded themselves to reality, and those that do don't have to pretend that these people aren't being obtuse and sticking their heads in the sand, they're just probably better off not telling that to the person they're trying to deprogram

Sure. But saying they’re not obtuse is obtuse.

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