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Comment by N_Lens | Hacker News Reader

My friend was saying that we just need to show people the facts to change their minds. I showed him a pile of scientific studies indicating that it doesn't work. His response was "I still think it'll work"!

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That's funny :) Though when presenting facts and studies, it's also worthwhile to think about how much of the world these studies are accurately able to explain. For physics this number is high. " For social sciences there's good reason to be skeptical. Even if (big if) a study is directionally replicable, the total proportion of the world, that can be accurately and consistently be explained isn't great.

"Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q" Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders.

The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.

> The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies

This, in itself, assumes that all studies / papers are equally as good and methodologically sound, which is not a true assumption.

I agree, if we limit the statement to the quoted piece. But I think the full line is true as it stands. > The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate. I.e. that the danger doesn't come from being selective based on methodological soundness as you say, but based on e.g. ideology.

There's also you can't get an ought from an is, the is–ought problem. The facts don't guide your action at all, not even in an imagined neutral unbiased dispassionate way. They can only change minds as part of an argument, and the argument is going to have ideology behind it.

Re: Alternative Facts. Feelings are not the same as actual facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

Interestingly, research shows LLMs are better than humans at persuading people, and one of the reported reasons is that their arguments are deemed to be more evidence-based. (Findings even show that people are more likely to be persuaded when they KNOW the other side is an AI... maybe the underlying dynamic is that they assume people have vested interests?)

So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies.

LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.

Sounds really interesting! Do you have a link to that research? Unless you're an AI, then I'll just accept your statements as fact ;)

Haha, sure! Some of the studies I read about, though admittedly I haven't read most of them in depth:

https://www.fbk.eu/en/press-releases/artificial-intelligence...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61345-5

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09662

https://arxiv.org/html/2411.06837v2

https://arxiv.org/html/2604.22109v2

Thank you! That's actually really interesting reading. Some of the effect sizes are small though - would have been interesting to see a greater variety of benchmarks. Like what's the effect of different incentives given to the human controls (does 20 VS 100 USD change anything? etc.). Anyways, thanks for the links!

Someone here mentioned the pickup artist method of convincing people - keep trying until they relent.

I have looked into some of these studies and realized that it’s near impossible to change people’s minds.

Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches their already held opinions.

I don't think this is particularly strange when one thinks about the effect of ideology. It has a way of filtering any common reality different people have. I'm not sure how to move towards a common understanding without a larger sense of shared experience, but even then the same experience can have different interpretations.

That being said, having shared experience can help, at least anecdotally, in being able to come to terms with wildly differing views. One example I have is with my brother. With the same event we had come away with a drastically different understanding. The facts between us all checked out, and we confirmed it many times. Yet the shared vocabulary gave us a way of acknowledging the others disagreement in the shared experience.

There's a fantastic book[0] about positioning in a marketing sense, that explains, among many other things and IIRC, that the mind is fundamentally a WORM machine; you almost never can overwrite existing information (or, with extreme effort and time; you can add new information but for it to be accessible, it needs a different key/name/index.

So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it.

The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf.

I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more.

Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels.

[0] Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981)

What facts do you think can change my preferences? I'm sitting here telling you I want apple pie, and you're harping on about how "kale salads have all the vitamins you need!". We're talking at each other, because you failed to understand. This isn't about what you think the facts are, but about what I want to happen. I can accept those as facts and it wouldn't change anything.

This feels unrelated to anything else being said, unless you’re arguing that literally no arguments feature a factually incorrect position.

In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. Then when told apple pie is not the answer and its actually kale you want them you immediately pivot to a different for ending up at apple pie.

Its the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.

>In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins.

No. I just want it. That's the part you don't seem to get. It's a preference. There's no reason or rationale that you can attempt to short-circuit with any fact.

>ts the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and

They're not arguing with you. They're attempting to tell you that this is their preference. That they won't change their mind. Sometimes they're bad at it, can't articulate it. Other times they say this perfectly clearly... doesn't much matter, because you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear (like above, with "you think the apple pie has vitamins!").

>and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.

It's not belief. That's actually frustration. And a little bit of spite.

Hillarious, to be honest. It still leaves me wondering... what _does_ work?

MDMA/Psychedelics on the carrot axis

Torment nexii on the stick axis.

evolution -- ppl who refuse to acknowledge reality tend not to leave many offsprings. and if they do, maybe they are adhering to a more powerful reality afterall.

You cannot change people, you need to change people.

That's realy inaccurate. If anything the more religious you are the more offsprings you have. Atheist societies are below replacement levels. What makes you think fact based thinking leads to more children making?

Could it be that atheists are the ones who are ignoring reality?

Can you show me where to point my camera to take a picture of the giant sky daddy?

They don't think anything so silly as that. He's invisible, and if you have any further questions, he's ineffable.

I'm pretty sure you have to have graduated elementary school to be able to post here.

I'll happily admit I'm wrong though, in light of evidence before me

Way to fail at reading comprehension!

OP is absolutely correct of course. "Show me the money" is the only durable way.

With the usual caveat that "evolution can remain irrational longer than you can stay alive", so no guarantees on the individual level over a single human lifespan.

given the unknowability of reality - 'facts' in science are only hypotheses that have not yet been disproven by data - nobody knows why anything exists at all -

a lot of weight has to be given to 'what works' - what things grind up against the machinery of reality and survive over the long term? there is a 'truth' to such things

make everyone's voice matter. actually listening to peoples concerns and try to address them. but also, treat everyone as being on the same side. we all want a better life. we should cooperate to achieve that. globally. it takes education. not just STEM, but also moral education. teach people to care about each other and to listen. we need to eliminate prejudice and racism and make it possible to resolve conflicts.

it's a long road to get there. but it's the only way that is going to work.

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