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Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

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Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#131

Post by conistonwater »

coldtea wrote: post #76
jimbokun wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain. Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no citation. Peer review is better than no review. There is probably a higher correlation for a statement from an official state agency being true, than a random statement with no attribution. So yes, a statement can satisfy any of the things you mention, and still not be true.…

> All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain. Yeah, in the sense that all you are saying is its possible to have degrees of trust on difference sources of "facts". That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people. > Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no citation. Peer rev…

> That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people.

I think David Hume was quite good on this subject. If chance of being right is all there is to knowledge, then maximizing your chance of being right is what knowledge is. So all the peer review, the numbers and statistics, for example, contribute to knowledge even if it might be wrong. And if you dismiss, as you do, statistics because they just might be misleading or biased, and are thus not "objective reality fact", that does damage to your ability to know things, because you are discarding data without considering it, and that damage should be avoided. Whereas the proper thing to do is consider it on merits, whatever the actual merits are.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#132

Post by lngnmn »

Because a brain has been evolved for dealing with crude appearances which are supplied to its centers by imprecise and unreliable sense organs and for sloppy thinking, good-enough for successful survival and reproduction (and necessary competition to accomplish that).

Our minds are conditioned by appearances and the conditioning is based on the fact that things does not change too often in the physical environments - almost everything stays the same most of the time.

The visual system, for example, has a lot of hard-wired heuristics which reflects this assumption. The cues which a brain machinery of visual cortex is utilizing to decode scenes is a perfect illustration how an evolved brain structure reflects actual physical environment in which it has been evolved.

The mind, it seems, utilizes simple frequency-based machinery which strengthen (or weaken) the representation (whatever it might be, close to what we would call a weighted graph, perhaps) with each new impression. There is , obviously, no probability calculations going on in the brain, just simple weighted structures. Similar approach is in the very core of the classic machine learning.

To alter the representation dramatically there must be some impression with a big weight, and this is what emotions are for. A dog getting sick after eating drugged food would learn to avoid it after just one single exposure. An emotionally charged experience is the simplest (and still the most effective form of persuasion, readily exploited by memes) because a brain has been evolved in to reflect the physical environment (its laws) and be adaptive-enough to survive mostly-stochastic, partially-observable environment.

One single mention of a supposed fact is not enough to change one's internal representation of reality (which, perhaps, is a structure trained with thousands if not millions of impressions). Even direct experience sometimes is not enough, because one cannot completely trust ones senses.

Only a rigorously trained mind could consciously deliberately alter its own model of the world (which is not that simple and cannot be accomplished at a whim) when it meets a single contradiction with "proven" or implicitly encoded in brain's heuristics laws of nature, leave alone a logical contradiction which is hard to notice given the default way of thinking we have evolved with. The non-verbal mind is much more ancient and much more powerful, and it does not understand the language of a newer parts.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#133

Post by Florin_Andrei »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #49
77pt77 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When it becomes expedient to change our opinion, then we're very quick to do so. And even deny that ever had any other position.

Of course. That would be an admission we were wrong which goes against our worldview where we're right.

Human beings are full of way-overcranked early optimizations. I guess that's what was required for the propagation of the selfish gene (and individuals be damned, Stalin-like), and you can't really blame a natural process - but sheesh, the whole thing just looks like a stinking pile of bad engineering.

Maybe that's because I'm thinking from the side of the individual. The selfish genes, however, must be pretty happy with the result.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#134

Post by darod »

What happens when you have 2 scientists arguing over what they consider fact? How do you know who to believe? It then becomes that example of requiring everyone to understand metal work prior to picking up a knife. You don't get very far.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#135

Post by balabaster »

philipov wrote: post #79
balabaster wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that my definition of the term "fact" is wrong... http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fact Fact: a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true. So... are you saying that a fact isn't something that's known to be true? Because my understanding of the word "fact" is that it means something indisputable, an underlying truth upon which you can base other truths and know them…

Yes, correct. Humans are not capable of having access to indisputable truth. However, indisputable truth is not necessary for forming useful foundations for other knowledge. Humans exist in the space of the "probably good enough." What becomes a fact for you depends on how tolerant you are for uncertainty. You're probably going to die. That's almost 100%. A solipsistic universe is likewise very unlikely. Those are pr…

> If you want facts that won't change after 15 years, you should study Mathematics.

I was just watching The Man Who Knew Infinity the other night and I would dispute that even Maths won't change after 15 years.

Once in a generation, someone like Ramanujan comes along and manages to change something even as fundamental as Mathematics.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#136

Post by VLM »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #46

Translation: "Why did Trump win the election even though he and his policies are obviously nuts?" Seriously, not trying to inject politics or my opinion on Trump, but there do seem to be a lot of these "why do people make act so crazy" articles lately. I too am trying to make sense of it all and failing.

When a mental model dies by no longer being predictably useful in the world, no matter if its religious or astrological or chemistry or physics or politics or economics or whatever, unlike the death of a famous person, the death of a worldview is a very hard sell, but "the folks we don't like also happen to be dumb and crazy" is an extremely easy sell. The twilight of every model looks the same across all humanity. A left wing fake news provider today sounds pretty much like a right wing pre-civil rights era southern "humorist" talking about blacks, its the same speech but different subjects.

If you believe in the right/left dichotomy then over more than a century the right tends to respond to dissent with force, isolation (camps), and criminalization, whereas the left tends to respond to dissent with indoctrination medication and mental hospitalization. "Anyone who would disagree with world communism must be mentally ill, lets treat them in a special hospital ward". So a natural concern troll against the right is to insist they're just taking the wrong pills and with the right mix of benzos they'd be happy to see their civilization annihilated. Which, technically, is true, if you get people high enough they don't care anymore.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#137

Post by guelo »

coldtea wrote: post #15
brightball wrote: post #10

Another factor here is when people abuse the word "fact" regularly. If you ever get into a discussion with somebody who claims they've proved their point by citing "facts", then actually follow up on their citations and discover that it doesn't actually say what they think it says it creates an impression of the messenger, not the message. Enough messengers saying the same faulty message over and over and you distrus…

> then actually follow up on their citations Not to mention that citations are not all they are touted to be. Just because something has been written by someone somewhere doesn't make it an objective reality fact. Just because something has been published on a peer reviewed journal doesn't make it an objective reality fact. Just because something has the consensus opinion doesn't make it an objective reality fact. Ju…

OK, but many times that I see people making this argument they turn around and point me to some conspiracy theory from some guy yelling on youtube.

There are dark ugly forces that benefit from the destruction of trust in the press and democratic institutions. You have to maintain a balanced world view. The government and the press have their biases but they are not always in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy. Many times they are on your side.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#138

Post by balabaster »

meheleventyone wrote: post #73
balabaster wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that my definition of the term "fact" is wrong... http://www.dictionary.com/browse/fact Fact: a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true. So... are you saying that a fact isn't something that's known to be true? Because my understanding of the word "fact" is that it means something indisputable, an underlying truth upon which you can base other truths and know them…

Dictionaries are not sources of objective facts either. The subject you're looking to know more about is the philosophy of science and in particular how it relates to epistemology which tackles this subject.

These days I wonder if anything is a source of objective fact. The more I try and remain objective and strive for enlightenment, the cloudier everything seems to become.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#139

Post by adekok »

coldtea wrote: post #15
brightball wrote: post #10

Another factor here is when people abuse the word "fact" regularly. If you ever get into a discussion with somebody who claims they've proved their point by citing "facts", then actually follow up on their citations and discover that it doesn't actually say what they think it says it creates an impression of the messenger, not the message. Enough messengers saying the same faulty message over and over and you distrus…

> then actually follow up on their citations Not to mention that citations are not all they are touted to be. Just because something has been written by someone somewhere doesn't make it an objective reality fact. Just because something has been published on a peer reviewed journal doesn't make it an objective reality fact. Just because something has the consensus opinion doesn't make it an objective reality fact. Ju…

It's often pretty simple to check that studies are biased and wrong:

---

Q1: For black people, how many times have you mugged a white person?

Q2: For white people, how many times have you been mugged by a black person?

Conclusion: There's a one-sided racial problem!

---

It's not always that simple, but too many times it is. I've found the various social sciences to be the worst at this. All of the popular media tropes of "X people are like Y!" are generally not just wrong, but biased and often opposite to well-done studies.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#140

Post by d3ad1ysp0rk »

balabaster wrote: post #53
xapata wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And amazingly, someone with skin in the game can also be wrong despite years of experience and training.

and amazingly the amount of information that comes out with peer reviewed science that has been repeatable enough to be accepted as fact and advertised as such can be thrown away 15 years later as wrong... how can a fact be wrong? Either it was a fact back then and you were right or you were wrong back then and it wasn't a fact but information supporting a non-factual hypothesis... given how often we see this present…

Probably because in all of your examples the science generally didn't say that - the news did. Nuance is lost when things get summarized, especially by people rewarded for viewership/ads and not accuracy.
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