Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#241

Post by cortesoft » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 12:44 AM UTC

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…

Yeah, I was thinking of this when I got to the part about people not immediately changing their minds when presented with new facts.

In reality, this makes sense if we think of knowledge in a Bayesian sense; we don't have absolute facts, we have little bits of information we gain over time. When a new bit of information comes in, we have to determine our new reality - what is the chance that our current views are wrong versus the chance that the new information is wrong. If we keep getting new information saying our current beliefs are wrong, we might end up changing out view eventually.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#242

Post by Mz » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 12:46 AM UTC

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…

What you describe is what the book "How to lie with statistics" covers in detail. It is a great read. I highly recommend it.

A lot of so-called facts are just blurbs intended to support someone's manipulative agenda. Sadly, this is even true of this article. Towards the end, it begins making ugly political commentary instead of sticking to psychological phenomenon.

The people who claim to have science on their side are often merely claiming to be intellectual elites and implying that anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot. It isn't scientific at all. So, it is unsurprising that it does not go over well with people who are basically being called stupid by people more interested in winning the argument themselves than in trying to have a meaningful discussion of good information.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#243

Post by cortesoft » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 12:57 AM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #128

bambax wrote: post #18

> The fact that both we and it survive proves that it must have some adaptive function No, no, no, absolutely not, no, it doesn't. No. A feature can maintain itself in a population for a number of reasons: - it's neutral or not detrimental enough to drive affected individuals to extinction (ie, to get them killed before they have a chance to reproduce) - it's linked to some other trait that provides actual benefits -…

I suggest a more simple and straightforward explanation for the limitations of "reason": our brain is, in fact, write only. That seems to be inconsistent with the research described in the article where subjects were asked for an opinion, then in some way required to explain that opinion, and then asked for another opinion on the same issue. People apparently did weaken in their convictions, but only when forced to c…

Yeah, I think it is more like 'lazy loading' than write only; we assume we have strong reasons for believing something, and only realize we don't when we are asked to actually explain why we believe something.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#244

Post by ythn » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 12:58 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #232

xapata wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I'd say it's often "our" problem. Racism, sexism, climate-change denialism, etc. All stem from anti-empiricism. As the main said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

Except for Climate Change Denialism, those problems predate empiricism as a thing noticeable enough to have coherent opposition, by (at least) hundreds of generations. They aren't produced by anti-empiricism (though, insofar as empiricism threatens them, they may be a source of resistance to empiricism.)

> Except for Climate Change Denialism

That's the flavor of the decade, yes, but back in the 70s there was "zero population denialism" which is roughly equivalent (there was a big scare that the earth's population was unsustainable and we were rapidly running out of resources and couples needed to stop having more than 2 babies and if you disagreed you were a zero population denier)

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#245

Post by sqeaky » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:07 AM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #210

rl3 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The acrimonious and often zealous tone taken by many doesn't help matters either. What you just wrote was nuanced, and there's very little room for nuance recently. Most of what qualifies as discourse today simply degenerates into a shouting match with each side not giving an inch. For example: compulsory vaccination via mandate, coercion, exclusion, or otherwise. While there are compelling motivations to pursue such…

> What you just wrote was nuanced, and there's very little room for nuance recently. It certainly seems like that has become the case though I wonder if it's always been like that and modern technology just exposes it better. > "Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance" I saw a stand up comedian misquote that as "Tyranny is the absence of nuance" which I think I actually preferred. As for your point on the vaccina…

I am afraid I fall into one of these extreme camps. I don't see room for a gray area on this issues like I can on other issues. I see no practical downside and lots of benefit to vaccines.

Children, plural, Children have died in my home city because of this anti-scientific attitude and the "serious side-effects" are either non-existent or so rare as to not be worth discussing.

There is no link with autism, and this is the main point that most anti-vaxxers use. Once you get to real side-effects you get to things that literally have around a 1 million chance for mild side effects, and much less frequent for serious.

The risk of most diseases is much higher than the the risk of its vaccine, so it makes sense for that individual and it makes for the population. I really don't see any wiggle room on this one and I don't understand this recent softness towards anti-vaccination.

When real deaths are on the line in much higher percentages than any real side-effects there is definitely a moral high ground. Let's revisit the vaccine issue one the diseases are gone, I don't see a need to vaccinate in North America for smallpox or polio and if we organized well we could make that the case for many other things we vaccinate for.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#246

Post by sqeaky » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:08 AM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #178

crpatino wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would upvote you twice if I could. The anti-science crowd and not idiots, but rather moderately intelligent individuals that go bersek after catching the Science spokeperson's oversimplifications and/or white lies. Fool me once and it's your fault, fool me twice and it is mine.

The anti-vac crowd might not be idiots, but they're selfish as hell (free-riding on herd immunisation while not willing to accept the (very very tiny) risk of vaccination to their precious child).

I haven't met one that wasn't an idiot.

Around my location they are all claiming that vaccines cause autism or deferring to Jesus for his medical opinion like he actually exists.

EDIT - Downvote away, but I would prefer if you demonstrated I was wrong by presenting a sensible reason to allow mass anti-vaccination.

I understand there legitimate reasons for an individual to avoid a vaccine, like immune deficiency or allergies, but that is not a pass for the whole population.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#247

Post by sqeaky » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:12 AM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #228

zimzam wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You mean, selfish like everyone else is? Nope: everyone else gets vaccines, they are clearly more selfish in this regard

>Nope: everyone else gets vaccines, they are clearly more selfish in this regard From their perspective, they are not getting a benefit. How are they selfish? Great of you to take one piece of my comment and ignore the main point of it.

Perspectives can be wrong.

They are gaining benefit. Ever wonder why non-urban menengitis outbreaks tend to happen in churches that preach some non-sense about vaccines being bad and not to groups that vaccinate?

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#248

Post by MaxfordAndSons » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:16 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #199

guelo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The government and the press have their biases but they are not always in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy. No, but they often are. And not just in easy to point fingers at regimes. Not that long ago, the might NYT were writing about the fabled "WMDs", were independent bloggers (no YouTube existed yet) were speaking against that BS. To a third party those would have looked like conspiracy theorists. Gu…

But the NYT, along with the rest of the world, was misled by the Bush administration. Sure they could have been more circumspect in evaluating the "facts" as presented by Colin Powell - but why do you jump from them being notably mistaken on a handful of occasions to believing they are "often" "in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy"?

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#249

Post by TheLilHipster » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:24 AM UTC

I'm constantly overhauling my own bias and opinions on subjects when presented with new information, I don't do this actively - its more subconscious, which is against the results of these experiments. The results were the subjects estimating a scenario (after being told they were deceived). The scale of measurement was the positive and negative bias they had towards themselves.

They started with a negative bias, which was then contradicted by a neutral fact. The outcome was a negative leaning estimation.

The others started with a positive bias, which was then contradicted by a neutral fact. The outcome was a positive leaning estimation.

A logically sound conclusion, a "mean" outcome. This doesn't seem like some kind of eye-opening revelation... am I missing something here?

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#250

Post by sqeaky » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:28 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #159

It's important to remember that most scientific disputes can't be resolved by two uninformed people talking on the Internet. If you can get people to share links to well-written scientific articles, you're doing well, but these disputes can only really be answered by actual scientific discussion between actual experts who take the time to dig into methodology (etc), and maybe not even then; the replication crisis is…

Most the arguments I get into are on already resolved topics, like whether or not CO2 captures heat, whether or not evolution is real, whether or not vaccines work.

I don't know, so I can't tell you when or if the climate will hit some unrecoverable precipice, but I can tell you reliably that adding more CO2 doesn't help.

I don't know, so I can't tell you whether punctuated equilibrium or the selfish gene imply better statistical models for distribution, bit I can reliably tell you evolution is definitely real and maybe one or two of the effects it has.

I don't know, so I can't tell you the exact odds of a vaccine having the maximal effect or meaningfully compare two new potential vaccines, but I can tell you why the USA doesn't have polio and smallpox.

Just being able to say "I don't know" helps, so many people out there make up their mind then won't change with the facts because they are uncomfortable going through that "I don't know" mental territory. Don't try to be an expert in fields you aren't, but try to understand what little can be understood with the information at hand.