What society tolerates in political discourse has much more to do with this than any quirks of the brain. Politics drags objectivity through the mud.
Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
261–270 of 347 posts
Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
#262Earlier 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.…
>Having a citation from a well regarded source Who gets to decide who is "well regarded" and who is not?
The community of people who have spent their time becoming knowledgeable in that field. Or do you suppose that any quack peddling snake oil is as knowledgeable as someone who went to medical school and practices medicine?
Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
#263Earlier 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…
So, the Saddam regime was the little guy the mainstream media was out to destory? I'm not sure what this example is trying to show. That a good portion of the world was misled into thinking Iraq still had WMDs, which justified an invasion?
Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Having a citation from a well regarded source Who gets to decide who is "well regarded" and who is not?
The community of people who have spent their time becoming knowledgeable in that field. Or do you suppose that any quack peddling snake oil is as knowledgeable as someone who went to medical school and practices medicine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[5] He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever.
Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practiced and operated, using hygienic methods, with great success. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died at age 47 of pyaemia, after being beaten by the guards, only 14 days after he was committed.
Galileo also comes to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
I am sure there are many others, those are just ones I readily remember off the top of my head. Current "experts" are really terrible about defending their current belief system, and actual evidence be damned. Their jobs and whatever depend on them being right, so don't confuse them with the facts LA LA LA NOT LISTENING. (And because they are experts, many other people simply defer to them.)
This does not appear to have changed in the modern world.
Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also wrong. Hunter-gatherer societies are much less concerned about social standing than agrarian ones.
Not that I'm doubting you (I simply don't know) but how do we know that was/is the case?
From modern-era studies of existing hunter-gatherers, as well as nomads. They're a lot more egalitarian (though of course there are some status differences) as there is less scope for specialisation. Agrarian societies are much larger, allow for much more specialisation, and as such have much more power on offer. Think about all the power levels in an agrarian society. At the macro level, we have working, middle, and upper classes. Each of these is divided again into more and more levels.
Look at the different titles for British peers for example - from Baron, through Viscount and Earl, Marquis, Duke, Prince, King, plus the female versions of all of these, plus that all peers above Baron are also Barons, and all of these titles means different roles and privileges. Then you go down the ladder and you get knights and dames of the various orders, awards, and so forth. Then you can start looking at the middle classes...
It's an extreme example, but it isn't hard to see similar in other places. Take a 'new world' anglo country, and compare how seriously people take the word of a senator versus a teacher versus a homeless person.
The simple counter to the statement in question is: "people in agrarian societies are primarily concerned with social standing, making sure they're not the ones doing the back-breaking work in the fields". Field work is gruelling, and requires a lot of labour. In comparison, hunter-gatherers historically only needed to work ~2 hours/day to meet their needs.
Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then Heisenberg happened.
What do you mean? Heisenberg just implies that you cannot observe everything at once. It puts an upper limit on the amount of facts (as in: observations).
Some comments are not meant to be brought to their complete logical consequences.
Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is basically the NRAs strategy as well and it's been incredibly successful. They know that their opponents intend to use compromise as a foothold for total disarmament so they have no choice but to occasionally take extreme or irrational stances. I don't blame them in the slightest.
> They know that their opponents intend to use compromise as a foothold for total disarmament. Really? Care to provide any factual evidence for that statement?
I'm not the GP, but I think it's obvious that of the spectrum of desired outcomes regarding gun control and the people that support them, there exist some that want nothing less than the total ban of firearms (as some other countries do). Any measure less than that will appease some, but others will continue to advocate.
The part that wasn't spelled out is how any appeasement helps those who want more extreme measures. I think that is explained somewhat by allowing them to then point out that you've capitulated on gun control for safety reasons, so the argument is no longer whether guns are unsafe, but how unsafe they are, and being able to reframe the argument in that manner is likely to result in further restrictions later as current events are used to pass more stringent laws.
I'm not sure how true that is or not in practice, but that's what I assume the GP was referring to.
Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
#268Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed; https://qz.com/924343/alternative-facts-a-psychiatrist-expla...
Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
The community of people who have spent their time becoming knowledgeable in that field. Or do you suppose that any quack peddling snake oil is as knowledgeable as someone who went to medical school and practices medicine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with chlorinated lime solutions in 1847 while working in Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[5] He published a book of his findings in Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. Despite various publications of results where ha…
I completely disagree. These particular incidents highlight those occasions when new knowledge had to overcome challenges between experts,
It completely ignores the many times experts knew things, and applied them and improved the working of their field.
You are absolutely overfitting an example used to highlight a pitfall. Instead you are using it to dismiss experts.
In other words you are re-broadcasting the anti expert propaganda which is constantly being spread for the past several decades.
Do note: if this was a modern news channel, The usual next step would be to bring up a total hack and have them repeat some truly outlandish claim, and state "the experts are all in cahoots, and are against homeopathy/AGW/etc. they have a monetary interest!"
Of course experts have a monetary interest. Expert Programmers are experts in their code. They earn a living off of it. Does that stop them from making rational choices.
Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds
#270Earlier 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.
This seems to be exactly the same as what the anti-PC and general Trump voting crowd believe as well. They HATE oversimplifications that deny their viewpoint. For example "Affirmative action is 100% fair." That's not an objective truth, but the left tries to sell it that way.
No, it's what the right-wing pundits sell as what the left tries to sell.