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

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#311

Post by marknutter » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:22 PM UTC

sjy wrote: post #290

Mz wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It would be better if you provided more recent examples: medical science was very primitive in the 19th century, and Galileo was not persecuted by scientists. More recently, Marshall and Warren's research on stomach ulcers quickly led to the rejection of the expert consensus which had prevailed for decades, because technological advances enabled them to present convincing evidence to a profession which had come to ac…

The consensus around fat being so bad and The Bell Curve are two that come to mind for me.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#312

Post by marknutter » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:34 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #164

gregmac wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> repeatable enough to be accepted as fact No. They are accepted as a scientific theory [1]. A scientific fact is "a repeatable careful observation or measurement (by experimentation or other means), also called empirical evidence" [2]. The media and general public doesn't really understand the distinction, and tends to call widely-accept scientific theories "facts" and treat them as if they are proven true -- when i…

> The media and general public [...] tends to call widely-accept scientific theories "facts" and treat them as if they are proven true -- when in reality the best science can do is just not yet prove something false. That Popperian view (published 1934) is itself somewhat problematic, and I'd say obsolete. The distinction between pure unambiguous observation statements and the edifice of theory on top (concepts, oper…

Your definition of fact is dangerous to science. As soon as something is declared "fact" (is this done by some sort of high science cleric handing down edicts in an ivory tower or something) it can never be contradicted. All progress in that area will effectively halt, since the assumption is that there is no more progress to be made. I for one thank God we haven't regarded fact in this way, otherwise we may not have General Relativity (among countless other contradictory scientific findings).

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#313

Post by marknutter » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:37 PM UTC

balabaster wrote: post #138

meheleventyone wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Strive less for objective facts and strive more for keeping an open mind.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#314

Post by sgt101 » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 1:47 PM UTC

sqeaky wrote: post #245

noir_lord wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

I can see where you are coming from; and I am pro-vaccine in the sense that I had my children vaccinated in line with government / health service requests and guidelines. In fact we also opted to have my daughter given an extra vaccine for meningitis that was not indicated at the time but has subsequently become mainstream.

However, I think that you may be a bit out in some of the views you have written here. Have a look at this site : http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vaccinations/Pages/mmr-side-eff...

1:1000 for a seizure is a long way from 1:1000000, and yes I would and did prefer to run that risk rather than the risk of Measles which is an appalling disease, and I would prefer to sleep knowing that I've not only protected my child but also other children. But I did this with the honest knowledge that there was a risk.

My brother suffers from seizures - this is a bad thing to have happen to anyone.

I believe my fellow citizens deserve the same chance, and I believe that they will come to the same view as me if given the opportunity.

>When real deaths are on the line in much higher percentages than any real side-effects there is definitely a moral high ground.

One thing that changed my views here was holding my child in my arms; things stopped being about percentages and trade-offs and became centred on the welfare of the small person who could not protect herself. We are asking parents to be altruistic; in society we are not obliged to be altruistic as we are obliged to be moral - it's a gift, not a requirement. For example you could say that parents are obliged to make sure that all the children in the city have eaten before they feed their child, but human society and human rationality just don't run that way.

We are neither angels, nor automata.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#315

Post by hughdbrown » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 2:03 PM UTC

> This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

This is every conversation ever in my extended family.

So maybe we try to elect leaders who can win arguments, not ones who reason clearly. Then you'd find that we get politicians who favor expanding the military while having avoided being drafted and fighting, who have illogical ideas of how government can be expanded and paid for without increasing taxes, who will get us all a better deal while sticking it to those other countries/states/cities, and they'll protect us from others who are not like us. I can see how this idea would run wild in politics.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#316

Post by SolaceQuantum » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 2:30 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #142

fnovd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I feel that people have gotten more and more binary and we need more shades of gray What about people who think we need more binary thinking and fewer shades of gray? How do you even form a nuanced (gray) argument against that kind of dogmatism? Where do you draw the line against line-drawing without being hypocritical? This isn't just rhetorical: this is a problem we're struggling with as a society. People are inte…

The hidden lesson of 1984 is there is no answer once identity politics are in play. "Four legs good, two legs bad." is already past the point of no return and there is no "a society" as you quote but two battling for supremacy. Historically we have little evidence of solutions other than civil wars. Asking how to roll back identity politics without a physical war is like debating strategies to avoid nuclear war after…

Could you clarify what you mean by identity politics? I'm mostly used to see them in that gay people, trans people exist are considered identity politics. It's confusing that they are considered a politics that demands for more binary. Wouldn't the acceptance of sexual and gender diversity actually be less Binary than the total rejection of any sexuality and gender identity besides cis and hetereo?

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#317

Post by bobbington » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

This is misleading article like the guys who show you optical illusions and then say you can't trust what you see. The fact is that it is rational to let past experiences affect you. Of course here people are told their past was a lie - but they weren't given any additional facts about what is right now. It was still pure conjecture as to how well they did.

I think this is a very poor conclusion, an article by a professional journalist who just is trying to make money by posting something dumb. It's obvious why people are "irrational". There is so stinking much information in the world, not to mention the pressure our own minds put on us in the form of wants and needs. We have to sift through that to make decisions. The fact is irrationality comes from not sifting through the information correctly which is a difficult task that takes time and training.

There are all kinds of reasons we don't sift through information correctly, and as machine learning shows that takes time. Plus we often have pride which keeps us from acknowledging the truth.

The of course even if we have the facts sometimes it is difficult to make predictions based on those facts. This is in my opinion often because we don't really understand the facts. The only way to make predictions is based on past experience of some sort. If you don't understand the past well you can't make a good prediction, so once again it comes down to not understanding the huge amount of info in the world.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#318

Post by PetoU » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 2:37 PM UTC

methehack wrote: post #26

I guess it should come as no surprise that the comments section for an article called “facts don’t change our minds” would be so disappointing. For me, this article — and many like it that point out how whimsical and feeble our natural, undisciplined cognitive capacities are — are a rally cry to continue the enlightenment project, as best we can and in as personal a way as we can. Years ago I learned that my family m…

I see this events roughly the same. The romantic emotional turn against rational enlightenment, can be seen nowadays. In a broader picture, you could see this oscillation of rational / irational (objectivists / subjectivists ) cycles all over history. Someone surprised by this events seems ignorant of history, and how people can actually behave.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#319

Post by Noos » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

Why is this even a valid article? The evidence given was based on studies that actively deceived the takers in order to prove a point. Of course if you trick people they become defensive. You've primed them to believe one thing and then turned around and said it was another.

Re: Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

#320

Post by hashkb » Wed, Mar 08, 2017, 3:00 PM UTC

bobbington wrote: post #317

This is misleading article like the guys who show you optical illusions and then say you can't trust what you see. The fact is that it is rational to let past experiences affect you. Of course here people are told their past was a lie - but they weren't given any additional facts about what is right now. It was still pure conjecture as to how well they did. I think this is a very poor conclusion, an article by a prof…

Sounds like you're defending those who throw up their hands because critical thinking is just too hard. I found your comment depressing.