The article is basically saying that if we're told we're right, then we're told we're wrong, we will still believe we're right even though we're presented with a contrary fact? The test group aren't asked their answers in response to being told a fact - its more of a psychological game in my opinion
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
141–150 of 163 posts
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good point. When I see the word 'fact', I remind myself that even now evolution is still only considered a theory - despite the weight of evidence on its side. Because in science something might just show up that invalidates all that came before, and maintaining that faint skepticism is what separates science from belief. (And of course evolution is a theory, not a mere hypothesis because of this weight of evidence…
There's a difference between the theory of evolution and the fact of evolution borne out by the fossil record. Using your definition, even gravity is a "theory", yet things still fall to the ground when we drop them from above.
The difference between the theory of evolution and the "theory of gravity" is that tests about gravity are reproducible and repeatable, but not tests on evolutionary theory. One can not test/replicate evolution happening over millions of years. This is why evolution will forever be a theory. Evolution is not a fact. Its a post-facto explanation, where fossils are made to fit a theory.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#143This is a tangent. How much/long does a study like this cost/take? Is it possible/useful to scale this? From reading into some of the replicability discussion, I've gotten curious about social science generally. What's an expirement like this trying to prove/demonstrate. The journalistic narrative likes the easy "X debunked." I imagine researchers have a more nuanced perspective. I guess what im asking is what does t…
The replication rate is social science studies is very poor. And an even larger problem is that the studies themselves do not actually test what they aim to test, often because they simply cannot. For instance do video games cause violence? The only way you could realistically test this would be to have one group somehow prevented from playing video games for their entire life, or at least up to a certain age, and an…
I think there is a way. Facebook/Google have all data to perform studies like that. Problem is that current University system is broken. You are forced to publish short success stories instead doing actual research.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
>People who don't understand what assault rifles are, Or don't care for pedants who try arguing that an AR-15 isn't an assault rifle... because the issue isn't about terminology. Although trying argue about that does deflect from the real issue though. >or that you can shoot up a school 99% as well with a `regular` rifle Are you trying to say a bolt action hunting rifle is 99% as effective at massacring large numbers…
You contradict yourself when you talk about the issue not being one of terminology when you say the opposite by saying a `regular` rifle is a bolt action rifle when the most common retail rifle sales are of magazine fed semi-automatic weapons. Please come back with an internally coherent argument, and then we can start from there.
Most proposed "assault-weapons bans" ban features like magazines larger than ten rounds and bump stocks.
Whether you want to call a qualifying weapon a "regular" rifle or an "assault" rifle is not pertinent because neither of those terms is well-defined.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#145This is very long and complicated, but I'll try to write a quick comment. Many people know from experience how hard it's to convince anyone to change what they say, the way they behave, etc, from facts alone. I say "behave", because it's very important to realize the difference between "rationally accepting" and "caring about a truth or fact", more to that later. We also know that people can change their minds quite…
> We also know that people can change their minds quite easily when they are exposed to pretty much anything for enough time, with enough repetition. Even when we know something is false, the repetition of a certain discourse can have a noticeable effect on us. When you pair that with other types of external pressures, it becomes even more egregious.
After decades people still believe that global warming is a hoax and vaccines cause autism, despite mountains of oft-repeated evidence that this is not the case.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The rational thing to do for almost everything is to trust the majority of the specialists. Brilliant way to miss the point, which is that rational reasoning also tells you whom to trust. If you have two groups pointing fingers at each other while yelling "Those are not specialists! We are!", you gain no information about who really is. You need something else, and untampered data is something else, even if you can…
Well, only one of those two groups actually studied climate science, so my money is on them being the actual specialists.
You could just as well throw your money at any other group of advocacy scientists... say creation scientists.
Of course, I am not an actual creationist, so dont throw any money at my belief that the world is billions of years old.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#147Michael Huemer has written extensively on the topic of why people are irrational about politics [0]. I recommend this brief talk [1] which goes over some of the key ideas. Fundamentally, it's a problem of incentives: There is little or no incentive for people to be rational about their political beliefs, and there is frequently an incentive to be irrational about them. In particular:
The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that people often choose—rationally—to adopt irrational beliefs because the costs of rational beliefs exceed their benefits. To understand this, one has to distinguish two senses of the word “rational”: Instrumental rationality (or “means-end rationality”) consists in choosing the correct means to attain one’s actual goals, given one’s actual beliefs. This is the kind of rationality that economists generally assume in explaining human behavior. Epistemic rationality consists, roughly, in forming beliefs in truth-conducive ways—accepting beliefs that are well-supported by evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, avoiding contradictions, revising one’s beliefs in the light of new evidence against them, and so on. This is the kind of rationality that books on logic and critical thinking aim to instill.
The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that it is often instrumentally rational to be epistemically irrational.
The theory of Rational Irrationality makes two main assumptions. First, individuals have non-epistemic belief preferences (otherwise known as “biases”). That is, there are certain things that people want to believe, for reasons independent of the truth of those propositions or of how well-supported they are by the evidence. Second, individuals can exercise some control over their beliefs. Given the first assumption, there is a “cost” to thinking rationally—namely, that one may not get to believe the things one wants to believe. Given the second assumption (and given that individuals are usually instrumentally rational), most people will accept this cost only if they receive greater benefits from thinking rationally. But since individuals receive almost none of the benefit from being epistemically rational about political issues, we can predict that people will often choose to be epistemically irrational about political issues.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#148I say that's a good thing. It's a good thing that beliefs have inertia, and it makes sense. Think of the years of patterns of thinking and neural connections that have formed in your brain. Are you expected to read something and change that in an instant? Imagine when Darwin's Theory of Evolution came out, assuming it had perfect evidence for it, do we expect everybody to instantly change their beliefs? And sometimes…
One of my favorite points in favor of facts, debate, and persuasion is the observation that you almost never see someone change their mind, but you can find legions of people who have changed their minds. There are a host of reasons we don't respond to facts with "oh, I guess I'll abandon all my deeply-held beliefs immediately!" Everything from "that's an embarrassing loss of face" to "I'd like to fact-check you befo…
After reading a bit of evolutionary psychology, I realized to my astonishment that humans have evolved to survive, and not to be perfectly rational. Rational so much so its useful. I'm actually convinced that extreme rationality has evolutionary disadvantages. When you realize the universe has no meaning, does it motivate you and your species to keep breeding and take risks? As Schopenhauer said, if you truly considered all the costs associated with having kids before having them, no rational being would ever have kids! No person thinking clearly would ever trade 10-15 minutes of feeling good for a lifetime of costs and responsibilities. Then there's tribalism and ingroup and outgroup psychology which dictates much of what we see. These are survival mechanisms meant for living in small tribes, malfunctioning in a globally connected civilization. I would suggest yuval harrari's recent article on how humans are hackable and how that completely demolishes our concepts of liberal democracy , free market etc which assumes rational actors behaving in their self-interest.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#149I say that's a good thing. It's a good thing that beliefs have inertia, and it makes sense. Think of the years of patterns of thinking and neural connections that have formed in your brain. Are you expected to read something and change that in an instant? Imagine when Darwin's Theory of Evolution came out, assuming it had perfect evidence for it, do we expect everybody to instantly change their beliefs? And sometimes…
Agree with most of what you said, but > A world where people's minds are easily changed by facts would be a world of fads... is an interesting statement. Because we live in a world of fads anyway. This even though peoples' minds are not easily changed by facts.
Let me rephrase that: it would be a world where we would become extinct quickly. I am convinced that extreme rationality has evolutionary disadvantages. So the emphasis on rationality only makes sense in a modern society when you can in some sense override your biological programming since you don't have to fight a bear and hunt etc.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#150I say that's a good thing. It's a good thing that beliefs have inertia, and it makes sense. Think of the years of patterns of thinking and neural connections that have formed in your brain. Are you expected to read something and change that in an instant? Imagine when Darwin's Theory of Evolution came out, assuming it had perfect evidence for it, do we expect everybody to instantly change their beliefs? And sometimes…
So true. I read this article recently about doctors not switching to the newest techniques. [ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/upshot/its-hard-for-docto... ] The interesting thing is that I think the author makes the opposite point of what they were intending. The tl;dr of the article is that a study came out saying doctors should strictly control blood sugar in the ICU. It was very slow to gain adoption. Eventuall…
"Imagine if America created an evidence-based centrist party in the 1940s that listened to the scientists how much more advanced things would be. Mandatory frontal lobotomies for hysterical women who show sapphic tendencies. Free cigarettes for kids to smooth their breathing." https://twitter.com/getfiscal/status/1032299239160913920