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Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

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Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#151

Post by MrFantastic »

mmsimanga wrote: post #44
tunesmith wrote: post #6

We have this weird fetish these last few years with asserting in broad language that people don't change their minds, don't respond to evidence, dig their heels in further when presented with evidence that contradicts their preconceived opinions, etc. It's all over pop psychology and the headlines. Bugs the heck out of me, because if the language they use is literally true, then no one would ever be convinced to chan…

All facts (those that are not lies) are true under specific circumstances/environment. Capitalism is bad. This statement is not always correct and neither is it always wrong. When unchecked, capitalism is bad. Capitalism also gave rise to SpaceX, Apple ...

Apple, SpaceX exists because of Free Markets. There is no reason to think they required our current flavor of Capitalism to come to fruition.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#152

Post by mmsimanga »

MrFantastic wrote: post #151
mmsimanga wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All facts (those that are not lies) are true under specific circumstances/environment. Capitalism is bad. This statement is not always correct and neither is it always wrong. When unchecked, capitalism is bad. Capitalism also gave rise to SpaceX, Apple ...

Apple, SpaceX exists because of Free Markets. There is no reason to think they required our current flavor of Capitalism to come to fruition.

I am not sure I follow the point you are making. The point I was trying to make is that there are good and bad things about capitalism. Often people are always against capitalism or always pro-capitalism but it isn't as simple as that. When you start delving into details you will find some things about capitalism are good and some aren't so great. I for one tink capitalism is the best of the worst lot. I don't think much of the banking and finance systems that are part of capitalism today. As far as I know and I am not economics professor, Free Market is a component of capitalism. Once you produce the goods the market will decide on the price.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#153

Post by ycombinete »

emodendroket wrote: post #58
ycombinete wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must admit to smirking at the unintended irony created by the title of the article, and the publication it appears in. That said, Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind does outline a very similar thing. That our 'reasoning' is almost always a post-hoc attempt to explain how we already feel. And Haidt, while claiming neutrality is very definitely on the right end of the spectrum.

> That said, Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind does outline a very similar thing. That our 'reasoning' is almost always a post-hoc attempt to explain how we already feel. I think Hume beat him to this position by a bit.

And St. Augustine beat Hume to his position by more than a century :)

In The Righteous Mind Haidt actually quotes Hume's "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

Given the above, I'm still happy with Haidt as a reference here, as he references Hume, and also has a decade or two of research to back up his claims.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#154

Post by antidesitter »

the_greyd wrote: post #150
snarf21 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Free cigarettes for kids to smooth their breathing.

How was this “evidence-based”?

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#155

Post by slx26 »

emodendroket wrote: post #145
slx26 wrote: post #52

This 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 an…

well, not the evidence they are frequently exposed to.

but of course there are many other factors. I already talked about the problem with more technical arguments, but nowadays in many cases we have this aversion to science and mistrust for anything that might come from it. also, many people are mostly exposed to what they think and feel, because when someone else tells them something they don't believe in, they don't hear that, they just repeat their own discourse again for themselves. so they are exposed to that. and in case it was a bit confusing, I didn't say that "people will always change their minds [...]", there are a lot of factors. but that we can very easily doubt ourselves when information comes predominantly from only one direction? for sure. and that direction doesn't necessarily need to be "science" or "media". we are just bad at detecting where the relevant information comes from for a person.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#156

Post by tptacek »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #114
beat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Race-IQ correlation? Really? Do tell.

The Minnesota Transracial Adoption [1] study is something that, for better or for worse, changed my outlook. It was a major and longterm study designed to try to prove once and for all that environmental factors were the dominant factor in the correlation between race and IQ. The study followed the results of well to do white parents adopting children of black, half black, indigenous/asian, and white ancestry. In it…

Your analysis of this study is, to put it gently, not the prevailing view in academic psychology. In addition to methodological criticisms, the findings of your cited study not only haven't replicated, but have been contradicted by larger studies that show, for instance, adoption from low-SES parents to high-SES parents --- in co-sibling controlled studies --- is associated with IQ gains of up to 15 points.

It's always a little interesting to me to see the vintage of the studies "HBD" advocates introduce their ideas to HN with.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#157

Post by n4r9 »

candiodari wrote: post #19
n4r9 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the language they use is literally true, then no one would ever be convinced to change their minds ever. Not sure how you've made this leap. The point is not that people never change their minds, just that the way they do so is less evidence-based than one would hope. It even says later in the article: > Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting…

> antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science That's perhaps an argument for the sciences directly built on positivism (the philosophical positivism), but that list ends quickly. Everything else is based on at the very least odds, but mostly consensus, and convincing based on those is required for anything beyond a few basic sciences. And positivism only covers math, large parts of physics and chemistry (but…

I can't understand what you're saying. As far as I can tell, climate science and medicine and to some extent psychology depend on genuine, evidence based reasoning. It's not pure guesswork.

Either way this is very tangential to my point.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#158

Post by TangoTrotFox »

tptacek wrote: post #156
TangoTrotFox wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Minnesota Transracial Adoption [1] study is something that, for better or for worse, changed my outlook. It was a major and longterm study designed to try to prove once and for all that environmental factors were the dominant factor in the correlation between race and IQ. The study followed the results of well to do white parents adopting children of black, half black, indigenous/asian, and white ancestry. In it…

Your analysis of this study is, to put it gently, not the prevailing view in academic psychology. In addition to methodological criticisms, the findings of your cited study not only haven't replicated, but have been contradicted by larger studies that show, for instance, adoption from low-SES parents to high-SES parents --- in co-sibling controlled studies --- is associated with IQ gains of up to 15 points. It's alwa…

Please do link to any studies that actually designed, developed, and carried out a comparable experiment with different results. I'd be more than happy to read them! I try to base my views on evidence so much as I possibly can -- and to my knowledge, such studies do not exist. On that note please do not link to any studies where an individual decided to 'process' data and p-hack their way to a proof for their ideological biases. There are indeed a multitude of such studies, and such behavior goes a long ways towards explaining the current replication crisis plaguing psychology.

p-hacking is particularly easy to do with IQ since there's a peculiar effect in that the heritability of IQ is not fixed. When we are young our IQ is generally able to be more significantly influenced by environmental factors, yet as we age our IQ becomes ever more a product of genetics with recent studies showing the heritability to be upwards of 80%.

So for instance in this study if you look at the results of the children at age 7, you'll note that both black and white children had measured IQs that were about 10% higher than their IQ at age 17 (around 8 and 10 points respectively). This is normal and indicative of a privileged upbringing, as all the children in this study had. Yet that privilege counter intuitively does not carry over into adulthood, which is phenomenally interesting -- but also makes it very easy to generate disingenuous arguments when it comes to this topic.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#159

Post by tptacek »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #158
tptacek wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis of this study is, to put it gently, not the prevailing view in academic psychology. In addition to methodological criticisms, the findings of your cited study not only haven't replicated, but have been contradicted by larger studies that show, for instance, adoption from low-SES parents to high-SES parents --- in co-sibling controlled studies --- is associated with IQ gains of up to 15 points. It's alwa…

Please do link to any studies that actually designed, developed, and carried out a comparable experiment with different results. I'd be more than happy to read them! I try to base my views on evidence so much as I possibly can -- and to my knowledge, such studies do not exist. On that note please do not link to any studies where an individual decided to 'process' data and p-hack their way to a proof for their ideolog…

"80% heritability" (which, from the literature, appears to be a wild overestimate, overshooting even Herrnstein's estimate from _The Bell Curve_) does not mean "80% genetically determined". Heritability and genetic determination are different concepts.

Regardless, the only cite you've brought to this thread is a study from the 1970s which has not only not replicated, but has, as I've said, been contradicted by later studies, studies informed by the methodological criticisms the Minnesota study received --- some of those criticisms coming from the study's own authors.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#160

Post by CompanionCuuube »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #144
CompanionCuuube wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Most proposed "assault-weapons bans" ban features like magazines larger than ten rounds

Magazines larger than ten rounds are OEM standard on the regular rifles that are in common retail sale.

You're still failing at being internally consistent.

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