Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

niemanlab.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 137 posts

Re: Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

#41

Post by crispinb »

Does the research cited distinguish between hardwired vs culturally (or developmentally) entrenched behaviour? I haven't followed all the links so I'm asking, not answering, but if the research doesn't make that distinction, then the 'hardwired' aspect is unwarranted, and the title should have been something like "Contemporary humans tend to dismiss ...".

In general, most social psychology research is still conducted on WEIRDS (and if the current Euro-American 'global' culture continues to spread, this is going to become an increasingly harder problem to tease out). Richard Nisbett & others claim to have shown that many cognitive behavioural regularities merely assumed to be 'hardwired' turn out not to be universal, therefore not hardwired at all.

Re: Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

#42

Post by mnemonicsloth »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #32
mmsimanga wrote: post #9

> This approach succeeds most of the time when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen. The article is interesting but I think misses one critical point. Most "facts" aren't as clear cut as the weight of hydrogen. Most answers to questions will differ according to conditions. As an example not all people will respond the same to a treatment regimen. Low carb doesn't work for everyone for different reasons so…

If we're talking about weight loss, low carb does indeed work for everyone, just not everyone can stick with it, because the link between brain and gut is complex and strong, physical activity levels vary which impacts the speed of progress, etc. It is a fact that there is no process by which someone eats less than 20 g of carbs per day and does not lose weight.

...except eating 4000 calories a day of fat and protein.

Conservation of energy is the law.

Re: Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

#45

Post by tabtab »

austincheney wrote: post #12

Twice I have been through interviews that use hours of psychology assessments to filter candidates. One of those was a large hedge fund. Through that I have learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait that is astonishingly rare. Most humans are hardwired to seek mutual security, which means banding together as a stress coping mechanism. That incidentally means some natural revulsion of…

Re: I have learned that objectivity...is astonishingly rare.

As somebody who has been in many political debates, I have to agree. A good many are addicted to authority figures to tell them how to think.

Another frustrating aspect of human nature is that most people don't know how to be logical. I strive to be logical as a personal goal, but it's often not valued in the work-place, or anywhere.

Keep in mind "logical" is not necessarily the same as "being right", at least not my working definition. Being logical is being able to back up your viewpoint and claims using a clear chain of logic. I define any assumptions I make as givens, and my conclusion can be formed directly from those givens. I don't necessarily write it out in formal logic, but if one questions a specific informally-written step, I can and do formalize/clarify it.

Most don't return the favor. "My guts have proven accurate and I'd rather trust my gut feelings" is a common response. Screw Guts, I want logic, damn humans! Human guts have proven dumb.

Re: Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

#46

Post by imtringued »

Isn't that obvious? Think of the human brain as a byzantine fault tolerant distributed system. You are collaborating with other "nodes" that may be malicious, manipulitative or omit critical information. Therefore every message you receive has to be validated but since there is no objective criteria that can be used to form global consensus the only way to validate messages is by drawing upon your existing knowledge. When you are young you are more receptive to messages because you haven't gathered enough knowledge. Your "worldview" is being developed and then once it has matured you can use it to validate further messages.

Lock-in happens when you build a whole network of beliefs that are fully dependent on each other. Admitting A can mean that B is no longer valid but you are fully convinced C must be true and if C is true then B is true as well. Therefore denying A is the only way to maintain your worldview.

Re: Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

#47

Post by dane-pgp »

mynameishere wrote: post #20

Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed picture of how Donald Trump is the victim of a fabricated conspiracy...None of that is correct Day 1 after the election. On Day 1 after that guy was elected the media--95 percent of it, in lockstep--said the following: "Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia, etc, etc, etc." For years . And then they dropped it when the shit didn't stick…

To be fair, the media was also talking about Russia before the election too, and so was Trump himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kxG8uJUsWU

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't stick as planned":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_th...

but I'm glad we both agree about the correctness of the article title.

Re: Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

#48

Post by hnuser123456 »

mnemonicsloth wrote: post #42
hnuser123456 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're talking about weight loss, low carb does indeed work for everyone, just not everyone can stick with it, because the link between brain and gut is complex and strong, physical activity levels vary which impacts the speed of progress, etc. It is a fact that there is no process by which someone eats less than 20 g of carbs per day and does not lose weight.

...except eating 4000 calories a day of fat and protein. Conservation of energy is the law.

Sure, yes, of course, but protein especially being harder to digest means for eating a constant mass of food, lower carb will cause faster weight loss than a higher proportion of carbs in the diet.

Also, regarding your HN bio, google no longer claims "don't be evil" as a motto as of 2018.

Re: Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

#49

Post by crispinb »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #26
Sarcasmatic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccine "skepticism" used to be more prevalent among the (mostly left) urban health freaks. But that is changing rather rapidly, see for example https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/27/anti-vaccine-repub... . This might be a good example actually of people self-sorting into one of the two tribes. And Republicans (not conservatives) have conquered the science-is-bad spectrum so thoroughly they don't need to fear com…

It doesn't make much sense to use "left" and "right" to describe quite a bit of US politics, but even more so out west, where strange combinations of political outlook and motivation are easy to find.

It's not just the US. Where I live (Northern Rivers, Australia), large numbers of people in the hippy areas would situate themselves politically as ultra-left and/or deep green. So highly anti-capitalist, anti-racist etc. They'll attack the right for its hostility to science when it comes to climate change, yet ignore any science relating to GMOs, nuclear power, vaccines, chemtrails, 4/5g ("Death Rays!" say the local signs). They're very pro-welfare so kind of Statist, yet left-anarchist on drugs, attitude to cops, etc.

People are a mixed bag, and becoming more so (I think). Longstanding political maps are being redrawn almost everywhere it seems.

Re: Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

#50

Post by api »

This could be a side effect of how intelligence works. Intelligence is at least largely about making parsimonious models, and that involves a lot of throwing away of noise. So this is sort of a failure mode of that system. Sometimes contrarian but otherwise good information gets misidentified as noise.
Post reply on HN