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

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

#71

Post by kunglao »

tabtab wrote: post #45
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"…

The problem with trying to be "define any assumptions" and using "a clear chain of logic" is that, if you do this right, you will realise that there's really very few things you can actually say about anything at all. This is a problem when it comes to day to day dealings.

On the one hand, average population do not agree on what can be construed as "self-evident". On the other hand, what seems self-evident within our limited capacity is often misguided or frustratingly incomplete. Even if we sorted both these out, being logical means having to deal with details. My experience has been that average person does not like to deal with the details.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #11
wetpaws wrote: post #5

I dismiss this fact as it does not fit into my worldview

Funny, but what about those who agree with it? Do they agree with it because it's true? Or just because they've dismissed the facts that don't agree? This idea means that you can't really trust anything that you think is true, including this idea . To some degree it is, not quite self-refuting, but at least... self-skepticism-causing? I don't know a good word for what I'm trying to say. But it leads you to question t…

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by joe_the_user »

analog31 wrote: post #67
tabtab wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

I suspect that there are many situations where the "facts" are poorly established or just wrong, and "logic" is just a set of assertions rendered plausible by the rhetorical skill and popularity of the debater. Stubbornness may be a survival trait for a social animal. We humans are flooded with facts and logic contrived to cause us to sacrifice our own self interest in favor of someone else's. I've even read that the…

The "logical" thing to do in most real world situations is to be extremely uncertain. I think just about only way that logic enters into real world considerations is through maintaining a set of not-logically-arrived assumptions and heuristic arrived at models and then using some logic and math to keep your behavior consistent.

A lot of what people call logic are things like "not expecting a different result from the same behavior" and "not follow an impulse with no relation to reality" but even those are heuristics. Usually good heuristics but not logic.

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

#74

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

When looking at specific claimed values, outside of a specific core, not so much.

When looking at general orientation, particularly in terms of concentration vs. extension of establishment power, there are trends peresistent across millennia.

This passage from the opening of A.H.M. Jones, Augustus, sticks with me:

It was the agrarian problem that sparked off the violence that was ultimately to destroy the Republic. Tiberius Gracchus' bill [Lex Sempronia Agraria, Ed], enacted in 133 B.C. for distributing the public land, after leaving a generous allowance to the occupiers, in small lots to poor citizens, excited such furious resistance among the senatorial landowners that a group of them lynched Gracchus. This was the first in a series of violent clashes between two groups who called themselves the optimates and the populares. The nucleus of the optimates was the small clique of nobles (men whose fathers, grandfathers, or more remote ancesters had been consuls) who more or less monopolized the highest offices and dominated the Senate, but they had wide support among the propertied class, even, as Cicero says, propserous freedman; otherwise they could not have maintained their unbroken hold on the higher magistracies. They were conservatives, who regarded the rights of property as sacred, and therefore resisted bitterly any attempts to redistribute land or cancel debt. They were upholders of the constitution and of religion, which could be used to block any revolutionary legislation. Though at times they had to yield to popular pressure, they always remained the government.

The populares were a much less well defined group. Their leaders were individual politicians or very small groups of politicians, who at intervals attempted to legislate in the interests of the people, by which they meant the common people....

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6i2h0e/ahm_jon...

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

#75

Post by d1zzy »

padmanabhan01 wrote: post #54
tabtab wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

It's not always logic vs guts. Logic is great when you are dealing with theoretical problems that are well defined and you know the variables involved etc. In real life problems, often there are way too many variables, are time bound, things aren't as well defined. It's in those cases that people resort to gut..

That's fine and all except we should at least recognize when we've decided by gut and when by logic. Unfortunately this doesn't happen in most cases which means that when weighing alternatives we give equal credit to gut and logic based decisions because we don't even know which is which.

Saying "I don't know" is one of the most honest and correct things a human can say about most problems. Then starting from that they may attempt to gather some (partial) information and build a logic to support some solution. But if instead we're starting with "let's do this" then we already lost.

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

#76

Post by epicgiga »

Accurate, but fundamentally it is a type of laziness.

Changing your worldview takes a serious amount of effort. Most people don't use their new years resolution one year gym memberships after the second week of January -- and rewiring your beliefs in the face of evidence and reason makes gymming look like sitting on your couch in your undies.

This is why it's fundamentally an education issue. People's false beliefs and weak work ethics are usually baked in back at school.

If school was improved, this problem would be diminished.

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

#77

Post by internet_user »

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…

how is that measured? what are the tests that measure for it? tia

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

#78

Post by dredmorbius »

ryukafalz wrote: post #4
starpilot wrote: post #2

In the book Superforecasting, one of the top scorers in a prediction contest wrote a program to display him news sites with differing biases from what he had viewed in the past. Social news, including HN, does the opposite.

HN doesn’t show different results to different people, does it? Though I suppose things that the majority disagree with are less likely to be upvoted.

Not based on user behaviours, excepting whether or not users have opted in to "showdead".

Posting new or low-rated stories will appear on some but not all front-page views, effectively by random assignment was tried in the past, it fared poorly. The idea was that those that pick up votes are rated more highly. The result was that readers reacted viscerally and negatively to junk.

Discussion:

Apparently tried, but reverted (from 5 years ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333178

And from a month ago:

When we tested a variant of this idea, we found that it didn't work for what I guess you could call psychological reasons: readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing junk on HN's front page. By "junk" I mean stories that were placed there randomly and that weren't of high-enough quality to otherwise be credible candidates for the front page. Basically, it was an "ow my eyes", "get that shit away from me" effect. (I don't mean to demean the submissions people posted that got randomly placed in this way; it's just that words like junk and shit reflect how users reacted to the random placement thing.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868365

Apparently my theory on front-page submissions and karma accumulation is officially validated:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228866

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

#80

Post by mgh2 »

You have to be aware that part of human nature comes with greed, dishonesty, and countless of other nasty things. Maybe what we call "gut" is another checking point to guard ourselves of the real monster inside each of us.

Take GMOs, I am still skeptical of the science behind its safety, especially knowing that corporations fund these starving scientists. There is for example, a hidden MIT (unpublished, maybe due to retaliation fears) study that found 10 correlations of diseases to the rise of GMOs. Feel free to fact-check, HN is great at this (study below): https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson....

You can accuse the less-educated or talented on their bias all you want, but ultimately the smartest elite lie more often for personal gain than the humble and innocent rest (99%)...Perhaps we should be pointing fingers at our own society that glorifies lies and hides truth. Ex: "relative truth and morality" was invented by this culture.

Perhaps there is something in our human nature that still strives for truth after all, but it is very hidden among all the lies and the rest of our majority evil nature. Some people call it "the moral law". There is still a sliver of hope...

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