Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by leereeves » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 12:24 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #96

leereeves wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no double-blind studies of the effect cell phones on cancer. That would be impossible - how would you create a control group that thought they were using cell phones but actually weren't? And even if you could magically solve that problem, who would pay to run such a study on thousands of people for years? And Democrats have their own bigots. They're probably worse than Republicans on appearance discriminat…

Please don't use HN for political and ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I apologize. I should refrain from responding to flamebait.

But I waited hours before responding to:

> Every group has their wingnuts, but I'm sure as heck am glad my liberal wingnuts aren't calling for the extermination of nonwhite/nonchristian/nonheteronormitive people.

and it was still highly upvoted and had no mod response. I thought someone should respond.

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

#112

Post by austincheney » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 12:54 PM UTC

mercer wrote: post #92

austincheney wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a false dichotomy. Objectivity allows you to assess data and make decisions based upon that data opposed to a gut feeling. Objectivity is very helpful when it comes to persuading and manipulating people, as it means you are making decisions based upon your observations of them opposed to your personal opinions of them.

Our senses are not objective, and our mental processing of said sensory input even less so. While generally I do agree that trying to be 'objective' in the way you describe is a solid approach, I've met plenty of people and had plenty of experiences where this backfired because I or others had too much trust in the ability to be 'objective' about something, overruling our very subjective but also correct 'gut feeling…

That is largely why objectivity is a personality trait. Most people, at least non cognitively, don’t want objectivity. They want comfort or reassurance.

You can’t pretend to be objective when the appearance of such is convenient, because then you are just lying to yourself about dodging the emotional considerations that compose a decision. This sort of self deception is far more common than you might find comforting. Even highly objective people sometimes need guard rails to ensure their decisions are objectively quantifiable.

All decision making is a highly emotional experience in all cases for all people. It’s just how our primate brains work. For highly objective people a careful consideration of data and perceptions of balance are a fundamental part of that emotional experience in a way they cannot be for other people.

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

#113

Post by austincheney » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 1:18 PM UTC

mercer wrote: post #90

adventured wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found the lack of an ability to use basic logic to be extremely widespread down to simple conversational matters. It severely impedes and distracts conversations (online and off). I wish it were primarily a problem when dealing with theoreticals, as I find it's a problem just about any time you converse where there are many people. Emotionalism is rampant. I have yet to find a forum - in ~25 years of near daily…

I suppose this is a fundamental flaw of 'online communication' having low bandwidth when it comes to conveying information. We humans spent most of our history interacting with people in a more direct way, and having out 'gut' conclude things about another person based on what they say, do, how they look, how they sound, and so on, was and is important to our survival. If I meet a person face to face who says 'Bush d…

> If I meet a person face to face who says 'Bush did x', I might also notice the tone of voice, that the have a Southern drawl, that they're wearing camo and a red hat with MAGA on it. In this situation I'm not likely to conclude that they're pro-Obama despite their critical statement wrt Bush.

Stereotypes are convenient when you need to make decision in a pinch, but they are horribly ignorant and misguided when talking to people. You can easily dispel your ignorant bias by asking a single pointed question.

As far as politically loaded hyperbole and labeled stereotype buckets I find Bush and Obama far more in common than Trump and that Trump and Clinton have far more in common. When I look at these people I don’t care what their politics are or how charming they are. I am trying to examine their motivations and how they interact with people. I am not sure which labeled bucket that would put me in and I don’t really care because I despise political labels.

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

#114

Post by toasterlovin » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 3:26 PM UTC

kunglao wrote: post #71

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"…

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…

> you will realise that there's really very few things you can actually say about anything at all

This really only applies if you require absolute certainty. But most of the time being reasonably certain is enough to operate in the world. And you can be reasonably certain about lots of stuff.

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

#115

Post by pixl97 » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #25

edoo wrote: post #10

Hardwired and perhaps trained as well. If you ever develop serious skill at debugging logic problems it will be because you have no choice but to accept facts that don't fit into your world view, or maybe it is because you stop having a rigid world view because of how many times you eventually realize you weren't seeing the bigger picture.

A number of times, I've had to debug something where the impossible was happening. The question then became "Which thing that I think is impossible is actually possible? And how do I find out?"

I like to think of it as "it is impossible at this layer", which then can point to a failure at another abstraction layer.

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

#116

Post by pixl97 » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #83

droithomme wrote: post #31

It's a good filter to cut through distracting BS that would otherwise bog you down. If you're surviving and thriving, your worldview is not so bad. A worldview is a paradigm of reality constructed over decades. It makes sense to require higher standards of evidence for apparent exceptions to the hard won rules eked out from decades of observation and insight.

I'm increasingly convinced that worldviews / mental models are not simply modeling devices, but information rejection tools. Borrowing from Clay Shirkey's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", the world is a surprisingly information-rich space , and humans (or any other information-processing system, biological or otherwise) simply aren't equipped to deal with more than a minuscule fraction of it. We…

Heh, you've hit a point I thought of years ago. That is, the brain isn't so much of a learning device, but instead on of the most powerful filtering devices ever created.

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

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Post by Kim_Bruning » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

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..

Slightly aside; I wonder ...

How large is the difference between arriving at an answer by "using your gut", vs. arriving at the answer using a Machine Learning system?

Especially in cases where the ML system is a simulated neural net?

In both cases you are using a neural net based optimizer, and in both cases it is hard to apply (post-hoc) introspection.

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

#118

Post by jffhn » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #57

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"…

> Another frustrating aspect of human nature is that most people don't know how to be logical. Many human philosophies reject logic (Or any mechanical system of derivation) as a valid epistemological device. Logic in the west is heavily shaped by Greek philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, and then Latin Catholicism's embrace of them in the medieval times (logic is not particularly important in the eastern churches…

>Many human philosophies reject logic (Or any mechanical system of derivation) as a valid epistemological device.

People can reject what they want, but rejecting hammers doesn't make them less capable of hitting nails.

>logic remains popular mainly due to the theological musings (...)

It's a flourishing field, popular for its usefulness in formal proofs, etc., not a dead remains of the past.

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

#119

Post by jffhn » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

>dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

I find this disconnect from reality especially fascinating in the software field, where nature's answers are just at our fingertips, and where we just have to open an editor or launch our program to be able to verify our expectations.

I once told one of our architects that we were creating a lot of (Java) garbage, and he stared at me incredulously before saying: "but... no, we are using factories!" (the code was bloated with factories indeed, but no object was ever returned to them since noone knew when instances could be released)

In the less verifiable and more nebulous matters of human psyche and philosophy, all hell breaks loose, which is unfortunate since they are also the most essential. I remember my philosophy professor in college, telling us, as we were leaving him for math class: "Ah, now serious stuffs!".

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

#120

Post by ska » Sat, Feb 01, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #70

ska wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a false dichotomy. I value objectivity a lot, but recognize that there are lots of issues in human interactions that you just cannot solve well with this approach. In trying to break it down to something tractable, you throw out the important bits. I suspect that sometimes the resistance you find is not due to you applying logic, but instead misapplying it. For what it's worth, I also suspect that som…

It’s not a false dichotomy. Objectivity allows you to assess data and make decisions based upon that data opposed to a gut feeling. Objectivity is very helpful when it comes to persuading and manipulating people, as it means you are making decisions based upon your observations of them opposed to your personal opinions of them.

What I was trying to say is that it is intractable to get the right data in many common cases, and in others unsolvable because of different premises. In the latter case of course it is good to be objective about what the premises are, but you can't derive a solution there often - it's possible but may not be worth the time needed.

Handwavy: often what you need is more rough-and-ready approximate statistics than any real logic. You are still approaching it with an objective mindset, but you are being realistic about the limitations of your data and modeling capabilities.

And at the end of the day a lot of what is important is also subjective.