Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

The thing is, truth does exert a pull on our beliefs. It's a slow force. It may take years for people to come around to it. Sometimes it even happens on a generational scale. But we are approaching the truth. Everything in history, and everything in our daily experience tells us this. A couple of experiments where researchers manage to fool the people in their studies does not disprove this overall trend.

What scares me about this narrative, is that people are using it to discredit democracy. "Look how stupid people are! We have to spoonfed them the cherrypicked facts that lead them to the right beliefs. We have to decide everything for them."

The point isn't that evidence has no power, it's that it has dramatically less power than most people think. However there are strategies for getting us out of the personal bias quagmire, such as the scientific method and the approach described in the article of providing an account or explanation of your position and the reasons for it. The debating rule of first explaining your opponent's position in your own words, but in a form they accept as being accurate, before trying to rebut it is also hugely powerful. These do seem to work and help lead us to better outcomes, so this is valuable and actually useful work.

To mirror simonh's comment, it's rather ironic that you're responding to a claim of fact, with an opinion. Whether it's true or not is a question of science, not wishful thinking, and you've not given a solid reason to reject the findings of this research.

It's like the way the theory of evolution remains true whether or not some nasty elements of the far right try to use it to justify an atrocious ideology like 'social Darwinism'.

> people are using it to discredit democracy

Who does this? I don't see researchers like Dan Ariely [0] lurching to the far right when they make discoveries about our psychology. (It's odd that neither Ariely nor the field of behavioural economics [1] are mentioned in the article.)

Nothing about this research indicates that non-democratic systems of government are the best way to run things after all.

> truth does exert a pull on our beliefs

Broadly speaking mankind seems to get less ignorant over time, but sometimes the pull on our beliefs can act in the opposite direction. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#backfire_eff...

I don't think that is the real "narrative" here, although reading this article may make it seem like that. The "narrative", or rather the modern scientific understanding which this article tries to present to a lay audience, is that real rational thinking is not our default, even though it seems to us that way.

But we can think more rationally. It just takes a lot more work. We can do all of the following...

* Subject our thinking to a rigorous framework such as the scientific method, in which we have to declare what evidence would falsify our argument (hypothesis) as we make it.

* Study cognitive biases to become more aware of their effects on our thinking and hopefully "immunize" our mind against some of their effects.

* Train our capacity for meta-cognition with mindfulness practices to become more aware of why we think what we think as we think it.

As for using the limitations of human rationality as an argument against democracy... I don't think that's a logical conclusion at all since leaders and lawmakers are subject to these limitations no matter how they come into power. But it is an argument that we still need to improve the processes by which policy is decided and that we need to watch out for and guard against those who would abuse the specific ways that humans can be tricked because of these factors (such as the Cambridge Analytica crowd).