141–150 of 155 posts
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No it wouldn't cheapen the message, it would illustrate it. I'm also curious which ones.
'Cheapen' might not be the right word but it wouldn't certainly tend to hijack it. As soon as you get specific people start debating the specifics.
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Triangulation. Take in news sources from opposite sides of the political (scientific etc) spectrum and take them all in in equal size/depth. They'll repeat their own message to make you believe you are "on the right side of the issue" but with triangulation both brainwashing attempts cancel out.
My only problem with that is that I get frustrated and contrarian with every side.
Repetition, in itself, does not persuade anyone of anything. Repetition, as others have noted, simply makes the thing being repeated easier to remember. The true "persuasion" -- i.e., the misinterpreting of the false fact as true -- occurs because we forget the /source/ of a statement quicker than we forget the /content/.
So, for example, if you happen from your friend Joe (whom you know to be a compulsive liar) that "Priuses are actually less environmentally friendly than Hummers, because manufacturing the batteries for Priuses actually releases more greenhouse gases than a Hummer releases over its average lifespan," you'll likely remember that statement for far longer than you remember that it came from Joe, the compulsive liar. And if you find yourself in an argument with a pretentious Prius driver two years down the road and you search your memory banks for relevant facts to throw in his face, you may well pull out the "Prius battery" statement, without ever remembering that it is almost certainly bunk. You have, in essence, adopted a false belief due to having an imperfect/poorly configured memory.
To take it a step further: If you then make the "Prius battery" statement to the Prius driver, presenting it as fact, you have repeated it (thus making it more firmly entrenched in your mind) and you have replaced the (previously empty) "Spoken By" metadata field with one that now reads "Me [trust score: 100%]." Speaking the false fact is not necessary to make the false-belief-adoption effect appear, but if you do happen to speak the false fact, it only serves to strengthen the effect and further entrench the false fact.
This effect, of course, only works with facts that are not absurd or plainly wrong on your face. If you hear 2+2=5, you don't need to remember the source to know that's wrong. But there's a whole class of facts out there that exist in a gray area -- where they are wholly falsifiable on their face, and would require some serious digging to validate/disprove -- where this effect can lead to serious confusion. To the extent the repetitive blasting of falsehoods works, it works because of this and this alone. Wired here is doing us (and the fools who paid for the "HeadOn" advertising campaign) a disservice by implying otherwise.
>Hitler's rules sound vaguely familiar. I don't think comparing Hillary to Hitler is that appropriate.
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It's ridiculous to compare Trump to Hitler. It's a childish emotional response from people who have spent a lot of their adult life in left leaning echo chambers. If you have a policy you want to criticize, by all means do. Don't shut your brain off and try to imply the president is the same as a man responsible for genocide. It puts you in the same camp as the people claiming Obama is a closet Muslim terrorist. >Now…
Just stop. Just. Stop. The parent didn't mention Trump. You are the one who brought up Clinton. And now you're whining hypocritically about childishness, when your childishness started all this. The vast majority of Americans voted against Trump, who has been and continues to be the main dog-whistler-wink-winker for the only real echo chamber, of racist ideas like Obama wasn't born here, or was a Muslim, or supported…
What makes some people more vulnerable to accepting things uncritically? Why is it so hard to admit when they or someone they support makes a mistake? I have an ego, I don't like being wrong, and I think I'm right a lot. Ok, so far I get it. But to constantly ignore or avoid objective evidence? How do people not become ill at the thought? 1) Clinical narcissism or sociopathy? It's all an intentional means to an end.…
To add to this, I think an additional problem is academia.
So much of success and even prestige in academia is garnered through skills that do not involve critical thinking.
Who hasn't had a conversation with someone at the top of their field who has strong, factually unsupported, convictions about another?
Entire fields are subject to self-interested ideologies, rather than facts (i.e. my undergrad degree in economic science was more propaganda science at all): http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/economics-scien...
Just to clear up any notion that I'm being bitter, I graduated at the top of my class.
There needs to be entire coursework in critical thinking, starting in primary school. Unfortunately, most of my primary school education outside of maths and language was just rote memorization of facts.
Humans are the only beings who has language and hence reason to understand how everything works, unless they engage in producing dogmas and chimeras out of words and abstract concepts, which is what they usually do.
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It's not some people. It's most people. Investigating claims rigorously is very difficult, even for highly skilled individuals. And it usually has very minimal direct impact on the mundane aspects of day-to-day to life. For many, there isn't an easy answer to the question: "Why should I bother, given everything else going on in my life?" Honestly, it's pretty great how many people are willing to spend time and effort…
> I like to think I'm getting better at being generally skeptical and slowly layering together a coherent, mutually supportive set of usefully accurate mental models of how the world works You may be interested in the Meaningness project: http://meaningness.org
Btw, here is the fixed link: https://meaningness.com/
And HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136458
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How deliciously Nihilistic.
HN discussion from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13136458