I totally agree! I recently wrote a blog post saying something like this:
http://blog.drgriffin.com.au/posts/2021-01-13-facts-will-not...
Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
21–30 of 175 posts
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#22The problem with "objective facts" is that they are often carefully selected or pulled out of context to bolster the arguer's position. I'm sure everyone can think of objective facts related to covid that both make the disease seem more deadly, and also objective facts that make it seem less deadly. Appeals to emotion with subjective experiences have the same problem. You can use them to bolster support for the argue…
Or as the late great Mark Twain put it: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." A good example of FUD spreading using 'facts' is the current war on vaping. More contentiously, there is also the war against glycophosphate.
I don't know anything about these "wars". What's happening?
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#23Actually when it comes to personal experiences, and human to human offline interaction I've just noticed I don't need to agree with everyone.
I have liberal friends, conservative friends. I've dated liberals and I've dated conservatives. Well I still vote, I'm not nearly as political as I used to be. I don't use social media ( including online dating) , if only because I found people to be insanely mean. I don't want to be called slurs when discussing politics, and that's what happens online. Now if I'm at a bar, I might actually even buy a voter from the other team a beer. I can see his or her humanity. Online the other team is literally a group of evil villains who want to destroy all that is good in the world. And I'm at the point where I think social media needs to be heavily regulated to stop society from imploding. It's just too powerful, too harmful of a tool as is.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#24It's interesting to me that this delineates between facts and personal experience as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts. Perhaps a more useful way to think about people's relation to truth is one of proximity. For a given individual, their personal experience is entirely factual, and because it is also most proximate to them, it is weighted the most highly. Intuitively, I think we understan…
> this delineates between facts and personal experience as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts
As a matter of neuroscience, from a quick search it appears that they do not, [0] although as a philosophical point sure, personal history narratives consist (at least partly) of beliefs of facts.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952732/ (or if you like paywalls: https://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2FS1355617710000676 )
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#25It's interesting to me that this delineates between facts and personal experience as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts. Perhaps a more useful way to think about people's relation to truth is one of proximity. For a given individual, their personal experience is entirely factual, and because it is also most proximate to them, it is weighted the most highly. Intuitively, I think we understan…
N.b. in “An Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent”[0], John Henry Newman makes a distinction between real and notional apprehension that would, I think, be useful here.
[0] http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter4-1.html
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#26It's interesting to me that this delineates between facts and personal experience as if personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts. Perhaps a more useful way to think about people's relation to truth is one of proximity. For a given individual, their personal experience is entirely factual, and because it is also most proximate to them, it is weighted the most highly. Intuitively, I think we understan…
Many facts are universal claims that are actually pretty hard to prove. It can take many scientific studies to establish a fact. It's often not easy to figure out what to believe.
It's also often the case the whoever is asserting a fact didn't figure it out themselves. They are repeating someone else's assertion. Often, they misunderstood or simplified.
With personal stories, it's simpler: do you believe the person telling the story or not?
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [0] For example (and this is just one example), I remember last year stories about how covid-19 victims were going into mass graves in New York City. And while that was a true and an objective fact, important context was left out. The context that was missing was that they were being buried on Hart Island, which is literally a mass grave site designated for unidentifiable persons dying of any cause, not just covid.…
I ended up deleting that example because I knew someone was going to quibble about it. More people were buried on Hart Island in 2020 than previous years but more people were buried everywhere in 2020. That doesn't change the fact that Hart Island existed pre-covid and will continue to exist post-covid and that the "mass graves" stories were based on carefully selected out-of-context facts in order to paint covid in…
Fair enough i didn't notice that you deleted that.
> That doesn't change the fact that Hart Island existed pre-covid and will continue to exist post-covid
sure. i don't take issue with that. it was just one of many reports on the anomaly events like the refrigerator morgues and other events. Fact of the matter this disease is very deadly and the articles of the time show it.
here's articles from both sides of the aisle during that time period:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/11/us/hart-island-coronavirus-bu...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/aerial-images-new-york-hart-islan...
Both show proper context and highlight how different the burials were. (neither of them are AP stories) fox notes that burials went from one day a week to five days a week. both offer the history of the island and what it's normally used for. I see a fair article from both of those ideologically opposed orgs.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or as the late great Mark Twain put it: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." A good example of FUD spreading using 'facts' is the current war on vaping. More contentiously, there is also the war against glycophosphate.
I don't know anything about these "wars". What's happening?
There's a bunch of ads promoting making vaping illegal, on terrestrial radio/tv fear mongering about heavy metals aimed at the 'Karen' crowd. As far as I can tell they are based on a few people who died after consuming grey market THC cartridges and some studies where the scientists intentionally cranked up the wattage above spec to get metal release.
Glycophosphate (Round-Up) allegedly caused cancer in a few workers who, per label, grossly misused it. There have a been a few high profile lawsuits, at least one in CA, over those cancers, and corresponding calls to ban it. This is of course despite both an excellent safety record and lack of safer alternatives, asserted by many studies and meta studies from the FDA and the European equivalent. Glycophosphate though, is 'factually'[0] listed by IARC as a class 2A carcinogen. I'm sure there are few HN threads digging into this one if you have lots of time to kill.
[0]IARC is basically a factory of 'facts' that sound bad but aren't when it comes to cancer: class 2A is the same class as eating red meat.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#29Key point: "The problem is that facts—at least today—are themselves subject to doubt, especially when they conflict with our political beliefs (21). In the past decades, America has seen a decentralization of news and information (22) that has allowed people to gather their “own facts” (i.e., alternative facts; ref. 23). Most recently, claims of “fake news” allow people to distrust any information that fails to align…
Including the NYT communist shilling with Walter Durante? That doesn't seem so middle of the road.
Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
#30Key point: "The problem is that facts—at least today—are themselves subject to doubt, especially when they conflict with our political beliefs (21). In the past decades, America has seen a decentralization of news and information (22) that has allowed people to gather their “own facts” (i.e., alternative facts; ref. 23). Most recently, claims of “fake news” allow people to distrust any information that fails to align…
In 1980 newspapers were where >50% of advertising dollars were spent, now it's going to nothing - and - they have to fight for every little click using click bait. You can see the natural progression towards hyper bifurcated viewpoints.
If they were just smaller that would be one thing, but the change in what they get paid for is bigger, I think.
A paper supported by the big department store's ads is incentivised to be broad, because the store wants to sell to everyone. Likewise a paper supported classified and by sunday realtor adds -- nobody wants to sell their house exclusively to members of some fringe, they want the widest distribution.
But a paper supported by its most outraged subscribers will cater to them, and importantly, to keeping them outraged.