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Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

newyorker.com

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Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#41

Post by roter »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #20

I'm reminded of Tetlock and Gardner's excellent book 'Superforecasting', which was essentially a study of people who consistently score at the top of prediction markets. One key thing that these 'superforecasters' had in common was that any new information caused them to update their model of the world, but none caused them to update it very much - typical people making predictions either didn't update their model or…

Thanks for the recommendation.

I guess we just need to tune our relaxation factors [0] or, perhaps better, recalibrate our Kalman filters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successive_over-relaxation

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#42

Post by Isamu »

It takes constant training and energy to follow where the facts lead you. Feynman used different approaches as a way to keep himself focused on the facts and not exclusively what he “knew” was true. He said the easiest person to fool is yourself.

Mostly people want to validate their intuition and gut feelings and don’t want to experience the discomfort of finding out that their intuition is not magically correct.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#43

Post by simonh »

rbecker wrote: post #34
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really dislike this narrative that facts don't change our minds and we are all irrational. 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 no…

> To mirror simonh's comment, it's rather ironic that you're responding to a claim of fact, with an opinion. Are they? "But we are approaching the truth. Everything in history, and everything in our daily experience tells us this." sounds like a claim of fact. Do you disagree with it? Have we not, collectively, changed our minds on a great many things? Evolution, heliocentrism, the importance of doctors washing their…

Nobody has suggested humans are not capable of rationality, that's an absurd exaggeration. Clearly we are. The article even points out the scientific method as a valuable procedural tool we can use to help overcome the effects of biases, and suggests a method of self-reflection that has proved in studies to help obtain useful results. The better we understand those biases the better we are able to develop new approaches and procedures to mitigate them. But the first step is to understand ourselves and our limitations. Without that, we're a flailing bunch of tribal apes screaming at each other.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#44

Post by btmoney06 »

simonh wrote: post #13
im3w1l wrote: post #11

I really dislike this narrative that facts don't change our minds and we are all irrational. 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…

Whether you like it or not has no bearing on whether it's true. In fact that's a confirmation bias right there. Presented with evidence of something you find unpalatable you simply reject it outright purely on the basis you don't like it. Personally I'd rather know. 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…

Academics and the New Yorker staff: "Everybody is biased, except for me of course."

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#45

Post by im3w1l »

simonh wrote: post #36
im3w1l wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presented with evidence of something you find unpalatable you simply reject it outright purely on the basis you don't like it. I presented a case for why I think it is wrong. And I presented a case for why people have reason to push it despite it being wrong: it gives them more power. Considering peoples motivations is important, and when someone stands to gain we should be suspicious and have to go over everything…

I suppose I was a bit antagonistic in my post sorry, but if anything your observation supports the article's position. Why should facts exert only a slow, painstaking generational force on belief if people are actually rational? Surely it should have immediate effect? I really don't see what these researchers or journalists have to gain, beyond what they would gain from doing any research or journalism. I'm just not…

> Why should facts exert only a slow, painstaking generational force on belief if people are actually rational? Surely it should have immediate effect?

If you look at rational as a binary, then people aren't rational. But people are a little bit rational. Sufficiently rational, to eventually find the truth.

I like the parallel with machine learning. Many, many bright minds have tried to formalize our intuitions into automatic systems. Gradually they make progress. But it's plain to see that it's not as easy as "just incorporate the new fact". We have systems that can deal with facts, and systems that can learn from experience. But systems that do both, that can learn from experience and express that in terms of facts, or use facts to guide it's exploration, that's an open problem.

As for who has to gain, I do think journalists, and editors, and newspaper owners have something to gain. Their role transforms from giving people "just the facts", to manipulating people into the right beliefs. What the right beliefs are? That's for the journalists and their benefactors to decide.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#46

Post by WhompingWindows »

im3w1l wrote: post #11

I really dislike this narrative that facts don't change our minds and we are all irrational. 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…

Only certain truth exerts a pull on our beliefs: the truth that we use to justify our beliefs post-hoc. It's well established in psychology, from books I've read like "thinking fast and slow" or "The Righteous Mind", psychological study points to people building their beliefs THEN finding facts to justify them.

I do agree that, over generations, the correct and truthful views tend to gain the upper-hand. This arises from each generation downloading a new set of facts and learning in school, when they are young and their minds haven't formed their belief system yet. However, if we allowed all children to enter school at their place of worship from 5 to 18, we'd find college students remarkably unwilling to learn many more facts.

So, more broadly, why does it bother you that facts don't change our minds and we're all irrational? We are Homo Sapiens, a mammalian primate who made the jump from the jungle to the Savannah and learned to work together to gather food and hunt game. We haven't left behind our animal software, it is still active in and exploited by our modern society.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#47

Post by squarefoot »

dutch3000 wrote: post #14

i very much enjoyed the article, but i do prefer apolitical content when possible. unsure why it was necessary to reference trump in the vaccine portion. people (authors included) that can’t control themselves from injecting politics where it doesn’t naturally belong are becoming more and more irritating imo.

> unsure why it was necessary to reference trump in the vaccine portion.

It wasn't necessary, however it gave the authors the opportunity to test in just one line if the summary was true, and I guess it worked.

I also don't want politics injected into scientific topics, but the role of politicians is to rule for people's good, and talk with extreme caution and responsibility because of the trust people give them. When a high profile politician says "this is good", a lot of people will follow the advice blindly, so when a politician put people lives at risk by telling for example that Hydroxychloroquine works as a cure for the Coronavirus (to date at least one dead and one intoxicated after following that advice), it's politics actually harming lives with dangerous information, which makes everyone's duty to inject back common sense into the debate. If only because scientists don't have the same exposure, and it becomes so hard or even impossible for them to undo the damages done by clueless politicians who talk about things they don't know squat.

BTW. I would have the same exact opinion even in the case it was Obama or Clinton doing what Trump did.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#48

Post by simonh »

im3w1l wrote: post #45
simonh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I was a bit antagonistic in my post sorry, but if anything your observation supports the article's position. Why should facts exert only a slow, painstaking generational force on belief if people are actually rational? Surely it should have immediate effect? I really don't see what these researchers or journalists have to gain, beyond what they would gain from doing any research or journalism. I'm just not…

> Why should facts exert only a slow, painstaking generational force on belief if people are actually rational? Surely it should have immediate effect? If you look at rational as a binary, then people aren't rational. But people are a little bit rational. Sufficiently rational, to eventually find the truth. I like the parallel with machine learning. Many, many bright minds have tried to formalize our intuitions into…

>If you look at rational as a binary, then people aren't rational. But people are a little bit rational. Sufficiently rational, to eventually find the truth.

Right, which is pretty much exactly what the article says. It shows what forms the flaws in our rationality take, and suggests procedural methods we can use to help the process of rational analysis along.

Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

#50

Post by olah_1 »

I saw that Yuri Bezmenov interview[1] ages ago and didn't really think of it until now, when crime statistics are openly denied almost as if crime doesn't really exist at all.

Then I thought back to that Bezmenov interview with what he said about "demoralization". When a population is demoralized, they cannot discern true information when it is staring them in the face.

I think ignoring facts has less to do with some kind of esoteric psychological process and more to do with raising multiple generations to believe that they've been lied to and the whole "system" is evil.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaR7mWxuf8

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