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Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

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Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#41

Post by starkd »

umvi wrote: post #5

The 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…

Sure, this is the obvious takeaway if you are solely interested in how to persuade others and advance your agenda. But the reason why personal experiences are better at bridging moral/political divides is because shared experience makes it possible for to hear another viewpoint. If all you get from this study is an improved approach to advancing your issue, that's a shame.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#42

Post by TameAntelope »

croissants wrote: post #3

The upshot of these experiments appears to be: communicating a "relevant, harm-based, and personal experience" leads people to rate you as more rational and respect you more. Maybe because it reframes the interaction from "who will win this fight, you or me ?" to "gosh, I'm a vulnerable human, and here's part of how I got that way", which makes beating them at this game or demonizing them...somewhat less appealing.

Vulnerability has been popular for a while now as a way of successfully navigating crucial conversations.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#43

Post by wazoox »

MegaButts wrote: post #33
thereisnospork wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Leaded gasoline had an extraordinary safety record for decades before suddenly being recognized as dangerous. The story is actually fascinating. But my point is this is actually not as strong of an argument as you might think, especially since…

I think that the patents on glyphosate itself expired recently. The RoundUp-ready seeds are still protected, though.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#44

Post by UncleOxidant »

dantheman wrote: post #39
UncleOxidant wrote: post #8

Key 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…

Don't forget the media lied throughout that time too; let us not forget the craziness of satanic ritual abuse, or the lies that led to the vietnam war, etc... The media and the government routinely mislead the public, look at in 2019 the intentional confusion of blackmarket thc vapes and tobacco vaping. Or more recently, the use of human trafficking. To claim there was sometime in the past where the news was good and…

> Don't forget the media lied throughout that time too; let us not forget the craziness of satanic ritual abuse, or the lies that led to the vietnam war, etc...

The satanic ritual abuse stuff was in the 80s early 90s. Lies that led to vietnam, sure. But also there were lies that led to the Iraq war in the more fractured Fox News/internet age so it seems like the more fractured, politicized news didn't help protect against that.

> To claim there was sometime in the past where the news was good and reliable would require overlooking a huge amount of actual historic malfeasance.

Sure, my point was there was a past where we had a more common narrative. That certainly has downsides, but now we're seeing that it had some advantages compared to our current fractured era.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#45

Post by UncleOxidant »

iguy wrote: post #32
yters wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Including the NYT communist shilling with Walter Durante? That doesn't seem so middle of the road.

Different era. "Up until about the late 70s" makes it sound like this was the eternal state of affairs, but it wasn't. It was a few postwar decades.

Right, if I could edit (too late now it seems) I would add "from post WWII till about the late 70s".

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#46

Post by [deleted] »

MegaButts wrote: post #33
thereisnospork wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Leaded gasoline had an extraordinary safety record for decades before suddenly being recognized as dangerous. The story is actually fascinating. But my point is this is actually not as strong of an argument as you might think, especially since…

[deleted]

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#47

Post by lotsofpulp »

starkd wrote: post #41
umvi wrote: post #5

The 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…

Sure, this is the obvious takeaway if you are solely interested in how to persuade others and advance your agenda. But the reason why personal experiences are better at bridging moral/political divides is because shared experience makes it possible for to hear another viewpoint. If all you get from this study is an improved approach to advancing your issue, that's a shame.

I have lots of shared experiences with my parents, but there is no bridging our moral/political divide. The assumptions they use in their model of the world, as well as the data, are completely inappropriate. At least to accomplish my goals.

I think unless conversations agree on the assumptions and agree on the data sources and data itself, and even the logic, it’s going to end in disagreement. My parents can hold conflicting viewpoints simultaneously, in sentences one after another, and have no problem with it.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#48

Post by Udik »

tacitusarc wrote: post #9

It'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…

Personal experiences are not facts- they can be cherry-picked, they can be biased, they can be exaggerated and even just made-up. When reporting a supposedly objective fact, you have at least the benefit of multiple independent points of view over it- something observable happened and multiple people reported on it. When you hear a personal experience, you're often hearing an unconfirmed and un-confirmable recount of things that are entirely outside of public verification.

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#49

Post by fsflover »

mmsimanga wrote: post #37
umvi wrote: post #5

The 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…

This was the biggest lesson I learnt when doing my PhD. One of the sections I had to look at what factors led to successful software projects within companies. This could be anything, from going with Open Source, buying the right software from the right vendor, management involvement, 10X developer in the company or even something as simple as user training. You can practically pick whatever factor suits your bias an…

Perhaps because it's all true and all those factors help the projects?

Re: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts

#50

Post by mmsimanga »

fsflover wrote: post #49
mmsimanga wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the biggest lesson I learnt when doing my PhD. One of the sections I had to look at what factors led to successful software projects within companies. This could be anything, from going with Open Source, buying the right software from the right vendor, management involvement, 10X developer in the company or even something as simple as user training. You can practically pick whatever factor suits your bias an…

Perhaps because it's all true and all those factors help the projects?

You are right. The problem comes when it is time to weight which one is most important when making a decision. Open source Vs of the shelf all these "true"facts are brought to the table. It often ends up being what head honcho wants or going with IBM/Microsoft. No one ever got fired for making that decision
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