An ancient (albeit trivial) argument for facts not changing minds is that rhetoric was a distinct discipline from logic.
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
51–60 of 126 posts
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#52I 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…
> truth does exert a pull on our beliefs
I'm more cynical than that. I believe that facts do change people's minds, but most people harbor hidden agendas that they try to adjust convenient facts to while ignoring inconvenient ones.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#53i 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. Whe…
i’ve purposely attempted to fully disconnect from all politically related news and i’ve begun to notice oddities in conversation patterns mostly. the pattern is mainly people injecting political comments in completely nonrelated topics being discussed. the trump references were not educational, yet a sign of the author’s inability to control himself. it’s just a complete turn off for me. people can easily make the connections in the article to today’s reality, it doesn’t need to be explicitly referenced.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#54I 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…
The article doesn't say facts never change minds. Clearly, facts do change minds. Just not always. The article simply focuses on the latter case, because that's a more interesting thing to read about.
It's like boring headlines don't get voted up in Hacker News. It has to be something interesting. Facts change peoples' minds. Facts don't change people's minds. Both are true. But only one is interesting.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#55What politicians know that the authors of this study don't seem to realize, is that if we are told the same story repeatedly for long enough, no matter how absurd, we'll start believing it. If you throw in some scary outcome if we don't believe the story, we'll come around sooner. It seems that fear will cause us to re-examine our beliefs and values.
That's the illusory truth effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect), which is one of the understood cognitive biases.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#56First of all have all these psychological studies been replicated? Part of the reason, “facts” don’t change our mind is that a lot of “facts” aren’t really facts like physics, but are rather the result of statistical games. Finally, and I think the biggest issue is that a lot of facts rely on trust, since they are practically impossible for the average person to fully verify. And I think, for a variety of reasons, tr…
> Finally, and I think the biggest issue is that a lot of facts rely on trust, since they are practically impossible for the average person to fully verify. And I think, for a variety of reasons, trust has been lost.
That can explain non-movement of opinion when presented with contrary fact, but not movement away from the fact. The article here notes the experiment when students were presented with dueling articles on capital punishment: the ambiguous data acted to bolster their original position no matter the original stance.
A lack of trust in authority is one thing, but to use the authority's agreement with your pre-existing opinion to determine trust in that same evaluation is inherently circular -- even if it is human.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#57IMO the conclusion "facts don't change our minds" is a stronger conclusion than the first two experiments show. On my reading, the first two experiments show that:
1. if I have a uniform/undefined prior (how the fuck should I know how risky/conservative firefighters are?)
2. and then I'm given an anchor
3. and then told the anchor is bunk
4. the anchor still affects me
But I suspect this hinges very heavily on the fact that our initial prior is basically non-existent. By contrast, if you:
1. picked a topic where I actually have some prior belief (What country is colder: Sweden or Germany?)
2. gave me some information "Germany is actually colder on average than Sweden because of a weird atmospheric thing that affects the nordics"
3. told me that 2 was BS
I highly doubt you'd be able to replicate 4.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#58I 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…
It also assumes a few other critical things. 1. The person learning the fact trusts the source 2. The fact can be easily proven if the person doesn’t trust the source 3. There are no other facts which provide context that are missing These are all critical in how the general public receives “facts”.
Yeah, those points are crucial. I always cringe when I see anyone say anything along the lines of "we've got the facts". How do we know?
You can't trust any major media publication, because they'll play both sides of a story. For instance, a major newspaper reports that someone is predicting a recession. If there's a recession, the newspaper will crow about how smart they are, but if there's not a recession, the newspaper will run reports about why the recession predictions were wrong, and then crow about how smart they are. What were the facts?
You can't trust any major political figure, because they have an agenda by default of existing in the political system. If there exists a fact that damages their agenda, they would lose their career if they admitted it.
A lot of the time the "facts" that people are often the most angry about are actually either predictions of the future (ex: it's a 'fact' that global warming will lead to +2 deg C by 2100) or they're summaries of statistical models (ex: it's a 'fact' that X subgroup is n% more or less likely to earn less/more).
Even things we know are "facts" don't necessarily lend real understanding to the person believing them. Every high school physics student knows the fact that light is a particle and a wave. Does that mean they actually understand light?
How many "facts" were known to citizens in the past that we now laugh at?
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#59I 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…
You have the OP's causality chain backwards.
OP: I dislike the claim because I reject the claim.
Your version of OP: I reject the claim because I dislike the claim.
Re: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 approac…
> Nobody has suggested humans are not capable of rationality, that's an absurd exaggeration.
It's the title of the article.