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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

#61

Post by tootie »

hntrader wrote: post #17

What bridges divides the best is unfortunately a common enemy that has agency, which unites previously warring factions against a common outgroup. This is the unfortunate reality of our tribal brains. Just look at how this whole GME episode (common villain - hedge funds) has brought the US left and right closer together (even though the gulf remains large) than they've been in years. COVID was a missed opportunity, w…

On that note, the stonks crowd have already sentenced Robinhood to death even though the facts of the case have been wildly misrepresented. The belief that Citadel et al was out to get them and pulled strings to make it happen took hold with religious fervor even when the evidence says that's not what happened at all.

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

#62

Post by starkd »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #47
starkd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

"My parents can hold conflicting viewpoints simultaneously, in sentences one after another, and have no problem with it."

They probably say the same about you. The hard truth is that most people hold conflicting opinions. It usually takes about 20 years of being an adult to come to this realization.

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

#63

Post by hntrader »

tootie wrote: post #61
hntrader wrote: post #17

What bridges divides the best is unfortunately a common enemy that has agency, which unites previously warring factions against a common outgroup. This is the unfortunate reality of our tribal brains. Just look at how this whole GME episode (common villain - hedge funds) has brought the US left and right closer together (even though the gulf remains large) than they've been in years. COVID was a missed opportunity, w…

On that note, the stonks crowd have already sentenced Robinhood to death even though the facts of the case have been wildly misrepresented. The belief that Citadel et al was out to get them and pulled strings to make it happen took hold with religious fervor even when the evidence says that's not what happened at all.

I mostly agree, but the only evidence we have is Robinhood's word which industry people seem to have taken as gospel. It's not implausible that they're lying, given that Citadel is their biggest customer, and they could've done what they did without breaking any laws, e.g. by purposely failing to arrange the appropriate credit lines in time, thereby guaranteeing that they'll be able to go "oops, we don't have the capital, we have no choice but to shut her down now".

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

#65

Post by austincheney »

> Both liberals and conservatives believe

Upon seeing that I stopped reading.

Most people abhor objectivity and cannot perform self-reflection within anything remotely close to any outside observation. Asking people to self-identify against loaded (poorly understood) political labels only compounds the otherwise commonly stupid behavior at play.

Data does not exist for the general population to make better decisions. It is there only for the trained analyst, leader, manager to make better decisions. I know that sounds elitist, but in discussions of behavior data elitism seems to take on radically different definitions compared to social contexts, and I am fine with that.

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

#66

Post by monadic3 »

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…

What the fuck is a fact

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

#67

Post by oblib »

Our political divide has little to do with facts. More than anything it's driven by the hyperbole produced by popular media.

I have watched the right and left respond to the media's outrage of the day, week, month, on cue, and stop just as fast, for years now.

More than anything our political divide is a result of our fandom based culture and "fans" don't care about facts. We grow up with this. If you're born in New York you're either a Mets or a Yankees fan and the other team sucks and always will no matter what the facts are.

Every night CNN and FOX compete to see who can stir up the most outrage in their fan base. We've got to the point where you're either a "fascist" or a "socialist". There is no middle ground for the hard core fan and they make the most noise.

QAnon is another fine example. Those fans love to wallow in their shared insults and disdain for those who don't "follow Q". They're "smart" and everyone else is a fool. The find great joy in believing that and they will not give it up for anyone's "personal experiences". They'll give it up when it "goes out of style".

Most fans move on eventually because trends go stale and fandom feeds on trendiness. Our "Media" is constantly looking for "the next trend" ("outrage of the month" in the case of politics) and when they see one with potential they'll push it for all it's worth and squeeze it til the last nickle is made out of it.

We all love the concept of "free speech" but we live in a time where bullshit goes viral and can be deadly when it does. Where I live 55% of my neighbors believe "masks don't work" while 1 in 70 of them who've gotten infected with covid-19 have died. Last year I saw them claim "the vaccine has a tracker chip in it", "proof that mask don't work is I can smell my farts when I wear one", "the virus is a hoax".

We have to figure out how to deal with these issues. With over 400,000 lives lost to covid-19 just here in the U.S. de-platforming bullshitters has to be on the table.

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

#69

Post by austincheney »

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

The significance of that varies by person. If you need social reinforcement to validate your interpretation of information the media lying is certainly significant, but then if you are more reliant upon social reinforcement you aren't acting on original interpretations of the information anyways. In other words this argument is moot.

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

#70

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

dang wrote: post #59
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…

If I understand it correctly, the claim is not that personal experience narration is a superior form of objective information to facts, it's that sharing personal experience is more likely to create a feeling of relational connection, which in turn is more likely to lead to a shift in position. Tossing facts in an argument where people don't feel any personal connection is a bit like throwing stones at each other. Ma…

I think the aspect that spans between your comment and the one you replied to is this:

Why should “personal experiences” be a different category than “facts?” (even taking for granted the extra step you mentioned, where it is the use of these experiences within a discussion, not the absolute existence of the experience, at play).

For example, suppose I know you and you are honest and trustworthy, so if you verbally testify to an experience, I’ll believe it.

Why would there be a difference in you coming to me and saying, “I attended a BLM rally and just observed such a clear and obvious peaceful sense of non-violent protesting” vs you coming to me and saying “According to research institute XYZ, statistically almost none of the BLM protests involved violence.”

Both of those things are facts in 100% the same sense, in every way. But because you personally claim to experience one of them, I am likely to give it more weight.

Even though there are plenty of reasonable hypotheses why humans would rely on this heuristic, it is still a big problem and a big source of manipulation, from liars, deceivers, conspiracy theories, debunked cranks, folk wisdom, etc.

If our goal is to believe as accurately as possible then we should not feel accepting or accommodating of a heuristic quirk in which we regard one set of facts that have the door wide open to manipulation (anecdotes of others) as generally more compelling than facts sourced through research, compiling data, journalism and so forth.

If we let up the pressure to thwart this heuristic, the most likely outcome is that people use confirmation bias and folk wisdom to construct false realities - and indeed in the US we have been seeing that play out in a huge violent saga. That didn’t happen because people don’t like being confronted with hard facts, it happened because we have allowed much too weak of a sense of social obligation to align beliefs with accurate predictions, as opposed to merely letting people feel they are entitled to believe whatever they want.

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