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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

#81

Post by M5x7wI3CmbEem10 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #80
M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occasionally it swings in the opposite direction. I've met immigrants who are staunchly anti-immigration.

This is an example of broken language. Immigrants are never simply anti-immigrant, for example there might be nuance to their view as to whether it is okay to cut in line, especially if they waited the ‘legal’ way.

No, I truly mean people who are against any sort of immigration. A subset of which who say that they escaped from worse cultures and don't want the new culture to be diluted.

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

#82

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

citrablue wrote: post #74
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It sounds like you believe people can behave more in line with the Rational Human used to model older economic theories. I'm not so sure confirmation, affinity, or proximity biases can be held down. What we need is a system that is either immune to these biases, or is designed to thwart them. My opinion: individual's actions and beliefs do not put a dent in the tsunami of bias that swamps our brains. We need systemic…

I think a precondition of the entire discussion is that we’re talking about what’s more effective in resolving disagreement - which would be measured by whether a disagreement process approaches the conclusion that would be reached between two rational agents sharing their information.

Note that I am not saying I believe humans do act that way, rather that is the yardstick of outcome to decide if one disagreement resolution technique is better than another.

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

#83

Post by throwawayboise »

starkd wrote: post #62
lotsofpulp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also opinions and perspectives change. I was quite liberal, politically, in my 20s. In my 50s I'm quite conservative, though I would never have thought that could be the case when I was 22.

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

#84

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #73
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Why would there be a difference in you coming to me and saying, [ ... ] because if I really don't want to agree with you, I can accept your story but regard it as an anecdote that does not contradict what I see/read from my media bubble. I can't do that with the study from research institute XYZ, so I'll just dismiss it out of hand. This requires more cognitive effort (for example, I have to explicitly or implicitl…

What I’m saying is that the heuristic you describe is perfectly understandable, but it’s a bad outcome for society. My comment is not about the “why” behind the existence of this heuristic. There are many obvious reasons that leap off the page in terms of evolutionary adaptation, confirmation bias, availability heuristic, halo bias and so forth.

Instead what I am saying is that if I approach a new conversation tomorrow and I say to myself something like this,

> “Boy, my friend Bob sure is not going to like to hear about the very overt evidence of Trump siding with white supremacists. He won’t like that so I’d better not appeal to facts where Trump’s quotes were compiled and analyzed by researchers. Instead I should tell him about my experience walking near a Trump rally and directly observing racist language going unrebuked by campaign staff. Then at least he’ll connect with the part that is my experience instead of immediately taking a motivated cognition biased position gainsaying the more official data.”

then that would be a very bad thing - much worse than directly confronting Bob with the actual facts and making it clear it’s not OK for Bob to inhabit a false reality where one type of fact (anecdotes) is accepted but another (data, research, journalism) is rejected. That cannot be left unchecked.

Mitt Romney actually said it quite well in the Senate inauguration proceedings after the Capitol riot,

“If you respect people who are disappointed by the outcome of the election and believe it was stolen, the best thing you can do is tell them the truth.”

Of course the election is just an example, but the point is more general. If someone is resistant to real facts, and you actually respect them and want to reach a positive conclusion, the best thing is absolutely always to confront them with the truth. If you instead deliberately mollify it and water it down to an anecdote they are more likely to accept while not adjusting their beliefs, you are only disrespecting them and hurting yourself, the other party, and discourse in general.

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

#85

Post by Context_free »

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…

Emma Goldman was writing about yellow journalism about prostitution and "the traffic in women" and liberal response to it back in 1910. It's 110 years later and Nicholas Kristof et al. are still publishing the same dreck in the New York Times, absolutely nothing has changed.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-whi...

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

#86

Post by drdeca »

Udik wrote: post #48
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…

I’m a bit unclear on what the word “fact” means. Does it mean “known true proposition”, or “independently verifiable true proposition about an event”, or what?

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

#87

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

Damorian wrote: post #75
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>false realities Or just other people's realities. You mention BLM riots, which affected me a great deal; tens of millions in damages to my city, destruction of local landmarks, one of the teachers in my local school district was arrested for assaulting a state politician for recording them burning a police car, and to top it off, they smashed the pharmacy where I get my wife's medicine, so she had to go without for…

I am sorry you feel this way, and I hope you will find a way past the biases that are preventing you from accepting the facts.

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

#88

Post by jbullock35 »

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…

> If I understand it correctly, the claim is [...] 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.

The last part is wrong. The authors are explicit on this point: they are not studying persuasion, i.e., changes in people's issue positions. (They never measure change in people's issue positions.) Instead, they are studying the effects of sharing factual claims vs. sharing personal experiences on respect: which strategy makes you more respected?

See especially page 3: "we leave aside the question of persuasion to focus on how best to foster respect in moral disagreements with political opponents."

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

#89

Post by Damorian »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #87
Damorian wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>false realities Or just other people's realities. You mention BLM riots, which affected me a great deal; tens of millions in damages to my city, destruction of local landmarks, one of the teachers in my local school district was arrested for assaulting a state politician for recording them burning a police car, and to top it off, they smashed the pharmacy where I get my wife's medicine, so she had to go without for…

I am sorry you feel this way, and I hope you will find a way past the biases that are preventing you from accepting the facts.

And I'll say the same to anyone who supports BLM, that's my point.

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

#90

Post by yters »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #45
iguy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

So we went from heavily left to middle of the road for a few decades to back to left? Sounds like reversion to normal state of affairs.
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