[HN Gopher] Personal experiences bridge moral and political divi...
___________________________________________________________________
Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than
facts
Author : lobbly
Score : 184 points
Date : 2021-01-29 22:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pnas.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pnas.org)
| stakkur wrote:
| Yes; beyond a (very) small in-group of people we are part of,
| larger groups of people relate mainly through shared stories, not
| 'facts'. Hence religion, nation myths, etc. Likewise, they fight
| over conflicting stories.
|
| Yuval Harari does a concise and brilliant job of explaining this
| in _Sapiens_ , which I seem to recommend to everyone I meet.
|
| TL;DR: facts are not how humans interact.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Personal experiences are facts. What the article refers to as
| "facts" are more properly known as "factoids". Approximately 73%
| of quoted statistics are simply made up, and an unknown
| percentage are deliberately misleading.
|
| An actual personal experience is a very different thing from a
| second-hand (or worse) anecdote.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Many many people reject personal experience of any type as
| specious and constantly reject opinions contrary to their own
| when shown contradictory evidence on this basis. It is a large
| part of the reason the country is the way it is.
| hntrader wrote:
| 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, we had an opportunity to cleverly
| frame as an outgroup threat (which lacked agency, so it's not an
| ideal driver of group cohesion), which we didn't do.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| hntrader wrote:
| 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".
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| 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 with their political
| beliefs (24, 25) and to trust fake news that aligns with their
| beliefs (26)."
|
| This is the epistemic crisis we're currently facing. Up until
| about the late 70s we had 3 news networks that were all pretty
| much middle of the road politically. Newspapers could have more
| of a discernible political leaning, but even there most of the
| mainstream ones we're pretty centrist. People who hewed to an
| extreme political position in either direction were ostracized
| and thus had a very small audience. We had more of a common
| narrative which is now gone.
| jariel wrote:
| In 1980 newspapers were where >50% of advertising dollars were
| spent, now it's going to nothing - and - they have to fight for
| every little click using click bait.
|
| You can see the natural progression towards hyper bifurcated
| viewpoints.
| iguy wrote:
| If they were just smaller that would be one thing, but the
| change in what they get paid for is bigger, I think.
|
| A paper supported by the big department store's ads is
| incentivised to be broad, because the store wants to sell to
| everyone. Likewise a paper supported classified and by sunday
| realtor adds -- nobody wants to sell their house exclusively
| to members of some fringe, they want the widest distribution.
|
| But a paper supported by its most outraged subscribers will
| cater to them, and importantly, to keeping them outraged.
| orzig wrote:
| As long as we're talking about objective facts, I'll add that
| "Going to nothing" means going from $25B/y down to $5B/y,
| which is a huge drop - but also $5B/y.
|
| It's continuing to trend downward, so "going to nothing" is
| not a clearly false summary, but we might as well be specific
|
| Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/20244/estimated-print-
| adverti...
| yters wrote:
| Including the NYT communist shilling with Walter Durante? That
| doesn't seem so middle of the road.
| iguy wrote:
| 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Right, if I could edit (too late now it seems) I would add
| "from post WWII till about the late 70s".
| dantheman wrote:
| 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 reliable would require overlooking a huge amount of actual
| historic malfeasance.
| austincheney wrote:
| > 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > 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.
| ssivark wrote:
| This paper just validates as "fact" something that I strongly
| believed by "personal experience" :-D
|
| As humans (evolutionarily social creatures), we have a natural
| empathy that's hard to circumvent unless the discussion turns
| into very abstract statements about belief & facts & rationality.
| IME, all but a narrow segment of people are typically very
| receptive to hearing about and empathizing with other's
| experiences. Over time, this might also significantly change
| perspectives through osmosis.
|
| Very rarely do perspectives change in any significant manner
| before and after a "logical argument" -- and for good reason
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
| grahamburger wrote:
| Seems like we abandoned this type of emotional, personal rhetoric
| not because it didn't work but because it worked too well at
| manipulating people's opinions. I wonder if we can return to it
| without losing our grasp of reality.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I'm imagining YouTube (or maybe even HN) comments becoming
| dominated by stories of harm supposed people have supposedly
| experienced. There's no way to tell if a person you're
| interacting with in these kinds of contexts has actually
| experienced the harm they claim or if it's just being used to
| manipulate. So I'd agree that in the case of internet forums
| I'm not entirely sure this is a step in the right direction.
| For person-to-person, face-to-face interactions IRL it would be
| a different story as you could rely on non-verbal cues to help
| determine validity and you might have a history of relationship
| with the person you're interacting with.
| indymike wrote:
| In politics, there's a saying, "A story is worth 1000
| spreadsheets."
| auggierose wrote:
| A personal experience is a fact. It is a fact we can be pretty
| sure of, and we know the context of that fact. Obviously, once we
| extrapolate from that experienced fact, it becomes bias.
|
| A fact that is not a personal experience is difficult to trust.
| Even if I trust the source of that fact, I am often not sure if I
| understand the fact properly. Anyone who has ever tried to
| understand a math theorem might relate.
|
| It is entirely rational to trust more in your personal bias. In
| fact, I would argue that the only way to trust a fact is to make
| it somehow into something that you can personally experience. For
| example, to understand a math theorem, it helps to look at lots
| of different kinds of examples where it holds (and where it
| doesn't).
| tacitusarc wrote:
| 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 understand this, so we tend
| to weight other people's experiences similarly, knowing that
| those are as proximate to them as our experiences are to us.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > this delineates between facts and personal experience as if
| personal experience doesn't occupy the same space as facts
|
| As a matter of neuroscience, from a quick search it appears
| that they do not, [0] although as a philosophical point sure,
| personal history narratives consist (at least partly) of
| beliefs of facts.
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952732/ (or
| if you like paywalls:
| https://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2FS1355617710000676 )
| danielam wrote:
| N.b. in "An Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent"[0], John Henry
| Newman makes a distinction between real and notional
| apprehension that would, I think, be useful here.
|
| [0] http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter4-1.html
| petilon wrote:
| > _as if personal experience doesn 't occupy the same space as
| facts_
|
| There is some overlap but it is not the same space. Humans tend
| to extrapolate and generalize. For example based on your
| personal experience with one (or a few) persons of ethnicity1
| you may generalize that all persons of ethnicity1 have
| attribute2. But this is not a fact.
| skybrian wrote:
| Many facts are universal claims that are actually pretty hard
| to prove. It can take many scientific studies to establish a
| fact. It's often not easy to figure out what to believe.
|
| It's also often the case the whoever is asserting a fact didn't
| figure it out themselves. They are repeating someone else's
| assertion. Often, they misunderstood or simplified.
|
| With personal stories, it's simpler: do you believe the person
| telling the story or not?
| Udik wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Facts can very much be cherry-picked and usually are, so
| facts alone don't get you closer to the truth. On the
| contrary, the way people use facts is by selecting them after
| the fact (no pun indended) to bolster a position they've
| already settled on. Everyone does this, and with a little
| self-honesty anyone can easily observe themselves doing it.
| dang wrote:
| 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 and
| that 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. Maybe the one with more and bigger stones gains a
| temporary advantage, but it leads to a retrenchment of
| positions, which doesn't help in the long run.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| 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.
| monadic3 wrote:
| What the fuck is a fact
| stonecraftwolf wrote:
| This is only true if someone deems you or your experiences
| credible, and this in turn is highly related to existing biases
| and relative places in social hierarchies.
| nickhuh wrote:
| It's a good point and the study does some investigation of the
| question in Section 7 [1]. They find the trend seems to
| generalize across multiple speaker identities. Personal
| experiences appear more effective than facts at fostering
| respect for a wide range of different speakers.
|
| [1]: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/6/e2008389118#sec-7
| croissants wrote:
| 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.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Vulnerability has been popular for a while now as a way of
| successfully navigating crucial conversations.
| civilized wrote:
| So we politely validate the other person's personal experience
| and go on our way, forgetting about the whole thing and
| cleaving back to our original ideas within a few hours.
|
| That is to say, maybe neither of the interventions in this
| study has any long-term impact.
| discodave wrote:
| I totally agree! I recently wrote a blog post saying something
| like this:
|
| http://blog.drgriffin.com.au/posts/2021-01-13-facts-will-not...
| [deleted]
| monadic3 wrote:
| ...surprising to fucking who?
| austincheney wrote:
| > 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.
| umvi wrote:
| 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 arguer's
| position even if it's only representative of a tiny sample.
|
| The actual optimal policies we should be making over a wide
| variety of issues (environment, immigration, healthcare, and
| more) are very difficult to ascertain from objective facts or
| subjective experiences alone since both reflect the agendas and
| biases of those presenting them.
|
| For any given issue there will be enough facts and stats to tell
| the story you want to tell, and for any given issue there were be
| some heartwrenching experiences of how someone was screwed over
| by the issue/policy.
| starkd wrote:
| 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.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _...shared experience makes it possible for to hear another
| viewpoint._
|
| That's specifically why personal experience is a persuasion
| tool and an effective one - which isn't an absolute bad thing
| but also doesn't make it an inherently good thing.
|
| The average person, debating on the Internet or off, tends to
| start in an intensely emotional state. Giving your own
| personal experience backs them down from that intense
| emotional state.
|
| Once the person has backed-down a bit you can give your pitch
| and your pitch can be anything, either a plea for rational
| inquiry into the situation or your own intensely
| manipulative, emotional and off-kilter claims.
|
| I personally try to go from polarized emotional shouting
| matches to "let's make a model of the world and consider what
| makes sense in it" approaches. I think if you can get someone
| to start thinking about things that way, you have given them
| thinking-tools and not simply openness.
|
| Something to think about is that simple openness is by no
| means an inherently good thing. A lot of New Age ideologies
| talk about the need to stay open with upshot that people open
| themselves to all sorts of poisonous and delusional crap.
| Being open but selective in what you let in is much better.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| Viewpoints are typically the intersection of a number of
| values. Your interpretation of conflict might just be a
| function of how your values are weighted vs those of your
| parents.
| starkd wrote:
| "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.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Or as the late great Mark Twain put it: "There are three kinds
| of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
|
| A good example of FUD spreading using 'facts' is the current
| war on vaping. More contentiously, there is also the war
| against glycophosphate.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| Reminds me of the apocryphal but excellent quote:
|
| "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you
| read the newspaper, you're mis-informed." Mark Twain
| oblio wrote:
| I don't know anything about these "wars". What's happening?
| thereisnospork wrote:
| 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 who, per label, grossly misused it. There have a
| been a few high profile lawsuits, at least one in CA, over
| those cancers, and corresponding calls to ban it. 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.
| Glycophosphate though, is 'factually'[0] listed by IARC as
| a class 2A carcinogen. I'm sure there are few HN threads
| digging into this one if you have lots of time to kill.
|
| [0]IARC is basically a factory of 'facts' that sound bad
| but aren't when it comes to cancer: class 2A is the same
| class as eating red meat.
| chalst wrote:
| Roundup deserves its bad press, regardless of which exact
| scandal caused it to penetrate popular consciousness.
| Monsanto's highest margin R-Up product range is ultra-
| high dosage pesticides together with crops designed to
| tolerate the pesticide. It kills all rival plants, as
| advertised, and through its effect on funghi and bacteria
| it has plenty of knock-on effects on local ecologies.
| It's real "Silent Spring" material.
|
| The decision by the EU Parliament to ensure that
| decisions about permissibility of pesticides are based on
| open science, rather than the proprietary study model
| that dominated before, has led to a lot of good research.
| Cf. e.g.,
|
| https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/176/2/253/5835885
| ?ca...
| MegaButts wrote:
| > 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 glyphosate is a patented chemical
| effectively sold by one company.
|
| https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-
| patterson-sc...
| wazoox wrote:
| I think that the patents on glyphosate itself expired
| recently. The RoundUp-ready seeds are still protected,
| though.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Glyphosate itself was discovered back in the 50's;
| patents around that would have expired ~50 years ago.
|
| The patents around glyphosate resistant soybeans expired
| five or ten years back; someone immediately produced and
| released an unencumbered version. (I don't think it's as
| popular as you'd think; the yields are a bit lower than
| the state-of-the-art varieties available now, and farmers
| purchase new seeds every year for a lot of reasons beyond
| patent encumbrance.)
| [deleted]
| lamename wrote:
| You're right. This is how people with an agenda misuse facts.
| But just because specific facts can be misused does not mean we
| abandon using facts at all. Many facts are biased. All personal
| experiences are biased. Being less wrong is the goal.
| weaksauce wrote:
| > [0] For example (and this is just one example), I remember
| last year stories about how covid-19 victims were going into
| mass graves in New York City. And while that was a true and an
| objective fact, important context was left out. The context
| that was missing was that they were being buried on Hart
| Island, which is literally a mass grave site designated for
| unidentifiable persons dying of any cause, not just covid. But
| if you leave that part out it seems like the bodies are piling
| up so fast and so high the authorities had no choice but to
| dump the corpses in mass graves. Whereas in truth only
| unidentifiable/unclaimed covid victims were buried on Hart
| Island, and the same fate happens to any of NYC's homeless when
| they die for any reason and nobody claims the body.
|
| Except even your "objective fact" lacks the context.
|
| Hart island is and was a mass grave for unidentified/unclaimed
| bodies... however the number of dead going to that island was
| way way higher than years before during normal times. Hell even
| in october of last year at a time where the virus was more
| under control there was still 4 times(360 vs 90) the number
| normally going to that island. the number buried there through
| october was over 2 times the total buried there from the
| previous year with two more months to go in the year.
|
| even people who discount covid as a bad, made up thing also
| can't escape the fact that the year is _far_ more deadly from
| deaths of any cause than prior years:
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
|
| So either people are dying from _something else_ at an alarming
| rate that defies predictions or covid is something worth taking
| seriously(also, the fact that death is not the only outcome and
| there are people with serious long term negative effects).
| orzig wrote:
| And, while I don't debate the premise of the OP's article,
| the big redeeming virtue of objective facts is that we can
| dig into them - exactly like we're doing here.
| umvi wrote:
| I ended up deleting that example because I _knew_ someone was
| going to quibble about it. More people were buried on Hart
| Island in 2020 than previous years but more people were
| buried _everywhere_ in 2020. That doesn 't change the fact
| that Hart Island existed pre-covid and will continue to exist
| post-covid and that the "mass graves" stories were based on
| carefully selected out-of-context facts in order to paint
| covid in a deadlier light.
| weaksauce wrote:
| Fair enough i didn't notice that you deleted that.
|
| > That doesn't change the fact that Hart Island existed
| pre-covid and will continue to exist post-covid
|
| sure. i don't take issue with that. it was just one of many
| reports on the anomaly events like the refrigerator morgues
| and other events. Fact of the matter this disease is very
| deadly and the articles of the time show it.
|
| here's articles from both sides of the aisle during that
| time period:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/11/us/hart-island-coronavirus-
| bu...
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/us/aerial-images-new-york-hart-
| islan...
|
| Both show proper context and highlight how different the
| burials were. (neither of them are AP stories) fox notes
| that burials went from one day a week to five days a week.
| both offer the history of the island and what it's normally
| used for. I see a fair article from both of those
| ideologically opposed orgs.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| 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 and you will
| find the data that supports your argument.
| fsflover wrote:
| Perhaps because it's all true and all those factors help the
| projects?
| mmsimanga wrote:
| 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
| ilaksh wrote:
| Here is an awesome discussion between Andrew Yang and a moral
| psychologist named Jonathan Haidt about these issues:
|
| https://youtu.be/gjufYwIbITw
|
| Haidt also has a book named The Righteous Mind: Why Good People
| are Divided by Politics and Religion.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Actually when it comes to personal experiences, and human to
| human offline interaction I've just noticed I don't need to agree
| with everyone.
|
| I have liberal friends, conservative friends. I've dated liberals
| and I've dated conservatives. Well I still vote, I'm not nearly
| as political as I used to be. I don't use social media (
| including online dating) , if only because I found people to be
| insanely mean. I don't want to be called slurs when discussing
| politics, and that's what happens online. Now if I'm at a bar, I
| might actually even buy a voter from the other team a beer. I can
| see his or her humanity. Online the other team is literally a
| group of evil villains who want to destroy all that is good in
| the world. And I'm at the point where I think social media needs
| to be heavily regulated to stop society from imploding. It's just
| too powerful, too harmful of a tool as is.
| andrewjl wrote:
| > And I'm at the point where I think social media needs to be
| heavily regulated to stop society from imploding. It's just too
| powerful, too harmful of a tool as is.
|
| Heavy regulation would seem like a good solution, except it
| does nothing to shift incentives. Those remain unaddressed.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| One of the things we need to face as a society is that facts
| don't change anyones minds...
| oblib wrote:
| 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| I see a potential source of bias in this paper - the study is of
| the use of facts _in political topics_. This means that they are
| studying topics where facts have proven insufficient to settle
| the debate.
| pgsimp wrote:
| Reads to me like gibberish generated from a Markov chain. OK
| maybe not quite, but it doesn't make sense, as personal
| experiences are a subset of facts.
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