[HN Gopher] Facts don't change minds, structure does
___________________________________________________________________
Facts don't change minds, structure does
Author : staph
Score : 242 points
Date : 2025-07-22 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vasily.cc)
(TXT) w3m dump (vasily.cc)
| andrewmutz wrote:
| This is a good blog post. Two thoughts about it:
|
| - Contradictory facts often _shouldn 't_ change beliefs because
| it is extremely rare for a single fact in isolation to undermine
| a belief. If you believe in climate change and encounter a
| situation where a group of scientists were proven to have
| falsified data in a paper on climate change, it really isn't
| enough information to change your belief in climate change,
| because the evidence of climate change is much larger than any
| single paper. It's only really after reviewing a lot of facts on
| both sides of an issue that you can really know enough to change
| your belief about something.
|
| - The facts we're exposed to today are often extremely
| unrepresentative of the larger body of relevant facts. Say what
| you want about the previous era of corporate controlled news
| media, at least the journalists in that era _tried_ to present
| the relevant facts to the viewer. The facts you are exposed to
| today are usually decided by an algorithm that is trying to
| optimize for engagement. And the people creating the content (
| "facts") that you see are usually extremely motivated/biased
| participants. There is zero effort by the algorithms or the
| content creators to present a reasonably representative set of
| facts on both sides of an issue
| staph wrote:
| Thanks for your thoughts, they perfectly extend mine. I agree
| that it would be a sign of a very fragile belief system if it
| gets unwound by a single bit of contradictory evidence. And as
| to the "facts" that we're getting 24/7 coming out of every
| microwave is just a sign of complete decoupling of people's
| beliefs from empirical reality, in my humble opinion. Supply
| and demand and all that.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| I would contend that empiricism is inadequate to discern what
| is real and what is true. Much of human experience and what
| is meaningful to being a person is not measurable nor
| quantifiable.
| ianbicking wrote:
| I remember reading an article on one of the classic rationalist
| blogs (but they write SO MUCH I can't possibly find it)
| describing something like "rational epistemic skepticism" - or
| maybe a better term I can't recall either. (As noted below:
| "Epistemic learned helplessness")
|
| The basic idea: an average person can easily be intellectually
| overwhelmed by a clever person (maybe the person is smarter, or
| more educated, or maybe they just studied up on a subject a
| lot). They basically know this... and also know that it's not
| because the clever person is always right. Because there's lots
| of these people, and not every clever person thinks the same
| thing, so they obviously can't all be right. But the average
| person (average with respect to whatever subject) is still
| rational and isn't going to let their beliefs bounce around. So
| they develop a defensive stance, a resistance to being
| convinced. And it's right that they do!
|
| If someone confronts you with the PERFECT ARGUMENT, is it
| because the argument is true and revelatory? Or does it involve
| some slight of hand? The latter is much more likely
| ayoubd wrote:
| Was it this one? "Epistemic learned helplessness"
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-
| learn...
| ianbicking wrote:
| Yes, that's the one, thank you!
| mpyne wrote:
| Was it this one?
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-
| learn...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The problem isn't the PERFECT ARGUMENT, it's the argument
| that doesn't look like an argument at all.
|
| Take anti-vaxxers. If you try to argue with the science,
| you've already lost, because anti-vaxxers have been
| propagandised into believing they're protecting their kids.
|
| How? By being told that vaccinations are promoted by people
| who are trying to harm their kids and exploit the public for
| cash.
|
| And who tells them? _People like them._ Not scientists. Not
| those smart people who look down on you for being stupid.
|
| No, it's influencers who are _just like them_ , part of the
| same tribe. Someone you could socialise with. Someone like
| you.
|
| Someone who only has your best interests at heart.
|
| And that's how it works. That's why the anti-vax and climate
| denial campaigns run huge bot farms with vast social media
| holdings which insert, amplify, and reinforce the "These
| people are evil and not like us and want to make you poor and
| harm your kids" messaging, combined with "But believe this
| and you will keep your kids safe".
|
| Far-right messaging doesn't argue rationally at all. It's
| deliberate and cynically calculated to trigger fear, disgust,
| outrage, and protectiveness.
|
| Consider how many far-right hot button topics centre on
| protecting kids from "weird, different, not like us" people -
| foreigners, intellectuals, scientists, unorthodox creatives
| and entertainers, people with unusual sexualities, outgroup
| politicians. And so on.
|
| So when someone tries to argue with it rationally, they get
| nowhere. The "argument" is over before it starts.
|
| It's not even about rhetoric or cleverness - both of which
| are overrated. It's about emotional conditioning using
| emotional triggers, tribal framing, and simple moral
| narratives, embedded with constant repetition and aggressive
| reinforcement.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| Just to add a little to the discussion, I suspect that the
| "not like us" messaging is mostly a right-wing thing, while
| there's more of a "don't contaminate my fluids" argument
| from the far-left.
|
| Neither is a rational argument, and still trigger the same
| disgust and fear, but tend to have different implications
| for outgroups.
| e12e wrote:
| > "don't contaminate my fluids" argument from the far-
| left
|
| What does this refer to? I assume it has nothing to do
| with Flint, Michigan ;-)
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Ah yes. People who think like you and agree with you are
| rational, not prone to fear, disgust outrage, or
| protectiveness. But people who disagree with you are
| obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with. You are
| "educated" and they are "fear-mongers".
| bsder wrote:
| > But people who disagree with you are obviously
| irrational and can't be reasoned with.
|
| You are saying this with sarcasm, but it is a tautology.
|
| If I am factually correct, _by definition_ , everyone who
| disagrees with me _is_ irrational and can 't be reasoned
| with.
|
| Anti-vax is a _great_ example of this. We have loads and
| loads and loads of evidence of the harm that not being
| vaccinated can do (now including dead children thanks to
| measles) and very scant evidence to the contrary (there
| is some for specific vaccines for specific diseases like
| Polio). However, until it hits an anti-vaxxer
| _personally_ , they simply will refuse to believe it.
|
| Of course, once an anti-vaxxer _personally_ gets a
| disease, _NOW_ the anti-vaxxers want the vaccine. Thus,
| demonstrating simultaneously that they actually don 't
| understand a single damn thing about vaccines _and_ that
| their "anti-vaxx belief" was irrational as well.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| Ignoring the strawman at the end, you're making their
| point for them.
|
| Anti-vax is actually a horrible example of this because
| it can never be proven that vaccines don't harm us. Any
| non-infinite evidence will never reduce the probability
| to zero. You even allude to this point. If there is a
| single case of a harmful vaccine, or even a reasonable
| probability of one, then it isn't irrational to be
| cautious of vaccines. Just because the evidence is enough
| for you doesnt make anyone who disagrees irrational. That
| line of thinking just makes you irrational.
|
| I say this as a fully vaccinated (including COVID)
| vaccine enjoyer.
| bsder wrote:
| > Ignoring the strawman at the end
|
| Oh, no. You don't get to ignore _my actual experience_
| with people and Covid vaccines. I watched 3 different
| anti-vaxxers in my family _die_ begging for a vaccine
| while doctors struggled to save their dumb asses.
|
| > it can never be proven that vaccines don't harm us.
|
| That's _your_ job to prove, Mr. Skeptical. Not mine.
|
| I very much can prove that _not_ getting a vaccine _does_
| harm you. I 've got a handful of measles deaths to point
| to _right now_. We 've got step function decreases in
| reproductive cancers due to HPV vaccination. We've got
| shingles vaccines showing decreases in dementia and
| Alzheimers. I can go on and on.
|
| > I say this as a fully vaccinated (including COVID)
| vaccine enjoyer.
|
| "I'm not racist, but ..."
|
| Sorry. Statement gives you no credibility or authority.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I really think most of these statements apply to both
| political sides of messaging in a majority of cases. You
| can't talk about in-group out-group unless you draw a line
| somewhere, and in your comment you drew a line between
| people who represent science and rationality and those that
| are fearful and reactionary, which you'd believe to be a
| sensible place to draw that line if you habitually consume
| basically any media. The actual science seems _mostly_
| incidental to any kind of conversation about it.
|
| Some people are crippled by anxiety and fear of the unknown
| or fear of their neighbors. It's sad, but it's not unique
| to political alignment.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I think that what they were saying was that in-groups are
| trusted because of familiarity which can be exploited in
| order to instill messaging which drives emotional
| decision making over reasoned contemplation. 'Scientists'
| were part of the exampled used which invoked a
| contemporary issue (anti-vax). They are attributing these
| messaging systems to be a component of organized right
| wing campaigns; an attribution which at this point in
| time is rather uncontroversial.
|
| That they would see themselves as part of the rational
| group opposed to a campaign of weaponized social levers
| which turn people against evidence in order to further
| the goals of a different group which is not actually
| aligned with those they are manipulating is not
| insightful or provocative. It seems to reason they would.
|
| The implication that it means there is some sort of
| political 'both sides'ism that degrades their point is
| incredibly weak.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one
| tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of
| rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's
| the _values_ that change. As soon as you say one tribe is
| more rational than another you 're just feeding into more
| tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.
|
| I think the real problem is that zero friction global
| communication and social media has dramatically decreased
| the incentive to be thoughtful about anything. The winning
| strategy for anyone in the public eye is just to use
| narratives that resonate with people's existing worldview,
| because there is so much information out there and our
| civilization has become so complex that it's overwhelming
| to think about anything from first principles. Combine that
| with the dilution of local power as more and more things
| have gone online and global, a lot of the incentives for
| people to be truthful and have integrity are gone or at
| least dramatically diminished compared to the entirety of
| human history prior to the internet.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| >I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one
| tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of
| rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe,
| it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe
| is more rational than another you're just feeding into
| more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.
|
| That was largely the case until these most recent
| electoral cycle, where the Great Crank Realignment,
| driven by the COVID response, pushed conspiracy
| theorists, health and wellness grifters, supplement
| hawkers, and many others to the right.
| nudgeOrnurture wrote:
| repetition breeds rationalism. variety of phrasing breeds
| facts.
|
| it's how the brain works. the more cognitive and perceptive
| angles agree on the observed, the more likely it is, that the
| observed is _really_ / actually observed.
|
| polysemous language (ambiguity) makes it easy to manipulate
| the observed. reinterpretation, mere exposure and thus
| coopted, portfolio communist media and journalism, optimize,
| while using AI for everything will make it as efficient as it
| gets.
|
| keep adding new real angles and they'll start to sweat or
| throw towels and tantrums and aim for the weak.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's usually dumb people that have so many facts and
| different arguments that one can't keep up with.
|
| And they usually have so many of those because they were
| convinced to pay disproportionate attention to it and don't
| see the need to check anything or reject bad sources.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| Many people are curious about truth. But because of gaslighting
| and no single source of truth and too much noise level, people
| have checked out completely. People know something is fishy,
| they know barbarians are at the gate. But they also know that
| the gate is 10,000 km away so they think, "Let me live my life
| peacefully in the meantime." They have lost hope in the system.
| darksaints wrote:
| To add to your second point, those algorithms are extremely
| easy to game by states with the resources and desire to craft
| narratives. Specifically Russia and China.
|
| There has actually been a pretty monumental shift in Russian
| election meddling tactics in the last 8 years. Previously we
| had the troll army, in which the primary operating tactic of
| their bot farms were to pose as Americans (as well as Poles,
| Czechs, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Brits, etc.) but push Russian
| propaganda. Those bot farms were fairly easy to spot and ban,
| and there was a ton of focus on it after the 2016 election, so
| that strategy was short lived.
|
| Since then, Russia has shifted a lot closer to Chinese style
| tactics, and now have a "goblin" army (contrasted with their
| troll army). This group no longer pushes the narratives
| themselves, but rather uses seemingly mindless engagement
| interactions like scrolling, upvoting, clicking on comments,
| replying to comments with LLMs, etc., in order to game what the
| social media algorithms show people. They merely push the
| narratives of actual Americans (not easily bannable bots) who
| happen to push views that are either in line with Russian
| propaganda, or rhetoric that Russian intelligence views as
| being harmful to the US. These techniques work spectacularly
| well for two reasons: the dopamine boost to users who say
| abominable shit as a way of encouraging them to do more, and as
| a morale-killer to people who might oppose such abominable shit
| but see how "popular" it is.
|
| https://www.bruegel.org/first-glance/russian-internet-outage...
| psychoslave wrote:
| What should make us believe any other state propaganda is
| better, even for its own general population?
| yorwba wrote:
| > These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons
|
| _Do_ they work spectacularly well, though? E.g. the article
| you link shows that Twitter accounts holding anti-Ukrainian
| views received 49 reposts less on average during a 2-hour
| internet outage in Russia. Even granting that all those
| reposts were part of an organized campaign (its hardly
| surprising that people reposting anti-Ukrainian content are
| primarily to be found in Russia) and that 49 reposts
| massively boosted the visibility of this content, its effect
| is still upper bounded by the effect of propaganda exposure
| on people 's opinions, which is generally low.
| https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-
| never-w...
| darksaints wrote:
| Notice that the two reasons I mentioned don't hinge on
| changing anyones mind.
|
| 1 - They boost dopamine reward systems in people who get
| "social" validation of their opinions/persona as an
| influencer. This isn't something specific to
| propaganda...this is a well-observed phenomenon of social
| media behavior. This not only gives false validation to the
| person spreading the misinformation/opinions, but it
| influences other people who desire that sort of influence
| by giving them an example of something successful to
| replicate.
|
| 2 - In aggregate, it demoralizes those who disagree with
| the opinions by demonstrating a false popularity. Imagine,
| for example, going to the comments of an instagram post of
| something and you see a blatant neo-nazi holocaust denial
| comment with 50,000 upvotes. It hasn't changed your mind,
| but it absolutely will demoralize you from thinking you
| have any sort of democratic power to overcome it.
|
| No opinions have changed, but more people are willing to do
| things that are destructive to social discourse, and fewer
| people are willing to exercise democratic methods to curb
| it.
| yorwba wrote:
| Do you have any evidence that a substantial number of
| people will be influenced in the way you claim? Again,
| propaganda generally has no or almost no effect.
| meowface wrote:
| That is tricky. I think some propaganda has no effect
| while some propaganda is so impactful that it is the
| _sole_ cause of some major, major things. I know you said
| "generally" but I think that doesn't present the full
| picture.
|
| The Russian state's hack and leak of Podesta's emails
| caused Pizzagate and QAnon. Russian propagandists also
| fanned the flames of both. It's not quite clear if this
| was a propaganda victory (it could be that it was
| propaganda from other sources commenting on the hacked
| emails which bears almost all responsibility for
| Pizzagate and what followed) or simply an offensive
| cybercapabilities victory, but this is an example of the
| complex chains of actions which can affect societal
| opinions and attitudes.
|
| I am skeptical random LLM nonsense from Russian farms is
| shifting sentiment. But I think it's prudent to remain
| open to the possibility that the aggregate effect of all
| propaganda, intelligence, and interference efforts by the
| Russian state in the past decade could have created the
| impetus for several significant things which otherwise
| would likely not have occurred.
|
| Another example: the old Russian KGB propaganda about
| America inventing AIDS as a bioweapon was extremely
| effective and damaging:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Denver
|
| More recent Russian propaganda about America running a
| bioweapon lab in Ukraine has been quite effective and is
| still believed by many.
| foobarian wrote:
| > a "goblin" army
|
| Hah, a "monkey amplifier" army! Look at garbage coming out of
| infinite monkeys keyboards and boost what fits. Sigh
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > Specifically Russia and China.
|
| ...or USA
| goatlover wrote:
| The idea that people believe in climate change (or evolution)
| is odd considering people don't say they believe in General
| Relativity or atomic theory of chemistry. They just accept
| those as the best explanations for the evidence we have. But
| because climate change and evolution run counter to some
| people's values (often religious but also financially
| motivated), they get called beliefs.
| psychoslave wrote:
| You generally don't oppose to things you can grasp to the
| point you could understand how it challenges other beliefs
| you culturally or intuitively integrated.
|
| Evolution directly challenges the idea that humans are very
| special creatures in a universe where mighty mystic forces
| care about them a lot.
|
| Climate changes, and the weight of human industry in it,
| challenges directly the life style expectations of the
| wealthiests.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| To some extent, physics/chemistry/etc. challenge the notion
| that free will exists, but that challenge is far enough
| removed and rarely touched upon that people who believe in
| free will don't feel that modern science is attacking that
| belief, and the scientists working on it generally see free
| will or any mechanisms of the brain as far too complex when
| they are studying things on the order for a few particles
| or few molecules.
|
| Some of neurology/psychology gets a bit closer, but science
| of the brain doesn't have major theories that are taught on
| the same level nor have much impact on public policy. The
| closest I can think of is how much public awareness of what
| constitutes a mental disorder lags behind science, but that
| area is still constantly contested even among the
| researchers themselves and thus prevents a unified message
| being given to the public that they must then respond to
| (choosing to believe the science or not).
| zaphar wrote:
| The best way to lie is not presenting false facts, it's
| curating facts to suit your narrative. It's also often that you
| accidentally lie to yourself or others in this way. See a great
| many news stories.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| The act of curating facts itself is required to communicate
| anything because there are an infinite number of facts. You
| have to include some and exclude others, and you arrange them
| in a hierarchy of value that matches your sensibilities. This
| is necessary in order to perceive the world at all, because
| there are too many facts and most of them need to be
| filtered. Everyone does this by necessity. Your entire
| perceptual system and senses are undergirded by this
| framework.
|
| There is no such thing as "objective" because it would
| include all things, which means it could not be perceived by
| anyone.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The subjective/objective split is useful. What good is
| raising the bar for objectivity such that it can never be
| achieved? Better to have objective just mean that nobody in
| the current audience cares to suggest contradictory
| evidence.
|
| It's for indicating what's in scope for debate, and what's
| settled. No need to invoke "Truth". Being too stringent
| about objectivity means that everything is always in scope
| for debate, which is a terrible place to be if you want to
| get anything done.
| api wrote:
| I often put it this way: you can lie with the truth. I feel
| like most people don't get this.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _> If you believe in climate change and encounter a situation
| where a group of scientists were proven to have falsified data
| in a paper on climate change, it really isn 't enough
| information to change your belief in climate change, because
| the evidence of climate change is much larger than any single
| paper._
|
| Although your wider point is sound that specific example should
| undermine your belief quite significantly if you're a rational
| person.
|
| 1. It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so
| they are probably all dishonest.
|
| 2. They did it because they expected it to work.
|
| 3. If they expected it to work it's likely that they did it
| before and got away with it, or saw others getting away with
| it, or both.
|
| 4. If there's a culture of people falsifying data and getting
| away with it, that means there's very likely to be more than
| one paper with falsified data. Possibly many such papers. After
| all, the authors have probably authored papers previously and
| those are all now in doubt too, even if fraud can't be
| trivially proven in every case.
|
| 5. Scientists often take data found in papers at face value.
| That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years
| or decades after they were published. Scientists also build on
| each other's data. Therefore, there are likely to not only be
| undetected fraudulent papers, but also many papers that aren't
| directly fraudulent but build on them without the problem being
| detected.
|
| 6. Therefore, it's likely the evidence base is not as robust as
| previously believed.
|
| 7. Therefore, your belief in the likelihood of their claims
| being true should be lowered.
|
| In reality how much you should update your belief will depend
| on things like how the fraud was discovered, whether there were
| any penalties, and whether the scientists showed contrition. If
| the fraud was discovered by people outside of the field,
| nothing happened to the miscreants and the scientists didn't
| care that they got caught, the amount you should update your
| belief should be much larger than if they were swiftly detected
| by robust systems, punished severely and showed genuine regret
| afterwards.
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| You're making a chain of assumptions and deductions that are
| not necessarily true given the initial statement of the
| scenario. Just because you think those things logically
| follow doesn't mean that they do.
|
| You also make throw away assertions line "That's why so many
| claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after
| they were published." What is "so many claims?" The majority?
| 10%? 0.5%?
|
| I totally agree with you that the nuances of the situation
| are very important to consider, and the things you mention
| are possibilities, but you are too eager to reject things if
| you think "that specific example should undermine your belief
| quite significantly if you're a rational person." You made
| lots of assumptions in these statements and I think a
| rational person with humility would not make those
| assumptions so quickly.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > Say what you want about the previous era of corporate
| controlled news media, at least the journalists in that era
| tried to present the _relevant_ facts to the viewer.
|
| If you think this reduced bias, you couldn't be more wrong - it
| only made the bias harder to debunk. Deciding which facts are
| "relevant" is one easy way to bias reporting, but the much
| easier, much more effective way is deciding which _stories_ are
| "relevant". Journalists have their own convictions and causes,
| motivating which incidents they cast as isolated and random,
| and get buried in the news, and which are part of a wider
| trend, a "conversation that we as a nation must have", etc.,
| getting front-page treatment.
|
| A typical example: _And third, the failure of its findings to
| attract much notice, at least so far, suggests that scholars,
| medical institutions and members of the media are applying
| double standards to such studies._ -
| https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/10/27/the-data-...
| (unpaywalled: https://archive.md/Mwjb4)
| zahlman wrote:
| > the previous era of corporate controlled news media... The
| facts you are exposed to today are usually decided by an
| algorithm
|
| ... But that algorithm is still corporate controlled.
| miki123211 wrote:
| See also: the Chinese robber fallacy.
|
| Even if only 0.1% of Chinese people engaged in theft, and that
| would be a much lower rate than in any developed country, you'd
| still get a million Chinese thieves. You could show a new one
| every day, bombarding people with images and news reports of
| how untrustworthy Chinese people are. The news reports
| themselves wouldn't even be misinformation, as all the people
| shown would actually be guilty of the crimes they were accused
| of. Nevertheless, people would draw the wrong conclusion.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| > If we want to counter manipulation and polarization, we need to
| focus on strengthening the structural integrity and resilience of
| our own belief systems. This means fostering internal coherence,
| building bridges between different templates, and cultivating
| narratives that are not just factually accurate, but also
| emotionally compelling and structurally robust.
|
| I fear we are already increasingly too late on much of these
| things because there also exists communities that maintain
| structural integrity by resisting bridge building between
| different cultural templates. I.E. You must refuse bridge
| building in order to maintain your own community, such as wizard,
| blackpill, or MGTOW actively discouraging bonding with women as
| equal people to men.
| unpaydijk wrote:
| For some reason the article seems to really like the -- symbol,
| even as far as replacing most of it's commas with it
| altruios wrote:
| That dash is indicative of AI. Unlike the "-" - which I use
| often - the "--" is reportedly an AI tell.
| mrexroad wrote:
| Eh, the whole em dash thing is a low accuracy tell. Most of
| my writing uses em dashes; iOS/macOS replaces "--" (dash
| dash) with an em dash. Fwiw, in your example, an em dash is
| the correct choice, not a dash.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Ran this through a few AI-detection analyzers and, yeah, it's
| being pegged as AI-written. I'm guessing the author used it to
| do a final tidying up (not that I think that's acceptable- just
| proof-read your work) and the em dashes came out in force.
| csours wrote:
| I have come to believe that there is no such thing as 'true
| rationality' in the universe. There are true events and true
| facts, but rationality is a shared framework for communication.
| Rationality exists between people.
|
| People always have a framing story or perspective or viewpoint or
| system prompt for how they understand facts and events.
|
| If you want to influence beliefs you have to understand the
| framing story that a person is using - even when that framing
| story is invalid or untrue.
|
| Also, if you want to influence beliefs, you have to provide some
| emotional validation. You can't remove a load bearing core belief
| from someone's story, you can only replace it.
|
| ---
|
| Another partial explanation is trauma - you can think about
| 'conspiracy theories' in a number of ways, but these low
| information, high satisfaction theories often arise after
| traumatic experiences. You can't properly address the facts of
| the situation while a person is hurting.
|
| We should expect to see more conspiracy theories after natural
| and unnatural disasters. Think wildfires caused space lasers,
| floods caused by cloud seeding, storms caused by radar
| installations, melting of steel beams by various means. The
| people who believe these things are generally not having a good
| time in life.
|
| ---
|
| BONUS Link: Tim Minchin - Confirmation Bias
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1juPBoxBdc
| HPsquared wrote:
| There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of
| them
|
| There is such a thing as valid logic, but truthful results
| depend on the priors being correct.
| csours wrote:
| Yes, I am using the word 'rationality' somewhat informally.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _There are true facts, but a human observer can never be
| sure of them_
|
| See:
|
| > _Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the
| nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the
| theory of knowledge", it explores different types of
| knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts,
| practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by
| acquaintance as a familiarity through experience.
| Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and
| justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To
| discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of
| justification, such as perception, introspection, memory,
| reason, and testimony._
|
| > _The school of skepticism questions the human ability to
| attain knowledge, while fallibilism says that knowledge is
| never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from
| sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some
| knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a
| belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs.
| Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain that the
| justification of basic beliefs does not depend on other
| beliefs. Internalism and externalism debate whether
| justification is determined solely by mental states or also
| by external circumstances._
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
|
| A philosophy joke:
|
| > _When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background
| is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can
| trick them into having a justified true belief that is not
| actually knowledge._
|
| * Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, https://old.reddit.com/r/Philos
| ophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Agreed, I'd phrase it slightly differently in that symbolized
| reality exists inside our heads, but we often operate as if[1]
| it exists outside our heads and some, possibly a majority of
| people, believe that there is not difference - that they are in
| fact the same thing, that the symbolic universe _is_ real
| universe.
|
| Every frame is the act of assuming a symbolic correspondence.
| The only problem is that we've incredibly bad at disproving the
| veracity of frames.
|
| 1. To great success even
| turnsout wrote:
| Yes. There are true facts, but the concept of "rationality"
| presupposes that there is one correct way to interpret these
| facts and translate them into behavior.
|
| Two people observe someone beating another person. One person
| moves forward to intervene and stop the violence. The other
| moves away to protect themselves. Which person has acted
| rationally? They may have both acted in complete alignment with
| their personal philosophies, and they may each view the other
| as irrational.
|
| "Rationality" is completely subjective to your own values and
| belief systems. Human behavior is infinitely more complex than
| formal logic allows.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| Aside: For the Mermaid graph, what library or how is it being
| shown like this?
| staph wrote:
| It's a brutally simple combination of `@kevingimbel/eleventy-
| plugin-mermaid` with `svg-pan-zoom` :)
| joelg wrote:
| my understanding (which is definitely not exhaustive!) is that
| the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced than
| is popularly retold, and had nothing whatsoever to do with
| Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the
| sun stand still.
|
| Paul Feyerabend has a book called Against Method in which he
| essentially argues that it was the Catholic Church who was
| following the classical "scientific method" of weighing evidence
| between theories, and Galileo's hypothesis was rationally judged
| to be inferior to the existing models. Very fun read.
| staph wrote:
| Thanks for the book recommendation! I wasn't there for the
| Galileo spat, so I can't be certain, but I always appreciate
| more reading.
| marcofloriano wrote:
| I completely agree with your comment. The common narrative
| about Galileo and the Church is often oversimplified and
| overlooks the intellectual context of the time. As you pointed
| out, it wasn't about a crude Biblical literalism--after all,
| even centuries before Galileo, figures like Saint Thomas
| Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, already accepted that the Earth
| is spherical.
|
| By Galileo's era, the Catholic Church was well aware of this
| scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and
| natural philosophy. The dispute was far more about competing
| models and the standards of evidence required, not a refusal to
| accept reason or observation.
|
| Then I can't help but think: if the author of the article
| didn't even understand this, how can the rest of the article be
| correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?
| ajuc wrote:
| > Then I can't help but think: if the author of the article
| didn't even understand this, how can the rest of the article
| be correct if it started from a biased and almost false
| premise?
|
| Same way Galileo could be correct about Earth circling the
| Sun despite basing it on incorrect assumptions :)
| Asraelite wrote:
| > By Galileo's era, the Catholic Church was well aware of
| this scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and
| natural philosophy.
|
| I'm confused. Are you saying that the Church knew the Earth
| was round or not? If they knew, then it doesn't matter what
| arguments were made, it was all in bad faith and therefore
| wasn't scientific.
|
| EDIT: Never mind, I misread
| mcswell wrote:
| The sphericity of the Earth was not what Galileo and the
| Church were arguing about--they were arguing about whether
| the Sun revolved around the Earth, or the Earth around the
| Sun.
| looperhacks wrote:
| The church knew that the earth was round. Which is largely
| irrelevant, because Galileo argued for a heliocentric model
| vs the (at the time popular) geocentric model. Nobody
| argued that the earth was round
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The idea that people used to think the Earth was flat is a
| common misconception. Sometimes medieval painters would
| draw the Earth that way for artistic purposes, but nobody
| seriously thought it worked that way for real.
|
| Why not? It's obvious to anyone who watched a ship sail
| over the horizon that the Earth must be a sphere because
| you see the body of the ship disappear before its sail mast
| does.
| kijin wrote:
| The author doesn't use the Galileo episode as a premise, only
| as a catchy illustration. If anything, the more nuanced
| version of the story seems to support their argument better
| than the simplified version does.
| ajkjk wrote:
| > Then I can't help but think: if the author of the article
| didn't even understand this, how can the rest of the article
| be correct if it started from a biased and almost false
| premise?
|
| That seems pretty unfair. The article is clearly structured
| to treat the Galileo thing as an example, not a premise. It
| is supposed to be a familiar case to consider before going
| into unfamiliar ones. In that sense it clearly still works as
| an example even if it's false: does it not set you up to
| think about the general problem, even if it's a fictional
| anecdote? It's no different than using some observation about
| Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter as an example before
| setting into a point. The fact that it's fictional doesn't
| affect its illustrative merits.
| carbonguy wrote:
| > The fact that it's fictional doesn't affect its
| illustrative merits.
|
| Indeed, it may even reinforce the overall argument being
| made in the post we're discussing; the "Galileo vs.
| Catholicism" narrative is itself a linchpin trope in an
| empirical scientific worldview, with the trope reinforcing
| (among other beliefs) that "it's right and proper to pursue
| and advocate for objective truth even to the extent of
| making enemies of the most powerful."
|
| Considering the likely audience for a piece like this post
| we're discussing, that the Galileo narrative doesn't
| necessarily reflect what actually happened historically
| makes it a pretty good example on a meta-level. Are any of
| us who have the belief in the ultimate value of objectivity
| going to give up on it because a potentially weak example
| was used to support it?
| psychoslave wrote:
| Galileo started the troll himself depicting the opponent
| theory in the mouth of Simplicius.
|
| And even with its acquaintances with the pope, he finished
| jailed at home. Far better than being burned alive like the
| Church did with Giordano Bruno.
|
| So, yes, they are more nuances to the affair, but the case
| around lack of observable parallax or other indeed judicious
| reasoning is not going to create a great narrative to sell on
| the one hand, and on the other hand focusing on technical
| details is kind of missing the forest for the tree of what
| where the social issues at stake the trial examplified.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Was it during Galileo's era or was it a much earlier time
| with Greek philosophers when the idea of heliocentrism was
| rejected because the lack of parallax movement of the stars?
| The idea of stars being so far away they wouldn't show
| parallax movement wasn't acceptable without stronger evidence
| than what was available at the time, given how massive that
| would make outer space, so the simpler explanation was that
| the sun moved.
| teabee89 wrote:
| Reminds me of the Galileo podcast series in the Opinionated
| History of Mathematics by Viktor Blasjo:
| https://intellectualmathematics.com/opinionated-history-of-m...
| gowld wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Galileo-Was-Wrong-Church-Right/dp/097...
|
| Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right CD-ROM - September 1,
| 2007 by Robert A. Sungenis (Author), Robert J. Bennett (Author)
| Uehreka wrote:
| > Robert A. Sungenis
|
| I wish Hacker News would let me use emojis so I could put
| three red sirens after this man's name.
|
| Sungenis isn't a good-faith investigator trying to shed light
| on nuances around Galileo's argument. He's a tradcath (old-
| school Catholic who rejects Vatican II) hack who wants to
| cast shadows on Galileo from as many directions as possible
| in the hopes that he can soften people up on the idea of
| Geocentrism. His approach is very cautious and incremental
| and relies a lot on innuendo; he makes it difficult to really
| pin him down on the things I just said about him. But if you
| look up the things this guy's written and the kinds of people
| he hires to "write the dirty work" when necessary, it's
| pretty clear what his project is.
|
| Edit: I will note that I am not familiar with Paul Feyerabend
| and the book mentioned in the top comment, it's totally
| possible that those are from a different school of thought
| more interested in good faith discussion about the scientific
| method (or not, I don't know). I would just advise taking any
| "turns out" argument about Galileo and the Church with huge
| grains of salt, given that this topic attracts some very
| slippery people with ulterior motives who intentionally
| appeal to contrarians like many of us on this site.
| Bluestein wrote:
| > the hopes that he can soften people up on the idea of
| Geocentrism
|
| He's _actually_ trying to sell Geocentrism, you mean?
| spiritplumber wrote:
| yep.
| Bluestein wrote:
| As in, in _earnest_? Or click-rage bait style?
|
| (I guess at some point you start arguing "I guess none of
| us have been out there to know better ...
|
| ... so it's all a hoax". A millenary hoax -
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sungenis
|
| > Robert A. Sungenis (born c. 1955) is an American Catholic
| apologist and advocate of the pseudoscientific belief that
| the Earth is the center of the universe. He has made
| statements about Jews and Judaism which have been criticized
| as being antisemitic, which he denies. Sungenis is a member
| of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, a Catholic
| Young Earth creationist group.
| kijin wrote:
| Regardless of what the standards of evidence were at the time,
| it surely wasn't "scientific" to threaten someone with
| prosecution for publishing a supposedly inferior hypothesis.
| That was politics.
|
| Speaking of politics, the Reformation happened with nearly
| perfect timing and several countries became safe havens for
| those who had disagreements with the Catholic Church. This
| window of safety helped incubate modern science during its
| critical early years. Less than 50 years after Gelileo died,
| Newton published _Principia_. By then it was already well
| accepted, at least in England, that the Earth goes around the
| Sun, not the other way around.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Absolutely agree that it was politics, not science, but it
| wasn't really anti-science either. In a nutshell, his theory
| was fine on its own; he was punished for insulting the Pope.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Does Feyerabend explain why Galileo was placed under house
| arrest?
|
| Perhaps I'm missing some nuance here, but I don't see why a
| rational argument about competing models would require such
| drastic suppression.
| akurtzhs wrote:
| He indirectly called the Pope a simpleton, and the Pope took
| offense.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| It wasn't his theory, it was that he presented it in the form
| of a dialogue with a character who was an obvious stand-in
| for the Pope, and then made that character sound like a
| complete idiot.
|
| The heresy charges were an excuse to punish him for being
| disrespectful. He'd gotten approval from the Pope to publish;
| he would have been fine if he'd just been polite.
|
| Obviously that's still petty and unjustified, but science
| denial wasn't the real reason for it.
| veqq wrote:
| > why Galileo was placed under house arrest
|
| Galileo's friend Barberini became Pope and asked Galileo to
| write a book. But Barberini became paranoid about
| conspiracies and thought it had seditious, secretly-critical
| undertones.
| opo wrote:
| I have always thought the lesson here is to be careful when
| insulting those with a great deal of power over you. Pope
| Urban VIII was originally a patron and supporter of Galileo:
|
| >...Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his
| book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian
| philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the
| name "Simplicio" in Italian also had the connotation of
| "simpleton."[55] Authors Langford and Stillman Drake asserted
| that Simplicio was modeled on philosophers Lodovico delle
| Colombe and Cesare Cremonini. Pope Urban demanded that his
| own arguments be included in the book, which resulted in
| Galileo putting them in the mouth of Simplicio. Some months
| after the book's publication, Pope Urban VIII banned its sale
| and had its text submitted for examination by a special
| commission
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
| jajko wrote:
| To be honest, I don't ever saw the reason to make him some sort
| of almost-martyr. People were wrong and fighting for a good
| cause many times in history, stuff is always way more complex
| than surface glance reveals.
|
| The moral of the story isn't how great he was, but how horrible
| the church was in punishing any dissent (which itself was a
| highly political process) and how ridiculous it was that they
| had any sort of power over whole society. And power they had,
| and rarely used it for some greater good.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent
|
| Cancel culture of the time.
| zahlman wrote:
| > To be honest, I don't ever saw the reason to make him some
| sort of almost-martyr.
|
| I think the best reason is what you already describe:
|
| > how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| > the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced
| than is popularly retold
|
| Ex historian here. This is true. It's a complicated episode and
| its interpretation is made more murky by generations of people
| trying to use it to make a particular rhetorical point. Paul
| Feyerabend is guilty of this too, although he's at least being
| very original in the contrarian philosophy of science he's
| using it for.
|
| If anyone is interested in the episode for its own sake (which
| is rare actually, unless you're a renaissance history buff
| first and foremost), I'd probably recommend John Heilbron's
| biography which has a pretty balanced take on the whole thing.
| wahern wrote:
| > and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism
| like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still.
|
| The church is and was a large, often heterogenous institution.
| For some the issue was about conflict with literal
| interpretations of the bible, not merely the predominate
| allegorical interpretations (a more widely held concern, at
| least as a pedagogic matter). AFAIU, while the pope wasn't of
| this mind, some of the clerics tapped to investigate were. See,
| e.g., the 1616 Consultant's Report,
|
| > All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in
| philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly
| contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture,
| according to the literal meaning of the words and according to
| the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers
| and the doctors of theology.
|
| https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/sacred-space-astronomy/in...
| polynomial wrote:
| Persevered through the article and comments in hopes someone
| would point this out.
| jack_h wrote:
| As I've grown older and witnessed history in action I've begun
| to understand that reality is much, much more complicated than
| the simple narratives of history we lean on as a society.
|
| Just think of how many different competing narratives are
| currently in existence surrounding this tumultuous point in
| history and realize that at some point some of these narratives
| will become dominant. Over time as the events leave social
| memory the key conclusions will likely be remembered but a lot
| of the reasoning behind them will not. As it exits living
| memory most of the nuance and context is lost. Over time we may
| change the narrative by reconsidering aspects that were
| forgotten, recontextualizing events based on modern concepts
| and concerns, misunderstanding what happened, or even
| surreptitiously "modifying" what happened for political ends.
| Or to put it more plainly, history is written by the victors
| and can be rewritten as time goes on and the victors change.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| The important thing is not why they thought they were right but
| the fact they could not tolerate being wrong, or even tolerate
| dissidence on that one little inconsequential thing.
|
| That's why you have people today pushing for flat earth and
| creationism.
|
| Because their whole shtick is we are always right about
| absolutely everything.
| legitster wrote:
| I just recently watched a lecture about this and was
| fascinated.
|
| Specifically, the (incorrect) model of the universe that was
| used in Europe at the time had been refined to the point that
| it was absurdly accurate. Even had they adopted a heliocentric
| model, there would have been no direct benefit for for a long,
| long time. If anything, Galileo's work was rife with errors and
| mathematical problems that would have taken a lot of work to
| figure out.
|
| So the argument was to take on a bunch of technical debt and
| switching costs for almost no benefits.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Feelings aren't facts but they are important for persuasion. The
| methods most able to create radical change are the gentlest
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument
|
| I disagree with Rapoport's taxonomy, not least "Chinese
| brainwashing" in the Korean war was _not_ Pavolivan and was
| rather closer to the T-group method developed in Bethel, ME.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-groups
| dgb23 wrote:
| Interesting. I often hear/read the term "steelmanning" instead,
| as in the opposite of constructing a straw man argument.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I've tried to understand why a MAGA friend of mine believes what
| he believes and I've literally heard him reject the concept that
| facts matter. He doesn't have evidence and isn't interested in
| finding it. This allows him to reject all opposing evidence out
| of hand. It's pretty weird.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| The silent downvotes speak volumes.
| immibis wrote:
| Any opposition to right wing thinking tends to get silently
| downvoted on HN. Wonder if it's something like the "goblin
| army" mentioned in another comment, or just individual right-
| wing lurkers.
|
| Multiple times, I've emailed HN moderators, asking "which
| guideline did this flagged comment break?" and their answer
| has been "Oh, you didn't break any guideline. Users just
| flagged it a lot for some reason. I've unflagged it for you."
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| I know it's overused and incorrectly applied, but I can't
| get past the thought that the people doing this have a
| silent, burning mentality of " _Rule 1: You don 't talk
| about fight club!_"
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I downvote anyone who starts political topics, be they left
| or right leaning. Because unfortunately, the users on this
| site are incapable of having a constructive discussion on
| the topic. They always turn into personal attacks, strawman
| arguments, etc. I'm sick of it - so I downvote such threads
| when I see them.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's called a cult for a reason. Outside of isolation (which
| you can still argue for), it meets all traditional criteria.
|
| Also, consider that people aren't rational actors to begin
| with. If the true reasons are deemed too controversial to say
| out loud, an outlandish, nonsensical explanation is preferable
| over spouting the controversial statement.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Yeah honestly I'm afraid to find out what he actually
| believes.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Same reason for religion. Community and a feeling of self
| righteousness.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| With religion it's different. To take the example from TFA,
| well the Bible says the Sun goes around the Earth.
|
| He doesn't even get an inch deep like that. Specifically I'm
| talking about the "rigged" 2020 election. He has no evidence,
| not even fake evidence and isn't interested in trying to find
| any.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| >the Bible says the Sun goes around the Earth
|
| Where? I don't see it in the passages TFA gave
| idontwantthis wrote:
| > These passages were cited as literal proof that the
| Earth was stationary and central.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Where were they cited in such a way? How?
| chasd00 wrote:
| Religion is a good analogy because ultimately every argument
| boils down to a matter of faith. The believer has it and the
| unbeliever does not. No facts or evidence, no matter how well
| presented/articulated, will change that.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. In my case it's especially disturbing
| because prior to this whole _gestures broadly_ thing, we had
| nuanced debates on many topics. Now, he just dismisses
| everything as 'narratives' if he disagrees with it.
|
| Sadly, it seems to be based on the propaganda style I've seen
| out of authoritarians in general. It doesn't hurt 'their side'
| to break everything down to narratives, because at the end of
| the day, you just have to swallow the current one and you don't
| have to think about it again.
|
| In another way it seems almost like a form of burnout. Like
| 'fuck this, I'm settling on cognitive ease from now on'.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I saw an interesting interview on the subject:
| https://youtu.be/6Ibk5vJ-4-o?t=1678
|
| It argues the way to engage with these people is to first
| understand the psychological manipulation tactics they have
| been subjected to. That what you should focus on is not their
| false beliefs, but the underlying reasons why they were
| vulnerable to that manipulation in the first place; and to
| realize that everybody can become a victim of such cults helps
| to empathize with them. Don't give up on your friend.
| dgb23 wrote:
| If he is close and trusts you then this might work as well for
| you (has for me):
|
| Don't start discussions with a concrete (recent) topic, but
| focus on fundamental things: Values, hopes, fears... Strengthen
| their argument. Tell them how you feel and why instead of
| making judgements.
|
| The topical stuff is always under attack through
| misinformation, social media spam and propaganda. It's far more
| effective to honestly nurture human connection and focusing on
| core values. Without the fog of BS, people can see what's
| happening more easily themselves.
| amai wrote:
| The only way to help these kind of people is by reactivating
| their critical thinking. This is only possible if you tell them
| something that is so absurd, that even they have to reject it.
| For example: ,,Trump is Putins father." ,,Kennedy was killed by
| aliens, because he wanted to land on the moon." ,,We live on
| the inside of a hollow world with the sun in the middle." ,,The
| mothership will come soon and send all humans with a chip
| inside their brain to Beteigeuze." At some point they start
| rejecting your outlandish ideas, because their brain simply
| can't stand that nonsense. And this is the first step in the
| right direction for these kind of people.
| skybrian wrote:
| I'm wary of making an "arguments are soldiers" assumption where
| facts are mostly useful for making arguments, in an attempt to
| change people's minds.
|
| We should be curious about what's going on in the world
| regardless of what ideologies we might find appealing. Knowing
| what's going on in the world is an end in itself. An article with
| some interesting evidence in it is useful even if you disagree
| with the main argument.
|
| Facts may not change minds, but we should still support people
| who do the reporting that brings us the facts.
| staph wrote:
| I just really wish most people had this same kind of attitude,
| but can't in good faith say that's what I'm observing.
| jfarmer wrote:
| CS Peirce has a famous essay "The Fixation of Belief" where he
| describes various processes by which we form beliefs and what it
| takes to surprise/upset/unsettle them.
|
| The essay: https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
|
| This blog post gestures at that idea while being an example of
| what Peirce calls the "a priori method". A certain framework is
| first settled upon for (largely) aesthetic reasons and then
| experience is analyzed in light of that framework. This yields
| comfortable conclusions (for those who buy the framework,
| anyhow).
|
| For Peirce, all inquiry begins with surprise, sometimes because
| we've gone looking for it but usually not. About the _a priori_
| method, he says:
|
| "[The _a priori_ ] method is far more intellectual and
| respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the
| others which we have noticed. But its failure has been the most
| manifest. It makes of inquiry something similar to the
| development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or
| less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have
| never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung
| backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual
| philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest. And so from
| this, which has been called the a priori method, we are driven,
| in Lord Bacon's phrase, to a true induction."
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Wow. I'm reminded of a great essay/blgo I read years ago that
| I'll never find again that said a good, engaging
| talk/presentation has to have an element of surprise. More
| specifically, you start with an exposition of what your
| audience already knows/believes, then you introduce your thesis
| which is SURPRISING in terms of what they already know. Not too
| out of the realm of belief, but just enough.
|
| The bigger/more thought-diverse the audience, the harder this
| is to do.
| mswen wrote:
| I had a grad school mentor William Wells who taught us
| something similar. A good research publication or
| presentation should aim for "just the right amount of
| surprise".
|
| Too much surprise and the scientific audience will dismiss
| you out of hand. How could you be right while all the prior
| research is dead wrong?
|
| Conversely, too little surprise and the reader / listener
| will yawn and say but of course we all know this. You are
| just repeating standard knowledge in the field.
|
| Despite the impact on audience reception we tend to believe
| that most fields would benefit from robust replication
| studies and the researchers shouldn't be penalized for
| confirming the well known.
|
| And, sometimes there really is paradigm breaking research and
| common knowledge is eventually demonstrated to be very wrong.
| But often the initial researchers face years or decades of
| rejection.
| meowface wrote:
| Some of the core ideas here seem good, but the node/edge
| distinction feels too fuzzy. The node "Climate Change Threat" is
| a claim. Is the node "Efficiency" a claim? Can one challenge the
| existence of Efficiency? If one instead challenges the benefit of
| Efficiency, isn't that an edge attack?
|
| I could give a bunch of other examples where the nodes in the
| article don't feel like apples-to-apples things. I feel less
| motivated to try to internalize the article due to this.
| mcswell wrote:
| The edges are labeled by transitive verbs, where the arrow
| points from the subject of that verb to the direct object. (I'm
| counting particle verbs, like "leads to", as verbs.) The nodes
| are labeled by nouns. If you can change a noun to a verb, I
| guess you would be changing what is an edge and what is a node.
|
| Example: In the article's first diagram, there is a node
| labeled "Innovation". This could be replaced by a node labeled
| "Capitalist" and a node labeled "Improvement", with an arrow
| from the first to the second labeled "innovates."
|
| So yes, if you can replace a node by an edge (and vice versa,
| although I don't give an example), this node vs. edge thing is
| fuzzy.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I'm struggling to understand this article. I think it's for a
| couple of reasons:
|
| 1. The capitalism graph seems OK but the climate change graph
| doesn't look right. I've never heard anyone argue that "resilient
| communities" automatically lead to "policy changes". What does
| that mean? If you have a resilient community already, why would
| you need to change anything? It seems to suggest that people with
| this belief system would end up in an infinite loop of wanting to
| change policies even when the original motivating problem is
| solved, which sounds like a very uncharitable view of climate
| activists.
|
| 2. After setting up this very abstract argument, the author ends
| by claiming, _" The evidence, and the argument of this post,
| suggest [truth doesn't determine what people believe]: structure,
| coherence, and emotional resonance are far more important for the
| persistence and spread of beliefs"_. But he hasn't supplied any
| arguments. He outlined an abstract theoretical model, but it
| makes no testable predictions and he doesn't try to prove it's
| correct. Then he claims there are no real debates in the west
| about climate change, vaccines, or race, it's all driven by the
| evil Ruskies "creating social chaos". This claim isn't linked in
| any way to the first part with the graphs.
|
| I've written about this belief twice in the past.
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
|
| It's all based on a bunch of academic papers that don't replicate
| and which use pseudo-scientific methodologies. They misuse ML in
| ways that generate noise, identify random people as "Russian
| bots", conclude that "Russian bots" support every possible
| opinion simultaneously and from there assume there must be some
| nefarious psychological strategy behind it. In reality they're
| just doing bad social science and casting the results through the
| prism of their ideological biases. It works because social
| science is full of people who are easily impressed by maths they
| don't understand, and who are surrounded by people with identical
| ideologies to themselves (often extreme ones). So there's nobody
| to give them a reality check. Eventually people who understand
| computer science come along and write a rebuttal, but academia is
| a closed system so they just ignore it and keep pumping
| journalists/politicians full of conspiracy theories and
| misinformation.
|
| Given that, it's kind of ironic that the author is writing about
| the difficulty of changing people's minds with truth.
| zahlman wrote:
| > graph seems OK but
|
| The point of the argument is agnostic to the contents and
| structure of the graphs. They are only there to illustrate that
| a) there exists a conflict; b) both sides of this conflict
| _have_ a graph; c) even though these graphs inform positions on
| the same policy, they are composed of completely unrelated
| ideas.
|
| > But he hasn't supplied any arguments. He outlined an abstract
| theoretical model, but it makes no testable predictions and he
| doesn't try to prove it's correct.
|
| You're meant, I think, to find the argument intuitively
| persuasive. It's easy to map the model's concept onto one's own
| beliefs, at least if you consider yourself to be rational (and
| most people do, even if they end up believing absurdities).
|
| I think there is a testable prediction: if you just go in guns
| blazing to a "culture war" argument and try to convince people
| of your viewpoint, you are not going to make any progress.
| Further, in order to even challenge individual beliefs, you
| will have to understand how they relate to the rest of the
| other side's memeplex.
|
| > Then he claims there are no real debates in the west about
| climate change, vaccines, or race, it's all driven by the evil
| Ruskies "creating social chaos". This claim isn't linked in any
| way to the first part with the graphs.
|
| Blaming Russia for this is indeed very much out of pocket, and
| an example of the kind of culture warring that the article
| seems to want to discourage. However, there is ample evidence
| of the existence of the groups cited (granted there are others
| from other countries as well), even if they can't really
| explain more than a small part of the problem -- at least
| directly. I think it's fair to say that a small number of
| agitators can produce large amounts of social tension, if they
| hit just the right talking points (qv.
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/).
|
| More importantly, I'd say the dearth of "real debate" is
| _abundantly_ clear from looking at pretty much any social
| media. Even on sites that allow users to take either side of an
| issue, even on the subset of those where one side isn 't
| clearly being continually persecuted and driven off, you find
| very heavy siloing of each side into its own echo chamber.
| newsclues wrote:
| Structure for facts and information is just communication.
|
| You can have the facts but not be persuasive due to poor
| communication skills.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| The core of the problem lies not in facts failing to persuade,
| but in our obsession with trying to change minds.
|
| We've developed systems to facilitate this. Parliamentary debate,
| for instance, was meant to force parties to justify their
| positions through public reasons, not private convictions.
| Religious institutions, too, have long shaped minds with varying
| degrees of success.
|
| But attempts to reshape humanity, especially on a grand scale,
| have consistently produced devastating and unintended
| consequences.
|
| We now live in an age where political expedience trumps truth;
| what matters is not whether something is right, but whether it
| plays well. The public is expected to absorb politicized half-
| truths while being shielded from the real issues....because
| complexity isn't expedient. The current obsession with labeling
| ideas as "misinformation" or "disinformation" is a desperate,
| often incoherent attempt to control discourse, and it breeds more
| cynicism than clarity.
|
| In the end, good ideas tend to survive, but not on any schedule
| we can manage. Trying to micromanage thought or the flow of
| information is not only futile, it's unworthy of the very
| rationality we claim to protect.
| dgb23 wrote:
| You say the misinformation label is counterproductive. But what
| if we cannot even agree on what the facts are? There's no
| productive discussion to be had. We cannot solve problems
| collaboratively when facts are ignored or denied.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| Disagreement about facts is not new and you're assuming too
| much about how truth operates in public discourse.
|
| Obviously, facts matter but disagreement is rarely about
| facts themselves. What counts as 'fact' is often embedded in
| a web of assumptions, models, and values. A lot of what
| passes as fact are merely claims dressed up as indisputable
| but often laden with interpretation, ideology, or selective
| framing.
|
| To say there's 'no productive discussion' unless facts are
| agreed upon is to misunderstand how knowledge and consensus
| actually work. History shows that productive discourse often
| begins in spite of disagreement over facts. Scientific
| progress, legal systems, and democratic deliberation rely not
| on perfect consensus but on procedures that tolerate
| disagreement and test claims over time.
|
| Labeling something as 'misinformation' may feel like
| asserting the truth, but epistemologically it's simple a kind
| of speech act... one that can shut down inquiry rather than
| promote it. It assumes a finality that's likely not
| justified, and worse, it can become a tool of political
| expedience. This is especially dangerous when wielded by
| institutions that are pursuing their own interests, are
| fallible, or are compromised.
|
| The path to truth is not paved with censorship and labeling.
| It's built through dialogue, humility, and robust mechanisms
| for testing competing claims. Dissent is not the enemy of
| truth, it's often the precondition.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I agree with everything you've said one hundred percent.
|
| However, I'm not talking about honest discussion, truth
| seeking and competing perspectives etc. But about literal
| dishonesty, actual lies and complete disregard of proof and
| data in order to achieve a goal (usually power or
| attention).
|
| Like "no troops in Crimea", "Jewish space lasers" or
| "windmills cause cancer"...
|
| There is a qualitative difference between honestly
| believing X versus constructing X in order to manipulate
| and deceive. It seems to be that the latter has become much
| more prevalent, aggressive and even automated in recent
| years in public discourse. That's what is meant by
| "misinformation".
|
| I don't believe in systemically/institutionally policing
| speech (with exceptions like calling for violence, doxxing
| and similar). And I don't have a solution in mind. But it
| sure as hell is tiring, because it takes a lot more effort
| to deconstruct lies and misinformation than to spread them.
|
| It's an honest question: Are the tools for honest public
| discourse even effective against this in the long term? Is
| that how we go forward?
| renox wrote:
| > Religious institutions, too, have long shaped minds with
| varying degrees of success.
|
| Given that a huge portion of the world's population is
| religious (a quick google search say 84%), I'd say with a very
| high success.
| felineflock wrote:
| In the "Climate Change Threat" example, one vector of attack is
| when the policy changes do not lead to renewable energy adoption
| or to reduced emissions.
|
| That justifies the questioning of whether the climate change was
| really motivating the policy change or just being used as
| pretext.
| mcswell wrote:
| That idea suggests there might be another way to get to the
| desired goal, if that goal is renewable energy adoption (quite
| aside from whether that goal results in reduced emissions).
|
| We have solar panels on our house, and recently installed a
| heat pump with gas furnace backup in place of an AC (for
| summer) + gas furnace (for winter). We also replaced our gas
| water heater (near the end of its life) with a heat pump water
| heater, and I drive an EV (not Tesla :)). All these were partly
| paid for by various tax rebates. The result is that our
| electric bill is zero, and our gas bill has plummeted (I think
| it will be nearly zero), and I spend zero at the gas station
| and the oil change place. One should be able to sell that idea
| to anyone who wants to reduce their expenses, and expects to
| live in a house for a few years to a decade to break even, and
| to drive their car for five years or so.
|
| Of course the current administration is doing its best to
| eliminate those tax benefits...
| asdff wrote:
| The thing is with all of these improvements is that if they
| were so easy to implement for other people, everyone would do
| them. It might be better to ask why people aren't installing
| this stuff if they save money over time? The answer is most
| people really don't have very much money available beyond
| what can cover existing routine costs. For a lot of people if
| they wanted to replace their water heater they would have to
| take on debt or part with an asset to afford that. Yes, on
| the whole the cost is amortized, but you still need to
| produce significant capital up front to make it happen at
| all. And maybe the water heater isn't the only couple hundred
| dollar purchase you've been putting on the backburner in your
| life.
|
| As a result, where you find homes outfitted like yours, you
| tend to also find incomes well above the cost of living.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Minds can't be changed when a decision was based on emotion.
|
| One day I told a friend how I could make no sense of my
| girlfriend's behavior in some situation.
|
| He said to me "you still think people make decisions on logic.
| Many people make their decisions on how they feel emotionally.
| Logic and facts have nothing to do with it."
|
| Suddenly a light switched on and i realized that I'm a typical
| computer person who _thinks_ that everything is based on logic
| and if you can just explain clearly enough, explain the facts,
| then the other person will change their mind when they see the
| facts. It doesn't work that way.
|
| Computer people have real trouble getting their head around this
| concept.
| fvdessen wrote:
| In 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' the argument is made that the most
| important cultural changes happen outside the debate, where new
| structures of thought are being built without being noticed. As
| without a competing thought structure we are unable to even
| perceive the new structure. It is the dissonances and the debates
| that lets us introspect our own ideas. Without the dissonance we
| do not notice new ideas taking hold of us and changing ourselves,
| and it is only unnoticed that truly radical changes can take
| place.
| joules77 wrote:
| In the seminaries of the world they don't teach how to make up
| clever stories to entrap people. For that you go to Marketing, PR
| or Sales school. And ofcourse the people who come out of these
| schools think they are very clever because they sold some widgets
| or politicians to the masses by some deadline.
|
| But have you heard of a sales org or a marketing dept that has
| been running for thousand years? They barely ever survive few
| decades as a coherent unit if ever.
|
| For the curious go check what the neighborhood seminary teaches.
|
| The Church (and all other religious systems) haven't stood for
| thousands of year through the fall of empires, nations, civil
| wars, revolutions, plagues, famines, collapse of economic
| systems, internal schisms, enlightenment, progress in
| science/tech etc because of the stories they tell.
|
| In fact the stories have been rewritten, branched, mutated,
| merged with other stories thousands of times to the point we have
| thousands of different versions of these stories. There is no
| "narrative domination".
|
| The Church has survived because when people Suffer due to the
| fall of empire/nations/banks/economies, war, plagues, famine,
| disasters etc where else do people go?
|
| Do they all head to house of the local system analyst/graph
| theorist?
| moate wrote:
| So what about the _checks notes_ tens if not hundreds of
| thousands of religions and religious belief structures that
| have fallen apart since the inception of humanity?
|
| This is some very weird survivor bias.
|
| Also, philosophically, a the whole of organized religion is
| "clever stories to entrap people" from a non-believer's
| standpoint.
| pier25 wrote:
| This seems way too logical. Humans are not, for the most part,
| rational and logical creatures.
| mcswell wrote:
| I resemble that remark.
| zebomon wrote:
| Very engaging look at a very difficult topic to approach
| analytically.
|
| I'm reminded of something I learned about the founder of
| Stormfront, the internet's first white supremacist forum. His
| child went on to attend college away from home, her first time
| away from her family, and over a period of roughly two years, she
| attended dinners with a group of Jewish students who challenged
| each of her beliefs one at a time. Each time, as she accepted the
| evidence her friends presented to her about a particular belief,
| she nonetheless would integrate the new information with her
| racist worldview. This continued piece by piece until there was
| nothing left of her racist worldview at all.
|
| It's both heartening and disheartening at the same time, because
| if this person can change her mind after almost two decades of
| constant indoctrination during her formative years, then surely
| anyone can change their mind. That's the heartening part: the
| disheartening part is, of course, that the effort it took is far
| from scalable at present and much more difficult to apply to
| someone who remains plugged into whatever information sources
| they are getting their current fix of nonsense from.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| AI chat bots in the future may be a part of ritual mind
| cleansing.
| staph wrote:
| Wait are you writing from the past?
| ilaksh wrote:
| I remember my first year in college as being the time when I
| solidified my own first worldview. Prior to that, I had some
| ideas like the existence of God (in some form) that I was
| ambivalent about or maybe deferring final judgement. That's
| when I decided that I was an atheist.
|
| Coincidentally, around the same time my twin brother became a
| serious Christian. He was socially integrated into a group. He
| finished college. I did not.
|
| Then years later, maybe late 20s or early 30s, I became
| convinced that I had been wrong about my government my whole
| life and that they were not trustworthy. 9/11 being a false
| flag (which I still believe) was evidence of that.
|
| The interesting thing was at the time when I was in New York I
| had completely accepted the idea that those three buildings had
| all turned into dust because the jet hit them. I remember
| walking around lower Manhattan to pick up a check and the dust
| was just coating everything.
|
| I had even done some word processing on one of the twin towers
| leases shortly before the event while temping at Wachtell
| Lipton. At the time I made no connection.
|
| Anyway, I think an underappreciated aspect of belief graphs is
| their connection to social groups and identity. It was much
| easier for me to question institutions when I already felt more
| marginalized and actually partly blamed society for it being so
| hard for me to handle my needs and find a place in it.
|
| Another aspect of group membership and beliefs is practical.
| When groups are competing strategically, they often do so in
| ways that are not particularly ethical. It's much easier to
| justify this if you think of the other group as being deeply
| flawed, evil, invaders, etc.
|
| Although some of these demonization s of the other group do
| have some kernel of truth to them, they are largely
| oversimplifications in the belief graphs leading to dangerous
| inaccuracies.
|
| What are the practical structural and cultural differences that
| lead to the group divisions? They largely seem geographic,
| economic, ethnic.
|
| Could a more sophisticated, better integrated, and more
| accurate belief system help? Or do the social structures and
| networks largely define the groups?
|
| Are we just basically mammalian ant colonies? Brutally fighting
| each other for dominance any time there is a resource conflict?
|
| If the other side seems to be trying to hog important resources
| any time they get a chance, you perceive that you are not
| playing a fair game. It's not a civil interaction. The other
| doesn't play by the rules or tell the truth or leave any subtly
| in discourse. So why should your group, unless it wants to get
| wiped out?
|
| In my worldview the faint hope is that having more abundance of
| resources will somehow lead to more civility.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think this is just gloating. Children leaving home for
| college and quickly abandoning the belief systems of their
| family is almost more common than the opposite, where they
| maintain them. Especially if the belief system is something as
| unpopular as white supremacy mythology; not easy to make new
| friends at your new school if you don't give that up.
|
| I'm sure she maintains many beliefs that may people would see
| as racist, along with her classmates. She hasn't been educated
| or fixed, she just left home.
| zahlman wrote:
| It's also noteworthy that she was willing to sit with and
| listen to them in the first place.
| csense wrote:
| This accurately describes how my brain works. My thought process
| is like a bunch of graph nodes, and when new information doesn't
| "fit", it puts tensions on the links, and I want to resolve that
| tension. I can...feel it happening inside my mind when I think,
| more or less? -- It's hard to describe
|
| Resolving that tension may occur in several ways, in order of
| increasing significance:
|
| - Rejecting the new information
|
| - Refining the graph (splitting a node representing a concept
| into multiple sub-nodes representing sub-concepts with their own
| relationships)
|
| - Making local modifications to the graph
|
| - Making sweeping architectural changes to the graph as a whole
|
| The author seems to imply that cognitive biases are an inherent
| qualitative problem that is fundamentally forced to arise from
| this graph structure. I personally respectfully disagree. In my
| view, cognitive biases are a quantitative problem, incorrectly
| setting the threshold at which a large reorganization should
| occur. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is
| qualitatively a sound epistemological principle -- but to
| correctly apply it, you must quantitatively set a reasonable
| threshold for "extraordinary."
|
| I feel like we need to get better at understanding the graph
| structure of people we disagree with. The best example I can
| think of is the abortion debate [1]: If you accept the premise
| "Life begins at conception" [2], the pro-life camp has an
| enormously strong case; the rest of the graph between that
| premise and "Abortion should be illegal" is very strong (it's
| mostly tremendously well-reinforced nodes in near-universal moral
| foundations, like "Do unto others" or "Murder should be
| illegal").
|
| Arguments against abortion are frequently just _bad_ when looked
| at from the graph point of view: They often don 't directly
| confront the premise "Life begins at conception," nor do they
| attack the graph between the premise and conclusion. [3]
|
| [1] I'm personally in the pro-choice camp; I do not accept the
| premise that a human fetus has the same moral status as a fully
| grown human.
|
| [2] "Life" here is not in the technical biological sense, but
| something more akin to "The ethical standing of human-equivalent
| sentience." (Bacteria and protozoa and so on are biologically
| alive, but nobody moralizes about killing them en masse by, e.g.,
| cooking your food.)
|
| [3] If you're curious about my own views on this specific
| subject, I've talked about them here before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255493#36270990
| mcswell wrote:
| You're absolutely right about the abortion debate; the entire
| pro-life argument makes sense only if you deny that "life
| begins at conception". But I don't believe I've ever heard the
| pro-choice camp attack that axiom; instead, it's always about
| the mother having control over her body, which just ignores the
| pro-life axiom. (If life begins at conception, then abortion is
| not about the mother's body, it's about the pre-born's body.)
| No wonder the two sides don't communicate.
| ranger207 wrote:
| I've had this mental model for a while now, but this post lays it
| out better than I could've. I think the most important part of
| the post is this part of the conclusion:
|
| > For years, our main defense against misinformation and
| manipulation has been to double down on "truth"--to fact-check,
| debunk, and moderate. These efforts are important, but they rest
| on the assumption that truth is the main determinant of what
| people believe. The evidence, and the argument of this post,
| suggest otherwise: structure, coherence, and emotional resonance
| are far more important for the persistence and spread of beliefs.
|
| I'm still friends with one or two people who are hat-wearing MAGA
| supporters. WE stopped talking politics after 2018 or so, but
| between 2016 and 2018, and still occasionally since, I get a
| glimpse into their belief graph. Sometimes their facts are
| incorrect, but that's less common than simply them interpreting
| the same facts in a different light. Occasionally they'll have an
| interpretation of a fact pattern that I find more compelling than
| the interpretation I find in more liberal spaces. (The Democrat
| party is, after all, not the best at hypocrisy.) These patterns
| are the place where the point of the blog post comes out most
| clearly: most people aren't motivated by facts and logic; they're
| motivated by a vast network of feelings and emotions where each
| point reinforces all the other points and an individual fact is
| less important for its truth than its reinforcement of the
| overall belief graph.
|
| The most interesting thing about the MAGA belief graph though is
| its overall structure and maintenance. There is approximately a
| third of the US that simply has an entirely different basis of
| belief in the world than the other two thirds. How is it
| maintained? How does normal everyday contact between the two
| groups not reconcile the foundations of the two belief systems?
| It's not a difference in facts, although that does come up
| occasionally. For example, the sudden change in the truth of the
| Epstein client list and the effort of the MAGA belief system
| maintainers (news orgs, influencers, etc) to excise it from the
| belief graph has had some interesting effects.
|
| But the interesting part is the methods used, the way the belief
| system reacts to influencers and others that shape the belief
| system, and how particular facts and opinions are used to
| reinforce the effects of both new and existing parts of the
| belief graph. Looking at my MAGA acquaintances and seeing their
| belief system from the outside has made those methods and
| reactions more legible, and has allowed me to notice some of the
| times those same methods and reactions pop up in other
| communities. For example, I dislike the focus on fact-checking,
| because too often the facts are the same on both sides, and it's
| only a difference in interpretation. Then people who agree with
| the fact checkers prove to themselves that the other side is
| unable to see truth, while people who disagree with the fact
| checkers prove to themselves that the other side twists truth
| into lies. Yet people still push for fact checking despite the
| fact it only reinforces both sides opinion of themselves rather
| than having any chance of changing the mind of anyone on the
| other side.
|
| Unfortunately I am lazy or else I would've taken notes of
| examples of the methods and reactions used to reinforce a belief
| system, rather than just vague half-recollected memories that
| form my own belief graph. Regardless, I think it's important for
| people to look at their own belief system and, when presented
| with new facts or arguments, examining them and how they fit into
| their belief system, and see if maybe the argument is relying
| less on pure facts and more on emotional ties to the rest of
| their belief system.
| mcswell wrote:
| Economist Paul Samuelson: "When events change, I change my
| mind. What do you do?" Unfortunately--as you say--most of us
| don't.
| zahlman wrote:
| > For example, the sudden change in the truth of the Epstein
| client list and the effort of the MAGA belief system
| maintainers (news orgs, influencers, etc) to excise it from the
| belief graph has had some interesting effects.
|
| Interesting. My own experience has been that they are actually
| upset at Trump about this.
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| > Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the
| valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed
|
| Who am I to doubt the Church's interpretation but this seems like
| it literally reads as if the scripture is saying that the sun
| stood still and the Earth revolves around it?
| kentlyons wrote:
| For an overview of the psychology of how people understand things
| (and don't!) I highly recommend this paper. It highlights a lot
| of ways our brains take shortcuts in terms of actually
| understanding things. And that facts play only one particular
| role amongst many other factors.
|
| Keil, F. C. (2006). Explanation and understanding. Annu. Rev.
| Psychol., 57(1), 227-254.
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3034737/pdf/nihms26...
| wjholden wrote:
| To the author: I love this idea, but your blog has two problems
| that made it less enjoyable for me to read. The first is the pull
| quotes. I find them confusing and unnecessary, especially when
| they repeat sentences in the preceding paragraph. The second is
| that I got stuck on the moving graphs while scrolling on my
| phone. I suggest making them smaller with a different background
| color or simply make them static images.
| staph wrote:
| I really appreciate this feedback, I'll look into both of those
| before the next post. Just wanted to say thanks.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Just to add to this: I couldn't read the text in the white
| boxes of the graphs. Very unfortunate choices of colors...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| "Belief" doesn't actually mean "to believe", as in "I think A is
| true and B is false". "Belief" is the faith, trust, or alignment
| with in an idea planted in one's head. It has nothing to do with
| factual or true information. You can simultaneously know
| something is untrue, and have belief in it.
|
| You can't change minds because "the mind" (in this context) is
| the personal identity and ego of an individual, of which their
| "tribe" is a huge part. Any information that conflicts with the
| narrative of their identity or tribe will be rejected, because it
| threatens their identity or tribe. To question one's identity
| causes a crisis which most people are not capable of dealing
| with. The more you attack those things, the stronger they will
| defend them.
|
| The "culture war" is literally just that: one culture attacking
| another culture on its fundamental nature. This is like
| Christians vs Muslims. The only way to "win" that war is complete
| destruction. If you want the war to end without that, you're
| gonna have to stop fighting and come to some kind of truce.
| duderific wrote:
| I feel like what we're seeing now is that the uneasy truce
| which used to exist is breaking down. Each side is more or less
| openly calling for the destruction of the other, and not seeing
| each other as human beings.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| In practice I think people often don't see the full structure of
| their own belief graph. Parts of it are clear but for 99% of
| important issues, it's more fuzzy than portrayed in the figures
| here. I still think this is an illuminating way of looking at it!
|
| Another major factor is that while the graph may be fuzzy, the
| _people we trust_ are clear. Only those people are allowed to
| "fill in" the missing pieces, and I think it takes a lot of work
| to do that, so it totally makes sense.
|
| If the takeaway is "don't expect conflicting facts to convince
| your audience" I agree with that, but the reason is _they don 't
| trust you_, not the conflicting graphs, and the trust is not
| really a consequence of the graph structure.
|
| (Also, I was writing about similar stuff recently here:
| https://blog.griffens.net/blog/no-one-reads-page-28/)
| xwkd wrote:
| Galileo and the church were both correct.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological
| battle. It tramples curiosity.
|
| TFA is about the meta level of what persuasive arguments look
| like.
|
| I see several examples in the comments here of people appearing
| to share their favourite object examples of how such and such
| nefarious force is causing people to believe bad things with
| propaganda -- according to them and the sources they trust. If
| you do this, you are missing the point completely.
|
| Instead, consider privately examining the opposed memeplex to
| understand why someone else might find it convincing -- how their
| values might be understood, charitably. Re-evaluate how you know
| what you know; recognize the basis of your own position, and
| assess the soundness of _that_ "structure" (as the author terms
| it). Recognize who you need to implicitly trust, and how much, in
| order to accept that reasoning. Consider why other people might
| not trust the same authorities you do. (Consider the possibility
| that other people might be able to trace direct harm done to
| themselves, to those authorities.) Recognize that reasoning from
| entirely absurd premises is still reasoning; consider that others
| do reason. This is why your own (sane, to you) premise does not
| resonate: it does not fit in that framework.
|
| > So when you encounter someone whose worldview seems
| impenetrable, remember: you're not just arguing with a person,
| you're engaging with a living, self-stabilizing information
| pattern--one that is enacted and protected by the very
| architecture of human cognition.
|
| > Truth matters--but it survives and spreads only when it is
| woven into a structure that people can inhabit.
|
| Time spent on the Internet complaining about others' structures,
| is not time spent weaving truth into them. On the contrary,
| should those others see you, you will only activate their defense
| mechanisms.
| tk90 wrote:
| If you found this interesting, I highly recommend reading "The
| Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It's deeply impacted how I
| think of morality and politics from a societal and psychological
| point of view.
|
| Some ideas in the book:
|
| - Humans are tribal, validation-seeking animals. We make
| emotional snap judgments first and gather reasons to support
| those snap judgments second.
|
| - The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left) is
| because they have a very consistent and shared understanding and
| definitions of what Haidt calls the 5 "moral taste receptors" -
| care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Whereas the left
| trades off that cohesive understanding with diversity.
| thelittlenag wrote:
| I've really enjoyed Haidt's book, though its really a couple of
| different books in one. I need to read his other work.
|
| To your point about left and right, an interesting point I
| heard recently is that the left is coalition-driven whereas the
| right is consensus-driven (at least in US politics). Mapping
| this back to Haidt, one of his findings is that the left tends
| to greatly emphasize one or two of the "moral taste receptors",
| with the right having a roughly equal emphasis between them. It
| isn't clear to me how these two points might explain each
| other, but I do wonder if there isn't some self-reinforcement
| there. If there is, I wonder how/if that might explain
| political systems more widely.
| moate wrote:
| >>The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left)
|
| Citation excruciatingly needed. This feels like recency bias
| imo. The Right (I'm assuming we're going US here?) is a
| coalition of people all walks just as much as the left. I mean,
| right now large chunks Trump voters are rioting over the
| Epstein non-release and all the people who were in it for the
| tax breaks are trying to convince them to stop.
| bentt wrote:
| It's worth asking ourselves "When was the last time I changed my
| mind?" It's hard to really recall because the belief rewiring
| required seems to play havoc with our memory.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| The Galileo example is messy. I don't think they cared deeply
| about the issue as implied here. There's obvious power in being
| the only ones allowed to say what God thinks about an issue. They
| wanted to maintain that monopoly.
| cgio wrote:
| Is a fair summary of this that in a belief _system_ attacking any
| of its individual components can compromise the system itself? I
| would not find this surprising, actually rather intuitive. The
| insights I would be finding really interesting are the unexpected
| /unassessed on my end, e.g. how much harder it is to attack each
| of the individual components by their attributes, or if there is
| a type of component that is easier to compromise (e.g. edges vs
| nodes). Or how different systems compose over time (e.g. the venn
| diagram between flat earthers and Christians has significantly
| changed since Galileo's time).
| butlike wrote:
| I was on board until I realized there can be an infinite number
| of "nodes" (as defined in the post) between one another. The idea
| of destabilization/destruction of ideas works in the macro
| examples defined in the post, but may not be effective in
| practice, where the amount of major nodes between one idea and
| the next is opaque.
|
| Any mapping of the destruction of one idea node in hindsight will
| suffer survivorship bias with the mapping seemingly sublimely
| simple. Hindsight is, as they say, always 20/20.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Lovely article, and he hints at something that's been on my mind
| lately, about how the internet enables collisions between groups
| that cannot (and often should not) mix. For example, the quiet,
| thoughtful academic giving insightful analysis of Plato's
| Symposium getting shouted down and called rude names. Or a rowdy
| bunch of young gamer kids being scolded by a priggish group of
| college kids for being politically incorrect. The loss of
| friction, the loss of gate-keeping, sounds good but feels really
| bad. It's like how we value biodiversity and so lament and
| control "invasive species" to keep these unique and interesting
| pockets of the biosphere alive. As a society, we benefit from
| having quieter, softer, kinder places where sensitive, smart
| people can do intense work, and yet we are ALSO served by the
| louder, harder, harsher places where the fighters go. But if we
| allow these two spaces to mix, the former is quickly eradicated,
| the latter loses not just its purpose, but eventually the former
| can no longer offer better fighting tools to the latter. Perhaps
| this effect has a name, or has been talked about by a more
| articulate author?
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