I really dislike this narrative that facts don't change our minds and we are all irrational.<p>The thing is, truth does exert a pull on our beliefs. It's a slow force. It may take years for people to come around to it. Sometimes it even happens on a generational scale. But we are approaching the truth. Everything in history, and everything in our daily experience tells us this. A couple of experiments where researchers manage to fool the people in their studies does not disprove this overall trend.<p>What scares me about this narrative, is that people are using it to discredit democracy. "Look how stupid people are! We have to spoonfed them the cherrypicked facts that lead them to the right beliefs. We have to decide everything for them."
I'm reminded of Tetlock and Gardner's excellent book 'Superforecasting', which was essentially a study of people who consistently score at the top of prediction markets. One key thing that these 'superforecasters' had in common was that any new information caused them to update their model of the world, but none caused them to update it very much - typical people making predictions either didn't update their model or updated it too much in response to new facts.<p>I think it makes a lot of sense, when one is trying to identify patterns in information, that it's easy to over- or undervalue novel information. We don't necessarily know what a new fact means, so ignoring it is one common error while paying too much attention to it is another.
IMO the conclusion "facts don't change our minds" is a stronger conclusion than the first two experiments show. On my reading, the first two experiments show that:<p>1. if I have a uniform/undefined prior (how the fuck should I know how risky/conservative firefighters are?)<p>2. and then I'm given an anchor<p>3. and then told the anchor is bunk<p>4. the anchor still affects me<p>But I suspect this hinges very heavily on the fact that our initial prior is basically non-existent. By contrast, if you:<p>1. picked a topic where I actually have some prior belief (What country is colder: Sweden or Germany?)<p>2. gave me some information "Germany is actually colder on average than Sweden because of a weird atmospheric thing that affects the nordics"<p>3. told me that 2 was BS<p>I highly doubt you'd be able to replicate 4.
I saw that Yuri Bezmenov interview[1] ages ago and didn't really think of it until now, when crime statistics are openly denied almost as if crime doesn't really exist at all.<p>Then I thought back to that Bezmenov interview with what he said about "demoralization". When a population is demoralized, they cannot discern true information when it is staring them in the face.<p>I think ignoring facts has less to do with some kind of esoteric psychological process and more to do with raising multiple generations to believe that they've been lied to and the whole "system" is evil.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaR7mWxuf8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaR7mWxuf8</a>
I see quite a big problem with those studies: the facts where made up and the truth was contingent, not necessary.<p>So why was it expected of the participants to change their minds? Nothing they could verify disproved their initial position.<p>For me all this proves is what I already knew: "garbage in, garbage out".<p>edit: as below comment pointed out this might not be the problem of the studies but of how the article tries to use them to prove its point.
What politicians know that the authors of this study don't seem to realize, is that if we are told the same story repeatedly for long enough, no matter how absurd, we'll start believing it. If you throw in some scary outcome if we don't believe the story, we'll come around sooner. It seems that fear will cause us to re-examine our beliefs and values.
According to 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
First of all have all these psychological studies been replicated?<p>Part of the reason, “facts” don’t change our mind is that a lot of “facts” aren’t really facts like physics, but are rather the result of statistical games.<p>Finally, and I think the biggest issue is that a lot of facts rely on trust, since they are practically impossible for the average person to fully verify. And I think, for a variety of reasons, trust has been lost. Think about vaccines. Say back in the 1950’s, you probably knew or heard of someone who died from polio. You mom, might have had a sibling that died from one of the other vaccine related illnesses. The doctor recommending the vaccines, was seen as a trusted friend. He(it was usually a he back then) probably spent his whole life in your town. He knew your grandparents. Maybe he delivered your parents. He would spend hours at the bedside of a sick child or a dying grandparent. Maybe he was the one who delivered your children as well. Now when he says that he recommends you give your child this vaccine, you are going to listen.<p>Now forward to modern times. You book your appointment. You go to the office where you wait for hours. The pediatrician comes in and rushes through a 15 minute visit. Says your kid should get vaccinated. On the way home you listen to an investigative report of how doctors are paid by big pharma to prescribe drugs. By the way, you have never heard of anyone you know getting one of these vaccine preventable illnesses.<p>Now the gap between the educated elites and regular people in this country is widening. They do t interact much socially. They do t even live together. In the United States, the non-college educated have seen a steady decline in their real wages and well-being. Of course they are going to distrust “facts” put out by the elite who are seen as out of touch.<p>I say this as someone who totally believes in vaccines and have persuaded many of my friends that they should have their children vaccinated. The growing gap between the rich and poor in this country is at the root of many issues.
Interesting read. They're basically proposing that our anti-rational behavior came out as a type of 'hyper-socialization'. I can believe it and, if true, would point to why things like changing the Overton window [1] and other mass public perception shifts change individual perception.<p>I don't think it's the only way to change peoples minds and I hesitate to dive into "just employ emotional reasoning" as that seems dangerous.<p>From personal experience, another effective way is to change people's minds is by giving them "skin in the game".<p>I've tried, over the years, to convince friends of the solution to the Monty Hall [2] problem. After explaining the solution and them either not believing it or not understanding it, I then play the game with them with 100 doors and revealing 98 after the first pick. Once this game is played a couple times, they understand the solution much more readily.<p>My take on this is that they suddenly have a personal stake in the game, even if it's weak. There's a personal cost that takes the form as social shame or loss aversion, even for a game that's played between friends with no money involved, that gives them a stake. Once they start wanting to actively avoid losing, they're much more willing to listen to reason.<p>The article points out that our anti-rational behavior is at odds with survival but I would bet there's a level of abstraction below which our survival minded rationality kicks in and above which we don't have enough of a stake in the answer to use our rationality to good effect.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem</a>
> <i>strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding</i><p>I've thought about this too on my own strong feelings. The more I know about something, the more I understand its nuances, pros and cons, etc, the less I feel strongly about it. Now when I spot myself with a strong feeling about something I try to remind myself that I'm most likely missing something.<p>We see this constantly in the dev world. Younger devs feel very strongly about languages, libraries, frameworks, etc, probably because they have a shallower understanding of the thing.
It takes constant training and energy to follow where the facts lead you. Feynman used different approaches as a way to keep himself focused on the facts and not exclusively what he “knew” was true. He said the easiest person to fool is yourself.<p>Mostly people want to validate their intuition and gut feelings and don’t want to experience the discomfort of finding out that their intuition is not magically correct.
Why they didn't in 2018: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099488" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099488</a><p>Why they didn't at the time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764</a>
The fundamental problem is that our beliefs become part of our identity, and thus most of the time we're not actually seeking the "truth". This is obviously true when it comes to religion, and almost as bad when it comes to politics. And these days, a lot of "science" has become hyper political: race, climate, gender, evolution. Forget changing anyone's mind on those topics, no matter what facts you have in your arsenal.
Truth is only important to us as long as it contributes positively to our well-being. This sort of mushrooms is edible and this one is poisonous - everyone would agree on that.
As far as more abstract truths are concerned: people believed for centuries that the Earth is flat. Many still do. If you said otherwise, society would probably burn you for heresy, so the cost of truth was hugely negative.
Were the New Yorker honest, they'd entitle this: "Why the Uneducated Don't Understand That You're Right." Which is a shame. This type of information should be used to help better the reader by asking them to understand their own blind spots--not indulge the reader by telling them that their adversary is ignorant and irraitonal.
Slightly misleading headline. The study tested how much a lie persists in someone's mind even after they're told the truth.<p>The study found that facts do indeed change people's minds, just not as much as we'd like, because the initial impression sets expectations. Caldini talks about this in some of his books on persuasion.
The Stanford experiment forgot to account for the fact that the students could've used the fake score they first received as a useful prior on how difficult the task was. It does not show that "Facts Don't Change Our Minds".
The New Yorker can't help itself, can it? Reasonably fair article, but then suddenly veers into:<p>"When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration."<p>And:<p>"(They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)"<p>The thing is with studies like this is it's used by people on the losing side of elections to start complaining about "low information voters" with the subtext being "If only everyone was as clever as me and all my friends that think the same then [thing I disagree with] would never win elections." Ironically this also lets them avoid any introspection as to whether they may lose because there are defects with their policy positions.
Jordan Peterson studied/covered this as well; here's a short clip - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWbj-2DRLps" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWbj-2DRLps</a>
i very much enjoyed the article, but i do prefer apolitical content when possible. unsure why it was necessary to reference trump in the vaccine portion. people (authors included) that can’t control themselves from injecting politics where it doesn’t naturally belong are becoming more and more irritating imo.