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Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds

• jamesrcole 10y ago
  I find that subtitle a bit strange. It implies that the article is talking about the limitations of 'reasoning' as traditionally conceived, but the article is more about how human reasoning in practice isn't like the traditional notion of reasoning.
  • jjaredsimpson 10y ago
    I think you are substituting reasoning with deduction. Reasoning is the human process of deciding what one ought do. Deduction is a mechanical process of discovering what follows from axioms. Human reasoning is often fails by not being perfectly deductive. I'll grant that you might think I'm nitpicking on definitions.
    • jamesrcole 10y ago
      Not that I suppose it matters that much, but I mean reasoning not deduction
• YCode 10y ago
  The described permanence of lies even after they are revealed as such really lends weight (dare I say credit?) to the tactics of fake news and propaganda in general. The value of being the first to form an impression of an event, law, etc. on someone even if that impression will later be proven false just can't be overstated.
  • Pigo 10y ago
    This value never ceases to confound and frustrate me. Just like the impact of littering every yard with a brightly-colored name campaign sign has on elections. It must sway some people, maybe more than biased new reporters do. So we can hate the game, but at what point can we start hating the players?
• squozzer 10y ago
  Here's an application of our faulty, socially-dependent reason: Health care is a right, yes or no? Please explain your reasoning. The article mentions ACA so my proposal should not be too off-topic.
  • Eridrus 10y ago
    I think the discourse about "rights" is part of the problem in US politics, it makes the default mode of reasoning about ideology, rather than outcomes. The government should be in the healthcare business since the nature of the service precludes a functional market.
    • JackFr 10y ago
      > it makes the default mode of reasoning about ideology, rather than outcomes. That is nonsense. To claim to focus solely on 'outcomes' is to simply make the ideology behind the recommendation implicit and outside the bounds of debate.
    • ZeroGravitas 10y ago
      Though something that gets lost in the "aargh, socialist death panels" style discussion in the US, is that there are plenty of market-based mechanisms within the most "socialist" health care systems around the world, and there's a whole bunch of weird, anti-market bureaucracy in the American system. So you're right that talking about rights is unhelpful, I'd go further and suggest that just making healthcare provision better, rather than more/less market-based should be the main discussion to further avoid the conversation bogging down into "reasoning about ideology, rather than outcomes".
    • exclusiv 10y ago
      > I think the discourse about "rights" is part of the problem in US politics I think the definition is a very important distinction, although you're right about outcomes being a binding agent. I don't believe that health care is a right. A right is something that another person doesn't provide. This "me" movement has really clouded everyone, thinking they are entitled to everything, even if what they want to be entitled to compels another person to provide it, thereby infringing on that person's rights. So while I don't think it's a right, healthcare is a good idea as an investment and is a social good. So I agree on the positioning you suggested to get both sides to come together. It's the right thing to do and look at all the tangible benefits we could get from it....
• motivic 10y ago
  All these discussions remind me why I loved pure mathematics so much. Every theorem requires a proof, and nothing is really a fact on its own, but a logical derivation from an assumption. I guess you can call these "2nd order facts"?
• orasis 10y ago
  Even using facts, not biased opinions, vastly different models can arise. If the sampled facts that give rise to the models are random, then the models will tend to be similar. However, if the facts that make up the models are selectively placed in the models there can arise dramatically different models pulled from the same facts. Since all models are simplifications or subsets of all facts in reality they will always be prone to this fact selection bias.
• veli_joza 10y ago
  The source of confirmation bias is explained as evolutionary mechanism that developed capacity for reasoning not for critical thinking but for purpose of arguing and getting others to do our bidding. In that context it would make sense to protect our own opinion from inconvenient things such as facts. > "This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up." How can we as a society fix this? If we educated our kids about confirmation bias (and some other cognitive biases) and taught them how to compensate for shortcomings of their minds, would next generation grow up to be more reasonable? If so, shouldn't this be a high priority of educational system?
  • TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    This has already happened. I suspect the average medieval peasant didn't have a particularly sophisticated world view, or much understanding of cause and effect at all. But objective reality-based reasoning is a skill that has to be taught, learned, practiced, and promoted. And even then a lot of people won't be particularly good at it. When you add the fact that there are obvious political and financial advantages to lying to the public then it becomes very fragile indeed. I suspect the only practical answer is to reinvent society's reward functions - e.g. by making the intellectual/political/media equivalent of poisoning the well as much of a criminal offence as dumping a dead body inside a school water tank.
  • p0nce 10y ago
    > How can we as a society fix this? Don't mate with irrational people.
    • partomniscient 10y ago
      Additionally, as a Stanford undergraduate - refuse to participate in any 'studies'.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago
  Have these studies actually been replicated? I find it interesting how even after a lot of psychology has been called into question due to the replication crisis, a lot of news outlets still try to use studies based mostly on how many clicks it will generate.
• brightball 10y ago
  Another factor here is when people abuse the word "fact" regularly. If you ever get into a discussion with somebody who claims they've proved their point by citing "facts", then actually follow up on their citations and discover that it doesn't actually say what they think it says it creates an impression of the messenger, not the message. Enough messengers saying the same faulty message over and over and you distrust the message just because it's been repeated so often. This is an easy thing to do with conversations on subjects like guns where the key of slanting the message is based on subtle wording changes that allow you to leave out some data or include other data. The person presenting their information thinks they have "facts" because they see numbers that support their point of view without knowing what's been left out. I seem to remember a github repo that was posted to HN a couple of years back that did exactly that. They showed the same data set and presented 3 different ways with 3 entirely different conclusions.
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >then actually follow up on their citations Not to mention that citations are not all they are touted to be. Just because something has been written by someone somewhere doesn't make it an objective reality fact. Just because something has been published on a peer reviewed journal doesn't make it an objective reality fact. Just because something has the consensus opinion doesn't make it an objective reality fact. Just because something is supported by the numbers given by some government, state agency, NGO etc doesn't make it an objective reality fact. And in many cases someone with actual "skin in the game", who knows a subject empirically can be right, and know they are right, against "citations" from all of the above.
    • guelo 10y ago
      OK, but many times that I see people making this argument they turn around and point me to some conspiracy theory from some guy yelling on youtube. There are dark ugly forces that benefit from the destruction of trust in the press and democratic institutions. You have to maintain a balanced world view. The government and the press have their biases but they are not always in conspiracy mode out to destroy the little guy. Many times they are on your side.
• JabavuAdams 10y ago
  """ Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.” """
• laretluval 10y ago
  Oh boy, sweeping conclusions based on psychology research! http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/25/071530 http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/25/071530 "False report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature. In light of our findings the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience."
• enord 10y ago
  The interactionist perspective presented is enlightening. It both motivates and explains many of the classic reasoning snafus that we "suffer" from. In the end our mental artefacts (including beliefs) are just tools, and their value (or "truth") is a function of their utility. If we were to present a 19th century carpenter with a nail gun he would agree upon demonstration; "that is very nice and all, thanks but i'll stick to my hammer". He would have neither a compressor, gasoline and a long enough hose, nor a wall socket and extension chord. The nail gun has no place in his toolshed because he doesn't have the required infrastructure and context to put it to use, and therefore the utility of the nail gun to him is close to zero. Beliefs are the same, and a relation to "facts" or "truth" is not a requrement for their utility. When presented with new facts and truths we always evaluate their utility before we ascribe to them. We might fool ourselves that this process is somehow "rational" but rationality is just a social preference with some second-order effects with regards to science and the developement of technology (which indeed has "utility" but is far from the only "utility" beliefs can achieve).
  • laretluval 10y ago
    > Beliefs are the same, and a relation to "facts" or "truth" is not a requrement for their utility. If your beliefs about the world are entirely false then you are going to have a bad time.
    • coldtea 10y ago
      Or a very good time. One's circumstances are seldom that much dependent upon their beliefs about the world.
      • laretluval 10y ago
        > One's circumstances are seldom that much dependent upon their beliefs about the world. You are interpreting belief in a very narrow and mysterious way. If you believe that poison is food, or that bus impacts are healthy, then you are going to have a bad time. There are many beliefs that must be correct in order to ensure survival. It isn't all relative.
• sgt101 10y ago
  Vaccines are safer for a population, and they are safer for individuals in an unvaccinated population. In a vaccinated population the risks to the individual having a vaccine are low, but non zero. The risk of not having the vaccine may well be lower. The problem is that by not being clear that having a vaccination is an altruistic act with marginal risk but a massive social good the way is left open for claims of duplicity. This may be the key issue; some people won't agree with the desired position because the fact we are using isn't a fact at all. We fail to persuade because we don't make a good case.
  • crpatino 10y ago
    I would upvote you twice if I could. The anti-science crowd and not idiots, but rather moderately intelligent individuals that go bersek after catching the Science spokeperson's oversimplifications and/or white lies. Fool me once and it's your fault, fool me twice and it is mine.
    • pzone 10y ago
      This seems to be exactly the same as what the anti-PC and general Trump voting crowd believe as well. They HATE oversimplifications that deny their viewpoint. For example "Affirmative action is 100% fair." That's not an objective truth, but the left tries to sell it that way.
      • skj 10y ago
        No, it's what the right-wing pundits sell as what the left tries to sell.
    • FabHK 10y ago
      The anti-vac crowd might not be idiots, but they're selfish as hell (free-riding on herd immunisation while not willing to accept the (very very tiny) risk of vaccination to their precious child).
      • BeetleB 10y ago
• bambax 10y ago
  > The fact that both we and it survive proves that it must have some adaptive function No, no, no, absolutely not, no, it doesn't. No. A feature can maintain itself in a population for a number of reasons: - it's neutral or not detrimental enough to drive affected individuals to extinction (ie, to get them killed before they have a chance to reproduce) - it's linked to some other trait that provides actual benefits - it's so recent it didn't leave time to be selected against - or, yes, it actually has some adaptive function. But just because a feature is found does NOT "prove" anything in and of itself. > Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments. Excuse me, what?? There's little advantage in reasoning clearly while hunting prey and making tools and building traps to catch huge mean animals that can and will kill you if you do anything wrong? And there's much to be gained from "winning arguments" in a cave, while pondering about one's social standing?? Come on. * * * I suggest a more simple and straightforward explanation for the limitations of "reason": our brain is, in fact, write only. We usually don't notice it because it also has a huge capacity and so we can always write more, it never gets full. But to one given named item corresponds a unique value, that cannot be overwritten. If you want to store a new value you have to create a new name to store it with. To "overwrite" something you can create lookup tables of sort, that tell you that the old value is in fact "wrong" and that said item should be associated with another, newer item. But this is costly, and so is avoided whenever possible (because the first rule of life is to be lazy, ie to conserve resources).
  • komali2 10y ago
    The only problem I take with the "write only" mindset is that memory has been demonstrated to be able to be "changed" after the fact - i.e. making a person "remember" that the color of the truck was red, even though it was blue and they had correctly stated remembering it being blue.
    • manmal 10y ago
      Yeah I don't think it's as simple as write only. There is also memory compression, which could not happen in a write only memory.
• bambax 10y ago
  > There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. There is: have them been born outside the US. Those two beliefs are specific to Americans; hardly a good example of "humanity" as a whole.
  • fiatjaf 10y ago
    Strangely the most successful country in the history of mankind by all criteria.
    • pklausler 10y ago
      "Most successful" obviously doesn't mean life expectancy, quality of education, or infrastructure, it would seem.
      • js8 10y ago
        Nor landmass, population, nuclear capability..
    • hugofirth 10y ago
      Oh for goodness sake...
    • roberto 10y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjMqda19wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjMqda19wk
  • yongjik 10y ago
    There are antivaxxers outside US, sadly, and different brands of "alt medicines" are popular in many countries.
  • gregpardo 10y ago
    Good... Dangerous.... See how even the writers of this article see in black in white.... I can believe handguns are dangerous and still believe they should be legal. It's reasonable to look for reasons why Trump won but this is really stretching it all. People often care more about fighting against something they don't like than they do about being 'right'. If the author needs a scientific study to tell her that maybe she's a little out of touch herself...
• charles-salvia 10y ago
  Evolutionary explanations are often speculative just-so stories with no basis in actual genomic research. Nobody ran a hierarchical clustering algorithm over the human genome, inspected the dendrogram, and then found meaningful gene expressions that indicate confirmation bias somehow. The reality is confirmation bias is probably deeply rooted in many other elements of human psychology. My (completely worthless) conjecture is that your "opinions" are deeply associated with your own sense of self-identity and self-worth, and therefore they register as very much worth protecting, regardless of external data. Opinions also often overlap with tribal affiliations, which makes them even more deeply rooted in evolved primate cooperative behavior, and therefore even more worth protecting.
• methehack 10y ago
  I guess it should come as no surprise that the comments section for an article called “facts don’t change our minds” would be so disappointing. For me, this article — and many like it that point out how whimsical and feeble our natural, undisciplined cognitive capacities are — are a rally cry to continue the enlightenment project, as best we can and in as personal a way as we can. Years ago I learned that my family motto from way back was “through faith we are free”. I found that immediately alienating because for me it was always “through doubt we are free.” From this article to my comment to current events: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/opinion/the-enlightenment-project.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/opinion/the-enlightenment...
  • DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
    > Years ago I learned that my family motto from way back was “through faith we are free”. I found that immediately alienating because for me it was always “through doubt we are free.” From my own experience as a reluctant religious agnostic, I see the faith/doubt-freedom issue as less clear-cut. Some Christians I know appear capable of doing things that I, as an agnostic, cannot. The first thing that comes to mind is showing care for people I find unlovable. For those Christians, either their faith or (if real) the Holy Spirit in whom they have faith allows them to act in a selfless way towards such people. Those Christians have a freedom that I don't. OTOH, their faith (or the Holy Spirit, if real) also constrains their actions and thoughts in ways mine aren't.
    • rustynails 10y ago
      "The first thing that comes to mind is showing care for people I find unlovable." Most of my friends describe me as more religious/spiritual than most religious people they know, yet, I consider myself closely aligned to atheism. One of my good friends (an Anglican) told me about a community activity to promote girls only. I asked why the church was so sexist and he said nobody had challenged it (supposedly they ONLY get government grants if ONLY females are helped!!). Needless to say, he kicked up a fuss and the church is now split fairly evenly on the topic of "should boys be given ANY support". When you said about religious people acting selflessly, I had to chuckle. I know some lovely religious people and some prejudiced people. Religion is no judge of character or empathy.
• RichardHeart 10y ago
  These are not limitations of reason. “Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective." Once awareness of the game becomes more common, than playing that new game including that new awareness will replace the old game. (Just like saying someone else ate the cookie when caught as a child, gets replaced with more elaborate things like, "you ate the cookie after you came home from drinking 2 nights ago." Reason evolves.
• JackFr 10y ago
  > If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration. The complete absence of self-knowledge and high level of unintentional irony here is astonishing. "Confirmation bias and groupthink happen to other people, not me."
• SubiculumCode 10y ago
  I dunno, I still think that my rationality has no limits. ^_^
• Mikeb85 10y ago
  Facts don't change our minds because we make up our world views and beliefs in a way that's expedient for us to happily continue about our lives. For instance, we all NEED to believe we're the 'good' guys. Whether the 'we' is our religion, our job, our state, political stance, etc... This prevents existential angst from realizing we're in the wrong, and then needing to change our behaviour which would disrupt our everyday lives. This is also the reason why we stay in failed relationships, keep toxic friends, jobs we hate, etc... It's easier and more conducive to our survival instincts to keep the status quo, whatever it is. Only when things get extremely bad do we ever change. On the flip side, let's say popular opinion about a particular topic flips. When it becomes expedient to change our opinion, then we're very quick to do so. When keeping an archaic opinion begins to cause friction in our everyday lives, we change to the prevailing opinion because again, staying with the tribe is easier than going against it. But of course, realizing all of this would be to reduce human existence to base survival instincts, which would also ruin our self-narrative. So we think we're all special, enlightened, unique and think for ourselves no matter how much the evidence points to the fact that we all devolve into holding the same popular opinions.
  • 77pt77 10y ago
    > When it becomes expedient to change our opinion, then we're very quick to do so. And even deny that ever had any other position.
    • Mikeb85 10y ago
      Of course. That would be an admission we were wrong which goes against our worldview where we're right.
      • Florin_Andrei 10y ago
        Human beings are full of way-overcranked early optimizations. I guess that's what was required for the propagation of the selfish gene (and individuals be damned, Stalin-like), and you can't really blame a natural process - but sheesh, the whole thing just looks like a stinking pile of bad engineering. Maybe that's because I'm thinking from the side of the individual. The selfish genes, however, must be pretty happy with the result.
• pklausler 10y ago
  Some people can't tell the difference between authorities and experts.
• baldfat 10y ago
  The issue isn't facts. The issue is our worldview. If it is a binary worldview (Good vs Evil) then what we don't agree with is always bad/evil (Black Hat Cowboy) and what we do agree is good/good (White Hat Cowboy). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white_hat_symbolism_in_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white_hat_symbolism_... So when our side makes a mistake we defend and spin till it is okay for us to still think of them as wearing a White Cowboy Hat. Anything good will also have conspiracies and spin so that they always wearing a Black Cowboy Hat. If you want evidence ask anyone with a strong feeling for Trump/Clinton and you will see this in action. The issue is when people change their minds (with a binary worldview) it isn't accepting a small fact but it is a whole worldview change of astronomical proportions. I feel that people have gotten more and more binary and we need more shades of gray where it isn't world changing to accept a problem with a fact. From Asia thinking about American Worldview: http://www.atimes.com/article/americas-binary-worldview-killed-nuance-politics/ http://www.atimes.com/article/americas-binary-worldview-kill...
  • matt_wulfeck 10y ago
    That's an extremely oversimplified explanation of the world. In my experience a lot of misunderstanding comes not from lack of facts, but a lack or difference in perspective. Hardly anyone even feels the need to justify their actions, let alone squeeze it into some bizarre cowboy metaphor.
    • Spellman 10y ago
      Or, put another way, no one think they're the villain/wrong. Which aligns with what the studies seem to indicate. Often the strongest objections arise in a subject that we hold very dear as part of our identity.
    • baldfat 10y ago
      To think in this example of a binary worldview in logical thinking it would be a genetic fallacy. Everything that comes from one person is good and everything that comes from another person is bad/evil. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic >That's an extremely oversimplified explanation of the world. It isn't a over oversimplified it is an actual legitimate worldview in Philosophy/Ethics for many individuals. There is not one worldview that is up to each individual and different cultures. I wasn't trying to paint everyone but I am stating that many people absolutely think this way.
• agumonkey 10y ago
  More than facts and logic, is a big "why" ? People use "facts" to satisfy their relative ego (point or surface) and will stop digging for reason or distort said facts to reach that goal. When you stop arguing and start agreeing, it's a whole different game. That's why the whole political paradigm is obsolete. Rallies and speeches are mostly emotional drivers. They amplify the problem naturally (it's a nice form of competition).
• danharaj 10y ago
  Reasoning is a social process as much as it is an individual cognitive process. We're strongly conditioned to be unempathetic when reasoning, but this severely impairs our ability to reason together. Empathy and reason together are more powerful than either alone. The substance of reasoning comes second to the process of reasoning. If the process is hobbled by artificial or cultural constraints, it becomes perverse and harmful to understanding.
• eagsalazar2 10y ago
  Translation: "Why did Trump win the election even though he and his policies are obviously nuts?" Seriously, not trying to inject politics or my opinion on Trump, but there do seem to be a lot of these "why do people make act so crazy" articles lately. I too am trying to make sense of it all and failing.
  • kansface 10y ago
    A decent article on the economics: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
  • 77pt77 10y ago
    It's quite explicit: > If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration. Not even being subtle.
    • eagsalazar2 10y ago
      Hah, well I guess I'm busted (didn't read the article, just the title and other comments)
  • VLM 10y ago
    When a mental model dies by no longer being predictably useful in the world, no matter if its religious or astrological or chemistry or physics or politics or economics or whatever, unlike the death of a famous person, the death of a worldview is a very hard sell, but "the folks we don't like also happen to be dumb and crazy" is an extremely easy sell. The twilight of every model looks the same across all humanity. A left wing fake news provider today sounds pretty much like a right wing pre-civil rights era southern "humorist" talking about blacks, its the same speech but different subjects. If you believe in the right/left dichotomy then over more than a century the right tends to respond to dissent with force, isolation (camps), and criminalization, whereas the left tends to respond to dissent with indoctrination medication and mental hospitalization. "Anyone who would disagree with world communism must be mentally ill, lets treat them in a special hospital ward". So a natural concern troll against the right is to insist they're just taking the wrong pills and with the right mix of benzos they'd be happy to see their civilization annihilated. Which, technically, is true, if you get people high enough they don't care anymore.
• mkalygin 10y ago
  I recently was thinking on the similar topic after reading an article about scientific myths most people believe. For example, one of such myths is that humans are genetically predefined and can't be changed through life. It's clear that there are a lot of social, cultural and gender factors impacts on our nature, but still there is such a belief. So my conclusion was that our reasoning is very restricted. We tend to simplify our thoughts, our memories. And all this stuff is highly dependant on emotions we feel. That's why we like to make our memories brighter than they are, make them more romantic and ideal. Everything in the past was better, etc. That's why we remember facts which are easier to remember and close to our beliefs, sometimes no matter are they true or not.
  • corporateslave 10y ago
    To some degree people are genetically defined. Aside from luck, people are highly genetically determined. The whole basis of evolution is that positive traits are passed on and reflected in offspring, for that to work, people have to be genetically determined. Either you are against the idea of evolution, or you are against the idea of non biological determinism. Of course there is some grey area where life factors to change the course, but for evolution to work, people need to be largely determined by their DNA.
  • marcofloriano 10y ago
    I have to fight against this tendency to believe past was better almost every day. My mind seems to try to trick me every time i'm making progress in life, bringing memories of a better past, showing why today sucks. The solution? Reason. I just ask myself: Ok, that was the good part. Now, try to remember the bad ones. Oh you can't? So it's obviously a fake memory pal. There were no such time in my life without difficulties.
    • mkalygin 10y ago
      Yea, also we sometimes remember only bad things. E.g. if we play in poker, we may lose with two aces for a number of times in a row. And because of the emotional frustration we start thinking that two aces are not that good.
• notriddle 10y ago
  Or, in a lot fewer words, we're dumber than pigeons [1]. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3086893/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3086893/
  • dwringer 10y ago
    I'm all for that result, but [isn't the increase in probability of winning the Monty Hall problem by switching doors an increase from 1/3 to 1/2]? [ED: no] The summary claims it is "doubled". I'm also interested in some kind of control for the concept that pigeons simply get bored inevitably with the first choice and tend to switch in spite of whether it gives them any advantage. I don't see evidence that this experiment covers that. Informative and interesting nevertheless.
    • thefalcon 10y ago
      There are a lot of givens and provisos to make the Monty Hall problem work[1], but in the end if you stick with your door you have a 1/3 chance of winning and if you switch you have a 2/3 chance of winning. [1]Monty must always open a non-winning door based on his insider knowledge and always give you the chance to switch, and of course the prize has to always remain behind its original door.
      • dwringer 10y ago
        Ahh. of course... funny how even after learning the problem multiple times I could still forget the correct answer and manage to have the wrong intuition about it :) Ah, to be a pigeon.
      • vacri 10y ago
        The way this was made clear to me was to use 100 doors instead of 3. Hall opens 98 doors when you make your initial guess. It's much clearer to see how information is added to the system with this many doors.
• splintercell 10y ago
  Quoting myself from another comment: I have been reading 'Mental Models' by Philip Johnson-Laird where the author argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the relations among objects and events that concern us, and then we act according to these models. This book tries to argue against the idea that we think in terms of logical propositions. Take for instance this example Steven Pinker in this lecture[1] presents a logical problem which stumps a lot of people. However, when people are presented with a 'real world' version of the problem they do a lot better. Phillip Johnson-Laird uses the same example and some other studies to claim that it is because people think in terms of mental models and not in terms of logical/deductive propositions. Another example: If J Edgar Hoover was born in Russia, then he would have been a communist. If J Edgar Hoover was a Communist then he would have been a traitor. Therefore if J Edgar Hoover was born in Russia then he would have been a traitor. Clearly the transitivity doesn't follow here, and this is not the only example of apparent transitivity failure, but nearly everyone can point out the logical problem with the transitivity inference in the third statement, but a lot more people would fail it if presented in abstract terms. This has been a very ameliorating book for me. It explains many things regarding people's beliefs. When people present moral outrage, this must mean that they need to have that mental model in their minds. Take for instance if you started to work in a store, and the manager informs you of the following rule: > If the receipt is for more than $30 worth of goods, then it must have manager's sign on it. Most people would have no problem in understanding and following that rule. But if the rule was following: > If the receipt is for less than $30 worth of goods, then it must have manager's sign on it. To most people this is confusing and non-sensical. To most of us, we would try to think for a reason behind this rule. Most probably come up with the explanation 'There must be a lot of theft/fraud going on for smaller receipts', or something which explains this anomaly. This is the same reason why everytime it snows in the middle of April, conservatives are like "Oh god, the Global Warming is killing me", and whenever there is a hot day in winter, it's the liberals who take it as a proof. Because to all people, the data which doesn't fit into their mental model is noise. And all theories which people ascribe to, somehow fit in their broader mental models. tl:dr; It isn't that there are limitations to reason, rather everyone uses mental models to separate signal from noise. '10 Photographs which prove that ghosts exist' are just noise to us unless the photos come with reasoning which provides 'patches/updates' to our mental model. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PXy3vWZiJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PXy3vWZiJo
• rvail2 10y ago
  So is this testing how people adjust to facts, or how they respond once they know you have lied to them?
  • joe_the_user 10y ago
    Yeah, The test seems like "I will screw with your sense of reasoning a bit and call you irrational when you don't respond the way I think you should"
• projektir 10y ago
  I think the problem is that there's often a lot of risk with changing one's mind and not all that much benefit. How much does being right really help one in their day-to-day life? And there are many ways it could hurt them.
  • Diederich 10y ago
    What kinds of risk are you seeing as associated with changing one's mind?
    • projektir 10y ago
      Being classified as a loser in any given argument is probably the biggest one. You do not get a very positive response for admitting that you're wrong in the vast majority of settings. There's generally an expectation that being wrong is associated with fundamental problems and should be punished by suffering. Being wrong is already perceived as a state so bad that correcting yourself from it is only marginally beneficial. This creates a very negative association with being wrong and kills that incentive. Yet being able to say that you're wrong is a necessary prerequisite to changing your mind. There's also a fairly high risk of actually changing your mind towards the more wrong conclusion. Anything you already believe is likely rooted in something relatively deep, like childhood experiences, experiences in general, and a long, involved chain of partially logical, partially emotional reasoning that you can't even remember most of anymore. The incoming "facts" are often disembodied, not actually connected to anything, and often not that hard to fabricate because of how disconnected they are. Now take these two concepts together, and consider what an attempt at making a person believe something different from what they do usually looks like. They're going to be told some disembodied facts, given some rough evidence or appeals as to why those facts are true, and then told that the only reason they don't already agree with those fact is because they are dumb, mean, uneducated, or otherwise undesirable.
• dalbasal 10y ago
  There are two types of people: people who believe the first thing they hear and people that believe the last person they hear. The second are more unpredictable.
• motivic 10y ago
  Case in point: All religions.
• nibstwo 10y ago
  Fact is a relative word, like luck or loser. Luck is someone richer than you, and a loser is someone less rich than you. Fact is something more truthy than the relative. There is physics, then there are leaky abstractions of physics and culture. I think honesty in the sense of accuracy is important, rather than the meta question of what is truth.
• seanxh 10y ago
  I have three recommendations: 1.read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman 2. think in Bayesian term about statistic when you see the "facts" they claim from a report 3. being okay with the fact that you might waste time and efforts or being wrong on thinking regarding about issues (disclaimer: I am not a psychologist or data scientist)
• lngnmn 10y ago
  Because a brain has been evolved for dealing with crude appearances which are supplied to its centers by imprecise and unreliable sense organs and for sloppy thinking, good-enough for successful survival and reproduction (and necessary competition to accomplish that). Our minds are conditioned by appearances and the conditioning is based on the fact that things does not change too often in the physical environments - almost everything stays the same most of the time. The visual system, for example, has a lot of hard-wired heuristics which reflects this assumption. The cues which a brain machinery of visual cortex is utilizing to decode scenes is a perfect illustration how an evolved brain structure reflects actual physical environment in which it has been evolved. The mind, it seems, utilizes simple frequency-based machinery which strengthen (or weaken) the representation (whatever it might be, close to what we would call a weighted graph, perhaps) with each new impression. There is , obviously, no probability calculations going on in the brain, just simple weighted structures. Similar approach is in the very core of the classic machine learning. To alter the representation dramatically there must be some impression with a big weight, and this is what emotions are for. A dog getting sick after eating drugged food would learn to avoid it after just one single exposure. An emotionally charged experience is the simplest (and still the most effective form of persuasion, readily exploited by memes) because a brain has been evolved in to reflect the physical environment (its laws) and be adaptive-enough to survive mostly-stochastic, partially-observable environment. One single mention of a supposed fact is not enough to change one's internal representation of reality (which, perhaps, is a structure trained with thousands if not millions of impressions). Even direct experience sometimes is not enough, because one cannot completely trust ones senses. Only a rigorously trained mind could consciously deliberately alter its own model of the world (which is not that simple and cannot be accomplished at a whim) when it meets a single contradiction with "proven" or implicitly encoded in brain's heuristics laws of nature, leave alone a logical contradiction which is hard to notice given the default way of thinking we have evolved with. The non-verbal mind is much more ancient and much more powerful, and it does not understand the language of a newer parts.
• darod 10y ago
  What happens when you have 2 scientists arguing over what they consider fact? How do you know who to believe? It then becomes that example of requiring everyone to understand metal work prior to picking up a knife. You don't get very far.
• sanjeetsuhag 10y ago
  Could somebody link the original study the author is referencing ?
• cbanek 10y ago
  One small interesting point was the test where people were given their own answers (but not told) and were more critical of them. This almost seems natural based on my viewing of code. Sometimes you don't know who wrote the code, or made a change, etc. Every line is suspect. I find that I'm best at debugging when my code when at the end I say "who wrote this crap? oh it was me."
• nemacol 10y ago
  You are not so smart podcast did a great 3 parter on this topic. https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/ https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/ #93, #94, #95
• mjw1007 10y ago
  The first two studies described have roughly the following form: 1: The researchers tell the students "X is true". 2: The researchers tell the students "statement 1 was a lie". 3: Many students report they still believe X is true. It seems risky to read anything much into that. Maybe at step 3 the students, who know they've been lied to at least once, were reluctant to assume that step 2 provided reliable information.
• onuralp 10y ago
  Piggybacking on the discussion about reasoning: I found the recently proposed 'argumentative theory of reasoning' quiet insightful and provocative with significant implications for belief formation (as well as scientific methodology). Here is an excerpt from the researchers who proposed the theory: > the argumentative theory of reasoning—proposes that instead of having a purely individual function, reasoning has a social and, more specifically, argumentative function. The function of reasoning would be to find and evaluate reasons in dialogic contexts—more plainly, to argue with others. Citation: https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/theargumentativetheoryofreasoning https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/theargumentativeth...
• perseusprime11 10y ago
  > For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Very funny and real.
• skybrian 10y ago
  It's important to remember that most scientific disputes can't be resolved by two uninformed people talking on the Internet. If you can get people to share links to well-written scientific articles, you're doing well, but these disputes can only really be answered by actual scientific discussion between actual experts who take the time to dig into methodology (etc), and maybe not even then; the replication crisis is a thing. With enough study, maybe you can become an expert. Mostly we don't. Reading a few articles and playing "instant expert" is just a bad habit. Remembering your ignorance is good; try not to forget that you knew nothing about the hot topic of the day before it became news and you suddenly became interested. Unless you have personal experience to share, we're really just sharing links here.
  • leshow 10y ago
    > can only really be answered by actual scientific discussion between actual experts I fundamentally disagree with this. For one, who gets to decide who the 'actual' experts are compared to the experts that aren't actually experts? The stuff you're saying is specious; on the surface it looks plausible but it actually doesn't mean anything. Anyone can develop expertise in a topic of interest if they follow it ardently and have good critical thinking skills. One obviously needs the ability to read and comprehend more than just an abstract, but that's not what separates an 'expert' from an 'actual expert' anyway.
    • skybrian 10y ago
      Oh, I totally agree that anyone can be an expert in principle, and yes, you can even be self-taught, but you do have to do the work. On most subjects in the news, we don't study and have no real-world experience. We don't even pick up the phone and talk to people like reporters do. So, we should admit (to ourselves and others) when we didn't actually study anything, we're just borrowing other people's analyses that we read online. One way I do that is by sharing links. One of the ways you become an instant (not-really) expert is by relying too much on your supposed "good critical thinking skills." They exist but are overrated - it's not a substitute for studying or for real-world experience.
  • sqeaky 10y ago
• morbidhawk 10y ago
  If facts don't actually persuade us, then why is test-taking on fact-based trivia so prevalent in schools? (seriously can I get all that wasted time and energy back somehow) I'd argue that there is only 1 useful fact that persuades us to open our minds and learn and that's realizing that we know nothing. This is the 1 truth Socrates held onto and helped him to learn so much. He'd never assume he knew something well enough and instead assumed there was always more to learn and used socratic method questioning to show contradictions in his own knowledge and world view. I think that is really the only way to persuade someone, by asking really good questions that cause them to question their own world views and biases.
• kpwagner 10y ago
  This is a really tough problem. Like many in the HN community, I try to fight against confirmation bias, but sometimes it feels like a lost cause. Compare it to a reasonably complex math problem--I'm talking an Algebra II / Calc I type problem. You are relying on so much previous knowledge to complete the problem. That knowledge may have been "earned", meaning you really took the time to build up an intuition, or "unearned", meaning you just took the word of the instructor or book (essentially applying a procedure to get a result). This is a MATH problem that has defined parameters and a definitive right or wrong answer. Moving to something in the social realm, it's like a laser hitting a geode. When I see a talking head like Ann Coulter on a "news" program, they are often quite adept at providing facts and statistics to support their argument. But ironically, this usually does nothing for me to strengthen their argument or change my mind. To start with, are these facts and statistics true and accurate? Is there really some subjectivity in these "facts"? Are they just outright rumors? Even if these facts are true and accurate, does it tell the whole story, or does it simply support their position? That's a pretty loaded question; no one really goes to the effort of presenting all relevant information and interpretation--nor would you want to listen. Denying facts and falling back on beliefs, ideally wisdom, is a defensive mechanism against information overload. To aggressively change your mind again and again when presented with new information is similar to the problem of overfitting a neural network.
  • coding123 10y ago
    And, as we know, overfitting is bad. I think you hit it on the nose, I mean look at our Supreme Court.. like the TOP court, a set of people that are supposed to do their absolutely best at leaving out bias. I mean that's the resume - NOT BIASED PERSON JUDGING THINGS. Yet almost like clockwork, each Justice is delivering carefully crafted prose fully backed up by legal jargon to explain their final judgement. 90% of the time when the judgement falls into some political trap, the court is split down to the R or D President that got them there (with exceptions of course). Shouldn't those opinions basically be identical? Why are we not FIXING that, instead we let them die, and feverishly get a new president that matches our worldview more so the new Justice can fix our world. I remember watching some news program like 60 minutes or 20/20 back in the day. They put on two fake trials, but I think the jury thought it was all real. In one they presented the defendant as a old man that had probably looked ugly. In the other they presented the defendant as a young man with good posture in a suit. All of the orchestrated words in both trials was the same. In the end they fried the old-ugly man and let the suit go. Why don't we change anything? Why is this acceptable? I can think of countless other crazy things in this planet that we shockingly let slip by. Given that THIS is the world we live in, I'm absolutely not surprised the talking heads can easily just push completely biased information and everything goes unchecked. In the end it's simple really, it's just a big war of who's right and wrong, but we all lose. The EGO has taken over this planet.
• tn13 10y ago
  In Batman Zero Year, Bruce Wayne has made his first appearance as Batman and is almost 100% sure that people will easily find it out that Bruce is Batman. Alfred then tells Bruce that during his performance as an actor he paid far too attention to minor details of the characters played including dialects, diction, consumes, makeup etc. just because he was terrified that people will see the person behind the mask. Only after some experience he learned that people pay to see the mask and not the face. They very willingly will refuse to see the face behind the mask because in their hear they want that mask to be real. People will not want to find out who is Batman. Of course this is all fiction but it does ring a bell especially in today's super-heated political environment where we cant even know if a fact is a fact. Even when something becomes an obvious fact or an obvious lie it does not seem to matter to most people because in their heart they have an alternate view of the very facts.
• syrrim 10y ago
  I read an interesting explanation for how lying developed in humans: when we became capable social creatures, lying to others would be a quick way of gaining an advantage, so it would be selected for in the individual. However, a culture made up of liars would be less trusting of each other, and so at a disadvantage. In this way, we evolved to give off signals, and feel guilt, when we are lying. However, it remained useful to lie to others, and so we evolved to be able to still do so. If we first lie to ourselves, trick ourselves into believing a falsehood is true, we can then spread this to others as if it were true, and therefore without consequences. In historical societies, it seems this was the right balance between generally telling the truth to others, while still being able to lie when it is important to do so. I wonder if it is time for the balance to swing the other way again, and for lying to again be selected against.
• ygmelnikova 10y ago
  Once again, Dopamine is the fundamental driving force of human nature.
• makecheck 10y ago
  When people find out who said a particular thing, the “what” seems to fall by the wayside and the “who” seems to matter more. The statement is accepted or rejected outright because of the person. Maybe it is time to change that. For instance, imagine a world where every bit of text you encounter — every news story, every tweet, every statement, every message — had no attributions AT ALL. Meaning, you have no idea if something was written by a celebrity, a politician with a (D) or an (R), your best friend, or your worst enemy. At that point, quite a bit of bias should start to filter out! Or, there could be a middle ground, a kind of “anonymous key” to recognize statements by the same person. Say you read a story last month, and “agreed” with that person; this month, maybe there is a way to find out if something else you read is from the same person but NOT a way to see exactly who that is. Then, you can start to build a sense of trust in sources but are still not able to be influenced by other factors.
  • wvenable 10y ago
    I'm not sure it matters. The real phenomenon of fake news (made up news to gather clicks) would be useless if people cared about the "who". It seems the case presented in the article, that people place more value on content that supports their world view, appears to work regardless of the source.
  • coding123 10y ago
    I loved this thought experiment. I often feel like this too, a lot of people identify with R or D or Trump or Clinton, not because of any specific policies they wrote. It's almost always your community, basically what level of shunning am I going to receive for believing X. We're all tiny machine learning experiments that push our personal agendas. We align with an issue that's important to us or we align with a group that's important to us. People are very "group oriented" so specific issues, while important, are typically less meaningful than the tribe mentality.
• Qcombinator 10y ago
  I'm tempted to file this as another "Humans think oversimplistically, says oversimplistic study". The world is a massively complicated place, and nobody can come close to understanding it all. If your intellectual background tells you that vaccines don't cause autism and somebody comes to you with a study that purports to say they do, is rejecting it "confirmation bias" — or is it in fact the rational thing to do, even if you lack the medical expertise to explain where the study goes wrong? Of course, your background beliefs are never going to be perfect, so sometimes you will reject the wrong things, but that's not because our reason is "broken" per se, it's an engineering trade-off: we have to take certain shortcuts, make certain assumptions, apply certain guesses, because working everything out in full mathematical detail just isn't possible. (That said, I'm certainly not claiming that most people are brilliant thinkers — the line "Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking" would come as news to everyone from Aristophanes to Zamyatin.)
• teslaberry 10y ago
  because context is everything so facts on their own are untrustworthy. even worse than facts are 'statistics'.
• mhkool 10y ago
  I have seen many people who deny facts and it is interesting to guess what their motivations are. I am, however, not very impressed with the statement from the medical science that the authors use as "a fact". Facts from the medical science that are debated have changed into lies: did you hear about the fact that cholesterol is bad for your health and one should eat eggs with moderation ? That fact is now a lie: (see http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/19/health/dietary-guidelines/ http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/19/health/dietary-guidelines/) and the Dietary Guidelines now contain "Cholesterol is not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption". Another example where yesterday's truth is today's lie: there are many scientific reports that say that the herbicide Roundup is safe, but the court in California recently decided that a warning must be put on the Roundup package: "THIS MAY CAUSE CANCER". For decades the truth was "Roundup is safe". In 2016 the new truth is "Roundup causes cancer". The new research is so overwhelming that the old research funded by the producer of Roundup is no longer considered truthful and that research from the producer did not convince the court. I think that the authors walk on a slippery road when they state that vaccinations are good and not hazardous since they ignore the fact that there is considerable debate about the subject and do not look at the arguments of those who are opposed. Yes there is scientific research that says that a vaccine given at birth is safe because the researchers observed babies for four days and there were no adverse reactions. Other scientific studies follow children just for a maximum of 90 days. One who argues that four days is not enough and labels the report 'unscientific' has a good point. One who shows that autism is linked to vaccinations does not present hard evidence but raises a valid point of attention. What is the truth? safe or unsafe? Currently it is debated. Most likely there will not be hard evidence soon about unsafety because nobody funds research for this. There is also an other argument to make: if we find autism a terrible disease that must be avoided at all costs, and there are mathematical indications that vaccines are not safe, and there is scientific research that says that they are safe but do not investigate the relationship between vaccines and autism, and there is no scientific research that shows that vaccines do not cause autism, then why do many persons accept "vaccines are safe" as a truth ? I suggest that the authors write a new book with a title like "What happens to people when that facts and truths that they believe in are no longer true ?" and do not make the mistake to believe everything that others say but to critically verify it.
• jakeogh 10y ago
  dv/dt(#7) == g
• Mz 10y ago
  I find this bit ironic: (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.) If this is written for an American audience, the odds are good that most of us not only don't know where the Ukraine is, we don't know where Kiev and Madrid are relative to each other. It would have made more sense to use two U.S. cities to give some perspective on how far off people were.
  • chki 10y ago
    Well Kiev is in Ukraine and Madrid is in Spain, so that is just the full width of Europe which makes it really funny for those who know (and those who know are - to honestly reply to your concern here - those who read The New Yorker)
    • Mz 10y ago
      I know where Madrid is and I have lived in Europe and I just read an article in the New Yorker. I even have a spiffy Certificate in GIS. I still don't find it to readily be a good comparison for a mostly American audience. If the point is to elucidate, I don't think it is a great example to use. If the point is to be all superior and imply or emphasize the idea that "if you don't know where these things are, you are dumb," hey, it works well. But trying to make your audience feel stupid is not really a great place from which to start. I mean, unless the point is to be toxic. Then, sure, go with that.
• TheLilHipster 10y ago
  I'm constantly overhauling my own bias and opinions on subjects when presented with new information, I don't do this actively - its more subconscious, which is against the results of these experiments. The results were the subjects estimating a scenario (after being told they were deceived). The scale of measurement was the positive and negative bias they had towards themselves. They started with a negative bias, which was then contradicted by a neutral fact. The outcome was a negative leaning estimation. The others started with a positive bias, which was then contradicted by a neutral fact. The outcome was a positive leaning estimation. A logically sound conclusion, a "mean" outcome. This doesn't seem like some kind of eye-opening revelation... am I missing something here?
• htns 10y ago
  What society tolerates in political discourse has much more to do with this than any quirks of the brain. Politics drags objectivity through the mud.
• known 10y ago
  Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed; https://qz.com/924343/alternative-facts-a-psychiatrist-explains-why-our-brains-resist-reality/ https://qz.com/924343/alternative-facts-a-psychiatrist-expla...
• known 10y ago
  AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
• known 10y ago
  People tell lies if truth hurts their self-esteem.
• unabst 10y ago
  Fake news is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack. Who's actually been to Iraq or Afghanistan? Who has actually seen first hand evidence of global warming or water pollution or of anything? Most facts are too detached from ordinary reality. That's why the person in charge of relaying them can alter them as they see fit. We're not to the point where we're faking wars (I don't think), so there are starting points. But the story, the narrative, and the facts of the matter are all subjected to manipulation. Even the "honest" media is guilty of sensationalism and clickbait. But the point is, when these are your "facts", you can't turn around and tell normal people to be more scientific or to choose your sources more wisely. You saying that just makes you another channel, waving yet another banner that says science, and a proponent of your version of the truth.
  • Intermernet 10y ago
    > Who has actually seen first hand evidence of global warming or water pollution or of anything? Many people have, they just may not have known it. Personally I've seen the retreating glaciers of New Zealand's south island as a stark example of global warming. As an example of water pollution, I've seen dead fish floating in rivers after storms had caused the overflow of a tailings dam at a mine here in Australia. These are pretty extreme examples, but the evidence is everywhere if you know what to look for.
    • unabst 10y ago
      Right. But seeing retreating glaciers after being told why they are retreating is still relying on something you were told. As long as we are being "told" we can change the channel and choose our preachers. There is nothing that can stop anyone from doing so in a "free" country. The point is, normal people have no way of knowing about most things anyway, that it isn't just fake news that is fake, it's that news as we know it is unreal. That's why they need that story of a cute cat or a new study on coffee at the end. The battle against fake news isn't the hard part. It's the battle to legitimize their own that is turning out to be an uphill battle. And when you know you go for the cookie jar once in a while, it becomes even harder.
• miclill_kit 10y ago
  >Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen? Why would that handle be depressed?
  • rimantas 10y ago
    It's in a shitty place, that's why.
• mathgenius 10y ago
  I change my belief's all the time. I'm incredibly empathetic to people and quite easily take on their beliefs, at least for a little while. Why? Because I am curious, I want to understand things, I want to see things from another point of view. This means I totally suck when it comes to debating anything. Sometimes I wish I could just be a rock and not sway around so much.
• MichaelMoser123 10y ago
  the article says we are optimized for cooperating in groups and not for reasoning (this supposedly had the function of controlling the free loaders). Of course this has the political implication that people should be governed by enlightened rulers - Plato didn't trust democracy either. Now i think that people are perfectly competent at deciding if they are better of now rather than they were four years ago; maybe I am fighting against a strawman here, but no, democracy still is the best of all systems out there. The dissident songwriter Alexander Galich has a song about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuXx6gU5wRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuXx6gU5wRc (In Russian) http://songpros.ru/1/Aleksandr-Galich/tekst-pesni-Boytes-togo-kto-skajet-ya-znayu-kak-nado http://songpros.ru/1/Aleksandr-Galich/tekst-pesni-Boytes-tog... "don't fear neither praise nor blame / don't fear hunger nor thirst / only fear but the one who says 'I know how it ought to be' / the one who says 'follow me i will teach how it has to be done' " (my attempt at translation)
• maffeis 10y ago
  Because it's our minds that change facts.
• reuven 10y ago
  This was a fascinating article, not just because it reinforced some of my existing thoughts. For me, the most important statement was as follows: "If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views." In other words, more information doesn't help people. But asking people to understand the implications of their thoughts, and encouraging to consider those implications, will lead people to be more moderate, thoughtful, and deferential to experts -- who have spent lots of time considering the implications.
• jlebrech 10y ago
  some facts are greater than others, and sometimes there's a stalemate and ones bias makes the preferred fact win.
• tremon 10y ago
  Meh. People are so inundated with so-called "fact-based" marketing materials, the entire word has become meaningsless. We have created entire "scientific" fields of study that serve no other purpose but inducing people to choose against their own interest (whether in politics, marketing, sales or PR) that this really should not be surprising: the people that still trust "facts" have been selected against for over four generations now. "Facts" aren't, news at 11.
• hughdbrown 10y ago
  > This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments. This is every conversation ever in my extended family. So maybe we try to elect leaders who can win arguments, not ones who reason clearly. Then you'd find that we get politicians who favor expanding the military while having avoided being drafted and fighting, who have illogical ideas of how government can be expanded and paid for without increasing taxes, who will get us all a better deal while sticking it to those other countries/states/cities, and they'll protect us from others who are not like us. I can see how this idea would run wild in politics.
• bobbington 10y ago
  This is misleading article like the guys who show you optical illusions and then say you can't trust what you see. The fact is that it is rational to let past experiences affect you. Of course here people are told their past was a lie - but they weren't given any additional facts about what is right now. It was still pure conjecture as to how well they did. I think this is a very poor conclusion, an article by a professional journalist who just is trying to make money by posting something dumb. It's obvious why people are "irrational". There is so stinking much information in the world, not to mention the pressure our own minds put on us in the form of wants and needs. We have to sift through that to make decisions. The fact is irrationality comes from not sifting through the information correctly which is a difficult task that takes time and training. There are all kinds of reasons we don't sift through information correctly, and as machine learning shows that takes time. Plus we often have pride which keeps us from acknowledging the truth. The of course even if we have the facts sometimes it is difficult to make predictions based on those facts. This is in my opinion often because we don't really understand the facts. The only way to make predictions is based on past experience of some sort. If you don't understand the past well you can't make a good prediction, so once again it comes down to not understanding the huge amount of info in the world.
  • hashkb 10y ago
    Sounds like you're defending those who throw up their hands because critical thinking is just too hard. I found your comment depressing.
• Noos 10y ago
  Why is this even a valid article? The evidence given was based on studies that actively deceived the takers in order to prove a point. Of course if you trick people they become defensive. You've primed them to believe one thing and then turned around and said it was another.
  • benmcnelly 10y ago
    This was a scientific experiment. Fact.
• benmcnelly 10y ago
  I have some facts for you. I hate passive aggressive pop overs that take over a page and then try and make you feel bad for not signing up. Also, against my better judgment I continued to try and read this. It was trash so let me offer some advice that at the least should be equally as subjective. A good frame of mind or world view to have, is to be open to the possibility that you don't know everything. That we are in a constant state of figuring things out and ratifying what we know, and accept that at some point, if we are tolerant and listen, we may learn something new. Hell, maybe modal window hijacks ARE the best way to try and get people to subscribe.
• davidf18 10y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
• Mikhail_Edoshin 10y ago
  I'd say the article's reasoning is flawed :) We cannot be experts in everything. We can hardly be experts in a very narrow field; for all the rest we have to trust other people. The only thing we can do is to choose who(m) we trust. Now, there are no rational rules to do this; we do this based on I don't know what. Experience, gut feeling, whatever; our own understanding of the world, of course, but it's bound to be limited. The fact that some people claim that they are devoted to science and reason doesn't make it so. The French Revolution claimed it was scientific; they gave us SI units everybody is so fond of. And Marx's "Capital" looked very reasonable for a very long time and even now many people still believe in its reasoning (or think they do; most don't understand it anyway). The Soviet propaganda and education made it a point that the communist theory was, you know, the only "scientific" theory of progress and everything. And it did look convincing, especially if you were exposed to nothing else since childhood; I'm talking as a survivor here :) And I say: no. Thanks, but the reason is not enough. Edit: typos.