17 ms·

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

144 points by BerislavLopac 8y ago

dang 8y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764
macspoofing 8y ago
Don't facts need to be contextualized in a larger belief framework to be useful? "Sun rises in the East" is a fact that is compatible with a heliocentric and geocentric view of the world. So that fact on its own is useless in explaining the world. In politics, your ideology will guide your interpretation. If you have a particular view on, say, immigration, you will highlight certain facts, suppress or dismiss inconvenient facts, and in general interpret all facts through your ideological lens.
taneq 8y ago
I still think they do.
- enriquto 8y ago
  Ι see what you did there, you Russell.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
> In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study ... A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. We have to wonder if Stanford undergraduate student generalises to the whole population. It doesn't require much stretching of the imagination to see that circa 1975 Stanford undergraduates, as a cohort, may score below average on objective measures of humbleness.
- conistonwater 8y ago
  Does it really rely on 1975 Stanford undergrads, though? For example, I think Dan Kahan (Yale's Cultural Cognition Project at http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/ http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/) usually says about the same thing about facts and changing minds.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    The first discussion in your link talks about peoples bias for wanting to remove plastic from the ocean remote from the source, rather than at the source. Surely it's obvious that preventing plastic entering the ocean at the source does nothing to remove the plastic that's already there. Maybe I should read more of this blog, but that doesn't inspire confidence.
    - conistonwater 8y ago
      I think you should, if you scroll back a couple of years, there's plenty of discussion of published research on science communication, which might be more interesting to you.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
        Cool, thanks, I'll have a gander.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  >It doesn't require much stretching of the imagination to see that circa 1975 Stanford undergraduates, as a cohort, may score below average on objective measures of humbleness. Which doesn't matter in this test. Both groups in this study would have the presumed bias, so the differences in scores could still be attributed to the independent variable.
tunesmith 8y ago
We have this weird fetish these last few years with asserting in broad language that people don't change their minds, don't respond to evidence, dig their heels in further when presented with evidence that contradicts their preconceived opinions, etc. It's all over pop psychology and the headlines. Bugs the heck out of me, because if the language they use is literally true, then no one would ever be convinced to change their minds ever. And yet, we do. It's true that perhaps some or many people never change their minds, or that all people might be apt to behave that way when they're not focusing their attention, but that's wildly different language then the headlines use. This article is obviously guilty as well - "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds". Like, ever? The content of the article doesn't back up the headline, but the headline is what people remember. Even some of the content is probably guilty. In the Stanford capital punishment study, is it really true that each and every individual in the study responded as they describe? Because that's how the article is written. And the problem is it gives people more excuse to give up - to not engage with someone who is wrong, or to dismiss someone who is right (that they think is wrong). Because, studies! The real lesson is the opposite - that we have to study and learn critical thinking, and practice, as a discipline, changing our minds when the evidence or reasoning warrants it. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible, and in fact the ability to do so is part of what makes us an evolved species - or more generally, our ability to surpass our instincts and evolved traits. Show me some experiments that demonstrate what conditions need to be in place, in order for people to change their minds after they've proven to be resistant. (Hint: psychological safety and lack of time pressure.) That's what'll be valuable. I'm tired of all these other studies that just say we don't.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  My observation is that when the real point of the argument is social pecking order bullshit where proving you got X fact wrong means you are evil (stupid, etc) and now deserve to be treated really terribly, people dig their heels in as the only possible defense against "agreeing" to be crapped on. If that's not what is at stake, people are vastly more willing to learn and grow. Some social settings are better than others in that regard.
- raverbashing 8y ago
BerislavLopac 8y ago
My problem with the studies described at the beginning is with this conclusion: Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. My understanding, from the descriptions in the article, was that it was not the beliefs were _refuted_, it was just that what they were told originally was not true. The subjects had no reason to believe the latter assertion above the former.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  It is also important to note that facts, in the true sense of the word, represent single observations of a phenomenon, while beliefs are more about models that reflect relationships between observable phenomena and a way to model and predict behavior. Thus it's easy to understand that a single observation, particularly one which is given at face value, is not enough to scrap whole models. To provide an example, should we scrap the whole notion of gravity accelerating all dropped objects uniformly independent of mass if someone observes a feather taking more time to fall than a canonball? I mean,that's a fact. Anyone ca see it and reproduce the same behavior. So, should everyone just abandon the notion of gravity acritically because of a single fact was presented?
philipps 8y ago
Both this and the previous discussion show that HN readers believe facts (or information) can and do change peoples’ minds. The way I understand the article (and the books it refers to) it suggests that social factors have a stronger effect on opinions than facts. I find this hypothesis plausible when I look at the polarized discussions I see playing out at the societal level, as well as interactions with other people individually. And maybe, rather than refute it, the HN reaction to the article is further evidence for the mechanism the article describes? Edit: typo
chiefalchemist 8y ago
If anyone would like to explore the topic a bit further try "The Influential Mind" by Tali Sharot. It was on FT's short list for best of 2017. It's a quick easy read. Gladwell-esque. The difference iis, she is an actual scientest who works in that field. Tho' perhaps that makes her bias? ;) https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Others/dp/1627792651 https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Other...
tobr 8y ago
For some reason this made me think of the problems with side effects in programming. If we can read and write willy-nilly, it’s very difficult to figure out why the data is the way it is, and we can’t undo/rewind unless we planned for it all along. When our minds are mulling over some piece of information, whether it’s true or not, it will have side effects on other thoughts, opinions and emotions. If we’re confronted with a revised set of facts later, there is no way to rewind all those side effects.
jokoon 8y ago
People are free to believe what they want. The problem with science is that it cannot change, so it can appear as a problem in politics, people feel science is a prison you cannot criticize. Also there are good reasons why science is not in control of our lives. What's worse is that people will also speak in the name of the science of economics to advocate about any kind of policy or tax break.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > The problem with science is that it cannot change Maybe science can't change, but our collective understanding of it changes (hopefully gets better) almost all the time.
  - jokoon 8y ago
    I guess people don't realize how science illiterate people can be. That's the issue I guess. If you don't understand science, you cannot trust it.
hevi_jos 8y ago
We should talk about complexity and complication here. Complex is the opposite of simple. If there is 50 equal elements communicating between them there we have a complex system. This is important because a thousand ants behave totally different from an isolated ant. You just can't study an ant and expect to understand the nest or anthill. Psychologists try to make it all the time and it is totally wrong: They studied isolated rats in order to understand addiction to drugs and they did not understood that they are social animals which travel 20miles-30kms each day. So they jailed the rats in a cage, because it was easier to study them that way, and extracted conclusions that were totally bogus for human beings. Those conclusions were the basis for the US war on drugs. Here they do the same. They make a very simple experiment, and extract conclusions about the whole system. In Africa, when humans whatever,more fiction than science. It is ok to make fiction and speculation, but you should always differentiate what we really know with high degree of confidence from what we do not.
netcan 8y ago
This is a tangent. How much/long does a study like this cost/take? Is it possible/useful to scale this? From reading into some of the replicability discussion, I've gotten curious about social science generally. What's an expirement like this trying to prove/demonstrate. The journalistic narrative likes the easy "X debunked." I imagine researchers have a more nuanced perspective. I guess what im asking is what does the larger effort look like? Do these studies eventually add up to a larger understanding of how we do form opinions, where facts do change our minds.... Replicability is one thing. How about generalisability?
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Which study are you referring to? Several are referenced.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  The replication rate is social science studies is very poor. And an even larger problem is that the studies themselves do not actually test what they aim to test, often because they simply cannot. For instance do video games cause violence? The only way you could realistically test this would be to have one group somehow prevented from playing video games for their entire life, or at least up to a certain age, and another group obligated to play video games in a similar fashion, and then some control group presumably free to do as they saw fit. And then follow these individuals for decades and see what happens. That's not really possible. So instead the experiments that are made are toy experiments, but when you're not really testing what you're trying to measure, it becomes impossible to prove anything, and possible to show anything. For instance could you design a toy experiment that might indicate video games cause violence? Of course. Could you design a toy experiment that might indicate video games don't cause violence? Of course. The experiments are meaningless. As an example of the problem, 'emotional intelligence' in work is all the rage right now. Yet the keystone study that sparked it is really just quite bad. The author had people split off into groups and perform a variety of tasks such as, literally, planning a shopping list. Using some method of determining who made the best shopping list, the author then determined that the groups who had the highest average IQ did not perform the best, whereas their 'emotional intelligence' as measured by an, again literally, "reading the mind in the eyes test" mapped better to performance - so therefore, it's not merit alone that judges performance but some emotional intelligence, at least as measured by "reading the mind in the eyes" that does. That's just broken logic. At the bare minimum IQ != specific task merit. The most logical way to perform that experiment would be to have created teams of those that performed individually best on any given task to work together against those that did not score so well on merit, but did well on the "reading the mind in the eyes test". Of course she did not do this, the bare minimum to even begin approaching this question, since the result would not be what she wanted. And negative results don't get published. Yet now there have been likely hundreds of articles and spin off studies taking that study's unjustified conclusion as a granted. So no, there is absolutely no big picture progress in the social sciences.
cal97g 8y ago
Most 'facts' are debatable.
lisper 8y ago
I just now (30 minutes ago) changed my mind about something based on a fact, and it wasn't even something that someone pointed out to me. I just realized on my own that I had been wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111870 I wonder if this fact will change anyone's mind about the idea that facts never change anyone's mind.
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Why such a mindlessly literal interpretation of an title clearly not intended to be literal?
  - hnbroseph 8y ago
    well, it's a time-honored tradition of we geeks on the internet. it helps us feel clever. :)
slx26 8y ago
This is very long and complicated, but I'll try to write a quick comment. Many people know from experience how hard it's to convince anyone to change what they say, the way they behave, etc, from facts alone. I say "behave", because it's very important to realize the difference between "rationally accepting" and "caring about a truth or fact", more to that later. We also know that people can change their minds quite easily when they are exposed to pretty much anything for enough time, with enough repetition. Even when we know something is false, the repetition of a certain discourse can have a noticeable effect on us. When you pair that with other types of external pressures, it becomes even more egregious. The key point is that we can't easily change how people feels while being respectful with that people and trying to make them change through words only. We are irrational, and we all have different priorities. Even if I accept a fact, it might not be something important to me, even if I rationally say it is, so I won't change the way I act, and it won't matter that much. Otherwise, I might say that I don't accept something just because I don't feel that way, even if I have to discard and ignore (unconsciously) the facts. What "I feel "is more relevant than the facts that I "don't really (want) to understand". As tobr puts very well in another comment too, all these feelings and ideas have a long term effect: "When our minds are mulling over some piece of information, whether it’s true or not, it will have side effects on other thoughts, opinions and emotions. If we’re confronted with a revised set of facts later, there is no way to rewind all those side effects." I thought it was interesting to write about all this, not only because it really helps a lot understand why facts might or might not help much changing the way people behaves, but it also helps us understand better how to actually make people change their minds. Words might be very effective for those that are already in a similar line of thought, but in other cases we might want to try changing the way people feels about something instead, by trying to making them live, in first person, the contradictions in their own beliefs (unfortunately, for many technical issues, you can't do that without becoming a teacher (and that assuming the other person trusts you enough to let you teach something), but then it's not surprising that people can't trust facts that depend on knowledge they don't have, it's only natural). And all this also help us understand that even though we might accept many rational truths, we all have different priorities, so the ones we end up acting upon deserve some consideration. Sometimes you are so focused on your own causes that don't understand how others don't share it, when it's simply that they have their own ones too, not necessarily that they don't rationally accept and understand what you are doing. And there are a billion worthy causes. For some people it might be about saving the world. Others focus only on their kids. We can do a lot to manage better that collision between rationality and irrationality, between facts and feelings, because both are critical to us as human beings.
izzydata 8y ago
They sure change my mind. I'm just not always convinced what people are saying are facts. At best they are the current best explanation and at worst only opinions.
- merpnderp 8y ago
  At one end of the spectrum of what constitutes a fact is Richard Feynman's definition, which was anything he'd replicated himself in a lab. He considered everything else he knew to be based on faith (in people, in organizations, in whatever made the claim, but which he held in high enough esteem to actually believe.)
- loco5niner 8y ago
  Agreed. Or even worse. Purposefully misreporting of research data. Example: recently disgraced "scientist" Brian Wansink.
dagaci 8y ago
Humans are overwhelmingly emotional creatures. We are a bunch of monkeys with only a fragment of real awareness of why we are doing X and Y. Human brains judge another persons whole life in milliseconds (we all do it, can't help that), but then struggle with what is quite simple math. That should tell you something about what we are. My advice is don't ever forget that logic is only the smallest part. Demeanor and a strong image is much more important than it should be, simply presenting a "fact" is not enough.
the_greyd 8y ago
I say that's a good thing. It's a good thing that beliefs have inertia, and it makes sense. Think of the years of patterns of thinking and neural connections that have formed in your brain. Are you expected to read something and change that in an instant? Imagine when Darwin's Theory of Evolution came out, assuming it had perfect evidence for it, do we expect everybody to instantly change their beliefs? And sometimes what we say facts are poor research, see ongoing replication crisis in psychology, social science, nutrition etc. The time it takes to change a mind is a long complicated process which is justified. A world where people's minds are easily changed by facts would be a world of fads.
- snarf21 8y ago
  So true. I read this article recently about doctors not switching to the newest techniques. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/upshot/its-hard-for-doctors-to-unlearn-things-thats-costly-for-all-of-us.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/upshot/its-hard-for-docto...] The interesting thing is that I think the author makes the opposite point of what they were intending. The tl;dr of the article is that a study came out saying doctors should strictly control blood sugar in the ICU. It was very slow to gain adoption. Eventually it started to take hold but a new more rigorous study came out and said this was a bad practice as it was actually causing too many hypoglycemic events and killing patients. The new recommendation was to not strictly control blood sugar in the ICU. The author states that doctors are now not switching back to the strategy they had in the first place. It seems like waiting for a preponderance of evidence might always be the best path forward, especially doctors and other situations where people's lives are at risk.
  - the_greyd 8y ago
    "Imagine if America created an evidence-based centrist party in the 1940s that listened to the scientists how much more advanced things would be. Mandatory frontal lobotomies for hysterical women who show sapphic tendencies. Free cigarettes for kids to smooth their breathing." https://twitter.com/getfiscal/status/1032299239160913920 https://twitter.com/getfiscal/status/1032299239160913920
Isamu 8y ago
Belief is not generally fact based. Going strictly with the facts is an incredibly disciplined thing. Feynman used to play games to keep himself sharp, to avoid fooling himself because as he said, the easiest person to fool is yourself. With people in general the belief comes first and then you backfill with supporting evidence and argument. Also we tend to pull our beliefs into our identity. Then a challenge to our beliefs is a challenge to our identity, and very hard to swallow. So it is also difficult but important to keep yourself from identifying yourself by your beliefs.
dqpb 8y ago
This is why cache invalidation is important.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Asturaz 8y ago
The study Mercier and some European colleagues did together which is mention in this article seems very similar to The Choice Blindness study. https://www.wired.com/2010/08/choice-blindness/ https://www.wired.com/2010/08/choice-blindness/ http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Choice-Blindness-summary.pdf http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Choice-Blin... The latest paper which is incredible interesting from that study http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Strandberg-Siv%C3%A9n-Hall-Johansson-P%C3%A4rnamets-False-Beliefs-and-Confabulation-Can-Lead-to-Lasting-Changes-in-Political-Attitudes-2018.pdf http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Strandberg-...
merpnderp 8y ago
But what is considered a fact? Richard Feynman only considered a thing a fact if he'd replicated the results himself. Everything else he took on faith. When the FDA said you should limit fat intake, that was considered a fact and only nuts would disagree, but that is now considered a much trickier statement. When the FDA says the flu vaccine is safe, that is a fact and only nuts would disagree, but that is not considered a questionable statement. But it isn't hard for a nut to use the first to confuse the latter.
ASinghUK 8y ago
The article is basically saying that if we're told we're right, then we're told we're wrong, we will still believe we're right even though we're presented with a contrary fact? The test group aren't asked their answers in response to being told a fact - its more of a psychological game in my opinion
antidesitter 8y ago
Michael Huemer has written extensively on the topic of why people are irrational about politics [0]. I recommend this brief talk [1] which goes over some of the key ideas. Fundamentally, it's a problem of incentives: There is little or no incentive for people to be rational about their political beliefs, and there is frequently an incentive to be irrational about them. In particular: The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that people often choose—rationally—to adopt irrational beliefs because the costs of rational beliefs exceed their benefits. To understand this, one has to distinguish two senses of the word “rational”: Instrumental rationality (or “means-end rationality”) consists in choosing the correct means to attain one’s actual goals, given one’s actual beliefs. This is the kind of rationality that economists generally assume in explaining human behavior. Epistemic rationality consists, roughly, in forming beliefs in truth-conducive ways—accepting beliefs that are well-supported by evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, avoiding contradictions, revising one’s beliefs in the light of new evidence against them, and so on. This is the kind of rationality that books on logic and critical thinking aim to instill. The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that it is often instrumentally rational to be epistemically irrational. The theory of Rational Irrationality makes two main assumptions. First, individuals have non-epistemic belief preferences (otherwise known as “biases”). That is, there are certain things that people want to believe, for reasons independent of the truth of those propositions or of how well-supported they are by the evidence. Second, individuals can exercise some control over their beliefs. Given the first assumption, there is a “cost” to thinking rationally—namely, that one may not get to believe the things one wants to believe. Given the second assumption (and given that individuals are usually instrumentally rational), most people will accept this cost only if they receive greater benefits from thinking rationally. But since individuals receive almost none of the benefit from being epistemically rational about political issues, we can predict that people will often choose to be epistemically irrational about political issues. [0] http://www.owl232.net/papers/irrationality.htm http://www.owl232.net/papers/irrationality.htm [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JYL5VUe5NQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JYL5VUe5NQ

144 points by BerislavLopac 8y ago

dang 8y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764

Don't facts need to be contextualized in a larger belief framework to be useful? "Sun rises in the East" is a fact that is compatible with a heliocentric and geocentric view of the world. So that fact on its own is useless in explaining the world. In politics, your ideology will guide your interpretation. If you have a particular view on, say, immigration, you will highlight certain facts, suppress or dismiss inconvenient facts, and in general interpret all facts through your ideological lens.

taneq 8y ago

I still think they do.

enriquto 8y ago
Ι see what you did there, you Russell.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago

> In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study ... A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. We have to wonder if Stanford undergraduate student generalises to the whole population. It doesn't require much stretching of the imagination to see that circa 1975 Stanford undergraduates, as a cohort, may score below average on objective measures of humbleness.

conistonwater 8y ago
Does it really rely on 1975 Stanford undergrads, though? For example, I think Dan Kahan (Yale's Cultural Cognition Project at http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/ http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/) usually says about the same thing about facts and changing minds.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  The first discussion in your link talks about peoples bias for wanting to remove plastic from the ocean remote from the source, rather than at the source. Surely it's obvious that preventing plastic entering the ocean at the source does nothing to remove the plastic that's already there. Maybe I should read more of this blog, but that doesn't inspire confidence.
  - conistonwater 8y ago
    I think you should, if you scroll back a couple of years, there's plenty of discussion of published research on science communication, which might be more interesting to you.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      Cool, thanks, I'll have a gander.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
>It doesn't require much stretching of the imagination to see that circa 1975 Stanford undergraduates, as a cohort, may score below average on objective measures of humbleness. Which doesn't matter in this test. Both groups in this study would have the presumed bias, so the differences in scores could still be attributed to the independent variable.

tunesmith 8y ago

We have this weird fetish these last few years with asserting in broad language that people don't change their minds, don't respond to evidence, dig their heels in further when presented with evidence that contradicts their preconceived opinions, etc. It's all over pop psychology and the headlines. Bugs the heck out of me, because if the language they use is literally true, then no one would ever be convinced to change their minds ever. And yet, we do. It's true that perhaps some or many people never change their minds, or that all people might be apt to behave that way when they're not focusing their attention, but that's wildly different language then the headlines use. This article is obviously guilty as well - "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds". Like, ever? The content of the article doesn't back up the headline, but the headline is what people remember. Even some of the content is probably guilty. In the Stanford capital punishment study, is it really true that each and every individual in the study responded as they describe? Because that's how the article is written. And the problem is it gives people more excuse to give up - to not engage with someone who is wrong, or to dismiss someone who is right (that they think is wrong). Because, studies! The real lesson is the opposite - that we have to study and learn critical thinking, and practice, as a discipline, changing our minds when the evidence or reasoning warrants it. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible, and in fact the ability to do so is part of what makes us an evolved species - or more generally, our ability to surpass our instincts and evolved traits. Show me some experiments that demonstrate what conditions need to be in place, in order for people to change their minds after they've proven to be resistant. (Hint: psychological safety and lack of time pressure.) That's what'll be valuable. I'm tired of all these other studies that just say we don't.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
My observation is that when the real point of the argument is social pecking order bullshit where proving you got X fact wrong means you are evil (stupid, etc) and now deserve to be treated really terribly, people dig their heels in as the only possible defense against "agreeing" to be crapped on. If that's not what is at stake, people are vastly more willing to learn and grow. Some social settings are better than others in that regard.
raverbashing 8y ago

BerislavLopac 8y ago

My problem with the studies described at the beginning is with this conclusion: Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. My understanding, from the descriptions in the article, was that it was not the beliefs were _refuted_, it was just that what they were told originally was not true. The subjects had no reason to believe the latter assertion above the former.

geezerjay 8y ago
It is also important to note that facts, in the true sense of the word, represent single observations of a phenomenon, while beliefs are more about models that reflect relationships between observable phenomena and a way to model and predict behavior. Thus it's easy to understand that a single observation, particularly one which is given at face value, is not enough to scrap whole models. To provide an example, should we scrap the whole notion of gravity accelerating all dropped objects uniformly independent of mass if someone observes a feather taking more time to fall than a canonball? I mean,that's a fact. Anyone ca see it and reproduce the same behavior. So, should everyone just abandon the notion of gravity acritically because of a single fact was presented?

philipps 8y ago

Both this and the previous discussion show that HN readers believe facts (or information) can and do change peoples’ minds. The way I understand the article (and the books it refers to) it suggests that social factors have a stronger effect on opinions than facts. I find this hypothesis plausible when I look at the polarized discussions I see playing out at the societal level, as well as interactions with other people individually. And maybe, rather than refute it, the HN reaction to the article is further evidence for the mechanism the article describes? Edit: typo

chiefalchemist 8y ago

If anyone would like to explore the topic a bit further try "The Influential Mind" by Tali Sharot. It was on FT's short list for best of 2017. It's a quick easy read. Gladwell-esque. The difference iis, she is an actual scientest who works in that field. Tho' perhaps that makes her bias? ;) https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Others/dp/1627792651 https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change-Other...

tobr 8y ago

For some reason this made me think of the problems with side effects in programming. If we can read and write willy-nilly, it’s very difficult to figure out why the data is the way it is, and we can’t undo/rewind unless we planned for it all along. When our minds are mulling over some piece of information, whether it’s true or not, it will have side effects on other thoughts, opinions and emotions. If we’re confronted with a revised set of facts later, there is no way to rewind all those side effects.

jokoon 8y ago

People are free to believe what they want. The problem with science is that it cannot change, so it can appear as a problem in politics, people feel science is a prison you cannot criticize. Also there are good reasons why science is not in control of our lives. What's worse is that people will also speak in the name of the science of economics to advocate about any kind of policy or tax break.

commandlinefan 8y ago
> The problem with science is that it cannot change Maybe science can't change, but our collective understanding of it changes (hopefully gets better) almost all the time.
- jokoon 8y ago
  I guess people don't realize how science illiterate people can be. That's the issue I guess. If you don't understand science, you cannot trust it.

hevi_jos 8y ago

We should talk about complexity and complication here. Complex is the opposite of simple. If there is 50 equal elements communicating between them there we have a complex system. This is important because a thousand ants behave totally different from an isolated ant. You just can't study an ant and expect to understand the nest or anthill. Psychologists try to make it all the time and it is totally wrong: They studied isolated rats in order to understand addiction to drugs and they did not understood that they are social animals which travel 20miles-30kms each day. So they jailed the rats in a cage, because it was easier to study them that way, and extracted conclusions that were totally bogus for human beings. Those conclusions were the basis for the US war on drugs. Here they do the same. They make a very simple experiment, and extract conclusions about the whole system. In Africa, when humans whatever,more fiction than science. It is ok to make fiction and speculation, but you should always differentiate what we really know with high degree of confidence from what we do not.

netcan 8y ago

This is a tangent. How much/long does a study like this cost/take? Is it possible/useful to scale this? From reading into some of the replicability discussion, I've gotten curious about social science generally. What's an expirement like this trying to prove/demonstrate. The journalistic narrative likes the easy "X debunked." I imagine researchers have a more nuanced perspective. I guess what im asking is what does the larger effort look like? Do these studies eventually add up to a larger understanding of how we do form opinions, where facts do change our minds.... Replicability is one thing. How about generalisability?

emodendroket 8y ago
Which study are you referring to? Several are referenced.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
The replication rate is social science studies is very poor. And an even larger problem is that the studies themselves do not actually test what they aim to test, often because they simply cannot. For instance do video games cause violence? The only way you could realistically test this would be to have one group somehow prevented from playing video games for their entire life, or at least up to a certain age, and another group obligated to play video games in a similar fashion, and then some control group presumably free to do as they saw fit. And then follow these individuals for decades and see what happens. That's not really possible. So instead the experiments that are made are toy experiments, but when you're not really testing what you're trying to measure, it becomes impossible to prove anything, and possible to show anything. For instance could you design a toy experiment that might indicate video games cause violence? Of course. Could you design a toy experiment that might indicate video games don't cause violence? Of course. The experiments are meaningless. As an example of the problem, 'emotional intelligence' in work is all the rage right now. Yet the keystone study that sparked it is really just quite bad. The author had people split off into groups and perform a variety of tasks such as, literally, planning a shopping list. Using some method of determining who made the best shopping list, the author then determined that the groups who had the highest average IQ did not perform the best, whereas their 'emotional intelligence' as measured by an, again literally, "reading the mind in the eyes test" mapped better to performance - so therefore, it's not merit alone that judges performance but some emotional intelligence, at least as measured by "reading the mind in the eyes" that does. That's just broken logic. At the bare minimum IQ != specific task merit. The most logical way to perform that experiment would be to have created teams of those that performed individually best on any given task to work together against those that did not score so well on merit, but did well on the "reading the mind in the eyes test". Of course she did not do this, the bare minimum to even begin approaching this question, since the result would not be what she wanted. And negative results don't get published. Yet now there have been likely hundreds of articles and spin off studies taking that study's unjustified conclusion as a granted. So no, there is absolutely no big picture progress in the social sciences.

cal97g 8y ago

Most 'facts' are debatable.

lisper 8y ago

I just now (30 minutes ago) changed my mind about something based on a fact, and it wasn't even something that someone pointed out to me. I just realized on my own that I had been wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18111870 I wonder if this fact will change anyone's mind about the idea that facts never change anyone's mind.

emodendroket 8y ago
Why such a mindlessly literal interpretation of an title clearly not intended to be literal?
- hnbroseph 8y ago
  well, it's a time-honored tradition of we geeks on the internet. it helps us feel clever. :)

slx26 8y ago

This is very long and complicated, but I'll try to write a quick comment. Many people know from experience how hard it's to convince anyone to change what they say, the way they behave, etc, from facts alone. I say "behave", because it's very important to realize the difference between "rationally accepting" and "caring about a truth or fact", more to that later. We also know that people can change their minds quite easily when they are exposed to pretty much anything for enough time, with enough repetition. Even when we know something is false, the repetition of a certain discourse can have a noticeable effect on us. When you pair that with other types of external pressures, it becomes even more egregious. The key point is that we can't easily change how people feels while being respectful with that people and trying to make them change through words only. We are irrational, and we all have different priorities. Even if I accept a fact, it might not be something important to me, even if I rationally say it is, so I won't change the way I act, and it won't matter that much. Otherwise, I might say that I don't accept something just because I don't feel that way, even if I have to discard and ignore (unconsciously) the facts. What "I feel "is more relevant than the facts that I "don't really (want) to understand". As tobr puts very well in another comment too, all these feelings and ideas have a long term effect: "When our minds are mulling over some piece of information, whether it’s true or not, it will have side effects on other thoughts, opinions and emotions. If we’re confronted with a revised set of facts later, there is no way to rewind all those side effects." I thought it was interesting to write about all this, not only because it really helps a lot understand why facts might or might not help much changing the way people behaves, but it also helps us understand better how to actually make people change their minds. Words might be very effective for those that are already in a similar line of thought, but in other cases we might want to try changing the way people feels about something instead, by trying to making them live, in first person, the contradictions in their own beliefs (unfortunately, for many technical issues, you can't do that without becoming a teacher (and that assuming the other person trusts you enough to let you teach something), but then it's not surprising that people can't trust facts that depend on knowledge they don't have, it's only natural). And all this also help us understand that even though we might accept many rational truths, we all have different priorities, so the ones we end up acting upon deserve some consideration. Sometimes you are so focused on your own causes that don't understand how others don't share it, when it's simply that they have their own ones too, not necessarily that they don't rationally accept and understand what you are doing. And there are a billion worthy causes. For some people it might be about saving the world. Others focus only on their kids. We can do a lot to manage better that collision between rationality and irrationality, between facts and feelings, because both are critical to us as human beings.

izzydata 8y ago

They sure change my mind. I'm just not always convinced what people are saying are facts. At best they are the current best explanation and at worst only opinions.

merpnderp 8y ago
At one end of the spectrum of what constitutes a fact is Richard Feynman's definition, which was anything he'd replicated himself in a lab. He considered everything else he knew to be based on faith (in people, in organizations, in whatever made the claim, but which he held in high enough esteem to actually believe.)
loco5niner 8y ago
Agreed. Or even worse. Purposefully misreporting of research data. Example: recently disgraced "scientist" Brian Wansink.

dagaci 8y ago

Humans are overwhelmingly emotional creatures. We are a bunch of monkeys with only a fragment of real awareness of why we are doing X and Y. Human brains judge another persons whole life in milliseconds (we all do it, can't help that), but then struggle with what is quite simple math. That should tell you something about what we are. My advice is don't ever forget that logic is only the smallest part. Demeanor and a strong image is much more important than it should be, simply presenting a "fact" is not enough.

the_greyd 8y ago

I say that's a good thing. It's a good thing that beliefs have inertia, and it makes sense. Think of the years of patterns of thinking and neural connections that have formed in your brain. Are you expected to read something and change that in an instant? Imagine when Darwin's Theory of Evolution came out, assuming it had perfect evidence for it, do we expect everybody to instantly change their beliefs? And sometimes what we say facts are poor research, see ongoing replication crisis in psychology, social science, nutrition etc. The time it takes to change a mind is a long complicated process which is justified. A world where people's minds are easily changed by facts would be a world of fads.

snarf21 8y ago
So true. I read this article recently about doctors not switching to the newest techniques. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/upshot/its-hard-for-doctors-to-unlearn-things-thats-costly-for-all-of-us.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/upshot/its-hard-for-docto...] The interesting thing is that I think the author makes the opposite point of what they were intending. The tl;dr of the article is that a study came out saying doctors should strictly control blood sugar in the ICU. It was very slow to gain adoption. Eventually it started to take hold but a new more rigorous study came out and said this was a bad practice as it was actually causing too many hypoglycemic events and killing patients. The new recommendation was to not strictly control blood sugar in the ICU. The author states that doctors are now not switching back to the strategy they had in the first place. It seems like waiting for a preponderance of evidence might always be the best path forward, especially doctors and other situations where people's lives are at risk.
- the_greyd 8y ago
  "Imagine if America created an evidence-based centrist party in the 1940s that listened to the scientists how much more advanced things would be. Mandatory frontal lobotomies for hysterical women who show sapphic tendencies. Free cigarettes for kids to smooth their breathing." https://twitter.com/getfiscal/status/1032299239160913920 https://twitter.com/getfiscal/status/1032299239160913920

Isamu 8y ago

Belief is not generally fact based. Going strictly with the facts is an incredibly disciplined thing. Feynman used to play games to keep himself sharp, to avoid fooling himself because as he said, the easiest person to fool is yourself. With people in general the belief comes first and then you backfill with supporting evidence and argument. Also we tend to pull our beliefs into our identity. Then a challenge to our beliefs is a challenge to our identity, and very hard to swallow. So it is also difficult but important to keep yourself from identifying yourself by your beliefs.

dqpb 8y ago

This is why cache invalidation is important.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Asturaz 8y ago

The study Mercier and some European colleagues did together which is mention in this article seems very similar to The Choice Blindness study. https://www.wired.com/2010/08/choice-blindness/ https://www.wired.com/2010/08/choice-blindness/ http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Choice-Blindness-summary.pdf http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Choice-Blin... The latest paper which is incredible interesting from that study http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Strandberg-Siv%C3%A9n-Hall-Johansson-P%C3%A4rnamets-False-Beliefs-and-Confabulation-Can-Lead-to-Lasting-Changes-in-Political-Attitudes-2018.pdf http://www.lucs.lu.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Strandberg-...

merpnderp 8y ago

But what is considered a fact? Richard Feynman only considered a thing a fact if he'd replicated the results himself. Everything else he took on faith. When the FDA said you should limit fat intake, that was considered a fact and only nuts would disagree, but that is now considered a much trickier statement. When the FDA says the flu vaccine is safe, that is a fact and only nuts would disagree, but that is not considered a questionable statement. But it isn't hard for a nut to use the first to confuse the latter.

ASinghUK 8y ago

The article is basically saying that if we're told we're right, then we're told we're wrong, we will still believe we're right even though we're presented with a contrary fact? The test group aren't asked their answers in response to being told a fact - its more of a psychological game in my opinion

antidesitter 8y ago

Michael Huemer has written extensively on the topic of why people are irrational about politics [0]. I recommend this brief talk [1] which goes over some of the key ideas. Fundamentally, it's a problem of incentives: There is little or no incentive for people to be rational about their political beliefs, and there is frequently an incentive to be irrational about them. In particular: The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that people often choose—rationally—to adopt irrational beliefs because the costs of rational beliefs exceed their benefits. To understand this, one has to distinguish two senses of the word “rational”: Instrumental rationality (or “means-end rationality”) consists in choosing the correct means to attain one’s actual goals, given one’s actual beliefs. This is the kind of rationality that economists generally assume in explaining human behavior. Epistemic rationality consists, roughly, in forming beliefs in truth-conducive ways—accepting beliefs that are well-supported by evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, avoiding contradictions, revising one’s beliefs in the light of new evidence against them, and so on. This is the kind of rationality that books on logic and critical thinking aim to instill. The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that it is often instrumentally rational to be epistemically irrational. The theory of Rational Irrationality makes two main assumptions. First, individuals have non-epistemic belief preferences (otherwise known as “biases”). That is, there are certain things that people want to believe, for reasons independent of the truth of those propositions or of how well-supported they are by the evidence. Second, individuals can exercise some control over their beliefs. Given the first assumption, there is a “cost” to thinking rationally—namely, that one may not get to believe the things one wants to believe. Given the second assumption (and given that individuals are usually instrumentally rational), most people will accept this cost only if they receive greater benefits from thinking rationally. But since individuals receive almost none of the benefit from being epistemically rational about political issues, we can predict that people will often choose to be epistemically irrational about political issues. [0] http://www.owl232.net/papers/irrationality.htm http://www.owl232.net/papers/irrationality.htm [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JYL5VUe5NQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JYL5VUe5NQ