3 ms·

One of my favorite points in favor of facts, debate, and persuasion is the observation that you almost never see someone change their mind, but you can find leg

One of my favorite points in favor of facts, debate, and persuasion is the observation that you almost never see someone change their mind, but you can find legions of people who have changed their minds. There are a host of reasons we don't respond to facts with "oh, I guess I'll abandon all my deeply-held beliefs immediately!" Everything from "that's an embarrassing loss of face" to "I'd like to fact-check you before I accept that, but it's rude to say I doubt you" to "brains don't work that way, it's physically impossible to discard a whole belief on demand" factors in. And I agree, this is hardly a bad thing. Taking time to change our minds is a safety feature. Not only are facts sometimes false, or falsified, or misleading, but most of us aren't great at knowing what's relevant when. On almost any topic, there is someone who could argue me into an embarrassing defeat, or at least an awkward stalemate of "we can't both be right". This is true for most people about all things, and all people about most things. I am overwhelmingly confident that young-earth creationism is wrong, but I've seen its adherents speak; I have a lot of arguments they can't answer, but they have a lot of arguments I can't answer either. I don't know enough about the geology of Mount Ararat to explain why some arcane point about flood sedimentology is wrong, but the correct response to that is not for me to agree that the Earth is 5,000 years old. And that's for a fringe theory that I'm uncommonly well-qualified to rebut - the problem only gets worse when we move to a lay viewer looking at any serious debate. People today may unprecedented access to facts, but that didn't give us the time or memory or training to evaluate every possible issue from the bare facts up. Everyone who's ever cast a vote is, on a great many issues, working from heuristics and expert opinions and best guesses. With only one lifetime to learn things, that's not avoidable. I'm sometimes alarmed by how harshly people will resist looking into new facts and evidence, but the idea that people should promptly respond to compelling-sounding facts by changing their minds doesn't strike me as a workable one.

the_greyd 8y ago
After reading a bit of evolutionary psychology, I realized to my astonishment that humans have evolved to survive, and not to be perfectly rational. Rational so much so its useful. I'm actually convinced that extreme rationality has evolutionary disadvantages. When you realize the universe has no meaning, does it motivate you and your species to keep breeding and take risks? As Schopenhauer said, if you truly considered all the costs associated with having kids before having them, no rational being would ever have kids! No person thinking clearly would ever trade 10-15 minutes of feeling good for a lifetime of costs and responsibilities. Then there's tribalism and ingroup and outgroup psychology which dictates much of what we see. These are survival mechanisms meant for living in small tribes, malfunctioning in a globally connected civilization. I would suggest yuval harrari's recent article on how humans are hackable and how that completely demolishes our concepts of liberal democracy , free market etc which assumes rational actors behaving in their self-interest.

the_greyd 8y ago

After reading a bit of evolutionary psychology, I realized to my astonishment that humans have evolved to survive, and not to be perfectly rational. Rational so much so its useful. I'm actually convinced that extreme rationality has evolutionary disadvantages. When you realize the universe has no meaning, does it motivate you and your species to keep breeding and take risks? As Schopenhauer said, if you truly considered all the costs associated with having kids before having them, no rational being would ever have kids! No person thinking clearly would ever trade 10-15 minutes of feeling good for a lifetime of costs and responsibilities. Then there's tribalism and ingroup and outgroup psychology which dictates much of what we see. These are survival mechanisms meant for living in small tribes, malfunctioning in a globally connected civilization. I would suggest yuval harrari's recent article on how humans are hackable and how that completely demolishes our concepts of liberal democracy , free market etc which assumes rational actors behaving in their self-interest.