18 ms·

Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

145 points by hhs 7y ago

bookAlot 7y ago
Britain is a King!
ninguem2 7y ago
Inability to understand reality will lead to the species' extinction. I guess that's indeed how it's supposed to work.
starpilot 7y ago
In the book Superforecasting, one of the top scorers in a prediction contest wrote a program to display him news sites with differing biases from what he had viewed in the past. Social news, including HN, does the opposite.
- runawaybottle 7y ago
  I really would like to read a business/product analyst HN just to see their perspective on tech on a regular basis. Every other post titled ‘What your developers don’t understand ...’
- ryukafalz 7y ago
  HN doesn’t show different results to different people, does it? Though I suppose things that the majority disagree with are less likely to be upvoted.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    The only way it does (that I know of) is whether you have "showdead" turned on or not.
    - rahimnathwani 7y ago
      The headlines are shown to only a subset of people: those who choose to visit the site.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Not based on user behaviours, excepting whether or not users have opted in to "showdead". Posting new or low-rated stories will appear on some but not all front-page views, effectively by random assignment was tried in the past, it fared poorly. The idea was that those that pick up votes are rated more highly. The result was that readers reacted viscerally and negatively to junk. Discussion: Apparently tried, but reverted (from 5 years ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333178 And from a month ago: When we tested a variant of this idea, we found that it didn't work for what I guess you could call psychological reasons: readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing junk on HN's front page. By "junk" I mean stories that were placed there randomly and that weren't of high-enough quality to otherwise be credible candidates for the front page. Basically, it was an "ow my eyes", "get that shit away from me" effect. (I don't mean to demean the submissions people posted that got randomly placed in this way; it's just that words like junk and shit reflect how users reacted to the random placement thing.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868365 Apparently my theory on front-page submissions and karma accumulation is officially validated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228866
- catalogia 7y ago
  HN, unlike many other examples of social media, doesn't show "personalized" news feeds. So in that respect it's not nearly as bad.
wetpaws 7y ago
I dismiss this fact as it does not fit into my worldview
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Funny, but what about those who agree with it? Do they agree with it because it's true? Or just because they've dismissed the facts that don't agree? This idea means that you can't really trust anything that you think is true, including this idea. To some degree it is, not quite self-refuting, but at least... self-skepticism-causing? I don't know a good word for what I'm trying to say. But it leads you to question the truthfulness of it, at least to some degree. That said, observation leads one to think there is an element of truth to it. It can be taken too far, though.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
coding123 7y ago
> Within the conservative political blogosphere, global warming is either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, vaccines, fluoridated water and genetically modified foods are known to be dangerous. Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed picture of how Donald Trump is the victim of a fabricated conspiracy. To this day you'll find most well off (and extreme) democrats avoiding GMO foods, protesting vaccines as well as avoiding fluoride in water. I don't think that's a republican issue. Especially in portland that consistently votes democratic but also NO to GMO, Flouride and Vaccines. Reading that middle sentence maybe it's a little unclear if they are tying that to conservatism, but it's definitely surrounded by it.
- leereeves 7y ago
  > To this day you'll find most well off (and extreme) democrats avoiding GMO foods, protesting vaccines as well as avoiding fluoride in water. I don't think that's a republican issue. Especially in portland that consistently votes democratic but also NO to GMO, Flouride and Vaccines. I found that claim surprising so I did a quick "fact check". About fluoride: true. "For the fourth time since 1956, Portland voters reject fluoridation" https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2013/05/portland_fluoride_for_the_four.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2013/05/portland_fluorid... About GMO: mixed. "Sixty-two percent of voters in Portland's Multnomah County supported " a measure to label (but not ban) GMOs, that was defeated statewide. https://www.agweb.com/article/oregon-voters-reject-gmo-labeling-on-foods-associated-press https://www.agweb.com/article/oregon-voters-reject-gmo-label... About vaccines: uncertain. I wasn't able to find evidence of this.
- davidw 7y ago
  I'm supposed to be avoiding politics here, but: I thought vaccines were kind of a 'fringes of both sides' issue until our Republican rep here in Bend, Oregon got the rug pulled out from under her by her own party: https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2019/05/vaccination-boosting-bill-passes-oregon-house.html https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2019/05/vaccination-boosti... I was surprised, I didn't think it'd go down that way. The sheer vitriol that our rep gets on her social media because of that one thing is quite something to behold.
mmsimanga 7y ago
> This approach succeeds most of the time when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen. The article is interesting but I think misses one critical point. Most "facts" aren't as clear cut as the weight of hydrogen. Most answers to questions will differ according to conditions. As an example not all people will respond the same to a treatment regimen. Low carb doesn't work for everyone for different reasons so most "facts" on low carb will likely be disputed.
- 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  Aren't Southern history books still teaching the War of Northern Aggression? https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/26/civil-war-still-being-fought-in-schools/e86c19b9-eedd-46dd-91d1-3f1f00e2f2f1/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/26/c...
  - undersuit 7y ago
    Not just in the south, I have a friend who grew up in eastern Washington State that I had to disabuse of that notion.
  - gbmor 7y ago
    Anecdotal, but I'm from the south and learned it as the Civil War. However, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many schools teach it as the "War of Northern Aggression" given how it's viewed in rural areas.
- hnuser123456 7y ago
  If we're talking about weight loss, low carb does indeed work for everyone, just not everyone can stick with it, because the link between brain and gut is complex and strong, physical activity levels vary which impacts the speed of progress, etc. It is a fact that there is no process by which someone eats less than 20 g of carbs per day and does not lose weight.
  - mnemonicsloth 7y ago
    ...except eating 4000 calories a day of fat and protein. Conservation of energy is the law.
edoo 7y ago
Hardwired and perhaps trained as well. If you ever develop serious skill at debugging logic problems it will be because you have no choice but to accept facts that don't fit into your world view, or maybe it is because you stop having a rigid world view because of how many times you eventually realize you weren't seeing the bigger picture.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  A number of times, I've had to debug something where the impossible was happening. The question then became "Which thing that I think is impossible is actually possible? And how do I find out?"
  - pixl97 7y ago
    I like to think of it as "it is impossible at this layer", which then can point to a failure at another abstraction layer.
austincheney 7y ago
Twice I have been through interviews that use hours of psychology assessments to filter candidates. One of those was a large hedge fund. Through that I have learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait that is astonishingly rare. Most humans are hardwired to seek mutual security, which means banding together as a stress coping mechanism. That incidentally means some natural revulsion of originality, objectivity, individuality, and even honesty. More important are group conformance, mutual reassurance, and perceptions of social security. This is readily observable when you take a group of people who have never worked together and are generally unfamiliar with the outdoors and drop them into an outdoor military training exercise, such as college ROTC junior classmen. Naturally they congregate really closely together and wait for somebody to tell them what to do with minimal or no initiative, all of which is a bad idea in modern military training.
- anonuser123456 7y ago
  >Through that I have learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait that is astonishingly rare. How does one test for this? I would like to mark my own belief to market.
  - hnuser123456 7y ago
    It's easiest to tell when someone is in a mildly stressful situation, and to see if they can focus on the task and evaluate tactical options to move forward, or if they get defensive. Also, hello username buddy.
    - texasbigdata 7y ago
      Defensiveness or stress tolerance or problem solving are not objectivity
      - hnuser123456 7y ago
        >A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens their ideological worldview. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence — that is, we engage in confirmation bias, giving credit to expert testimony we like and find reasons to reject the rest. >Political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge experimentally confirmed the existence of this automatic response. They found that partisan subjects, when presented with photos of politicians, produce an affective “like/dislike” response that precedes any sort of conscious, factual assessment as to who is pictured. >In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, information that threatens your belief system — say, information about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment — can threaten your sense of identity itself. If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack. If you are objective, you are not threatened by surprising new information, even if it might have some negative implications that jump to mind. You evaluate it against every other relevant information source you have on the topic, sometimes requiring more complex chains of information, and assign a level of trust to the new info.
MikeGale 7y ago
Remarkable how these debates reveal how many have a "scientific" attitude. Generally very few. There is no such thing as "done science". Science is about hypotheses that are questioned and challenged to come up with a better hypothesis. I'm astonished how this simple thing is not evident in much of the debate.
mynameishere 7y ago
Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed picture of how Donald Trump is the victim of a fabricated conspiracy...None of that is correct Day 1 after the election. On Day 1 after that guy was elected the media--95 percent of it, in lockstep--said the following: "Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia, etc, etc, etc." For years. And then they dropped it when the shit didn't stick as planned. So, yes, the title of the article is correct.
- richk449 7y ago
  Was curious if this was true. Looked at the front page of papers from day 1 after the election, and couldn’t find a single mention of Russia. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/business/media/trumps-victory-on-front-pages-worldwide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/business/media/trumps-vic...
- dane-pgp 7y ago
  To be fair, the media was also talking about Russia before the election too, and so was Trump himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kxG8uJUsWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kxG8uJUsWU Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't stick as planned": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_the_Special_Counsel_investigation_%282017%E2%80%932019%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_th... but I'm glad we both agree about the correctness of the article title.
- tabtab 7y ago
  Just because no drunks were found in a weaving car doesn't mean investigating it is a "hoax". The Tinted One is just a bad policy driver who kisses up to Mr. P because he likes Mr. P.
- pgrote 7y ago
  >So, yes, the title of the article is correct. I take conspiracy to be an active process where folks get together and agree on something. I think what has happened is folks who have different goals without communicating. The Democrats want to prevent re-election/gain removal, the media wants ratings/profit and activists want attention/change. I don't think they all got together, met, planned things out and ran a conspiracy.
thedudeabides5 7y ago
This is hardly new. Leon Festinger was talking about this in the 60s with a theory called cognitive dissonance.
getgoogled 7y ago
I was uninvited from from the house of a friend because i pointed out that payscale.com was claiming that asian women are paid more than men. The lady of the house then claimed i was unqualified to raise such a discussion point because i am a male.
leshokunin 7y ago
Fun fact: whether you agree or disagree with this premise, will prove this point right.
- netfl0 7y ago
  Nicely done.
droithomme 7y ago
It's a good filter to cut through distracting BS that would otherwise bog you down. If you're surviving and thriving, your worldview is not so bad. A worldview is a paradigm of reality constructed over decades. It makes sense to require higher standards of evidence for apparent exceptions to the hard won rules eked out from decades of observation and insight.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  I'm increasingly convinced that worldviews / mental models are not simply modeling devices, but information rejection tools. Borrowing from Clay Shirkey's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", the world is a surprisingly information-rich space, and humans (or any other information-processing system, biological or otherwise) simply aren't equipped to deal with more than a minuscule fraction of it. We aim for a useful fraction. It paints an incomplete, but useful picture. Even a bad model has utility if it rejects information cheaply: without conscious effort, without physical effort, and without lingering concerns or apprehensions. It's a no-FOMO mechanism. Usually, what happens is that we apply our bad models to a given scenario, act, process the new resulting scenario, and notice that that is obviously not favourable, and take appropriate actions to correct the new circumstance. Net loss: one round of interaction. Net gain: not succumbing to analysis paralysis or having to hunt for a new and improved worldview (especially: a new concensus worldview shared with numerous others, creating a large coordination problem). Sometimes that doesn't work out and people (or companies, or governments, or cultures) get stuck in a nonproductive rut, often characterised by "doing the one thing we know how to do, only harder". The big problem comes when there's a recognition that a former large-scale world model no longer applies. I'm leaning strongly to the notion that this is behind many psychological conditions: Grief, denial, meloncholia, depression, PTSD. Possibly burnout and ADHD.[1] Classic grief is triggered by the loss of a loved one, or in the "five stages of grief" study, news of the subject's own impending mortality (a fatal disease prognosis). That triggered denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It's a pattern once recognised that one sees repeated across numerous scenarios -- almost any disaster, epidemics, global catastrophic risks, wartime attacks, business failures, relationship breakups, and on. What's curious to me is what the threshold for grief or denial is. There are some surprises which don't elicit this response: almost all humour is based on the principle of surprise, and horror films and thrill rides are based on the premise of surprise or extreme experience, but rarely result in a traumatic response. We go through our daily lives experiencing small and medium-sized suprises and disappointments all the time. The grief/denial response seems to be triggered only above a magnitude or repetition threshold. (Though that can differ markedly between individuals.) ________________________________ Notes: 1. I'm not claiming that all PTSD, burnout, and ADHD are greif responses, but rather that there are at least strong similarities. Early psychologists linked grief and melancholia (itself then considered a much stronger longing, to the point of mental illness). The mechanisms for overload might be internal -- chemical, physical, illness, injury, or genetic in origin -- or external. But there's a common thread that seems to run through these conditions, ultimately an inability to cope with a level of change.
PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
Although the author was clearly trying for fair "equivalence" claims, I found that his best effort at this fell short: > As researcher Dan Kahan has demonstrated, liberals are less likely to accept expert consensus on the possibility of safe storage of nuclear waste or on the effects of concealed-carry gun laws. There's the very big question of what "less likely to accept" really means. Presented with good evidence of the above two points, I (believe) I would say "well, I accept X, Y and Z, but my objections to this were not limited to those points, and I still object to expanding these because <orthogonal reasons>". That's quite different from saying "that's fake news! it's all a bunch of crap! i'm not listening to any of that!" Studies that fail to differentiate between these two responses to "facts that don't fit their worldview" are somewhat pointless.
mnemonicsloth 7y ago
> If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack. There's nothing unnatural about genetic manipulation. Nature modifies genes at every level from base pairs to whole chromosome-sets, far more promiscuously than us humans. You learn all about this if you study biology in college. Arguably, you learn nothing but.
- undersuit 7y ago
  Because I took Biology in college, I can't be skeptical of GMOs?
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  - mnemonicsloth 7y ago
    You can be skeptical of almost anything you want. One thing that surprised me was how tolerant scientists are of dissent. Your views can run from the unorthodox to the downright eccentric and, so long as you pay attention to data and argue politely (and maybe even not so politely), people will listen to you. You can't be a scientist without being humble, and humble people listen even to the weird arguments. But if you believe GM foods have adverse health effects, and you design a study to look for them, and try to get it funded you'll be turned down. Literally thousands of scientists have had the same idea and done the same thing, and they all found nothing. Scientists listen to data, so if you wanted to go on looking for health effects, you would probably start with very subtle ones that haven't been looked for yet. If it were me, I would start by trying to find ways genetically modified protein gets past the digestive system, which destroys genetic information by breaking all protein down down into its constituent amino acids. Not an easy problem, but better than some of the others. If you don't want to work on the problem scientifically, you also have the option of thinking about it non-scientifically. A non-scientific opinion can be whatever you want, but holding one means lumping yourself in with a lot of people who object to genetic engineering without knowing the central dogma or even what a gene is. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-safe.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-sa...
crispinb 7y ago
Does the research cited distinguish between hardwired vs culturally (or developmentally) entrenched behaviour? I haven't followed all the links so I'm asking, not answering, but if the research doesn't make that distinction, then the 'hardwired' aspect is unwarranted, and the title should have been something like "Contemporary humans tend to dismiss ...". In general, most social psychology research is still conducted on WEIRDS (and if the current Euro-American 'global' culture continues to spread, this is going to become an increasingly harder problem to tease out). Richard Nisbett & others claim to have shown that many cognitive behavioural regularities merely assumed to be 'hardwired' turn out not to be universal, therefore not hardwired at all.
imtringued 7y ago
Isn't that obvious? Think of the human brain as a byzantine fault tolerant distributed system. You are collaborating with other "nodes" that may be malicious, manipulitative or omit critical information. Therefore every message you receive has to be validated but since there is no objective criteria that can be used to form global consensus the only way to validate messages is by drawing upon your existing knowledge. When you are young you are more receptive to messages because you haven't gathered enough knowledge. Your "worldview" is being developed and then once it has matured you can use it to validate further messages. Lock-in happens when you build a whole network of beliefs that are fully dependent on each other. Admitting A can mean that B is no longer valid but you are fully convinced C must be true and if C is true then B is true as well. Therefore denying A is the only way to maintain your worldview.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm still looking at the headline and I'm thinking "and why is that a bad thing?" I mean, the problem mainstream commentary are really talking about is the accumulation of irrational, garbage world views. But mainstream is hampered in its ability to describe this in particular. Essentially, the view of journalism, in America especially, has presented itself as a "non-world view", "just the facts" but really having a secular, pro-science, pro-capitalist, etc position. A variety of viewpoints could considered but not an infinite variety. And the endorse variety was the "unbiased", supposedly willing to considered anything. And it seemed plausible for a bit. Moreover, this mainstream view certainly wanted some things to be taken fully on authority while other things could have their validity debated. Especially, schools and newspapers can't come out and say religious is bunk, they have to couch things as religion is a fine thing but shouldn't impinge on the domain of science or the state. And when talking a world view that is, in my secular world view, screamingly irrational, that's leaving a big hole in your position. My personal biased view is that the rise of an educated populace in the 1960s lead to that populace questioning a lot and the elites then being happy to gut education. Which lead to a uneducated populace more ready to embrace idiocy. Researchers saying "maybe people should have tools to sort facts from trash" but how did the situation start anyway? Sure, the Internet accelerated this kindling but you had problems with the rationality of the citizenry beforehand.
api 7y ago
This could be a side effect of how intelligence works. Intelligence is at least largely about making parsimonious models, and that involves a lot of throwing away of noise. So this is sort of a failure mode of that system. Sometimes contrarian but otherwise good information gets misidentified as noise.
bobthechef 7y ago
Obviously, we aren’t absolutely unable to consider other views. If we couldn’t, people would never change their views and yet they do. Furthermore, evidence isn’t the same thing as a self-sufficient body of premises. We interpret evidence in light of prior beliefs. There are disagreements where those prior beliefs are concerned. The truth is often difficult to know and even when you have it, convincing others is still going to take a lot of work. Don’t trivialize that difficulty. What this article is really circling are not these things, which are natural and with which there is nothing wrong per se, but about cultivated prejudice. Cultivated prejudice can be overcome, but it requires humility, that is, an openness to considering other views to see if what they claim is plausible, likely, necessary, or whatever. Should you change your mind, it may also require courage to state your change of beliefs to your milieu, but it is possible, even if risky in some circumstances. I would caution against the opposite errors of relativism and intolerance toward others’ opinions. What has happened of late (a matter of decades) is that quotidian political squabbling has turned into a full-scale war because of the Left’s vicious and total attack on Western tradition and the very foundations of Western culture (in most cases, in profound ignorance of the depths of that culture). In turn, many on the Right have overcompensated by moving away from the cautious, principled pragmatism of conservatism. If you want a more measured atmosphere, where exchanges of views can take place without the strident nonsense that dominates today, then the Left has to stop its total, emotionalist, destructive, oikophobic siege on “the West”, especially as it offers no better alternatives. Nature abhors a vacuum and it will be filled with all manner of demons far exceeding the boogeymen haunting the Left’s imagination.
Hnrobert42 7y ago
This article fails to provide facts to support the use of the term hardwired.
epicgiga 7y ago
Accurate, but fundamentally it is a type of laziness. Changing your worldview takes a serious amount of effort. Most people don't use their new years resolution one year gym memberships after the second week of January -- and rewiring your beliefs in the face of evidence and reason makes gymming look like sitting on your couch in your undies. This is why it's fundamentally an education issue. People's false beliefs and weak work ethics are usually baked in back at school. If school was improved, this problem would be diminished.
FpUser 7y ago
What the header says sounds very obvious to me. And it is also encouraged everywhere. Does post downvoting ring any bell?
mgh2 7y ago
You have to be aware that part of human nature comes with greed, dishonesty, and countless of other nasty things. Maybe what we call "gut" is another checking point to guard ourselves of the real monster inside each of us. Take GMOs, I am still skeptical of the science behind its safety, especially knowing that corporations fund these starving scientists. There is for example, a hidden MIT (unpublished, maybe due to retaliation fears) study that found 10 correlations of diseases to the rise of GMOs. Feel free to fact-check, HN is great at this (study below): https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson.... You can accuse the less-educated or talented on their bias all you want, but ultimately the smartest elite lie more often for personal gain than the humble and innocent rest (99%)...Perhaps we should be pointing fingers at our own society that glorifies lies and hides truth. Ex: "relative truth and morality" was invented by this culture. Perhaps there is something in our human nature that still strives for truth after all, but it is very hidden among all the lies and the rest of our majority evil nature. Some people call it "the moral law". There is still a sliver of hope...
thesz 7y ago
And next to that is a link to https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488 https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488 "Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: Real World Preasymptotics, Epistemology, and Applications" by Nassim Taleb which states "Many "biases" found in psychology become entirely rational under more sophisticated probability distributions". May be "hardwiredness" is not all that hard wired. Or, put it other way, the hardwiredness is not in humans under study but in humans who study them. I don't think that humans would achieve what we have today being hardwired to dismiss facts that don't fit their worldview.
notmarkus 7y ago
I'm enjoying the amount of pushback this is getting here on HN, given that we all probably think we're not victim to this, and are actively exposing ourselves to be.
jffhn 7y ago
>dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview I find this disconnect from reality especially fascinating in the software field, where nature's answers are just at our fingertips, and where we just have to open an editor or launch our program to be able to verify our expectations. I once told one of our architects that we were creating a lot of (Java) garbage, and he stared at me incredulously before saying: "but... no, we are using factories!" (the code was bloated with factories indeed, but no object was ever returned to them since noone knew when instances could be released) In the less verifiable and more nebulous matters of human psyche and philosophy, all hell breaks loose, which is unfortunate since they are also the most essential. I remember my philosophy professor in college, telling us, as we were leaving him for math class: "Ah, now serious stuffs!".
bobosha 7y ago
"Everything we hear is opinion, not fact; everything we see is perspective, not the truth" - Marcus Aurelius

145 points by hhs 7y ago

bookAlot 7y ago

Britain is a King!

ninguem2 7y ago

Inability to understand reality will lead to the species' extinction. I guess that's indeed how it's supposed to work.

starpilot 7y ago

In the book Superforecasting, one of the top scorers in a prediction contest wrote a program to display him news sites with differing biases from what he had viewed in the past. Social news, including HN, does the opposite.

runawaybottle 7y ago
I really would like to read a business/product analyst HN just to see their perspective on tech on a regular basis. Every other post titled ‘What your developers don’t understand ...’
ryukafalz 7y ago
HN doesn’t show different results to different people, does it? Though I suppose things that the majority disagree with are less likely to be upvoted.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  The only way it does (that I know of) is whether you have "showdead" turned on or not.
  - rahimnathwani 7y ago
    The headlines are shown to only a subset of people: those who choose to visit the site.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Not based on user behaviours, excepting whether or not users have opted in to "showdead". Posting new or low-rated stories will appear on some but not all front-page views, effectively by random assignment was tried in the past, it fared poorly. The idea was that those that pick up votes are rated more highly. The result was that readers reacted viscerally and negatively to junk. Discussion: Apparently tried, but reverted (from 5 years ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9333178 And from a month ago: When we tested a variant of this idea, we found that it didn't work for what I guess you could call psychological reasons: readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing junk on HN's front page. By "junk" I mean stories that were placed there randomly and that weren't of high-enough quality to otherwise be credible candidates for the front page. Basically, it was an "ow my eyes", "get that shit away from me" effect. (I don't mean to demean the submissions people posted that got randomly placed in this way; it's just that words like junk and shit reflect how users reacted to the random placement thing.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868365 Apparently my theory on front-page submissions and karma accumulation is officially validated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228866
catalogia 7y ago
HN, unlike many other examples of social media, doesn't show "personalized" news feeds. So in that respect it's not nearly as bad.

wetpaws 7y ago

I dismiss this fact as it does not fit into my worldview

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Funny, but what about those who agree with it? Do they agree with it because it's true? Or just because they've dismissed the facts that don't agree? This idea means that you can't really trust anything that you think is true, including this idea. To some degree it is, not quite self-refuting, but at least... self-skepticism-causing? I don't know a good word for what I'm trying to say. But it leads you to question the truthfulness of it, at least to some degree. That said, observation leads one to think there is an element of truth to it. It can be taken too far, though.
- deleted 7y ago
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coding123 7y ago

> Within the conservative political blogosphere, global warming is either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, vaccines, fluoridated water and genetically modified foods are known to be dangerous. Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed picture of how Donald Trump is the victim of a fabricated conspiracy. To this day you'll find most well off (and extreme) democrats avoiding GMO foods, protesting vaccines as well as avoiding fluoride in water. I don't think that's a republican issue. Especially in portland that consistently votes democratic but also NO to GMO, Flouride and Vaccines. Reading that middle sentence maybe it's a little unclear if they are tying that to conservatism, but it's definitely surrounded by it.

leereeves 7y ago
> To this day you'll find most well off (and extreme) democrats avoiding GMO foods, protesting vaccines as well as avoiding fluoride in water. I don't think that's a republican issue. Especially in portland that consistently votes democratic but also NO to GMO, Flouride and Vaccines. I found that claim surprising so I did a quick "fact check". About fluoride: true. "For the fourth time since 1956, Portland voters reject fluoridation" https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2013/05/portland_fluoride_for_the_four.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2013/05/portland_fluorid... About GMO: mixed. "Sixty-two percent of voters in Portland's Multnomah County supported " a measure to label (but not ban) GMOs, that was defeated statewide. https://www.agweb.com/article/oregon-voters-reject-gmo-labeling-on-foods-associated-press https://www.agweb.com/article/oregon-voters-reject-gmo-label... About vaccines: uncertain. I wasn't able to find evidence of this.
davidw 7y ago
I'm supposed to be avoiding politics here, but: I thought vaccines were kind of a 'fringes of both sides' issue until our Republican rep here in Bend, Oregon got the rug pulled out from under her by her own party: https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2019/05/vaccination-boosting-bill-passes-oregon-house.html https://www.oregonlive.com/health/2019/05/vaccination-boosti... I was surprised, I didn't think it'd go down that way. The sheer vitriol that our rep gets on her social media because of that one thing is quite something to behold.

mmsimanga 7y ago

> This approach succeeds most of the time when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen. The article is interesting but I think misses one critical point. Most "facts" aren't as clear cut as the weight of hydrogen. Most answers to questions will differ according to conditions. As an example not all people will respond the same to a treatment regimen. Low carb doesn't work for everyone for different reasons so most "facts" on low carb will likely be disputed.

0xff00ffee 7y ago
Aren't Southern history books still teaching the War of Northern Aggression? https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/26/civil-war-still-being-fought-in-schools/e86c19b9-eedd-46dd-91d1-3f1f00e2f2f1/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/03/26/c...
- undersuit 7y ago
  Not just in the south, I have a friend who grew up in eastern Washington State that I had to disabuse of that notion.
- gbmor 7y ago
  Anecdotal, but I'm from the south and learned it as the Civil War. However, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many schools teach it as the "War of Northern Aggression" given how it's viewed in rural areas.
hnuser123456 7y ago
If we're talking about weight loss, low carb does indeed work for everyone, just not everyone can stick with it, because the link between brain and gut is complex and strong, physical activity levels vary which impacts the speed of progress, etc. It is a fact that there is no process by which someone eats less than 20 g of carbs per day and does not lose weight.
- mnemonicsloth 7y ago
  ...except eating 4000 calories a day of fat and protein. Conservation of energy is the law.

edoo 7y ago

Hardwired and perhaps trained as well. If you ever develop serious skill at debugging logic problems it will be because you have no choice but to accept facts that don't fit into your world view, or maybe it is because you stop having a rigid world view because of how many times you eventually realize you weren't seeing the bigger picture.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
A number of times, I've had to debug something where the impossible was happening. The question then became "Which thing that I think is impossible is actually possible? And how do I find out?"
- pixl97 7y ago
  I like to think of it as "it is impossible at this layer", which then can point to a failure at another abstraction layer.

austincheney 7y ago

Twice I have been through interviews that use hours of psychology assessments to filter candidates. One of those was a large hedge fund. Through that I have learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait that is astonishingly rare. Most humans are hardwired to seek mutual security, which means banding together as a stress coping mechanism. That incidentally means some natural revulsion of originality, objectivity, individuality, and even honesty. More important are group conformance, mutual reassurance, and perceptions of social security. This is readily observable when you take a group of people who have never worked together and are generally unfamiliar with the outdoors and drop them into an outdoor military training exercise, such as college ROTC junior classmen. Naturally they congregate really closely together and wait for somebody to tell them what to do with minimal or no initiative, all of which is a bad idea in modern military training.

anonuser123456 7y ago
>Through that I have learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait that is astonishingly rare. How does one test for this? I would like to mark my own belief to market.
- hnuser123456 7y ago
  It's easiest to tell when someone is in a mildly stressful situation, and to see if they can focus on the task and evaluate tactical options to move forward, or if they get defensive. Also, hello username buddy.
  - texasbigdata 7y ago
    Defensiveness or stress tolerance or problem solving are not objectivity
    - hnuser123456 7y ago
      >A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens their ideological worldview. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence — that is, we engage in confirmation bias, giving credit to expert testimony we like and find reasons to reject the rest. >Political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge experimentally confirmed the existence of this automatic response. They found that partisan subjects, when presented with photos of politicians, produce an affective “like/dislike” response that precedes any sort of conscious, factual assessment as to who is pictured. >In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, information that threatens your belief system — say, information about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment — can threaten your sense of identity itself. If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack. If you are objective, you are not threatened by surprising new information, even if it might have some negative implications that jump to mind. You evaluate it against every other relevant information source you have on the topic, sometimes requiring more complex chains of information, and assign a level of trust to the new info.

MikeGale 7y ago

Remarkable how these debates reveal how many have a "scientific" attitude. Generally very few. There is no such thing as "done science". Science is about hypotheses that are questioned and challenged to come up with a better hypothesis. I'm astonished how this simple thing is not evident in much of the debate.

mynameishere 7y ago

Right-wing media outlets paint a detailed picture of how Donald Trump is the victim of a fabricated conspiracy...None of that is correct Day 1 after the election. On Day 1 after that guy was elected the media--95 percent of it, in lockstep--said the following: "Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia, etc, etc, etc." For years. And then they dropped it when the shit didn't stick as planned. So, yes, the title of the article is correct.

richk449 7y ago
Was curious if this was true. Looked at the front page of papers from day 1 after the election, and couldn’t find a single mention of Russia. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/business/media/trumps-victory-on-front-pages-worldwide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/business/media/trumps-vic...
dane-pgp 7y ago
To be fair, the media was also talking about Russia before the election too, and so was Trump himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kxG8uJUsWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kxG8uJUsWU Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't stick as planned": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_the_Special_Counsel_investigation_%282017%E2%80%932019%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_brought_in_th... but I'm glad we both agree about the correctness of the article title.
tabtab 7y ago
Just because no drunks were found in a weaving car doesn't mean investigating it is a "hoax". The Tinted One is just a bad policy driver who kisses up to Mr. P because he likes Mr. P.
pgrote 7y ago
>So, yes, the title of the article is correct. I take conspiracy to be an active process where folks get together and agree on something. I think what has happened is folks who have different goals without communicating. The Democrats want to prevent re-election/gain removal, the media wants ratings/profit and activists want attention/change. I don't think they all got together, met, planned things out and ran a conspiracy.

thedudeabides5 7y ago

This is hardly new. Leon Festinger was talking about this in the 60s with a theory called cognitive dissonance.

getgoogled 7y ago

I was uninvited from from the house of a friend because i pointed out that payscale.com was claiming that asian women are paid more than men. The lady of the house then claimed i was unqualified to raise such a discussion point because i am a male.

leshokunin 7y ago

Fun fact: whether you agree or disagree with this premise, will prove this point right.

netfl0 7y ago
Nicely done.

droithomme 7y ago

It's a good filter to cut through distracting BS that would otherwise bog you down. If you're surviving and thriving, your worldview is not so bad. A worldview is a paradigm of reality constructed over decades. It makes sense to require higher standards of evidence for apparent exceptions to the hard won rules eked out from decades of observation and insight.

dredmorbius 7y ago
I'm increasingly convinced that worldviews / mental models are not simply modeling devices, but information rejection tools. Borrowing from Clay Shirkey's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", the world is a surprisingly information-rich space, and humans (or any other information-processing system, biological or otherwise) simply aren't equipped to deal with more than a minuscule fraction of it. We aim for a useful fraction. It paints an incomplete, but useful picture. Even a bad model has utility if it rejects information cheaply: without conscious effort, without physical effort, and without lingering concerns or apprehensions. It's a no-FOMO mechanism. Usually, what happens is that we apply our bad models to a given scenario, act, process the new resulting scenario, and notice that that is obviously not favourable, and take appropriate actions to correct the new circumstance. Net loss: one round of interaction. Net gain: not succumbing to analysis paralysis or having to hunt for a new and improved worldview (especially: a new concensus worldview shared with numerous others, creating a large coordination problem). Sometimes that doesn't work out and people (or companies, or governments, or cultures) get stuck in a nonproductive rut, often characterised by "doing the one thing we know how to do, only harder". The big problem comes when there's a recognition that a former large-scale world model no longer applies. I'm leaning strongly to the notion that this is behind many psychological conditions: Grief, denial, meloncholia, depression, PTSD. Possibly burnout and ADHD.[1] Classic grief is triggered by the loss of a loved one, or in the "five stages of grief" study, news of the subject's own impending mortality (a fatal disease prognosis). That triggered denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It's a pattern once recognised that one sees repeated across numerous scenarios -- almost any disaster, epidemics, global catastrophic risks, wartime attacks, business failures, relationship breakups, and on. What's curious to me is what the threshold for grief or denial is. There are some surprises which don't elicit this response: almost all humour is based on the principle of surprise, and horror films and thrill rides are based on the premise of surprise or extreme experience, but rarely result in a traumatic response. We go through our daily lives experiencing small and medium-sized suprises and disappointments all the time. The grief/denial response seems to be triggered only above a magnitude or repetition threshold. (Though that can differ markedly between individuals.) ________________________________ Notes: 1. I'm not claiming that all PTSD, burnout, and ADHD are greif responses, but rather that there are at least strong similarities. Early psychologists linked grief and melancholia (itself then considered a much stronger longing, to the point of mental illness). The mechanisms for overload might be internal -- chemical, physical, illness, injury, or genetic in origin -- or external. But there's a common thread that seems to run through these conditions, ultimately an inability to cope with a level of change.

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago

Although the author was clearly trying for fair "equivalence" claims, I found that his best effort at this fell short: > As researcher Dan Kahan has demonstrated, liberals are less likely to accept expert consensus on the possibility of safe storage of nuclear waste or on the effects of concealed-carry gun laws. There's the very big question of what "less likely to accept" really means. Presented with good evidence of the above two points, I (believe) I would say "well, I accept X, Y and Z, but my objections to this were not limited to those points, and I still object to expanding these because <orthogonal reasons>". That's quite different from saying "that's fake news! it's all a bunch of crap! i'm not listening to any of that!" Studies that fail to differentiate between these two responses to "facts that don't fit their worldview" are somewhat pointless.

mnemonicsloth 7y ago

> If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack. There's nothing unnatural about genetic manipulation. Nature modifies genes at every level from base pairs to whole chromosome-sets, far more promiscuously than us humans. You learn all about this if you study biology in college. Arguably, you learn nothing but.

undersuit 7y ago
Because I took Biology in college, I can't be skeptical of GMOs?
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- mnemonicsloth 7y ago
  You can be skeptical of almost anything you want. One thing that surprised me was how tolerant scientists are of dissent. Your views can run from the unorthodox to the downright eccentric and, so long as you pay attention to data and argue politely (and maybe even not so politely), people will listen to you. You can't be a scientist without being humble, and humble people listen even to the weird arguments. But if you believe GM foods have adverse health effects, and you design a study to look for them, and try to get it funded you'll be turned down. Literally thousands of scientists have had the same idea and done the same thing, and they all found nothing. Scientists listen to data, so if you wanted to go on looking for health effects, you would probably start with very subtle ones that haven't been looked for yet. If it were me, I would start by trying to find ways genetically modified protein gets past the digestive system, which destroys genetic information by breaking all protein down down into its constituent amino acids. Not an easy problem, but better than some of the others. If you don't want to work on the problem scientifically, you also have the option of thinking about it non-scientifically. A non-scientific opinion can be whatever you want, but holding one means lumping yourself in with a lot of people who object to genetic engineering without knowing the central dogma or even what a gene is. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-safe.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-sa...

crispinb 7y ago

Does the research cited distinguish between hardwired vs culturally (or developmentally) entrenched behaviour? I haven't followed all the links so I'm asking, not answering, but if the research doesn't make that distinction, then the 'hardwired' aspect is unwarranted, and the title should have been something like "Contemporary humans tend to dismiss ...". In general, most social psychology research is still conducted on WEIRDS (and if the current Euro-American 'global' culture continues to spread, this is going to become an increasingly harder problem to tease out). Richard Nisbett & others claim to have shown that many cognitive behavioural regularities merely assumed to be 'hardwired' turn out not to be universal, therefore not hardwired at all.

imtringued 7y ago

Isn't that obvious? Think of the human brain as a byzantine fault tolerant distributed system. You are collaborating with other "nodes" that may be malicious, manipulitative or omit critical information. Therefore every message you receive has to be validated but since there is no objective criteria that can be used to form global consensus the only way to validate messages is by drawing upon your existing knowledge. When you are young you are more receptive to messages because you haven't gathered enough knowledge. Your "worldview" is being developed and then once it has matured you can use it to validate further messages. Lock-in happens when you build a whole network of beliefs that are fully dependent on each other. Admitting A can mean that B is no longer valid but you are fully convinced C must be true and if C is true then B is true as well. Therefore denying A is the only way to maintain your worldview.

joe_the_user 7y ago
Yeah, I'm still looking at the headline and I'm thinking "and why is that a bad thing?" I mean, the problem mainstream commentary are really talking about is the accumulation of irrational, garbage world views. But mainstream is hampered in its ability to describe this in particular. Essentially, the view of journalism, in America especially, has presented itself as a "non-world view", "just the facts" but really having a secular, pro-science, pro-capitalist, etc position. A variety of viewpoints could considered but not an infinite variety. And the endorse variety was the "unbiased", supposedly willing to considered anything. And it seemed plausible for a bit. Moreover, this mainstream view certainly wanted some things to be taken fully on authority while other things could have their validity debated. Especially, schools and newspapers can't come out and say religious is bunk, they have to couch things as religion is a fine thing but shouldn't impinge on the domain of science or the state. And when talking a world view that is, in my secular world view, screamingly irrational, that's leaving a big hole in your position. My personal biased view is that the rise of an educated populace in the 1960s lead to that populace questioning a lot and the elites then being happy to gut education. Which lead to a uneducated populace more ready to embrace idiocy. Researchers saying "maybe people should have tools to sort facts from trash" but how did the situation start anyway? Sure, the Internet accelerated this kindling but you had problems with the rationality of the citizenry beforehand.

api 7y ago

This could be a side effect of how intelligence works. Intelligence is at least largely about making parsimonious models, and that involves a lot of throwing away of noise. So this is sort of a failure mode of that system. Sometimes contrarian but otherwise good information gets misidentified as noise.

bobthechef 7y ago

Obviously, we aren’t absolutely unable to consider other views. If we couldn’t, people would never change their views and yet they do. Furthermore, evidence isn’t the same thing as a self-sufficient body of premises. We interpret evidence in light of prior beliefs. There are disagreements where those prior beliefs are concerned. The truth is often difficult to know and even when you have it, convincing others is still going to take a lot of work. Don’t trivialize that difficulty. What this article is really circling are not these things, which are natural and with which there is nothing wrong per se, but about cultivated prejudice. Cultivated prejudice can be overcome, but it requires humility, that is, an openness to considering other views to see if what they claim is plausible, likely, necessary, or whatever. Should you change your mind, it may also require courage to state your change of beliefs to your milieu, but it is possible, even if risky in some circumstances. I would caution against the opposite errors of relativism and intolerance toward others’ opinions. What has happened of late (a matter of decades) is that quotidian political squabbling has turned into a full-scale war because of the Left’s vicious and total attack on Western tradition and the very foundations of Western culture (in most cases, in profound ignorance of the depths of that culture). In turn, many on the Right have overcompensated by moving away from the cautious, principled pragmatism of conservatism. If you want a more measured atmosphere, where exchanges of views can take place without the strident nonsense that dominates today, then the Left has to stop its total, emotionalist, destructive, oikophobic siege on “the West”, especially as it offers no better alternatives. Nature abhors a vacuum and it will be filled with all manner of demons far exceeding the boogeymen haunting the Left’s imagination.

Hnrobert42 7y ago

This article fails to provide facts to support the use of the term hardwired.

epicgiga 7y ago

Accurate, but fundamentally it is a type of laziness. Changing your worldview takes a serious amount of effort. Most people don't use their new years resolution one year gym memberships after the second week of January -- and rewiring your beliefs in the face of evidence and reason makes gymming look like sitting on your couch in your undies. This is why it's fundamentally an education issue. People's false beliefs and weak work ethics are usually baked in back at school. If school was improved, this problem would be diminished.

FpUser 7y ago

What the header says sounds very obvious to me. And it is also encouraged everywhere. Does post downvoting ring any bell?

mgh2 7y ago

You have to be aware that part of human nature comes with greed, dishonesty, and countless of other nasty things. Maybe what we call "gut" is another checking point to guard ourselves of the real monster inside each of us. Take GMOs, I am still skeptical of the science behind its safety, especially knowing that corporations fund these starving scientists. There is for example, a hidden MIT (unpublished, maybe due to retaliation fears) study that found 10 correlations of diseases to the rise of GMOs. Feel free to fact-check, HN is great at this (study below): https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/glyphosate/NancySwanson.... You can accuse the less-educated or talented on their bias all you want, but ultimately the smartest elite lie more often for personal gain than the humble and innocent rest (99%)...Perhaps we should be pointing fingers at our own society that glorifies lies and hides truth. Ex: "relative truth and morality" was invented by this culture. Perhaps there is something in our human nature that still strives for truth after all, but it is very hidden among all the lies and the rest of our majority evil nature. Some people call it "the moral law". There is still a sliver of hope...

thesz 7y ago

And next to that is a link to https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488 https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488 "Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails: Real World Preasymptotics, Epistemology, and Applications" by Nassim Taleb which states "Many "biases" found in psychology become entirely rational under more sophisticated probability distributions". May be "hardwiredness" is not all that hard wired. Or, put it other way, the hardwiredness is not in humans under study but in humans who study them. I don't think that humans would achieve what we have today being hardwired to dismiss facts that don't fit their worldview.

notmarkus 7y ago

I'm enjoying the amount of pushback this is getting here on HN, given that we all probably think we're not victim to this, and are actively exposing ourselves to be.

jffhn 7y ago

>dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview I find this disconnect from reality especially fascinating in the software field, where nature's answers are just at our fingertips, and where we just have to open an editor or launch our program to be able to verify our expectations. I once told one of our architects that we were creating a lot of (Java) garbage, and he stared at me incredulously before saying: "but... no, we are using factories!" (the code was bloated with factories indeed, but no object was ever returned to them since noone knew when instances could be released) In the less verifiable and more nebulous matters of human psyche and philosophy, all hell breaks loose, which is unfortunate since they are also the most essential. I remember my philosophy professor in college, telling us, as we were leaving him for math class: "Ah, now serious stuffs!".

bobosha 7y ago

"Everything we hear is opinion, not fact; everything we see is perspective, not the truth" - Marcus Aurelius