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I used to think that objective data would make people believe in the truth and they would in turn mend their beliefs. The Google’s ethis of @data is always corr
by hi41 6y ago
I used to think that objective data would make people believe in the truth and they would in turn mend their beliefs. The Google’s ethis of @data is always correct” seemed to confirm my belief. However i see that stories also move people in ways that data cannot. For example, I cannot understand why inspite of the available data people do not believe in vaccination. Instead, they believe in stories of kids getting autism because of mmr vaccine.
Is there an evolutionary benefit to believing in stories than in data? Maybe it helps save mental/psychological energy. Even the religions have mythological stoies. Or have we moderns changed so much that we want to believe in data than in stories?
- air7 6y agoData is just as much a story you choose to believe as mythology is.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoWhich data? Where did you get the data? What was not included in the data? Did the participants know they were observed when the data was collected? How biased is the data? Is this data specifically prepared in such a way so that a person without a statistical degree would not be confused by the numbers?
- kthejoker2 6y agoThere's a really useful paper called Datasheets for Datasets about this sort of questioning https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09010 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09010
- coldtea 6y ago>Is there an evolutionary benefit to believing in stories than in data? Evolutionarily (in the jungle) there are no "data", just stories. Animals don't read reports. Data itself is a kind of a story (the story being: "this information was collected correctly, by an impartial source, it's representative of the situation, there's no error, and their interpretation of what it means is also correct". Often this is more of a fairy tale than whatever Hans Christian Andersen wrote).