7 ms·

The sarcastic question that popped into my head was, OK, then what are the preconditions for becoming open to being persuaded? How do people develop a higher de

by 09bjb 5y ago

The sarcastic question that popped into my head was, OK, then what are the preconditions for becoming open to being persuaded? How do people develop a higher degree of openness? Then I thought...maybe if you're not being bombarded with opinions that are aggressively trying to convince you of something, you'll explore the world in a more open way, looking constantly for the next informational morsel that will evolve your mental schema of the world.

throwawaysea 5y ago
I agree with you that the feeling of being bombarded or manipulated causes people to close off and deny the opportunity to be persuaded. Another factor might be fear - if people feel that something they value is threatened by the other side's position, they will react to it like a cornered animal. I guess that means people can only be persuaded when something doesn't matter existentially to them?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  People only have so much mental bandwidth. If you lived completely alone, and one day someone walked up and started talking to you, and it was the only person you'd seen that month, you might take hours to talk to that person. You might thoughtfully consider their position, even if you didn't agree with it. We don't live in that world. Even here on HN, there are sometimes really strident voices trying very aggressively to advocate and defend their viewpoint. But it's worse off of HN. It's everywhere. It's social media, and TV, and advertising, and spam phone calls, and and and. Nobody has time to fairly consider even a small fraction of the attempts to persuade us. We just reject without consideration all these attempts, because it's the only way to keep any kind of space for ourselves in our own heads.
bamboo2 5y ago
Psychedelics.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Much of openness is what you are born with. Seriously. You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. There are ways to "picking the lock" however, as another part. That's the basis of marketing and sales. The processes are very well defined though the results are stochastic rather than deterministic. Hence marketing and sales are "number games". But such techniques are merely tools without specific morality or ethics - never give the human a free pass on morality or ethics because only humans can make such decisions.
- mistermann 5y ago
  > You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings, but exceptionally skillful thinking in things like logic and epistemology must be learned...but for people to learn them, they must be taught. As it is, numerous errors can be easily found even in intellectual spaces online, demonstrating that even the cream of the crop is far from perfect....and as for the less intellectual places (the overwhelming majority), well we're all familiar with how bad those are.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Half of studies have been shown to be non-repeatable though through p-hacking :) Maybe it’s all a dice roll.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    >> You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. > Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings You seem to be conflating openness to persuasion as a component of personality, and openness as a learnable mental skill. It isn't inconsistent to assert that being open to persuasion is in fact both.
analog31 5y ago
My rule is that I'm open to changing my mind, but on my own timetable and with no obligation to provide any feedback to the persuader. For instance, my time constant for updating my views is longer than one election or marketing cycle. Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater.
- JackFr 5y ago
  > Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater. A silly distinction - the most skilled debater is the one who makes you think their idea is the best.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    Given that most people are quite resistant to changing their minds, the most skilled debater is the one that gets the most people to change their mind, rather than the one that gets the most people to agree.
    - analog31 5y ago
      I was thinking of debate, more as a persuasive technique than as a way of discovering the truth. Changing my mind is easy -- the powers of advertising, manipulation, coercion, etc., are all highly refined arts. Arriving at the truth is harder, even if "truth" is merely a plausible choice of one alternative over another. It seems possible that if stubbornness is a acquired trait, it is one because it confers a survival advantage.
renewiltord 5y ago
Well, for my part, I have a couple of things that have helped me here (determined by change in outcome post-intervention which I, unfortunately, cannot share): 1. I know Aumann's Agreement Theorem and the appropriate lemmas about information transfer and prior modification (i.e. if I start failing to modify my priors with repeated conversation, I am failing or the other person is failing, either of which leads to our conversation failing at converging => we should exit) 2. I try to place myself in situations where the difference in outcome is a large multiple of the difference in knowledge of reality. This biases me to accept input well, since I want positive outcome and biology will ruthlessly optimize me toward it. Not every situation is like this. Sometimes, the part of reality you want to optimize against is specifically the people, ignoring the underlying reality. e.g. Though I had a respirator with P100 filters on all exhale and inhale valves I took it off and wore my standard N95 mask when on a plane when asked to. The truth didn't matter there as much as the part of the truth which is "don't piss off flight attendants". 3. I force skin in the game. For instance, I took all my money out of Vanguard and actively managed it in 2019 on a 5x lever. My idea was that I could beat the market, and I did. I also believed in early Feb that despite having advance warning from my friends in Asia about COVID-19 that it was a huge deal, that American bureaucracy was likely to be sophisticated and evidence-based. Since I knew the correct actions to be taken in response, I assumed they knew, and I assumed they had the wherewithal to make it happen. It appears that none of these things are true. But it was a good lesson. It helps me understand how some people I am distantly related to make all that money on defence contracts in Virginia - the bureaucracy is actually not sophisticated, it is merely large. 4. I model us all as message-passing elements that incur a cost per message. I make a good effort to pass you information that has been effective to me to encourage you to do so to me. Multiple elements doing so will lead to easier misinformation detection, less variance in information availability, etc. This is good for me since I am a very capable execution machine. I can only lose in the world in the ways I care about because I don't have information, not because I can't execute. The consequence of the message-passing element idea is that I don't try to convince, i.e. if I know that there is a red apple at the corner of Bush and Sansome and I tell you this and you say "oh yeah? Prove it!" I will not attempt to do so. I have given you the information but the cost of ensuring good provenance is high in an untrusted information network with few repeated interactions. So, what I do is that I attempt to repeat interactions as frequently as possible with a limited set of elements so that provenance-information is cached and I am operating on the trusted subnetwork. For my part, I try to make falsifiable claims so that other people can either add or remove me from their trust network. For HN, I have an extension that removes comment-threads started by low-information low-provenance individuals. I know I will fail sometimes at not being one of these people and I'll accept that risk and let others choose to do the same to me.

by 09bjb 5y ago

throwawaysea 5y ago

I agree with you that the feeling of being bombarded or manipulated causes people to close off and deny the opportunity to be persuaded. Another factor might be fear - if people feel that something they value is threatened by the other side's position, they will react to it like a cornered animal. I guess that means people can only be persuaded when something doesn't matter existentially to them?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
People only have so much mental bandwidth. If you lived completely alone, and one day someone walked up and started talking to you, and it was the only person you'd seen that month, you might take hours to talk to that person. You might thoughtfully consider their position, even if you didn't agree with it. We don't live in that world. Even here on HN, there are sometimes really strident voices trying very aggressively to advocate and defend their viewpoint. But it's worse off of HN. It's everywhere. It's social media, and TV, and advertising, and spam phone calls, and and and. Nobody has time to fairly consider even a small fraction of the attempts to persuade us. We just reject without consideration all these attempts, because it's the only way to keep any kind of space for ourselves in our own heads.

bamboo2 5y ago

Psychedelics.

xyzzy21 5y ago

Much of openness is what you are born with. Seriously. You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. There are ways to "picking the lock" however, as another part. That's the basis of marketing and sales. The processes are very well defined though the results are stochastic rather than deterministic. Hence marketing and sales are "number games". But such techniques are merely tools without specific morality or ethics - never give the human a free pass on morality or ethics because only humans can make such decisions.

mistermann 5y ago
> You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings, but exceptionally skillful thinking in things like logic and epistemology must be learned...but for people to learn them, they must be taught. As it is, numerous errors can be easily found even in intellectual spaces online, demonstrating that even the cream of the crop is far from perfect....and as for the less intellectual places (the overwhelming majority), well we're all familiar with how bad those are.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Half of studies have been shown to be non-repeatable though through p-hacking :) Maybe it’s all a dice roll.
- webmaven 5y ago
  >> You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. > Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings You seem to be conflating openness to persuasion as a component of personality, and openness as a learnable mental skill. It isn't inconsistent to assert that being open to persuasion is in fact both.

analog31 5y ago

My rule is that I'm open to changing my mind, but on my own timetable and with no obligation to provide any feedback to the persuader. For instance, my time constant for updating my views is longer than one election or marketing cycle. Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater.

JackFr 5y ago
> Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater. A silly distinction - the most skilled debater is the one who makes you think their idea is the best.
- webmaven 5y ago
  Given that most people are quite resistant to changing their minds, the most skilled debater is the one that gets the most people to change their mind, rather than the one that gets the most people to agree.
  - analog31 5y ago
    I was thinking of debate, more as a persuasive technique than as a way of discovering the truth. Changing my mind is easy -- the powers of advertising, manipulation, coercion, etc., are all highly refined arts. Arriving at the truth is harder, even if "truth" is merely a plausible choice of one alternative over another. It seems possible that if stubbornness is a acquired trait, it is one because it confers a survival advantage.

renewiltord 5y ago

Well, for my part, I have a couple of things that have helped me here (determined by change in outcome post-intervention which I, unfortunately, cannot share): 1. I know Aumann's Agreement Theorem and the appropriate lemmas about information transfer and prior modification (i.e. if I start failing to modify my priors with repeated conversation, I am failing or the other person is failing, either of which leads to our conversation failing at converging => we should exit) 2. I try to place myself in situations where the difference in outcome is a large multiple of the difference in knowledge of reality. This biases me to accept input well, since I want positive outcome and biology will ruthlessly optimize me toward it. Not every situation is like this. Sometimes, the part of reality you want to optimize against is specifically the people, ignoring the underlying reality. e.g. Though I had a respirator with P100 filters on all exhale and inhale valves I took it off and wore my standard N95 mask when on a plane when asked to. The truth didn't matter there as much as the part of the truth which is "don't piss off flight attendants". 3. I force skin in the game. For instance, I took all my money out of Vanguard and actively managed it in 2019 on a 5x lever. My idea was that I could beat the market, and I did. I also believed in early Feb that despite having advance warning from my friends in Asia about COVID-19 that it was a huge deal, that American bureaucracy was likely to be sophisticated and evidence-based. Since I knew the correct actions to be taken in response, I assumed they knew, and I assumed they had the wherewithal to make it happen. It appears that none of these things are true. But it was a good lesson. It helps me understand how some people I am distantly related to make all that money on defence contracts in Virginia - the bureaucracy is actually not sophisticated, it is merely large. 4. I model us all as message-passing elements that incur a cost per message. I make a good effort to pass you information that has been effective to me to encourage you to do so to me. Multiple elements doing so will lead to easier misinformation detection, less variance in information availability, etc. This is good for me since I am a very capable execution machine. I can only lose in the world in the ways I care about because I don't have information, not because I can't execute. The consequence of the message-passing element idea is that I don't try to convince, i.e. if I know that there is a red apple at the corner of Bush and Sansome and I tell you this and you say "oh yeah? Prove it!" I will not attempt to do so. I have given you the information but the cost of ensuring good provenance is high in an untrusted information network with few repeated interactions. So, what I do is that I attempt to repeat interactions as frequently as possible with a limited set of elements so that provenance-information is cached and I am operating on the trusted subnetwork. For my part, I try to make falsifiable claims so that other people can either add or remove me from their trust network. For HN, I have an extension that removes comment-threads started by low-information low-provenance individuals. I know I will fail sometimes at not being one of these people and I'll accept that risk and let others choose to do the same to me.