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Is there any scientific study (facts...) to this article? Generally I think I change my mind if new (reliable and significant) facts come in.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
Depends what you call a fact. If I say that this Processor is the best at these benchmark, does it matter that the benchmark favors it? If I say a camera takes the best images, but omit they’re difficult to do consistently does it have the best quality? If I said these headphones sound the best and produce the most accurate sound, what if it’s true for me but not for your music genres?
- elcomet 5y ago
  - Then I trust that this processor is best au this benchmark (but not necessarily at other tasks) - I trust what you say, and the best camera for me will depend on those factors - I trust that you like those headphones, that does not necessarily mean I will too.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    But there’s no other measure and it’s implied it’s the best. People will think it’s the best. I might not say that it’s difficult, since it’s easy for me, or to trick you to buy it, it’s still a fact. Headphones might be the most subjective but I’ll say they produce the most accurate sound (to me). You don’t have a way to measure if you like them or not.
- mitigating 5y ago
  from https://sure.nlb.gov.sg/tng/surevivors-activity5/ https://sure.nlb.gov.sg/tng/surevivors-activity5/ "Facts will also be unbiased. They do not support only one perspective and present the information in an objective manner" Of your examples only "Processor is the best at these benchmark" is a fact. You said "does it matter that the benchmark favors it" and I don't think that matters. You aren't saying "This processor is the best processor" then using the benchmark as evidence, you are saying the processor is the best at the particular benchmark which is true even if the benchmark is bias, manipulated, or whatever.
  - quinnjh 5y ago
    Not one perspective, right then- how many? Is 2 perspectives the best number? Or do we need to add every conscious perspective? Who is deciding what the "meridian" of bias (which is a range) is located? Cuz right now its in Greenwich UK but im not sure if that "fact" was known to the other side of the world until forced. Empiricism is empire and quantum is weird mannn
    - winnit 5y ago
      Asking how many is like asking somebody to precisely define which numbers are small and which are large. These concepts are vague, there are logic systems which analyse vague phenomena known as ‘fuzzy’ logic systems. But based on the ending of your comment, I can’t tell if you’re serious about any of it.
      - quinnjh 5y ago
        I guess the point i was trying to make, while dismissing the "validity" of it is that encapsulated factual models all still require some references- at some point truth breaks down into trust in the chains of composition. I dont understand fuzzy logic nearly enough - but it needs some kind of rule set and knowledgebase yes? Lets say you program a fuzzy logic controller that returns large=true for numbers > 100, and i program mine to return large = true for numbers > 10. Like you say, its subjective. These rulesets are chosen as truth in the same way the grenwich meantime is 0* lat, and we dont use the paris meantime because we arent french revolutionaries and also the brits had stronger empire. If i came off as joking its bc i am aware of the lunacy of my take. To call "normal" good is a strong position, but who was norm?? And why do we all have to measure up to him?
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    The point is they see the benchmark and assume it’s the best because they don’t have another measure, like using IQ as the only metric to success.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
carbonguy 5y ago
> Generally I think I change my mind if new (reliable and significant) facts come in. I think most people feel this way - but it's the very notions of "reliability" and "significance," and how personal they are, that filter out an awful lot of possible mind-changing facts.
- andi999 5y ago
  So where do you personally draw the line? Surely you do not believe everything somebody labels 'fact'? Do you have examples of the awful lot of mind changing facts?
OneTimePetes 5y ago
The whole sentence deserves a neuro-science carpet bombing, because there is a "I" in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I
- mdp2021 5y ago
  The article deserves worse, using 'we'. Correctly (ex Popper) the poster went 'I', hence, "well no, not really".
mdp2021 5y ago
The matter is different, the article is not using the language I understand you assumed. Its point is "a large number of people are tribal - truth is secondary to them, as they live in an inner world of familiarities, not of "intellectual"¹ structures: if you want to change their mind, to use obstensions and theorems is inefficacious: you can change their mind more easily - and painlessly, for them - with methods from the mental functions they live in". Note: unfortunately, some of us think that using a non-objective language is manipulation, and call that morally inappropriate. There is a difference between "treating children like children", and "treating children with awareness". The author of the article is not intentionally² saying that you, andi, or people you probably would call "normal" (or mathematicians who know about non working theorems, or engineers knowing that engines work or not work through facts and not social cheers and frowns), believe or not absurdities: it is advising you to be careful when breaking the bubbles of entities that you think should follow logic and facts, and instead are living a completely different inner world "of sensation". They do exist. ¹"intellectual": term to be read here in the common acquired sense, not in the pure one ²..."just factually".
- necovek 5y ago
  I think Andi's question is a valid one. The entire article resonates with me, but I worry that it's because I am part of that tribe and it's "others" who can't change their opinion. To dispel the notion that this is tribal "knowledge", we'd still want sufficiently large studies that (dis)prove that people change their opinions in face of facts, and that they are more likely to do so based on similarity of the views and friendship level (my side observation in real life is that people change their opinions but sometimes won't admit to it too :)). People have observed it throughout the history, true, but that does not make it a prevalent behaviour (is it just the behaviour we notice? similar to Murphy's law, which I call the law of observation/attention: you are more likely to notice/remember when just the worst thing happens). While it sounds hard to construct such studies, it's not impossible (compared to eg. controlling for level of love we give to children while they grow up from infancy and then establishing correlation or causation). It's easy to come up with opinion-changing studies (eg. this article references a bunch which do not support a simple view like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180622-the-surprising-reason-people-change-their-minds https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180622-the-surprising-r...), so it'd be good if there was scientific evidence that this happens (which means, statistically significant correlation). But even if it happens in, say, 55% of the studied situations, that's hugely different from, say, 95% of the situations.
trees101 5y ago
The article assumes a particular framework of understanding. This framework is not in any way "proven" using "facts" according to its own standard. It just baldly assumes a way of understanding, and then demands that other ways of seeing meet its standard. The article contains a "just so" origin story, without any proof, but with a lot of social cues and nods to authorities that are likely to be unquestioningly trusted by the target audience. An actual mythical origin story is told, with lots of handwaving and name dropping, about how we lived in tribes and needed to signal our membership. Then, in a giant logical leap, the hand-wavy "just so" origin myth is presented as the true reason why we don't have a strict adherence to "facts" as the author thinks we should. The proper way to understand why facts don't change minds, is to understand that there are no such things as "facts". Our minds carve out blocks of meaning from the sea of chaos in front of us. There could always be a different way to carve up what lies before us. This is not to deny that what in front of us is real, or to claim that we can make up whatever we want. Not at all. But it fails to understand that the reality we see is much more like a mythical or narrative structure at its base. We are completely integrated into it and can't separate ourselves from it. You can see that what I'm saying is true, by simply examining the article itself. Although it purports to be about "facts", the article is a narrative. It even has a mythical origin story from beyond the mists of time which can't ever be "proven" using "facts". I don't know what use the article is. Perhaps it can make a certain type of person feel superior as they sit at the family Christmas dinner and silently judge their relatives' differing beliefs as being somehow inferior because they don't meet this imaginary criteria of being "fact" based. How do "facts" even motivate a "fact based" person to want to change someone else's ideas? The slightest amount of critical thinking shows that we are all deeply immersed in narrative, value judgement and goals. This false concept of "facts" is merely a weapon for a certain worldview in its attempts to coopt other worldviews.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Of course there are facts. A fact is just a reliable observation. Science and engineering couldn't exist without reliable observations. I don't think facts are necessarily objective, because we don't have access to the levels of absolute omniscience required to know whether or not an observation is absolute for all qualified observers. Even so. Facts remain persistent for us, and that's good enough for many useful things. The article is just reiterating the difference between science and rhetoric. Science is not particularly persuasive because it's difficult, it requires special skills and knowledge, and leading edge research is always tentative, by definition. Rhetoric is persuasive by definition, because it has been engineered to be persuasive. Lawyers buy books which teach them how to craft persuasive arguments. Veracity is not required, and may be deprecated. It's a completely different process. The problem is that STEM-trained types do not understand this. Because so much STEM argument is about data and credible interpretations, STEM types are always blindsided whenever an opportunist/charlatan/crook turns up spewing obvious bullshit, but somehow still manages to take the public with them. The solution is to educate STEM people about rhetoric. Tribalism is just one aspect of it. There are many others.
atoav 5y ago
Feelings play a big role too. This is why some people will choose the sensitive mystical healer over the cold matter of factness of a stressed out hospital doctor. Even if we assumed both would tell you the same facts (bold assumption, I know) the way they make feel during hearing these facts plays a role as well. If you met the same doctor semi drunk in his holiday outfit on a beach telling you the same thing, wouldn't it change the way you treat these facts? If you trust science as an institution the white garment of the doctor standing in the hospital which is an achievement of science will play in favour of whatever the doctor says. What if you don't has that trust (or even active distrust)?
- mdp2021 5y ago
  > If you trust science as an institution the white garment of the doctor standing in the hospital which is an achievement of science will play in favour of whatever the doctor says You seem to be assuming that people are fools... Blinded by symbols and holding Ideas. That is very much not necessary. Experience, education and wisdom naturally put every input into perspective. Actually, you are pretty much required (deontically, for intellectual fitness) to vet your ideas, so you should be well trained not to be fooled by a garment or by capital letters ("Science" - or Whatever Big Word).
  - atoav 5y ago
    > You seem to be assuming that people are fools... Blinded by symbols and holding Ideas. That is very much not necessary. No, I am actually coming at it from the other direction. The human is an social animal, as such feelings play a big role in our daily lives (for some more, for some less). My point here is, that it is pretty much impossible to switch this off even if we try very hard – which btw. also aligns with most of what psychological science tells us. Of course there are differences (people who just follow their feelings vs people who try hard to use facts instead), but these differences don't change that everybody can and regularily will be influenced by feelings. Facts are not decoupled from their packaging. The two podcasters who work in science and whoose whole careers and lives you followed for years will enjoy a different trust than a piece of paper that you find on the street, written in Comic Sans, even if both tell you the exact same words. This is normal. To pretend we "just look at the facts" is naive – because we don't. We learn about the world and see how things fit with our current image of the world. If the new information fits neatly we don't feel a big urge to check the facts, especially if it was delivered by a source who we learned to trust. The question however is: *Do we listen to facts when the new information _does not_ fit our image of the world and it _feels_ wrong"? All science around that topic I have seen suggests we go with the feeling more likely in that case. This doesn't mean we are idiots, it means our image of the world lags behind the information we get. Otherwise it couldn't be stable, change all the time and we would require enourmous amounts of energy/thinking to just exist. It is the price we pay for having a more or less stable image of the world around us.
karaterobot 5y ago
If he cited facts as evidence of facts not changing people's mind, and those facts changed your mind, what would happen next, I wonder? Explosion?

GhettoComputers 5y ago

Depends what you call a fact. If I say that this Processor is the best at these benchmark, does it matter that the benchmark favors it? If I say a camera takes the best images, but omit they’re difficult to do consistently does it have the best quality? If I said these headphones sound the best and produce the most accurate sound, what if it’s true for me but not for your music genres?

elcomet 5y ago
- Then I trust that this processor is best au this benchmark (but not necessarily at other tasks) - I trust what you say, and the best camera for me will depend on those factors - I trust that you like those headphones, that does not necessarily mean I will too.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  But there’s no other measure and it’s implied it’s the best. People will think it’s the best. I might not say that it’s difficult, since it’s easy for me, or to trick you to buy it, it’s still a fact. Headphones might be the most subjective but I’ll say they produce the most accurate sound (to me). You don’t have a way to measure if you like them or not.
mitigating 5y ago
from https://sure.nlb.gov.sg/tng/surevivors-activity5/ https://sure.nlb.gov.sg/tng/surevivors-activity5/ "Facts will also be unbiased. They do not support only one perspective and present the information in an objective manner" Of your examples only "Processor is the best at these benchmark" is a fact. You said "does it matter that the benchmark favors it" and I don't think that matters. You aren't saying "This processor is the best processor" then using the benchmark as evidence, you are saying the processor is the best at the particular benchmark which is true even if the benchmark is bias, manipulated, or whatever.
- quinnjh 5y ago
  Not one perspective, right then- how many? Is 2 perspectives the best number? Or do we need to add every conscious perspective? Who is deciding what the "meridian" of bias (which is a range) is located? Cuz right now its in Greenwich UK but im not sure if that "fact" was known to the other side of the world until forced. Empiricism is empire and quantum is weird mannn
  - winnit 5y ago
    Asking how many is like asking somebody to precisely define which numbers are small and which are large. These concepts are vague, there are logic systems which analyse vague phenomena known as ‘fuzzy’ logic systems. But based on the ending of your comment, I can’t tell if you’re serious about any of it.
    - quinnjh 5y ago
      I guess the point i was trying to make, while dismissing the "validity" of it is that encapsulated factual models all still require some references- at some point truth breaks down into trust in the chains of composition. I dont understand fuzzy logic nearly enough - but it needs some kind of rule set and knowledgebase yes? Lets say you program a fuzzy logic controller that returns large=true for numbers > 100, and i program mine to return large = true for numbers > 10. Like you say, its subjective. These rulesets are chosen as truth in the same way the grenwich meantime is 0* lat, and we dont use the paris meantime because we arent french revolutionaries and also the brits had stronger empire. If i came off as joking its bc i am aware of the lunacy of my take. To call "normal" good is a strong position, but who was norm?? And why do we all have to measure up to him?
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  The point is they see the benchmark and assume it’s the best because they don’t have another measure, like using IQ as the only metric to success.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

carbonguy 5y ago

> Generally I think I change my mind if new (reliable and significant) facts come in. I think most people feel this way - but it's the very notions of "reliability" and "significance," and how personal they are, that filter out an awful lot of possible mind-changing facts.

andi999 5y ago
So where do you personally draw the line? Surely you do not believe everything somebody labels 'fact'? Do you have examples of the awful lot of mind changing facts?

OneTimePetes 5y ago

The whole sentence deserves a neuro-science carpet bombing, because there is a "I" in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

mdp2021 5y ago
The article deserves worse, using 'we'. Correctly (ex Popper) the poster went 'I', hence, "well no, not really".

mdp2021 5y ago

The matter is different, the article is not using the language I understand you assumed. Its point is "a large number of people are tribal - truth is secondary to them, as they live in an inner world of familiarities, not of "intellectual"¹ structures: if you want to change their mind, to use obstensions and theorems is inefficacious: you can change their mind more easily - and painlessly, for them - with methods from the mental functions they live in". Note: unfortunately, some of us think that using a non-objective language is manipulation, and call that morally inappropriate. There is a difference between "treating children like children", and "treating children with awareness". The author of the article is not intentionally² saying that you, andi, or people you probably would call "normal" (or mathematicians who know about non working theorems, or engineers knowing that engines work or not work through facts and not social cheers and frowns), believe or not absurdities: it is advising you to be careful when breaking the bubbles of entities that you think should follow logic and facts, and instead are living a completely different inner world "of sensation". They do exist. ¹"intellectual": term to be read here in the common acquired sense, not in the pure one ²..."just factually".

necovek 5y ago
I think Andi's question is a valid one. The entire article resonates with me, but I worry that it's because I am part of that tribe and it's "others" who can't change their opinion. To dispel the notion that this is tribal "knowledge", we'd still want sufficiently large studies that (dis)prove that people change their opinions in face of facts, and that they are more likely to do so based on similarity of the views and friendship level (my side observation in real life is that people change their opinions but sometimes won't admit to it too :)). People have observed it throughout the history, true, but that does not make it a prevalent behaviour (is it just the behaviour we notice? similar to Murphy's law, which I call the law of observation/attention: you are more likely to notice/remember when just the worst thing happens). While it sounds hard to construct such studies, it's not impossible (compared to eg. controlling for level of love we give to children while they grow up from infancy and then establishing correlation or causation). It's easy to come up with opinion-changing studies (eg. this article references a bunch which do not support a simple view like this: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180622-the-surprising-reason-people-change-their-minds https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180622-the-surprising-r...), so it'd be good if there was scientific evidence that this happens (which means, statistically significant correlation). But even if it happens in, say, 55% of the studied situations, that's hugely different from, say, 95% of the situations.

trees101 5y ago

The article assumes a particular framework of understanding. This framework is not in any way "proven" using "facts" according to its own standard. It just baldly assumes a way of understanding, and then demands that other ways of seeing meet its standard. The article contains a "just so" origin story, without any proof, but with a lot of social cues and nods to authorities that are likely to be unquestioningly trusted by the target audience. An actual mythical origin story is told, with lots of handwaving and name dropping, about how we lived in tribes and needed to signal our membership. Then, in a giant logical leap, the hand-wavy "just so" origin myth is presented as the true reason why we don't have a strict adherence to "facts" as the author thinks we should. The proper way to understand why facts don't change minds, is to understand that there are no such things as "facts". Our minds carve out blocks of meaning from the sea of chaos in front of us. There could always be a different way to carve up what lies before us. This is not to deny that what in front of us is real, or to claim that we can make up whatever we want. Not at all. But it fails to understand that the reality we see is much more like a mythical or narrative structure at its base. We are completely integrated into it and can't separate ourselves from it. You can see that what I'm saying is true, by simply examining the article itself. Although it purports to be about "facts", the article is a narrative. It even has a mythical origin story from beyond the mists of time which can't ever be "proven" using "facts". I don't know what use the article is. Perhaps it can make a certain type of person feel superior as they sit at the family Christmas dinner and silently judge their relatives' differing beliefs as being somehow inferior because they don't meet this imaginary criteria of being "fact" based. How do "facts" even motivate a "fact based" person to want to change someone else's ideas? The slightest amount of critical thinking shows that we are all deeply immersed in narrative, value judgement and goals. This false concept of "facts" is merely a weapon for a certain worldview in its attempts to coopt other worldviews.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Of course there are facts. A fact is just a reliable observation. Science and engineering couldn't exist without reliable observations. I don't think facts are necessarily objective, because we don't have access to the levels of absolute omniscience required to know whether or not an observation is absolute for all qualified observers. Even so. Facts remain persistent for us, and that's good enough for many useful things. The article is just reiterating the difference between science and rhetoric. Science is not particularly persuasive because it's difficult, it requires special skills and knowledge, and leading edge research is always tentative, by definition. Rhetoric is persuasive by definition, because it has been engineered to be persuasive. Lawyers buy books which teach them how to craft persuasive arguments. Veracity is not required, and may be deprecated. It's a completely different process. The problem is that STEM-trained types do not understand this. Because so much STEM argument is about data and credible interpretations, STEM types are always blindsided whenever an opportunist/charlatan/crook turns up spewing obvious bullshit, but somehow still manages to take the public with them. The solution is to educate STEM people about rhetoric. Tribalism is just one aspect of it. There are many others.

atoav 5y ago

Feelings play a big role too. This is why some people will choose the sensitive mystical healer over the cold matter of factness of a stressed out hospital doctor. Even if we assumed both would tell you the same facts (bold assumption, I know) the way they make feel during hearing these facts plays a role as well. If you met the same doctor semi drunk in his holiday outfit on a beach telling you the same thing, wouldn't it change the way you treat these facts? If you trust science as an institution the white garment of the doctor standing in the hospital which is an achievement of science will play in favour of whatever the doctor says. What if you don't has that trust (or even active distrust)?

mdp2021 5y ago
> If you trust science as an institution the white garment of the doctor standing in the hospital which is an achievement of science will play in favour of whatever the doctor says You seem to be assuming that people are fools... Blinded by symbols and holding Ideas. That is very much not necessary. Experience, education and wisdom naturally put every input into perspective. Actually, you are pretty much required (deontically, for intellectual fitness) to vet your ideas, so you should be well trained not to be fooled by a garment or by capital letters ("Science" - or Whatever Big Word).
- atoav 5y ago
  > You seem to be assuming that people are fools... Blinded by symbols and holding Ideas. That is very much not necessary. No, I am actually coming at it from the other direction. The human is an social animal, as such feelings play a big role in our daily lives (for some more, for some less). My point here is, that it is pretty much impossible to switch this off even if we try very hard – which btw. also aligns with most of what psychological science tells us. Of course there are differences (people who just follow their feelings vs people who try hard to use facts instead), but these differences don't change that everybody can and regularily will be influenced by feelings. Facts are not decoupled from their packaging. The two podcasters who work in science and whoose whole careers and lives you followed for years will enjoy a different trust than a piece of paper that you find on the street, written in Comic Sans, even if both tell you the exact same words. This is normal. To pretend we "just look at the facts" is naive – because we don't. We learn about the world and see how things fit with our current image of the world. If the new information fits neatly we don't feel a big urge to check the facts, especially if it was delivered by a source who we learned to trust. The question however is: *Do we listen to facts when the new information _does not_ fit our image of the world and it _feels_ wrong"? All science around that topic I have seen suggests we go with the feeling more likely in that case. This doesn't mean we are idiots, it means our image of the world lags behind the information we get. Otherwise it couldn't be stable, change all the time and we would require enourmous amounts of energy/thinking to just exist. It is the price we pay for having a more or less stable image of the world around us.

karaterobot 5y ago

If he cited facts as evidence of facts not changing people's mind, and those facts changed your mind, what would happen next, I wonder? Explosion?