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Facts can change minds but, for most, their minds will only be changed if those facts are sanctioned by someone they respect or see as an authority. This goes

Facts can change minds but, for most, their minds will only be changed if those facts are sanctioned by someone they respect or see as an authority. This goes back to the theory that 80% or more of any population of humans are going to be followers. You can't have a tribe of nothing but chiefs, because eventually those chiefs are going to pontificate too much and fight over their decisions. Every group needs a majority of its members to follow along no matter what, and as humans are a communal species, we developed as such. Groups don't have time to have every individual understand and debate the facts. To be efficient, most will need to just do what the chief tells them to do. The tragedy of our era is that we've told ourselves that everyone will make better decisions if we all were educated and knew the facts. The result is we've told unremarkable people that they are really intelligent, and we've wasted the time of the intelligent by telling them that humans aren't the programmable species that they really are. Pointing out facts is simply a sport of one-upsmanship that has no accountability for how someone acts upon that information. The chiefs, so to speak, are free to reason themselves into any contorted belief to the point of religious zealotry, and the followers are only more glad than ever to join these new religions. For facts to not only change our minds, but change enough minds, we may need to move beyond the model of the tribe. At the very least, the chiefs need to be knocked down a peg.

Jensson 5y ago
> This goes back to the theory that 80% or more of any population of humans are going to be followers It gets even worse than that, those followers climb the ranks parroting whatever the previous people said, and after a while you have organizations where there are just followers all the way to the top. In those nobody cares about facts.
7952 5y ago
Facts need to be balanced with analytical skills and that is often missing.
- hilbert42 5y ago
  Right. The best training I ever had was learning reasoning, formal logic and argument as part of philosophy. These are analytical skills and they're taught as such which you can then later apply to almost any aspect of your personal or professional life. Moreover, I'm a firm believer that their concepts should be appropriately scaled down and taught to kids at a very early age and that their underpinning principles should be the backbone of their learning throughout their education. Learning these analytical skills doesn't have to be boring or tedious either especially if their concepts are pitched to the kids' age. Whilst I wasn't lucky enough to be introduced to these subjects in primary school, I vividly remember the time that I was - and that was being thrust headlong into reading the great master himself - Plato. And there's no better starting point than Book I of his Republic - and Plato's subject 'What is justice?' is as both lofty and as meaningful as it can get. Here we see one of the great dialogues of all time played out - a formal argument between the philosopher Socrates and the sophist Thrasymachus. To watch Socrates methodically and systematically demolish Thrasymachus' proposition that 'Justice is evey man for himself' through logic and force of argument is a sheer delight - I get goose bumps on my neck every time I read it. And Plato delivers even more: as James Clear points out Facts don't change our minds - for that we first must get people on our side, which is exactly what Socrates does, as he eventually convinces Thrasymachus through friendliness, logic and pursuasion of argument of the error of his ways - thus the sophist is converted to the philosopher's much more powerful and just view (right, James Clear will have read Plato too!). There's more to developing analytical skills than just reading Book I and that's why it has to be an education-long process (and I'm appalled at how little attention we pay to it in our present-day education systems). Analytical skills work not only at the obvious level of the decision-making process but also when one is confronted with having to overturn a firmlyheld belief or fact that is wrong. When in possession of proper analytical skills one cannot simply ignore the issue and hope it will go away - thus, like it or not, one is confronted with having to deal with it. There have been times in my life when I've held what I have believed to be almost absolute fact - 'fact' that's turned out to be completely wrong. When finally confronted with (proof of) real fact my analytical training not only allowed me to switch position almost immediately but also it helped me understand why I was wrong initially. What that training does not do is to relieve one of the pain and smarting that comes from the realization that one was so very wrong in the first instance.

Jensson 5y ago

> This goes back to the theory that 80% or more of any population of humans are going to be followers It gets even worse than that, those followers climb the ranks parroting whatever the previous people said, and after a while you have organizations where there are just followers all the way to the top. In those nobody cares about facts.

7952 5y ago

Facts need to be balanced with analytical skills and that is often missing.

hilbert42 5y ago
Right. The best training I ever had was learning reasoning, formal logic and argument as part of philosophy. These are analytical skills and they're taught as such which you can then later apply to almost any aspect of your personal or professional life. Moreover, I'm a firm believer that their concepts should be appropriately scaled down and taught to kids at a very early age and that their underpinning principles should be the backbone of their learning throughout their education. Learning these analytical skills doesn't have to be boring or tedious either especially if their concepts are pitched to the kids' age. Whilst I wasn't lucky enough to be introduced to these subjects in primary school, I vividly remember the time that I was - and that was being thrust headlong into reading the great master himself - Plato. And there's no better starting point than Book I of his Republic - and Plato's subject 'What is justice?' is as both lofty and as meaningful as it can get. Here we see one of the great dialogues of all time played out - a formal argument between the philosopher Socrates and the sophist Thrasymachus. To watch Socrates methodically and systematically demolish Thrasymachus' proposition that 'Justice is evey man for himself' through logic and force of argument is a sheer delight - I get goose bumps on my neck every time I read it. And Plato delivers even more: as James Clear points out Facts don't change our minds - for that we first must get people on our side, which is exactly what Socrates does, as he eventually convinces Thrasymachus through friendliness, logic and pursuasion of argument of the error of his ways - thus the sophist is converted to the philosopher's much more powerful and just view (right, James Clear will have read Plato too!). There's more to developing analytical skills than just reading Book I and that's why it has to be an education-long process (and I'm appalled at how little attention we pay to it in our present-day education systems). Analytical skills work not only at the obvious level of the decision-making process but also when one is confronted with having to overturn a firmlyheld belief or fact that is wrong. When in possession of proper analytical skills one cannot simply ignore the issue and hope it will go away - thus, like it or not, one is confronted with having to deal with it. There have been times in my life when I've held what I have believed to be almost absolute fact - 'fact' that's turned out to be completely wrong. When finally confronted with (proof of) real fact my analytical training not only allowed me to switch position almost immediately but also it helped me understand why I was wrong initially. What that training does not do is to relieve one of the pain and smarting that comes from the realization that one was so very wrong in the first instance.