4 ms·

I'm very skeptical of any thesis that this phenomenon is about a failure of people to be able to discern fact from non-fact (or "critical-thinking" as it is oft

I'm very skeptical of any thesis that this phenomenon is about a failure of people to be able to discern fact from non-fact (or "critical-thinking" as it is often characterized). As it misses that the common thread among all these, formerly esoteric and now increasingly mainstream, subcultures. They're about "belonging" and in-group/out-group signaling. It may be true that they're ill-equiped to discern such things, but it's also the case that there are social incentives for them to not want to adhere to facts, self-derived or otherwise. It's possible, I suppose, that teaching people to discern and derive some domain of facts might coincidentally produce a broader cultural "in-group" of people that value social cohesion with others like them, but underneath it all this is all culture/counter-culture dynamics, not whether or not people have the tools to figure out the curvature of the Earth based on basic science and mathematics. There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. Getting them to abandon their creationism is at a minimum a matter of getting them to be willing to overcome the in-group judgement of their family, their friends, their extended social circles, etc. Unsurprisingly, outside of specific trauma they're not likely to embark on such an upheaval. People mostly behave like the people they're around. Being shunned or ostracized is (or used to be) an effective mechanism for social cohesion for this category of issue. The trouble at present is that social media makes it much more difficult (for better or worse) for shunning or ostracizing to improve that flavor of cohesion because it allows the universe of the shunned and ostracized to find cohesion amongst themselves, so the local fringe morphs into the global mainstream.

humanrebar 5y ago
> There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. You can be creationist and believe in carbon dating, fossils, etc. There's no contradiction. There are unanswered questions, such as "Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?" But that's not a scientific question, it's philosophical and irrefutable one, and therefore (IMO) it is not a particularly interesting question to get hung up on. I mostly agree with your point that these kinds of phenomena are not about critical thinking as such. Though I do think fans of deductive and inductive reasoning tend to entirely overlook other forms of reasoning. For instance, abductive reasoning: what narrative makes the most sense given the options? Also, reputational reasoning: which experts am I going to trust on this? Abductive reasoning doesn't apply in the case of the shape of the Earth, but reputational reasoning certainly does. At any rate, they help me understand why people make (to me) consterning choices, including in politics, religion, criminal verdicts, investing, and (lately) personal health care.
- im_down_w_otp 5y ago
  I don't think they're unaware of the questions. In fact, in the half-dozen or so cases I have any direct interaction with I'm certain they're aware of such questions. My point is exactly that they have other forms of incentives and reasoning that cultivate a willingness, or in the worst cases a zealotry, to entertain what their relative out-groups would consider a contradiction simply as open questions that their in-group permits. I used the example as a representative for the kind of issue involved, not as an exhaustively defensible one. :-) Principally I think we're in agreement. There seems to be quite a bit of analysis and consideration about what's going on that's through the lens of a kind of "enlightenment" reasoning wherein it's purportedly obvious that the pursuit of facts is intrinsically valuable, and so people not arriving at that value must be that they just don't know how to get there or are being lead astray. Alternatively, I would suggest that for almost everything that almost everyone deals with in their day-to-day and/or finds reward & incentives for, there's practically no value to facts. Often it's the inverse. "Bullshit" pays. Sometimes socially, sometimes financially, sometimes both. In the case where such "bullshit" has become a subculture of its own, suddenly facts have negative value. For whatever it's worth, this relates to one of my annoyances with the general startup ecosystem as it exists (to bring it around to HN-esque territory) I've been told (more than once) that the fact I have integrity is going to make my life harder as a founder. It makes it harder to sell. It makes it harder to fundraise. Etc. Those people are absolutely right. Because both selling and fundraising have a built-in incentive toward BS. "Fake it 'til you make it." became a social and financial good, and so people do it. Because if they don't, they automatically start out at a significant disadvantage. My personal bet is that my biasing toward integrity approach pays off in the long-term when the builders, not the brokers, get their cyclical day in the sun again, and in the meantime I can still be square with myself. That said, I very well could be wrong, and I unnecessarily made both the short term and the long term harder than they needed to be.
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  "Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?" That's not quite the right question. God didn't create a universe in a disguise that looks old. God simply created a universe of a certain age. This is perfectly consistent with the bible's creation story. God created humans of a certain age, in adult form. The bible doesn't say God created embryos that then grew up into Adam and Eve. Likewise the Garden was created with what we presume were fully grown trees, complete with tree rings providing evidence of prior years of existence. Trees with a past, which came into existence just now. Young-earth creationists like to pick and choose which features of the universe are allowed to have been created in place, and which must have been formed by mysterious interim events. For some reason, a lot of them refuse to allow geological features to have been created in place, which forces them to invent absurd explanations that usually involve Noah's flood and a lot of hand waving. But it's all unnecessary. There's no reason we can't entertain the notion that the universe was created complete and in motion, exactly as it is, at any point in time. And in fact there would be no way to prove it one way or another, just as there would be no way for Adam to prove that the trees in his garden were a hundred days or a hundred years old.
umvi 5y ago
Not all creationists adamantly believe the earth is literally only 7k years old. That's a very specific subset called "young earth creationists". I would venture most creationists at the most fundamental level believe the earth, life, evolution, etc. are not accidental occurrences but the calculated result of creative effort. And that basic belief is not incompatible at all with scientific discovery
- cannabis_sam 5y ago
  > but the calculated result of creative effort. Wouldn’t this mean it’s calculated by something that can conveniently ignore both computational complexity and logical completeness? To me this seems as unreasonable as young earth creationism.. Or are you thinking of something else..?
  - umvi 5y ago
    > Wouldn’t this mean it’s calculated by something that can conveniently ignore both computational complexity and logical completeness Assuming God has either access to more advanced technology than us or more advanced knowledge, why would that be unreasonable? Something that seems computationally complex now (like factoring primes) might be more manageable with more advanced knowledge/technology. Terraforming, bioengineering, factoring primes, etc. are within the realms of possibility for our civilization, so why not for a more advanced being?
- MPSimmons 5y ago
  My response to young earth creationists is, "God worked really hard to make it look like the Earth is billions of years old. Shouldn't we respect His wishes and just go with it?"
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    There's a T-shirt for that: https://amorphia-apparel.com/teach/devil-a-burying-dinosaur-bones-fossils-creationist-shirt#!/ https://amorphia-apparel.com/teach/devil-a-burying-dinosaur-... Religion teaches you how to rationalize literally anything, for better or worse. I suspect it wouldn't have evolved as part of human culture if there wasn't a need for it.
awb 5y ago
> They're about "belonging" and in-group/out-group signaling. It may be true that they're ill-equiped to discern such things, but it's also the case that there are social incentives for them to not want to adhere to facts, self-derived or otherwise. I think it’s most evident in cults, but agreed that it’s present in other less intense belief systems as well.

humanrebar 5y ago

> There still exist religious scientists. Heck, I even know creationists who fully understand how carbon and uranium dating work, and yet they're still creationists. You can be creationist and believe in carbon dating, fossils, etc. There's no contradiction. There are unanswered questions, such as "Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?" But that's not a scientific question, it's philosophical and irrefutable one, and therefore (IMO) it is not a particularly interesting question to get hung up on. I mostly agree with your point that these kinds of phenomena are not about critical thinking as such. Though I do think fans of deductive and inductive reasoning tend to entirely overlook other forms of reasoning. For instance, abductive reasoning: what narrative makes the most sense given the options? Also, reputational reasoning: which experts am I going to trust on this? Abductive reasoning doesn't apply in the case of the shape of the Earth, but reputational reasoning certainly does. At any rate, they help me understand why people make (to me) consterning choices, including in politics, religion, criminal verdicts, investing, and (lately) personal health care.

im_down_w_otp 5y ago
I don't think they're unaware of the questions. In fact, in the half-dozen or so cases I have any direct interaction with I'm certain they're aware of such questions. My point is exactly that they have other forms of incentives and reasoning that cultivate a willingness, or in the worst cases a zealotry, to entertain what their relative out-groups would consider a contradiction simply as open questions that their in-group permits. I used the example as a representative for the kind of issue involved, not as an exhaustively defensible one. :-) Principally I think we're in agreement. There seems to be quite a bit of analysis and consideration about what's going on that's through the lens of a kind of "enlightenment" reasoning wherein it's purportedly obvious that the pursuit of facts is intrinsically valuable, and so people not arriving at that value must be that they just don't know how to get there or are being lead astray. Alternatively, I would suggest that for almost everything that almost everyone deals with in their day-to-day and/or finds reward & incentives for, there's practically no value to facts. Often it's the inverse. "Bullshit" pays. Sometimes socially, sometimes financially, sometimes both. In the case where such "bullshit" has become a subculture of its own, suddenly facts have negative value. For whatever it's worth, this relates to one of my annoyances with the general startup ecosystem as it exists (to bring it around to HN-esque territory) I've been told (more than once) that the fact I have integrity is going to make my life harder as a founder. It makes it harder to sell. It makes it harder to fundraise. Etc. Those people are absolutely right. Because both selling and fundraising have a built-in incentive toward BS. "Fake it 'til you make it." became a social and financial good, and so people do it. Because if they don't, they automatically start out at a significant disadvantage. My personal bet is that my biasing toward integrity approach pays off in the long-term when the builders, not the brokers, get their cyclical day in the sun again, and in the meantime I can still be square with myself. That said, I very well could be wrong, and I unnecessarily made both the short term and the long term harder than they needed to be.
nate_meurer 5y ago
"Why would a creator create a young planet that looked very, very old?" That's not quite the right question. God didn't create a universe in a disguise that looks old. God simply created a universe of a certain age. This is perfectly consistent with the bible's creation story. God created humans of a certain age, in adult form. The bible doesn't say God created embryos that then grew up into Adam and Eve. Likewise the Garden was created with what we presume were fully grown trees, complete with tree rings providing evidence of prior years of existence. Trees with a past, which came into existence just now. Young-earth creationists like to pick and choose which features of the universe are allowed to have been created in place, and which must have been formed by mysterious interim events. For some reason, a lot of them refuse to allow geological features to have been created in place, which forces them to invent absurd explanations that usually involve Noah's flood and a lot of hand waving. But it's all unnecessary. There's no reason we can't entertain the notion that the universe was created complete and in motion, exactly as it is, at any point in time. And in fact there would be no way to prove it one way or another, just as there would be no way for Adam to prove that the trees in his garden were a hundred days or a hundred years old.

umvi 5y ago

Not all creationists adamantly believe the earth is literally only 7k years old. That's a very specific subset called "young earth creationists". I would venture most creationists at the most fundamental level believe the earth, life, evolution, etc. are not accidental occurrences but the calculated result of creative effort. And that basic belief is not incompatible at all with scientific discovery

cannabis_sam 5y ago
> but the calculated result of creative effort. Wouldn’t this mean it’s calculated by something that can conveniently ignore both computational complexity and logical completeness? To me this seems as unreasonable as young earth creationism.. Or are you thinking of something else..?
- umvi 5y ago
  > Wouldn’t this mean it’s calculated by something that can conveniently ignore both computational complexity and logical completeness Assuming God has either access to more advanced technology than us or more advanced knowledge, why would that be unreasonable? Something that seems computationally complex now (like factoring primes) might be more manageable with more advanced knowledge/technology. Terraforming, bioengineering, factoring primes, etc. are within the realms of possibility for our civilization, so why not for a more advanced being?
MPSimmons 5y ago
My response to young earth creationists is, "God worked really hard to make it look like the Earth is billions of years old. Shouldn't we respect His wishes and just go with it?"
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  There's a T-shirt for that: https://amorphia-apparel.com/teach/devil-a-burying-dinosaur-bones-fossils-creationist-shirt#!/ https://amorphia-apparel.com/teach/devil-a-burying-dinosaur-... Religion teaches you how to rationalize literally anything, for better or worse. I suspect it wouldn't have evolved as part of human culture if there wasn't a need for it.

awb 5y ago

> They're about "belonging" and in-group/out-group signaling. It may be true that they're ill-equiped to discern such things, but it's also the case that there are social incentives for them to not want to adhere to facts, self-derived or otherwise. I think it’s most evident in cults, but agreed that it’s present in other less intense belief systems as well.