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> The societal forces that drive people to join a belief system matter more than the specifics of what they believe. This article by Elżbieta Drążkiewicz is

> The societal forces that drive people to join a belief system matter more than the specifics of what they believe. This article by Elżbieta Drążkiewicz is good. It puts far better and with powerful examples, something I have tried to express about the decline of trust in science due to the abuses visited on people through manipulative technologies. It's surprising that many of the anti-vax crowd are well educated, middle class centrists who've just grown jaded with media lies, and also unsurprising when they then dig in deeper in response to being labelled idiots. Any actual scientific arguments vanish into irrelevance in a proxy argument that's really about past lies and injustices and the inability of the interlocutors to demonstrate their good faith. In positive influence you absolutely _must_ acknowledge and take into account people's legitimate grievances and understand why, even when you know your argument to be truthful and benevolent, you get rejected out of hand. My thoughts often turn to the Verbal Judo work of Dr. George Thompson, about letting people have ground to stand on, separating the defensive venting from the objectives you want to achieve. Don't set out to win an argument - keep the other person's best interests foremost. As for Thompson (who was a street cop), as scientists and technologists, whether in medicine, computing or whatever, we ought to recognise that a lot of people are mistrustful and angry about something they think we represent. edit: grammar

notahacker 5y ago
How much of it is about past lies and injustices though? Are UFOs emblematic of real world suffering? Is there a long list of elections rigged in the US? Are WASPs actually the most victimised social class in the US? The grievances often take weird directions precisely because people's existence is comfortable enough for them to have to manufacture them, or latch onto the grievances of figures they feel affinity with. Superficially, theories of aliens at Roswell pattern match onto real world issues with military secrecy, but that's because of how humans tell stories more than because military secrecy disproportionately hurt people who watched a lot of alien movies. Telling people they're privileged when they feel pretty ordinary or calling them stupid when they're literally just asking questions doesn't help matters, but neither does telling them that yes, actually they really are victims of X on a significant scale but it's not quite like the only people talking about a massive problem with X say it is... And whether the underlying grievances are real or not, the trouble with "Qanon makes a very good point but..." is that not only does it not seem to win many true believers over, but it also seems to encourage lots of people that happen to have legitimate grievances (or feel like they should have some) but haven't paid the strange sounding theories the slightest attention before. Why would you trust the people admitting "yeah actually, we do lie all the time" over the people who have absolute conviction in their outlandish theories? Sometimes you have to keep the best interests of the nonbelievers in mind too.
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myrryr 5y ago
Even if you do show compassion, it is usually extremely one directional. Eventually that gets hard to keep doing so, and you just give up on them. I found trying to deal with them with compassion was a cast of setting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. Sooner or later you just have to leave them to their world views, and just accept that it will go badly for them. As Keith Ng put it "You can't just keep saying we have to acknowledge the hurt and the sense of alienation that the antivax protesters have felt without acknowledging the feelings we have about them A sense of betrayal - the idea that a national project to defend ourselves is being actively undermined by them, for either entirely crazy or entirely unexplained ("it's my choice") reasons. A sense of threat - they used violence and intimidation to assert their power. A sense of provocation - when they keep insisting that we are stupid, cowardly, blindly obedient sheeple, that they are the smart ones, the brave ones, the ones who are truly free, yeah, that makes me angry. The Big Clean-up was my way of addressing that anger and frustration without giving into it. That anger is unproductive, but it's not unwarranted. And it needs to be acknowledged, every bit as much as the protesters' feelings of hurt, isolation and abandonment. But when you acknowledge their feelings and not ours, say that theirs is legitimate at some level then be silent on ours, and not acknowledge all the things that they've done that have led us to this place of anger - that's not reconciliation, that's digging the hole deeper. "
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  I agree with this - its a very good approach generally to 'meet in the middle' during a conflict, but that becomes very hard when one side is scientific and another is pure outright lies, wishful thinking, fears and generally mostly negative emotions which seemingly many adults have issues managing. Same would go say for Ukraine invasion - from moderate 'alternative truth' folks weakly defending russian invasion as 'forced by the west'. I would require so much mental gymnastics to accept this as some middle ground it would break my proverbial mental neck. Entire pillars of progress of what mankind achieved till 21st century included need to be abandoned to find middle ground in such cases. Just because some folks can't handle their emotional side of their being which can be very easily used to steer them (well anybody in such situation) as needed. You want to have productive discussion with somebody like me? Let's bring out the facts, proven, peer-reviewed if possible. There is no 'alternative truth', just alternatives to truth.

notahacker 5y ago

How much of it is about past lies and injustices though? Are UFOs emblematic of real world suffering? Is there a long list of elections rigged in the US? Are WASPs actually the most victimised social class in the US? The grievances often take weird directions precisely because people's existence is comfortable enough for them to have to manufacture them, or latch onto the grievances of figures they feel affinity with. Superficially, theories of aliens at Roswell pattern match onto real world issues with military secrecy, but that's because of how humans tell stories more than because military secrecy disproportionately hurt people who watched a lot of alien movies. Telling people they're privileged when they feel pretty ordinary or calling them stupid when they're literally just asking questions doesn't help matters, but neither does telling them that yes, actually they really are victims of X on a significant scale but it's not quite like the only people talking about a massive problem with X say it is... And whether the underlying grievances are real or not, the trouble with "Qanon makes a very good point but..." is that not only does it not seem to win many true believers over, but it also seems to encourage lots of people that happen to have legitimate grievances (or feel like they should have some) but haven't paid the strange sounding theories the slightest attention before. Why would you trust the people admitting "yeah actually, we do lie all the time" over the people who have absolute conviction in their outlandish theories? Sometimes you have to keep the best interests of the nonbelievers in mind too.

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myrryr 5y ago

Even if you do show compassion, it is usually extremely one directional. Eventually that gets hard to keep doing so, and you just give up on them. I found trying to deal with them with compassion was a cast of setting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. Sooner or later you just have to leave them to their world views, and just accept that it will go badly for them. As Keith Ng put it "You can't just keep saying we have to acknowledge the hurt and the sense of alienation that the antivax protesters have felt without acknowledging the feelings we have about them A sense of betrayal - the idea that a national project to defend ourselves is being actively undermined by them, for either entirely crazy or entirely unexplained ("it's my choice") reasons. A sense of threat - they used violence and intimidation to assert their power. A sense of provocation - when they keep insisting that we are stupid, cowardly, blindly obedient sheeple, that they are the smart ones, the brave ones, the ones who are truly free, yeah, that makes me angry. The Big Clean-up was my way of addressing that anger and frustration without giving into it. That anger is unproductive, but it's not unwarranted. And it needs to be acknowledged, every bit as much as the protesters' feelings of hurt, isolation and abandonment. But when you acknowledge their feelings and not ours, say that theirs is legitimate at some level then be silent on ours, and not acknowledge all the things that they've done that have led us to this place of anger - that's not reconciliation, that's digging the hole deeper. "

saiya-jin 5y ago
I agree with this - its a very good approach generally to 'meet in the middle' during a conflict, but that becomes very hard when one side is scientific and another is pure outright lies, wishful thinking, fears and generally mostly negative emotions which seemingly many adults have issues managing. Same would go say for Ukraine invasion - from moderate 'alternative truth' folks weakly defending russian invasion as 'forced by the west'. I would require so much mental gymnastics to accept this as some middle ground it would break my proverbial mental neck. Entire pillars of progress of what mankind achieved till 21st century included need to be abandoned to find middle ground in such cases. Just because some folks can't handle their emotional side of their being which can be very easily used to steer them (well anybody in such situation) as needed. You want to have productive discussion with somebody like me? Let's bring out the facts, proven, peer-reviewed if possible. There is no 'alternative truth', just alternatives to truth.