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Of course this is real problem, but like most things COVID related the public discourse has been 90% culture war, and 10% search for understanding.

sokoloff 4y ago
I’ve really been amazed at the lack of curiosity and ability/willingness to hold multiple probability-weighted points of view at once and examine questions like “what would have to be true/false in order for us to commit to X?”, “once we’ve started to do Y, what would be the signals for us to stop doing Y?” I had thought that people were often impatient and disinterested in hard thinking, but the extent of it surprised me, from people of all backgrounds and abilities.
- duxup 4y ago
  I think one issue, at least from an online experience, is that a multi weighted view just means that you get yelled at by everyone as people seem to look for points of view they don’t like and engage with them from that angle. They will often entirely miss what you agree on, or worse assume any common ground was some ruse to slowly introduce more extreme points of view.
- trailingComma 4y ago
- trashtester 4y ago
  It seems to me that most people are able to think in terms of probabilities (or degrees, more generally) most of the time. Those people need to split the world into safe/dangerous, good/bad, likely/impossible. Also, they tend to not gradually update beliefs based on data the way Bayes' Theorem would dictate, but will often go directly from one extreme to the other. Some will tend to add an additional level of "unknown", but even in that case, they tend to go for "as likely as not" 50/50 odds, not 80/20, 90/10 or 99.9/0.1, based on evidence. Maybe doubt/uncertainty is too much of a cognitive and emotional load? For topics that are also seen as essential symbols of some social group (religion, culture war side, nation), the number who will admit shades of gray fall even further, of course.

sokoloff 4y ago

I’ve really been amazed at the lack of curiosity and ability/willingness to hold multiple probability-weighted points of view at once and examine questions like “what would have to be true/false in order for us to commit to X?”, “once we’ve started to do Y, what would be the signals for us to stop doing Y?” I had thought that people were often impatient and disinterested in hard thinking, but the extent of it surprised me, from people of all backgrounds and abilities.

duxup 4y ago
I think one issue, at least from an online experience, is that a multi weighted view just means that you get yelled at by everyone as people seem to look for points of view they don’t like and engage with them from that angle. They will often entirely miss what you agree on, or worse assume any common ground was some ruse to slowly introduce more extreme points of view.
trailingComma 4y ago
trashtester 4y ago
It seems to me that most people are able to think in terms of probabilities (or degrees, more generally) most of the time. Those people need to split the world into safe/dangerous, good/bad, likely/impossible. Also, they tend to not gradually update beliefs based on data the way Bayes' Theorem would dictate, but will often go directly from one extreme to the other. Some will tend to add an additional level of "unknown", but even in that case, they tend to go for "as likely as not" 50/50 odds, not 80/20, 90/10 or 99.9/0.1, based on evidence. Maybe doubt/uncertainty is too much of a cognitive and emotional load? For topics that are also seen as essential symbols of some social group (religion, culture war side, nation), the number who will admit shades of gray fall even further, of course.