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Adversarial Collaboration

ARandomerDude 4y ago
> Let's start from the main domains where we know people don't change their minds—politics or religion. > In politics and in religion, the main driver is social. We believe what the people we love and trust believe. Except I've changed my mind on both, despite enormous pressure by people I love not to. Also this article seems to be self-defeating: if we don't change our minds, why attempt to convince us of that fact? If we truly don't change our minds, no amount of evidence will help us change our minds about this topic.
- xapata 4y ago
  I don't think it was meant as an absolutist assertion.
  - bearon 4y ago
    Then it shouldn't have been titled as so.
    - LeonB 4y ago
      This is called a “rhetorical device” and you’d struggle to find a lengthy article that does not employ rhetorical devices. It’s a big part of how communication works.
      - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
        I wonder if there is a term for this kind of objection. I’m starting to see more and more people demand quantifiers or conditional disqualifiers on statements that shouldn’t reasonably be considered as absolutes. And, the fact that bringing up that whatever assertion is being made is not a universal absolute doesn’t really add anything to the understanding. Which statement is better, “people don’t like the smell of skunk spray” or “the vast majority of people do not like the smell of skunk spray”? The latter is more correct, as I am sure there is probably someone out there who is an outlier. But I can’t help but feel like my communication has been made less precise and has been made subject to interpretation as a result.
        hackerlight 4y ago
        I advocate for everyone to use basic declarative statements when they are not completely certain, with uncertainty left implied and up to the reader to figure out. If the writer is certain about something or wants to make an absolute statement, then that's when the verbosity comes into play. That's when the writer can start to add all the fluff words. That's a convention that's way better, because the large majority of statements and propositions aren't known with certainty. I am exhausted at having to read long winded prose with endless "maybe" "mostly" and so on, with the obligatory "we don't know this for sure" at the end. I don't come away thinking you're humble, I am just annoyed that you've wasted my time when it was blatantly obvious you were saying something not absolute.
        BlueDingo 4y ago
        I hear you, but I'm also the type of person to admit my own uncertainty. And the people around me get way more uptake of their ideas by just leaving out those words, even when they have less or terrible foundations.
        hackerlight 4y ago
        It's a cultural thing. The cultural norm in academic or technical circles is extreme precision as well as fear of being held to account by enforcers of that norm. It's a spillover of rigorous academic publishing norms into general conversation. It's a fool's errand given that speech is intrinsically imprecise, and given that everyday speech is just a communication tool and not a vehicle for perfect applied epistemology. We should hedge statements depending on whether the context makes it self-explanatory that there's uncertainty. Any less, and we're being deceptive. Any more, and we're adding words without adding information. You know what would be a cool? Some notation to denote the level of certainty that doesn't take up horizontal space in the sentence. Or an API to a fine tuned GPT-3 that can strip out caveats and hedges from text on a screen.
        maxbond 4y ago
        I know very little about it, but it's my understanding the conlang Láadan has ways to express degrees of certainty and degrees of "handedness" to the information (first-hand, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1adan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1adan Check out the tenses, things like, "Known to speaker because perceived by speaker, externally or internally" vs "Assumed true by speaker because speaker trusts source". https://laadanlanguage.com https://laadanlanguage.com
      - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
        What you call a "rhetorical device" I call clickbait, and frankly I'm getting tired of it. If the response to every title should be "You shouldn't judge us on the title, everyone knows titles are bullshit", then maybe folks should stop making bullshit titles, or else not feign innocence when they are judged on them. (Note I understand the submitted title is not the title of the article, which I think is a valid defense in this instance, but my general point still stands)
        xapata 4y ago
        There's a difference between using a broadly true generalization as the title and using a bullshit statement as the title.
    - nagonago 4y ago
      The actual title is "Adversarial Collaboration: An EDGE Lecture by Daniel Kahneman". "People don't change their minds" is just the tagline, and he doesn't even actually say it in the lecture. The focus is much more on adversarial collaboration and why he thinks it is a positive thing for science. ...does that change your mind? ;)
      - lovelearning 4y ago
        Except he says things like: > To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters. > Let's start from the main domains where we know people don't change their minds — politics or religion. Perhaps people familiar with his work interpret his statements differently. It's also understandable if this was a lecture for peers. But I'm a layperson whose only context is this article and the things he says sound absolute. It's already an era of misinformation and low attention. We don't need content published in a way that may add to it. If there are conditions and nuances involved here, I think writers, especially scientists and professionals, and editors should include them and avoid saying anything that risks misinterpretation.
        Lewton 4y ago
        How do you interpret “To a good first approximation” in this context?
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      I disagree. What we need less of is endless caveats and hedges in writing that make it impenetrable for no added value. Leave it to the reader to exercise common sense. It's extremely obvious he didn't mean it as an absolute assertion.
- christophilus 4y ago
  I’m in the same boat as you, having changed my mind on many big, cherished ideas. Obviously, people change their minds. Having some familiarity with Kahneman, my guess is he means this is a general, but not absolute rule. Sort of like “You can’t convince someone of a wrong if their paycheck depends on them seeing it as a right.” It’s a helpful general, but not absolute rule.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    To be truly free, we should be paid by no one.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Also this article seems to be self-defeating: if we don't change our minds, why attempt to convince us of that fact? I don't think the point was to convince us that we don't change our minds but rather to convince us to do adversarial collaboration instead of angry science.
- handsclean 4y ago
  You’re doing the caricature attack thing. It’s a safe bet Kahneman is aware both that people sometimes change their minds on everything and that we often change their minds on small things.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  You changed your mind yourself. Not because someone pleaded you to.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Isn't a big point of the whole discussion that you may change your mind because you changed the group you associate with?
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  What everyone is missing is that changing of the mind is a spectrum process, not a single binary process. It happens over days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the subject. People who expect that if they refute a single then should then refute the entire opinion are the problematic ones (with binary thinking). There are always edge cases, if all it took was a single counter-example, I would be a nihilist with no actual opinions. People change their minds when the bigger picture demands not, not because some young jackass decides binary logic should fully and completely apply to life.
bigmatto 4y ago
One of the most disappointing things that I have learned is that most people hold opinions in order to be part of some group. If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. They are arguing in order to maintain their group membership, not to find the truth. It appears this is true of academic and scientific disciplines as much as anywhere else.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Yes. And if someone knows books or discussions about this topic I want the names. Its such a strong force in social structures. Stating your truth is rarely possible, you better sing along and talk down in smaller sub groups later.
  - christophilus 4y ago
    Read anything Charlie Munger writes on the topic. He said something to the effect of “A year in which you fail to kill at least one of your cherished ideas is probably a failed year.” Anyway, he has a lot to say on the subject and on incentives and human psychology broadly.
    - AstralStorm 4y ago
      Nice platitude, but sometimes cherished ideas are actually true. A better way to phrase it would be a year when you don't challenge your idea is probably a failed year. It might still win the challenge.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        I think the idea is you have many cherished ideas, and so many are actually false that you shouldn't have much difficulty killing one. Or, another way of looking at it, your knowledge of so many areas is superficial and a deep dive into any one would let you know how you weren't even wrong, as the saying goes. You can find people doing it in any HN thread about almost anything - often shows up as "why didn't they just do X". A non-domain expert with a "obvious solution" is almost always missing something major.
gcanyon 4y ago
I know this isn’t exactly a counterpoint, since “The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion.” — but I have changed my political views dramatically and repeatedly over the course of the past decades. Of course, I could disprove the conclusion by accepting it based on the evidence, but I don’t want the universe to collapse in on itself due to paradox, so I won’t.
bhouston 4y ago
Fun fact, edge.org and the Edge Foundation was generously funded by Jeffrey Epstein -- without him, Edge probably wouldn't exist as it does. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep.... From 2001 to 2017, "foundations associated with Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total of almost $857,000 received by Edge over this period." So basically Epstein funded 80% of Edge's budget.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Didn't he fund a ton of different scientific organizations?
  - tomrod 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure that is how he built is network, right?
  - robot_head 4y ago
    Edge and TED were his favorites tho
- robot_head 4y ago
  He paid for 100% of the "billionaire dinners" where all of Silicon Valley showed up
trafficante 4y ago
This whole article reads like a cope for the fallout caused by Thinking Fast and Slow. I purposely keep my copy faced forward on the bookshelf as a reminder of the dangers of reading too much into anything published in the past 15 years.
- nagonago 4y ago
  I'm curious what you mean by fallout, are you referring to the replication crisis?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
photochemsyn 4y ago
There's a simple trick that allows professionals in a given field to change their minds about something fundamental in their field - basically, it's the Feynman approach, where he trained himself to accept the data and analysis even if he didn't like the result, from an aesthetic viewpoint or whatever. A key strategy here is to have something else to put your ego and emotions into, such as a very subjective area like art, music, literature, etc. Politics and religion might be trickier, as people tend to have external forcing factors (family and work opinions) that respond negatively to a fundamental change of some sort or other, up to being sent to prison for a decade for apostasy (see Saudi Arabia). In such situations, even if people do change their minds, they may not broadcast that change to anyone over fear of retaliation at family gatherings or in workplace environments. Even in cases where a particular member of a political party or religious group is shown to be criminally corrupt, many people will still embrace the politics or religion, on the basis that the individual in question is an outlier, not a representative sample - even after dozens of such examples are exposed. (Practically, this is why I've made it a rule to avoid political or religious discussions at work or at family gatherings, there's just not much value to be found there).
brightball 4y ago
If you haven’t read The Undoing Project, you should.
- sitkack 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undoing_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undoing_Project
abrax3141 4y ago
https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/252301/1/El%2520Know%2520from%2520Exp%2520OBHD.pdf https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/252301/1/El%2520Know%2520from%25... https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.982.3132&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.98...
anonporridge 4y ago
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck
- bigmatto 4y ago
  This was not such a problem when science was advancing slowly, but with acceleration of scientific development, this has become the retarding force. If we want to speed up science, we need to find a way of allowing truths to triumph faster.
Digory 4y ago
Kahneman hedges just a bit in his talk: " To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters." Trying to explain the small number of people who do change their minds, David McRaney has an interesting book out called How Minds Change.[0] And I imagine there are people who change minds, even outside his model. People who change their minds when it doesn't seem to help them strike me as important people to hear from. [0] https://www.econtalk.org/david-mcraney-on-how-minds-change/ https://www.econtalk.org/david-mcraney-on-how-minds-change/
- agumonkey 4y ago
  I've seen a strange case, where someone argued blindly, but the next day advocated for the change. He didn't say it was his own idea but he didn't told he changed his mind :)
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You will find this again and again in the business world, and you can use it to your advantage. If you're arguing for a course of action, answer the objections well and then drop it. Often the person arguing against you (especially if they're "the boss") will come back a few days later and present it as basically their idea. People get emotionally tied to what they came up with, and it can take a few nights to disconnect enough to move on (even if they never admit they were "wrong").
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      People are so strange. They don't see the waste and friction due to these reflexes :) But about the 'drop' aspect, I think there's a reflex for other to argue someone to infinity if it become a belief confrontation, a kind of domination to impose their view. But if the other party drops the fight, it kills that aspect and the other person can accept the idea for its core value.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        That's exactly it; we like to pretend we're some advanced computational AI operating on pure rationality, but we're actually a bag of meat with an inferiority complex. And much of the "unreasonable rules" of society are built around exactly that, and if we abandon those we often have to relearn them again and again. Recognizing they exist can allow "the boss" to cut the issue short with a "I need to think about this" and de-escalate that way.
AlbertCory 4y ago
I was lucky enough to be in the group that ran Dr. Kahneman's talk at Google, so I was at lunch with him & 8 or so others. I asked him, "Dr. Kahneman, you've been writing about thinking for 40 years. Do you think you've changed how people think at all?" He said, "No, not even me." He proceeded to tell a story where he fell into the "eloquence trap" that he, himself, wrote about: a doctor said something, and he said to his daughter, "that doctor is very impressive!" She'd learned his lessons better than he had: she said that what mattered was how much experience the doctor had in this particular area, not how good she sounded.
robot_head 4y ago
Somewhat surprised to see Jeffery Epstein's "charity" still showing up on the front page of HN
- dang 4y ago
  (Edit: I interpreted your comment as asking why we'd allow this post to stay on HN's front page. The answer to that is below. If that wasn't your point, please ignore.) On HN, we generally go by article quality, not site quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22article%20quality%22%20%22site%20quality%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., and generally try to avoid guilt by association. These points both follow from the principle of intellectual curiosity that we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Reality is messier than simple heuristics, but I think the current article is a good test case. Can one be interested in Kahneman's views on adversarial collaboration and have a curious conversation about them while in no way endorsing the heinous Epstein? Clearly one can.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Bad call, dang. In this case, I was unaware of the Edge Foundation's Epstein links. The information is salient and useful. Edge itself certainly doesn't make the information evident. C.f., a site search for "Epstein" which ... conspicuously omits any prominent results for a disclosure or apology: <https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Aedge.org+epstein&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Aedge.org+epstein&ia=...>
    - dang 4y ago
      I interpreted the GP comment as asking why we allow posts from edge.org on HN. My comment is limited to answering that question. I've edited it to make this clearer.
      - 4y ago
sheerun 4y ago
Much better title than "People don't change their minds", which is false
xboxnolifes 4y ago
> The power of reasons is an illusion. The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion. This is one of my pet peeves with even casual conversation. Someone goes "I don't like X, because Y." You point out Y is false, and the response is "Well, I still don't like X". It used to annoy me because wanted to help people not base their views on bad information, as that's what I would want people to do for me. But now, it mostly just annoys me because of how predictable it is. You know the only good answer is to agree with them, so what's the point in even conversing?
- lazide 4y ago
  It’s actually even worse. For many people, disagreeing with them makes you their enemy, emotionally at least. So you’ve mostly just been alienating people while thinking you’re trying to help them. Most people have conversations to feed their emotional needs for social interactions and validation, not to learn anything. We’re interesting animals.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Because it's predictable you can use that. You just have to use a different form of communication than the "scientific one". Don't ask why do you not like X because that will get false reasons. Instead, ask how X affects them, how it makes them feel, etc. But this is more difficult and basically boils down to "become their friend and know them as a person".
Roark66 4y ago
I think what author describes and attributes to "everyone" is a trait of character. Yes, a common one, but not universal. From my own experience to that of (some of) my friends I can say with certainty people do change their minds.
gampleman 4y ago
At least in religion I think the idea that reasons follow belief rather than precede it is quite acknowledged. I think that's part of what in Christianity it meant when it says that faith is a gift of God. In my own conversion I felt it very intensely - my belief came over me in a sudden, external (or miraculous) way. I then spent 6 months learning everything there was to learn about my new found faith to placate my reason that I hadn't simply gone mad, but the temporal flow was clearly belief -> reason rather than the reverse. In some ways it's like falling in love. Most of us don't evaluate potential partner on a bunch of metrics and then after they reach a sufficiently high ranking we declare ourselves in love. Rather we fall in love instinctively, then evaluate the person rationally (and sometimes reject them, like when the circumstances aren't right or we can see their flaws even through the rose tinted glasses, etc.)
- bombcar 4y ago
  In my entire life I've only met one person who was actually convinced by the religious arguments; everyone else dug into them after a similar event. And many people can go wildly too far and try to ascribe everything to it. To take the love example, the "tricks of the trade" you see bandied about sometimes do NOT work to "make someone love you" but they can help if you have people who have already decided they love each other.
otikik 4y ago
I believe this all boils down to mental energy an efficiency. Our brains are great at pattern matching. We want to look at the landscape, see that there’s no hiding lion, and continue hunting-gathering. Constantly rechecking that there’s no lion is draining, and it also leads to less hunting-gathering. Adult humans really dislike having to do that (we even consider it a sign of mental illness) The “back and forth” between husband and wife supports this theory. Every time one of them designed one experiment, “the ball was on somebody else’s field” and they could temporarily forget about the problem until the results came back. I am sure they were two very busy individuals and being able to “move on to other things” after designing the next experiment was gratifying.
deadpannini 4y ago
> To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters. I love the model of adversarial collaboration, and I don't dispute the extremely strong influence of social bonds on knowledge formation, but Kahneman is just wrong about this. I know he's wrong because I change my mind relatively frequently, about things of at least some consequence. For a recent example, I was fairly sure that at the beginning of the pandemic, in the US, widespread, cheap testing would enable us to drive COVID cases near zero, and I wasn't shy about telling everyone I met. Obviously, I was wrong, for a variety of reasons - so I updated. That intimate experience with uncertainty and updating my own beliefs makes me wonder about Kahneman's research methods. It makes me doubt whether this question is even tractable or whether people are even legible enough to researchers to draw conclusions about this. Interestingly (and disarmingly) Khaneman is very forthright about the role his own experiences have played in convincing him that people in general don't change their minds. He writes: > I was also impressed by the fact that Anne and I didn't change our minds. I had read Kuhn and Lakatos about the robustness of paradigms, but I didn't expect that minor theories would also be impervious to evidence. also: > I will now share a personal experience of belief perseverance that I cannot shake ... However, it turns out that I only changed my mind about the evidence. My view of how the mind works didn't change at all. The evidence is gone, but the beliefs are still standing. Indeed, I cannot think of a single important opinion that I have changed as a result of losing my faith in the studies of behavioral priming, although they seemed quite important to me at the time. I think the most likely explanation for this is 1) social desirability bias has a dramatic influence on what information people make accessible about their cognition and 2) Kahneman is unusually stubborn, and his generalization from his own personality to all humankind is a manifestation of the typical mind fallacy. [0] [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy
- bombcar 4y ago
  That's a recent example of something that you came to quickly (obviously, covid didn't exist before) and so you were relatively easily able to get back out of it. As an approximation, it works insanely well. And as more and more things becomes "proxies for political decisions" we'll see it ramp up even more.
ouid 4y ago
I'm not sure what he means by the naive scientific method. It has always been a fundamentally adversarial process, nothing new is being discovered here. The scientific method as it has always existed requires two heuristics from you, the scientist: a hypothesis generator, a test generator (and an all important simplicity measure). The point of the method is that by making these things work adversarially, we can turn our very messy, fallible creativity, ie these heuristics, into facts about what the model isn't. Moreover no additional hypothesis of what the model is, or test which contradicts it, can derive a false fact of this form, relegating the entire concept of adversary to the meta who-gets-their-name-on-the-paper game. If Daniel has only recently started "using science adversarially", then he has only recently started doing science.

> Let's start from the main domains where we know people don't change their minds—politics or religion. > In politics and in religion, the main driver is social. We believe what the people we love and trust believe. Except I've changed my mind on both, despite enormous pressure by people I love not to. Also this article seems to be self-defeating: if we don't change our minds, why attempt to convince us of that fact? If we truly don't change our minds, no amount of evidence will help us change our minds about this topic.

xapata 4y ago
I don't think it was meant as an absolutist assertion.
- bearon 4y ago
  Then it shouldn't have been titled as so.
  - LeonB 4y ago
    This is called a “rhetorical device” and you’d struggle to find a lengthy article that does not employ rhetorical devices. It’s a big part of how communication works.
    - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
      I wonder if there is a term for this kind of objection. I’m starting to see more and more people demand quantifiers or conditional disqualifiers on statements that shouldn’t reasonably be considered as absolutes. And, the fact that bringing up that whatever assertion is being made is not a universal absolute doesn’t really add anything to the understanding. Which statement is better, “people don’t like the smell of skunk spray” or “the vast majority of people do not like the smell of skunk spray”? The latter is more correct, as I am sure there is probably someone out there who is an outlier. But I can’t help but feel like my communication has been made less precise and has been made subject to interpretation as a result.
      - hackerlight 4y ago
        I advocate for everyone to use basic declarative statements when they are not completely certain, with uncertainty left implied and up to the reader to figure out. If the writer is certain about something or wants to make an absolute statement, then that's when the verbosity comes into play. That's when the writer can start to add all the fluff words. That's a convention that's way better, because the large majority of statements and propositions aren't known with certainty. I am exhausted at having to read long winded prose with endless "maybe" "mostly" and so on, with the obligatory "we don't know this for sure" at the end. I don't come away thinking you're humble, I am just annoyed that you've wasted my time when it was blatantly obvious you were saying something not absolute.
        BlueDingo 4y ago
        I hear you, but I'm also the type of person to admit my own uncertainty. And the people around me get way more uptake of their ideas by just leaving out those words, even when they have less or terrible foundations.
        hackerlight 4y ago
        It's a cultural thing. The cultural norm in academic or technical circles is extreme precision as well as fear of being held to account by enforcers of that norm. It's a spillover of rigorous academic publishing norms into general conversation. It's a fool's errand given that speech is intrinsically imprecise, and given that everyday speech is just a communication tool and not a vehicle for perfect applied epistemology. We should hedge statements depending on whether the context makes it self-explanatory that there's uncertainty. Any less, and we're being deceptive. Any more, and we're adding words without adding information. You know what would be a cool? Some notation to denote the level of certainty that doesn't take up horizontal space in the sentence. Or an API to a fine tuned GPT-3 that can strip out caveats and hedges from text on a screen.
        maxbond 4y ago
        I know very little about it, but it's my understanding the conlang Láadan has ways to express degrees of certainty and degrees of "handedness" to the information (first-hand, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1adan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1adan Check out the tenses, things like, "Known to speaker because perceived by speaker, externally or internally" vs "Assumed true by speaker because speaker trusts source". https://laadanlanguage.com https://laadanlanguage.com
    - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      What you call a "rhetorical device" I call clickbait, and frankly I'm getting tired of it. If the response to every title should be "You shouldn't judge us on the title, everyone knows titles are bullshit", then maybe folks should stop making bullshit titles, or else not feign innocence when they are judged on them. (Note I understand the submitted title is not the title of the article, which I think is a valid defense in this instance, but my general point still stands)
      - xapata 4y ago
        There's a difference between using a broadly true generalization as the title and using a bullshit statement as the title.
  - nagonago 4y ago
    The actual title is "Adversarial Collaboration: An EDGE Lecture by Daniel Kahneman". "People don't change their minds" is just the tagline, and he doesn't even actually say it in the lecture. The focus is much more on adversarial collaboration and why he thinks it is a positive thing for science. ...does that change your mind? ;)
    - lovelearning 4y ago
      Except he says things like: > To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters. > Let's start from the main domains where we know people don't change their minds — politics or religion. Perhaps people familiar with his work interpret his statements differently. It's also understandable if this was a lecture for peers. But I'm a layperson whose only context is this article and the things he says sound absolute. It's already an era of misinformation and low attention. We don't need content published in a way that may add to it. If there are conditions and nuances involved here, I think writers, especially scientists and professionals, and editors should include them and avoid saying anything that risks misinterpretation.
      - Lewton 4y ago
        How do you interpret “To a good first approximation” in this context?
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    I disagree. What we need less of is endless caveats and hedges in writing that make it impenetrable for no added value. Leave it to the reader to exercise common sense. It's extremely obvious he didn't mean it as an absolute assertion.
christophilus 4y ago
I’m in the same boat as you, having changed my mind on many big, cherished ideas. Obviously, people change their minds. Having some familiarity with Kahneman, my guess is he means this is a general, but not absolute rule. Sort of like “You can’t convince someone of a wrong if their paycheck depends on them seeing it as a right.” It’s a helpful general, but not absolute rule.
- sitkack 4y ago
  To be truly free, we should be paid by no one.
lapcat 4y ago
> Also this article seems to be self-defeating: if we don't change our minds, why attempt to convince us of that fact? I don't think the point was to convince us that we don't change our minds but rather to convince us to do adversarial collaboration instead of angry science.
handsclean 4y ago
You’re doing the caricature attack thing. It’s a safe bet Kahneman is aware both that people sometimes change their minds on everything and that we often change their minds on small things.
ramraj07 4y ago
You changed your mind yourself. Not because someone pleaded you to.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Isn't a big point of the whole discussion that you may change your mind because you changed the group you associate with?
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
What everyone is missing is that changing of the mind is a spectrum process, not a single binary process. It happens over days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the subject. People who expect that if they refute a single then should then refute the entire opinion are the problematic ones (with binary thinking). There are always edge cases, if all it took was a single counter-example, I would be a nihilist with no actual opinions. People change their minds when the bigger picture demands not, not because some young jackass decides binary logic should fully and completely apply to life.

bigmatto 4y ago

One of the most disappointing things that I have learned is that most people hold opinions in order to be part of some group. If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. They are arguing in order to maintain their group membership, not to find the truth. It appears this is true of academic and scientific disciplines as much as anywhere else.

agumonkey 4y ago
Yes. And if someone knows books or discussions about this topic I want the names. Its such a strong force in social structures. Stating your truth is rarely possible, you better sing along and talk down in smaller sub groups later.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Read anything Charlie Munger writes on the topic. He said something to the effect of “A year in which you fail to kill at least one of your cherished ideas is probably a failed year.” Anyway, he has a lot to say on the subject and on incentives and human psychology broadly.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    Nice platitude, but sometimes cherished ideas are actually true. A better way to phrase it would be a year when you don't challenge your idea is probably a failed year. It might still win the challenge.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I think the idea is you have many cherished ideas, and so many are actually false that you shouldn't have much difficulty killing one. Or, another way of looking at it, your knowledge of so many areas is superficial and a deep dive into any one would let you know how you weren't even wrong, as the saying goes. You can find people doing it in any HN thread about almost anything - often shows up as "why didn't they just do X". A non-domain expert with a "obvious solution" is almost always missing something major.

gcanyon 4y ago

I know this isn’t exactly a counterpoint, since “The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion.” — but I have changed my political views dramatically and repeatedly over the course of the past decades. Of course, I could disprove the conclusion by accepting it based on the evidence, but I don’t want the universe to collapse in on itself due to paradox, so I won’t.

bhouston 4y ago

Fun fact, edge.org and the Edge Foundation was generously funded by Jeffrey Epstein -- without him, Edge probably wouldn't exist as it does. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-ep.... From 2001 to 2017, "foundations associated with Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total of almost $857,000 received by Edge over this period." So basically Epstein funded 80% of Edge's budget.

anonporridge 4y ago
Didn't he fund a ton of different scientific organizations?
- tomrod 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure that is how he built is network, right?
- robot_head 4y ago
  Edge and TED were his favorites tho
robot_head 4y ago
He paid for 100% of the "billionaire dinners" where all of Silicon Valley showed up

trafficante 4y ago

This whole article reads like a cope for the fallout caused by Thinking Fast and Slow. I purposely keep my copy faced forward on the bookshelf as a reminder of the dangers of reading too much into anything published in the past 15 years.

nagonago 4y ago
I'm curious what you mean by fallout, are you referring to the replication crisis?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

photochemsyn 4y ago

There's a simple trick that allows professionals in a given field to change their minds about something fundamental in their field - basically, it's the Feynman approach, where he trained himself to accept the data and analysis even if he didn't like the result, from an aesthetic viewpoint or whatever. A key strategy here is to have something else to put your ego and emotions into, such as a very subjective area like art, music, literature, etc. Politics and religion might be trickier, as people tend to have external forcing factors (family and work opinions) that respond negatively to a fundamental change of some sort or other, up to being sent to prison for a decade for apostasy (see Saudi Arabia). In such situations, even if people do change their minds, they may not broadcast that change to anyone over fear of retaliation at family gatherings or in workplace environments. Even in cases where a particular member of a political party or religious group is shown to be criminally corrupt, many people will still embrace the politics or religion, on the basis that the individual in question is an outlier, not a representative sample - even after dozens of such examples are exposed. (Practically, this is why I've made it a rule to avoid political or religious discussions at work or at family gatherings, there's just not much value to be found there).

brightball 4y ago

If you haven’t read The Undoing Project, you should.

sitkack 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undoing_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undoing_Project

abrax3141 4y ago

https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/252301/1/El%2520Know%2520from%2520Exp%2520OBHD.pdf https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/252301/1/El%2520Know%2520from%25... https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.982.3132&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.98...

anonporridge 4y ago

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck

bigmatto 4y ago
This was not such a problem when science was advancing slowly, but with acceleration of scientific development, this has become the retarding force. If we want to speed up science, we need to find a way of allowing truths to triumph faster.

Digory 4y ago

Kahneman hedges just a bit in his talk: " To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters." Trying to explain the small number of people who do change their minds, David McRaney has an interesting book out called How Minds Change.[0] And I imagine there are people who change minds, even outside his model. People who change their minds when it doesn't seem to help them strike me as important people to hear from. [0] https://www.econtalk.org/david-mcraney-on-how-minds-change/ https://www.econtalk.org/david-mcraney-on-how-minds-change/

agumonkey 4y ago
I've seen a strange case, where someone argued blindly, but the next day advocated for the change. He didn't say it was his own idea but he didn't told he changed his mind :)
- bombcar 4y ago
  You will find this again and again in the business world, and you can use it to your advantage. If you're arguing for a course of action, answer the objections well and then drop it. Often the person arguing against you (especially if they're "the boss") will come back a few days later and present it as basically their idea. People get emotionally tied to what they came up with, and it can take a few nights to disconnect enough to move on (even if they never admit they were "wrong").
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    People are so strange. They don't see the waste and friction due to these reflexes :) But about the 'drop' aspect, I think there's a reflex for other to argue someone to infinity if it become a belief confrontation, a kind of domination to impose their view. But if the other party drops the fight, it kills that aspect and the other person can accept the idea for its core value.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      That's exactly it; we like to pretend we're some advanced computational AI operating on pure rationality, but we're actually a bag of meat with an inferiority complex. And much of the "unreasonable rules" of society are built around exactly that, and if we abandon those we often have to relearn them again and again. Recognizing they exist can allow "the boss" to cut the issue short with a "I need to think about this" and de-escalate that way.

AlbertCory 4y ago

I was lucky enough to be in the group that ran Dr. Kahneman's talk at Google, so I was at lunch with him & 8 or so others. I asked him, "Dr. Kahneman, you've been writing about thinking for 40 years. Do you think you've changed how people think at all?" He said, "No, not even me." He proceeded to tell a story where he fell into the "eloquence trap" that he, himself, wrote about: a doctor said something, and he said to his daughter, "that doctor is very impressive!" She'd learned his lessons better than he had: she said that what mattered was how much experience the doctor had in this particular area, not how good she sounded.

robot_head 4y ago

Somewhat surprised to see Jeffery Epstein's "charity" still showing up on the front page of HN

dang 4y ago
(Edit: I interpreted your comment as asking why we'd allow this post to stay on HN's front page. The answer to that is below. If that wasn't your point, please ignore.) On HN, we generally go by article quality, not site quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22article%20quality%22%20%22site%20quality%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., and generally try to avoid guilt by association. These points both follow from the principle of intellectual curiosity that we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Reality is messier than simple heuristics, but I think the current article is a good test case. Can one be interested in Kahneman's views on adversarial collaboration and have a curious conversation about them while in no way endorsing the heinous Epstein? Clearly one can.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Bad call, dang. In this case, I was unaware of the Edge Foundation's Epstein links. The information is salient and useful. Edge itself certainly doesn't make the information evident. C.f., a site search for "Epstein" which ... conspicuously omits any prominent results for a disclosure or apology: <https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Aedge.org+epstein&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Aedge.org+epstein&ia=...>
  - dang 4y ago
    I interpreted the GP comment as asking why we allow posts from edge.org on HN. My comment is limited to answering that question. I've edited it to make this clearer.
    - 4y ago

sheerun 4y ago

Much better title than "People don't change their minds", which is false

xboxnolifes 4y ago

> The power of reasons is an illusion. The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated. The causality is reversed. People believe the reasons because they believe in the conclusion. This is one of my pet peeves with even casual conversation. Someone goes "I don't like X, because Y." You point out Y is false, and the response is "Well, I still don't like X". It used to annoy me because wanted to help people not base their views on bad information, as that's what I would want people to do for me. But now, it mostly just annoys me because of how predictable it is. You know the only good answer is to agree with them, so what's the point in even conversing?

lazide 4y ago
It’s actually even worse. For many people, disagreeing with them makes you their enemy, emotionally at least. So you’ve mostly just been alienating people while thinking you’re trying to help them. Most people have conversations to feed their emotional needs for social interactions and validation, not to learn anything. We’re interesting animals.
bombcar 4y ago
Because it's predictable you can use that. You just have to use a different form of communication than the "scientific one". Don't ask why do you not like X because that will get false reasons. Instead, ask how X affects them, how it makes them feel, etc. But this is more difficult and basically boils down to "become their friend and know them as a person".

Roark66 4y ago

I think what author describes and attributes to "everyone" is a trait of character. Yes, a common one, but not universal. From my own experience to that of (some of) my friends I can say with certainty people do change their minds.

gampleman 4y ago

At least in religion I think the idea that reasons follow belief rather than precede it is quite acknowledged. I think that's part of what in Christianity it meant when it says that faith is a gift of God. In my own conversion I felt it very intensely - my belief came over me in a sudden, external (or miraculous) way. I then spent 6 months learning everything there was to learn about my new found faith to placate my reason that I hadn't simply gone mad, but the temporal flow was clearly belief -> reason rather than the reverse. In some ways it's like falling in love. Most of us don't evaluate potential partner on a bunch of metrics and then after they reach a sufficiently high ranking we declare ourselves in love. Rather we fall in love instinctively, then evaluate the person rationally (and sometimes reject them, like when the circumstances aren't right or we can see their flaws even through the rose tinted glasses, etc.)

bombcar 4y ago
In my entire life I've only met one person who was actually convinced by the religious arguments; everyone else dug into them after a similar event. And many people can go wildly too far and try to ascribe everything to it. To take the love example, the "tricks of the trade" you see bandied about sometimes do NOT work to "make someone love you" but they can help if you have people who have already decided they love each other.

otikik 4y ago

I believe this all boils down to mental energy an efficiency. Our brains are great at pattern matching. We want to look at the landscape, see that there’s no hiding lion, and continue hunting-gathering. Constantly rechecking that there’s no lion is draining, and it also leads to less hunting-gathering. Adult humans really dislike having to do that (we even consider it a sign of mental illness) The “back and forth” between husband and wife supports this theory. Every time one of them designed one experiment, “the ball was on somebody else’s field” and they could temporarily forget about the problem until the results came back. I am sure they were two very busy individuals and being able to “move on to other things” after designing the next experiment was gratifying.

deadpannini 4y ago

> To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters. I love the model of adversarial collaboration, and I don't dispute the extremely strong influence of social bonds on knowledge formation, but Kahneman is just wrong about this. I know he's wrong because I change my mind relatively frequently, about things of at least some consequence. For a recent example, I was fairly sure that at the beginning of the pandemic, in the US, widespread, cheap testing would enable us to drive COVID cases near zero, and I wasn't shy about telling everyone I met. Obviously, I was wrong, for a variety of reasons - so I updated. That intimate experience with uncertainty and updating my own beliefs makes me wonder about Kahneman's research methods. It makes me doubt whether this question is even tractable or whether people are even legible enough to researchers to draw conclusions about this. Interestingly (and disarmingly) Khaneman is very forthright about the role his own experiences have played in convincing him that people in general don't change their minds. He writes: > I was also impressed by the fact that Anne and I didn't change our minds. I had read Kuhn and Lakatos about the robustness of paradigms, but I didn't expect that minor theories would also be impervious to evidence. also: > I will now share a personal experience of belief perseverance that I cannot shake ... However, it turns out that I only changed my mind about the evidence. My view of how the mind works didn't change at all. The evidence is gone, but the beliefs are still standing. Indeed, I cannot think of a single important opinion that I have changed as a result of losing my faith in the studies of behavioral priming, although they seemed quite important to me at the time. I think the most likely explanation for this is 1) social desirability bias has a dramatic influence on what information people make accessible about their cognition and 2) Kahneman is unusually stubborn, and his generalization from his own personality to all humankind is a manifestation of the typical mind fallacy. [0] [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy

bombcar 4y ago
That's a recent example of something that you came to quickly (obviously, covid didn't exist before) and so you were relatively easily able to get back out of it. As an approximation, it works insanely well. And as more and more things becomes "proxies for political decisions" we'll see it ramp up even more.

ouid 4y ago

I'm not sure what he means by the naive scientific method. It has always been a fundamentally adversarial process, nothing new is being discovered here. The scientific method as it has always existed requires two heuristics from you, the scientist: a hypothesis generator, a test generator (and an all important simplicity measure). The point of the method is that by making these things work adversarially, we can turn our very messy, fallible creativity, ie these heuristics, into facts about what the model isn't. Moreover no additional hypothesis of what the model is, or test which contradicts it, can derive a false fact of this form, relegating the entire concept of adversary to the meta who-gets-their-name-on-the-paper game. If Daniel has only recently started "using science adversarially", then he has only recently started doing science.