14 ms·

Facts don't change minds, structure does

• andrewmutz 1y ago
  This is a good blog post. Two thoughts about it: - Contradictory facts often shouldn't change beliefs because it is extremely rare for a single fact in isolation to undermine a belief. If you believe in climate change and encounter a situation where a group of scientists were proven to have falsified data in a paper on climate change, it really isn't enough information to change your belief in climate change, because the evidence of climate change is much larger than any single paper. It's only really after reviewing a lot of facts on both sides of an issue that you can really know enough to change your belief about something. - The facts we're exposed to today are often extremely unrepresentative of the larger body of relevant facts. Say what you want about the previous era of corporate controlled news media, at least the journalists in that era tried to present the relevant facts to the viewer. The facts you are exposed to today are usually decided by an algorithm that is trying to optimize for engagement. And the people creating the content ("facts") that you see are usually extremely motivated/biased participants. There is zero effort by the algorithms or the content creators to present a reasonably representative set of facts on both sides of an issue
  • staph 1y ago
    Thanks for your thoughts, they perfectly extend mine. I agree that it would be a sign of a very fragile belief system if it gets unwound by a single bit of contradictory evidence. And as to the "facts" that we're getting 24/7 coming out of every microwave is just a sign of complete decoupling of people's beliefs from empirical reality, in my humble opinion. Supply and demand and all that.
    • prometheus76 1y ago
      I would contend that empiricism is inadequate to discern what is real and what is true. Much of human experience and what is meaningful to being a person is not measurable nor quantifiable.
  • ianbicking 1y ago
    I remember reading an article on one of the classic rationalist blogs (but they write SO MUCH I can't possibly find it) describing something like "rational epistemic skepticism" – or maybe a better term I can't recall either. (As noted below: "Epistemic learned helplessness") The basic idea: an average person can easily be intellectually overwhelmed by a clever person (maybe the person is smarter, or more educated, or maybe they just studied up on a subject a lot). They basically know this... and also know that it's not because the clever person is always right. Because there's lots of these people, and not every clever person thinks the same thing, so they obviously can't all be right. But the average person (average with respect to whatever subject) is still rational and isn't going to let their beliefs bounce around. So they develop a defensive stance, a resistance to being convinced. And it's right that they do! If someone confronts you with the PERFECT ARGUMENT, is it because the argument is true and revelatory? Or does it involve some slight of hand? The latter is much more likely
    • ayoubd 1y ago
      Was it this one? “Epistemic learned helplessness” https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
      • ianbicking 1y ago
        Yes, that's the one, thank you!
    • mpyne 1y ago
      Was it this one? https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
    • TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      The problem isn't the PERFECT ARGUMENT, it's the argument that doesn't look like an argument at all. Take anti-vaxxers. If you try to argue with the science, you've already lost, because anti-vaxxers have been propagandised into believing they're protecting their kids. How? By being told that vaccinations are promoted by people who are trying to harm their kids and exploit the public for cash. And who tells them? People like them. Not scientists. Not those smart people who look down on you for being stupid. No, it's influencers who are just like them, part of the same tribe. Someone you could socialise with. Someone like you. Someone who only has your best interests at heart. And that's how it works. That's why the anti-vax and climate denial campaigns run huge bot farms with vast social media holdings which insert, amplify, and reinforce the "These people are evil and not like us and want to make you poor and harm your kids" messaging, combined with "But believe this and you will keep your kids safe". Far-right messaging doesn't argue rationally at all. It's deliberate and cynically calculated to trigger fear, disgust, outrage, and protectiveness. Consider how many far-right hot button topics centre on protecting kids from "weird, different, not like us" people - foreigners, intellectuals, scientists, unorthodox creatives and entertainers, people with unusual sexualities, outgroup politicians. And so on. So when someone tries to argue with it rationally, they get nowhere. The "argument" is over before it starts. It's not even about rhetoric or cleverness - both of which are overrated. It's about emotional conditioning using emotional triggers, tribal framing, and simple moral narratives, embedded with constant repetition and aggressive reinforcement.
  • cantor_S_drug 1y ago
    Many people are curious about truth. But because of gaslighting and no single source of truth and too much noise level, people have checked out completely. People know something is fishy, they know barbarians are at the gate. But they also know that the gate is 10,000 km away so they think, "Let me live my life peacefully in the meantime." They have lost hope in the system.
  • darksaints 1y ago
    To add to your second point, those algorithms are extremely easy to game by states with the resources and desire to craft narratives. Specifically Russia and China. There has actually been a pretty monumental shift in Russian election meddling tactics in the last 8 years. Previously we had the troll army, in which the primary operating tactic of their bot farms were to pose as Americans (as well as Poles, Czechs, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Brits, etc.) but push Russian propaganda. Those bot farms were fairly easy to spot and ban, and there was a ton of focus on it after the 2016 election, so that strategy was short lived. Since then, Russia has shifted a lot closer to Chinese style tactics, and now have a "goblin" army (contrasted with their troll army). This group no longer pushes the narratives themselves, but rather uses seemingly mindless engagement interactions like scrolling, upvoting, clicking on comments, replying to comments with LLMs, etc., in order to game what the social media algorithms show people. They merely push the narratives of actual Americans (not easily bannable bots) who happen to push views that are either in line with Russian propaganda, or rhetoric that Russian intelligence views as being harmful to the US. These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons: the dopamine boost to users who say abominable shit as a way of encouraging them to do more, and as a morale-killer to people who might oppose such abominable shit but see how "popular" it is. https://www.bruegel.org/first-glance/russian-internet-outage-offers-clues-about-online-goblin-army https://www.bruegel.org/first-glance/russian-internet-outage...
    • psychoslave 1y ago
      What should make us believe any other state propaganda is better, even for its own general population?
    • yorwba 1y ago
      > These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons Do they work spectacularly well, though? E.g. the article you link shows that Twitter accounts holding anti-Ukrainian views received 49 reposts less on average during a 2-hour internet outage in Russia. Even granting that all those reposts were part of an organized campaign (its hardly surprising that people reposting anti-Ukrainian content are primarily to be found in Russia) and that 49 reposts massively boosted the visibility of this content, its effect is still upper bounded by the effect of propaganda exposure on people's opinions, which is generally low. https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-never-works https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-never-w...
  • goatlover 1y ago
    The idea that people believe in climate change (or evolution) is odd considering people don't say they believe in General Relativity or atomic theory of chemistry. They just accept those as the best explanations for the evidence we have. But because climate change and evolution run counter to some people's values (often religious but also financially motivated), they get called beliefs.
    • psychoslave 1y ago
      You generally don't oppose to things you can grasp to the point you could understand how it challenges other beliefs you culturally or intuitively integrated. Evolution directly challenges the idea that humans are very special creatures in a universe where mighty mystic forces care about them a lot. Climate changes, and the weight of human industry in it, challenges directly the life style expectations of the wealthiests.
      • SkyBelow 1y ago
        To some extent, physics/chemistry/etc. challenge the notion that free will exists, but that challenge is far enough removed and rarely touched upon that people who believe in free will don't feel that modern science is attacking that belief, and the scientists working on it generally see free will or any mechanisms of the brain as far too complex when they are studying things on the order for a few particles or few molecules. Some of neurology/psychology gets a bit closer, but science of the brain doesn't have major theories that are taught on the same level nor have much impact on public policy. The closest I can think of is how much public awareness of what constitutes a mental disorder lags behind science, but that area is still constantly contested even among the researchers themselves and thus prevents a unified message being given to the public that they must then respond to (choosing to believe the science or not).
    • wredcoll 1y ago
      > But because climate change and evolution run counter to some people's values (often religious but also financially motivated), they get called beliefs Hey, weren't we just talking about propaganda?
  • zaphar 1y ago
    The best way to lie is not presenting false facts, it's curating facts to suit your narrative. It's also often that you accidentally lie to yourself or others in this way. See a great many news stories.
    • prometheus76 1y ago
      The act of curating facts itself is required to communicate anything because there are an infinite number of facts. You have to include some and exclude others, and you arrange them in a hierarchy of value that matches your sensibilities. This is necessary in order to perceive the world at all, because there are too many facts and most of them need to be filtered. Everyone does this by necessity. Your entire perceptual system and senses are undergirded by this framework. There is no such thing as "objective" because it would include all things, which means it could not be perceived by anyone.
      • __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        The subjective/objective split is useful. What good is raising the bar for objectivity such that it can never be achieved? Better to have objective just mean that nobody in the current audience cares to suggest contradictory evidence. It's for indicating what's in scope for debate, and what's settled. No need to invoke "Truth". Being too stringent about objectivity means that everything is always in scope for debate, which is a terrible place to be if you want to get anything done.
    • api 1y ago
      I often put it this way: you can lie with the truth. I feel like most people don't get this.
    • jononor 1y ago
      Another very good way to lie is to set up the framing such that any interpretation of any fact skews in your desired direction. Including which things are to be considered important/relevant, what kind of argument is considered valid/not. Done well, people might not even pick up that there is lying/misdirection involved. Rig the game.
  • mike_hearn 1y ago
    > If you believe in climate change and encounter a situation where a group of scientists were proven to have falsified data in a paper on climate change, it really isn't enough information to change your belief in climate change, because the evidence of climate change is much larger than any single paper. Although your wider point is sound that specific example should undermine your belief quite significantly if you're a rational person. 1. It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest. 2. They did it because they expected it to work. 3. If they expected it to work it's likely that they did it before and got away with it, or saw others getting away with it, or both. 4. If there's a culture of people falsifying data and getting away with it, that means there's very likely to be more than one paper with falsified data. Possibly many such papers. After all, the authors have probably authored papers previously and those are all now in doubt too, even if fraud can't be trivially proven in every case. 5. Scientists often take data found in papers at face value. That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published. Scientists also build on each other's data. Therefore, there are likely to not only be undetected fraudulent papers, but also many papers that aren't directly fraudulent but build on them without the problem being detected. 6. Therefore, it's likely the evidence base is not as robust as previously believed. 7. Therefore, your belief in the likelihood of their claims being true should be lowered. In reality how much you should update your belief will depend on things like how the fraud was discovered, whether there were any penalties, and whether the scientists showed contrition. If the fraud was discovered by people outside of the field, nothing happened to the miscreants and the scientists didn't care that they got caught, the amount you should update your belief should be much larger than if they were swiftly detected by robust systems, punished severely and showed genuine regret afterwards.
    • jmcqk6 1y ago
      You're making a chain of assumptions and deductions that are not necessarily true given the initial statement of the scenario. Just because you think those things logically follow doesn't mean that they do. You also make throw away assertions line "That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published." What is "so many claims?" The majority? 10%? 0.5%? I totally agree with you that the nuances of the situation are very important to consider, and the things you mention are possibilities, but you are too eager to reject things if you think "that specific example should undermine your belief quite significantly if you're a rational person." You made lots of assumptions in these statements and I think a rational person with humility would not make those assumptions so quickly.
  • like_any_other 1y ago
    > Say what you want about the previous era of corporate controlled news media, at least the journalists in that era tried to present the relevant facts to the viewer. If you think this reduced bias, you couldn't be more wrong - it only made the bias harder to debunk. Deciding which facts are "relevant" is one easy way to bias reporting, but the much easier, much more effective way is deciding which stories are "relevant". Journalists have their own convictions and causes, motivating which incidents they cast as isolated and random, and get buried in the news, and which are part of a wider trend, a "conversation that we as a nation must have", etc., getting front-page treatment. A typical example: And third, the failure of its findings to attract much notice, at least so far, suggests that scholars, medical institutions and members of the media are applying double standards to such studies. - https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/10/27/the-data-hinted-at-racism-among-white-doctors-then-scholars-looked-again https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/10/27/the-data-... (unpaywalled: https://archive.md/Mwjb4 https://archive.md/Mwjb4)
  • mistermann 1y ago
    [dead]
  • zahlman 1y ago
    > the previous era of corporate controlled news media... The facts you are exposed to today are usually decided by an algorithm ... But that algorithm is still corporate controlled.
  • miki123211 1y ago
    See also: the Chinese robber fallacy. Even if only 0.1% of Chinese people engaged in theft, and that would be a much lower rate than in any developed country, you'd still get a million Chinese thieves. You could show a new one every day, bombarding people with images and news reports of how untrustworthy Chinese people are. The news reports themselves wouldn't even be misinformation, as all the people shown would actually be guilty of the crimes they were accused of. Nevertheless, people would draw the wrong conclusion.
• KittenInABox 1y ago
  > If we want to counter manipulation and polarization, we need to focus on strengthening the structural integrity and resilience of our own belief systems. This means fostering internal coherence, building bridges between different templates, and cultivating narratives that are not just factually accurate, but also emotionally compelling and structurally robust. I fear we are already increasingly too late on much of these things because there also exists communities that maintain structural integrity by resisting bridge building between different cultural templates. I.E. You must refuse bridge building in order to maintain your own community, such as wizard, blackpill, or MGTOW actively discouraging bonding with women as equal people to men.
• unpaydijk 1y ago
  For some reason the article seems to really like the — symbol, even as far as replacing most of it's commas with it
  • altruios 1y ago
    That dash is indicative of AI. Unlike the "-" - which I use often - the "--" is reportedly an AI tell.
    • mrexroad 1y ago
      Eh, the whole em dash thing is a low accuracy tell. Most of my writing uses em dashes; iOS/macOS replaces "--" (dash dash) with an em dash. Fwiw, in your example, an em dash is the correct choice, not a dash.
  • RankingMember 1y ago
    Ran this through a few AI-detection analyzers and, yeah, it's being pegged as AI-written. I'm guessing the author used it to do a final tidying up (not that I think that's acceptable- just proof-read your work) and the em dashes came out in force.
• ltbarcly3 1y ago
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  • ysofunny 1y ago
    how dare other people learn to write!!!!?
  • izzydata 1y ago
    I wish more writing was framed in such a way that shows it is more of an opinion than an absolute truth. When I read the title "Why facts don't change minds" it sounds like they are explaining a natural law of the universe to you. Why can't they be framed as some ideas they have had and wanted to share?
    • johnnyanmac 1y ago
      >Why can't they be framed as some ideas they have had and wanted to share? Because if you make a weak title it wouldn't have been on HN to begin with. And thus the ideas ha have been shared with as many people.
    • dkarl 1y ago
      There's no claim to expertise or empirical support. There isn't even a claim that it applies an existing framework. Why would you think it was anything other than opinion? I get tired endless unnecessary invocations of "I could be wrong" and "this is just my opinion" as if every author needs to actively steer readers away from the mistake of assuming the author's omniscience and infallibility.
      • staph 1y ago
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  • dang 1y ago
    "Don't be snarky." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
  Aside: For the Mermaid graph, what library or how is it being shown like this?
  • staph 1y ago
    It's a brutally simple combination of `@kevingimbel/eleventy-plugin-mermaid` with `svg-pan-zoom` :)
• csours 1y ago
  I have come to believe that there is no such thing as 'true rationality' in the universe. There are true events and true facts, but rationality is a shared framework for communication. Rationality exists between people. People always have a framing story or perspective or viewpoint or system prompt for how they understand facts and events. If you want to influence beliefs you have to understand the framing story that a person is using - even when that framing story is invalid or untrue. Also, if you want to influence beliefs, you have to provide some emotional validation. You can't remove a load bearing core belief from someone's story, you can only replace it. --- Another partial explanation is trauma - you can think about 'conspiracy theories' in a number of ways, but these low information, high satisfaction theories often arise after traumatic experiences. You can't properly address the facts of the situation while a person is hurting. We should expect to see more conspiracy theories after natural and unnatural disasters. Think wildfires caused space lasers, floods caused by cloud seeding, storms caused by radar installations, melting of steel beams by various means. The people who believe these things are generally not having a good time in life. --- BONUS Link: Tim Minchin - Confirmation Bias https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1juPBoxBdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1juPBoxBdc
  • HPsquared 1y ago
    There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of them There is such a thing as valid logic, but truthful results depend on the priors being correct.
    • csours 1y ago
      Yes, I am using the word 'rationality' somewhat informally.
    • throw0101b 1y ago
      > There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of them See: > Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony. > The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge, while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain that the justification of basic beliefs does not depend on other beliefs. Internalism and externalism debate whether justification is determined solely by mental states or also by external circumstances. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology A philosophy joke: > When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge. * Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/gettier_it/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
• joelg 1y ago
  my understanding (which is definitely not exhaustive!) is that the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced than is popularly retold, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still. Paul Feyerabend has a book called Against Method in which he essentially argues that it was the Catholic Church who was following the classical "scientific method" of weighing evidence between theories, and Galileo's hypothesis was rationally judged to be inferior to the existing models. Very fun read.
  • staph 1y ago
    Thanks for the book recommendation! I wasn't there for the Galileo spat, so I can't be certain, but I always appreciate more reading.
  • marcofloriano 1y ago
    I completely agree with your comment. The common narrative about Galileo and the Church is often oversimplified and overlooks the intellectual context of the time. As you pointed out, it wasn’t about a crude Biblical literalism—after all, even centuries before Galileo, figures like Saint Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, already accepted that the Earth is spherical. By Galileo’s era, the Catholic Church was well aware of this scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and natural philosophy. The dispute was far more about competing models and the standards of evidence required, not a refusal to accept reason or observation. Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?
    • ajuc 1y ago
      > Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise? Same way Galileo could be correct about Earth circling the Sun despite basing it on incorrect assumptions :)
    • Asraelite 1y ago
• PaulHoule 1y ago
  Feelings aren't facts but they are important for persuasion. The methods most able to create radical change are the gentlest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument I disagree with Rapoport's taxonomy, not least "Chinese brainwashing" in the Korean war was not Pavolivan and was rather closer to the T-group method developed in Bethel, ME. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-groups
  • dgb23 1y ago
    Interesting. I often hear/read the term "steelmanning" instead, as in the opposite of constructing a straw man argument.
    • PaulHoule 1y ago
      Reminds me of the time that I was in a class on geoengineering and was supposed to have a debate with another student about "Should we fund BECCS in Brazil or fund efforts to protect the rainforest?" (I was advocating for the first) Two days before the debate I went to a talk about the rainforest with my debating partner, then the night before his friend was stabbed at a bar trying to break up a fight and he rode up to Syracuse in an ambulance so it turned out I was well prepared to give his presentation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... the economics of which are particularly good for Brazilian ethanol plants
• idontwantthis 1y ago
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  • idontwantthis 1y ago
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    • immibis 1y ago
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      • bigstrat2003 1y ago
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      • twojacobtwo 1y ago
        I know it's overused and incorrectly applied, but I can't get past the thought that the people doing this have a silent, burning mentality of "Rule 1: You don't talk about fight club!"
  • johnnyanmac 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • idontwantthis 1y ago
      Yeah honestly I’m afraid to find out what he actually believes.
  • CyberDildonics 1y ago
    Same reason for religion. Community and a feeling of self righteousness.
    • idontwantthis 1y ago
      With religion it’s different. To take the example from TFA, well the Bible says the Sun goes around the Earth. He doesn’t even get an inch deep like that. Specifically I’m talking about the “rigged” 2020 election. He has no evidence, not even fake evidence and isn’t interested in trying to find any.
• skybrian 1y ago
  I'm wary of making an "arguments are soldiers" assumption where facts are mostly useful for making arguments, in an attempt to change people's minds. We should be curious about what's going on in the world regardless of what ideologies we might find appealing. Knowing what's going on in the world is an end in itself. An article with some interesting evidence in it is useful even if you disagree with the main argument. Facts may not change minds, but we should still support people who do the reporting that brings us the facts.
  • staph 1y ago
    I just really wish most people had this same kind of attitude, but can't in good faith say that's what I'm observing.
• jfarmer 1y ago
  CS Peirce has a famous essay "The Fixation of Belief" where he describes various processes by which we form beliefs and what it takes to surprise/upset/unsettle them. The essay: https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html This blog post gestures at that idea while being an example of what Peirce calls the "a priori method". A certain framework is first settled upon for (largely) aesthetic reasons and then experience is analyzed in light of that framework. This yields comfortable conclusions (for those who buy the framework, anyhow). For Peirce, all inquiry begins with surprise, sometimes because we've gone looking for it but usually not. About the a priori method, he says: “[The a priori] method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the others which we have noticed. But its failure has been the most manifest. It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest. And so from this, which has been called the a priori method, we are driven, in Lord Bacon's phrase, to a true induction.”
  • CGMthrowaway 1y ago
    Wow. I'm reminded of a great essay/blgo I read years ago that I'll never find again that said a good, engaging talk/presentation has to have an element of surprise. More specifically, you start with an exposition of what your audience already knows/believes, then you introduce your thesis which is SURPRISING in terms of what they already know. Not too out of the realm of belief, but just enough. The bigger/more thought-diverse the audience, the harder this is to do.
    • mswen 1y ago
      I had a grad school mentor William Wells who taught us something similar. A good research publication or presentation should aim for "just the right amount of surprise". Too much surprise and the scientific audience will dismiss you out of hand. How could you be right while all the prior research is dead wrong? Conversely, too little surprise and the reader / listener will yawn and say but of course we all know this. You are just repeating standard knowledge in the field. Despite the impact on audience reception we tend to believe that most fields would benefit from robust replication studies and the researchers shouldn't be penalized for confirming the well known. And, sometimes there really is paradigm breaking research and common knowledge is eventually demonstrated to be very wrong. But often the initial researchers face years or decades of rejection.
• meowface 1y ago
  Some of the core ideas here seem good, but the node/edge distinction feels too fuzzy. The node "Climate Change Threat" is a claim. Is the node "Efficiency" a claim? Can one challenge the existence of Efficiency? If one instead challenges the benefit of Efficiency, isn't that an edge attack? I could give a bunch of other examples where the nodes in the article don't feel like apples-to-apples things. I feel less motivated to try to internalize the article due to this.
  • mcswell 1y ago
    The edges are labeled by transitive verbs, where the arrow points from the subject of that verb to the direct object. (I'm counting particle verbs, like "leads to", as verbs.) The nodes are labeled by nouns. If you can change a noun to a verb, I guess you would be changing what is an edge and what is a node. Example: In the article's first diagram, there is a node labeled "Innovation". This could be replaced by a node labeled "Capitalist" and a node labeled "Improvement", with an arrow from the first to the second labeled "innovates." So yes, if you can replace a node by an edge (and vice versa, although I don't give an example), this node vs. edge thing is fuzzy.
  • keyserj 1y ago
    I think the structure inherently enables each node to be a claim (like "this thing exists"), but that there's value in making a node even if that node's claim is not particularly disagreeable, because the edges to that node might be disagreeable, or to provide more detail about how one node relates to another (e.g. through some intermediate node). In this case, maybe the main value in modeling "Efficiency" is to convey how innovation might lead to profit. To me, it feels less fuzzy when you assume that all nodes and edges imply their own claims, and that it's just a matter of whether or not those claims are worth arguing. The fuzziness imo is based on the fact that the curator picks which nodes and edges exist, which therefore determines which claims exist and can be agreed or disagreed with, not to mention the overall legibility of the graph itself. But I would argue that a causal graph like this is better at representing reality than something like an argument tree, and that, while it might be fuzzy to determine which nodes should exist, at least there's less opinion involved about where nodes should be placed in relation to each other. Which imo makes the structure easier to refine given time and feedback.
• mike_hearn 1y ago
  I'm struggling to understand this article. I think it's for a couple of reasons: 1. The capitalism graph seems OK but the climate change graph doesn't look right. I've never heard anyone argue that "resilient communities" automatically lead to "policy changes". What does that mean? If you have a resilient community already, why would you need to change anything? It seems to suggest that people with this belief system would end up in an infinite loop of wanting to change policies even when the original motivating problem is solved, which sounds like a very uncharitable view of climate activists. 2. After setting up this very abstract argument, the author ends by claiming, "The evidence, and the argument of this post, suggest [truth doesn't determine what people believe]: structure, coherence, and emotional resonance are far more important for the persistence and spread of beliefs". But he hasn't supplied any arguments. He outlined an abstract theoretical model, but it makes no testable predictions and he doesn't try to prove it's correct. Then he claims there are no real debates in the west about climate change, vaccines, or race, it's all driven by the evil Ruskies "creating social chaos". This claim isn't linked in any way to the first part with the graphs. I've written about this belief twice in the past. https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-not-c66129e5e3f5 https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n... https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... It's all based on a bunch of academic papers that don't replicate and which use pseudo-scientific methodologies. They misuse ML in ways that generate noise, identify random people as "Russian bots", conclude that "Russian bots" support every possible opinion simultaneously and from there assume there must be some nefarious psychological strategy behind it. In reality they're just doing bad social science and casting the results through the prism of their ideological biases. It works because social science is full of people who are easily impressed by maths they don't understand, and who are surrounded by people with identical ideologies to themselves (often extreme ones). So there's nobody to give them a reality check. Eventually people who understand computer science come along and write a rebuttal, but academia is a closed system so they just ignore it and keep pumping journalists/politicians full of conspiracy theories and misinformation. Given that, it's kind of ironic that the author is writing about the difficulty of changing people's minds with truth.
  • zahlman 1y ago
• newsclues 1y ago
  Structure for facts and information is just communication. You can have the facts but not be persuasive due to poor communication skills.
• speak_plainly 1y ago
  The core of the problem lies not in facts failing to persuade, but in our obsession with trying to change minds. We've developed systems to facilitate this. Parliamentary debate, for instance, was meant to force parties to justify their positions through public reasons, not private convictions. Religious institutions, too, have long shaped minds with varying degrees of success. But attempts to reshape humanity, especially on a grand scale, have consistently produced devastating and unintended consequences. We now live in an age where political expedience trumps truth; what matters is not whether something is right, but whether it plays well. The public is expected to absorb politicized half-truths while being shielded from the real issues....because complexity isn’t expedient. The current obsession with labeling ideas as “misinformation” or “disinformation” is a desperate, often incoherent attempt to control discourse, and it breeds more cynicism than clarity. In the end, good ideas tend to survive, but not on any schedule we can manage. Trying to micromanage thought or the flow of information is not only futile, it’s unworthy of the very rationality we claim to protect.
  • dgb23 1y ago
    You say the misinformation label is counterproductive. But what if we cannot even agree on what the facts are? There's no productive discussion to be had. We cannot solve problems collaboratively when facts are ignored or denied.
    • speak_plainly 1y ago
      Disagreement about facts is not new and you're assuming too much about how truth operates in public discourse. Obviously, facts matter but disagreement is rarely about facts themselves. What counts as 'fact' is often embedded in a web of assumptions, models, and values. A lot of what passes as fact are merely claims dressed up as indisputable but often laden with interpretation, ideology, or selective framing. To say there's 'no productive discussion' unless facts are agreed upon is to misunderstand how knowledge and consensus actually work. History shows that productive discourse often begins in spite of disagreement over facts. Scientific progress, legal systems, and democratic deliberation rely not on perfect consensus but on procedures that tolerate disagreement and test claims over time. Labeling something as 'misinformation' may feel like asserting the truth, but epistemologically it's simple a kind of speech act... one that can shut down inquiry rather than promote it. It assumes a finality that's likely not justified, and worse, it can become a tool of political expedience. This is especially dangerous when wielded by institutions that are pursuing their own interests, are fallible, or are compromised. The path to truth is not paved with censorship and labeling. It's built through dialogue, humility, and robust mechanisms for testing competing claims. Dissent is not the enemy of truth, it's often the precondition.
• felineflock 1y ago
  In the "Climate Change Threat" example, one vector of attack is when the policy changes do not lead to renewable energy adoption or to reduced emissions. That justifies the questioning of whether the climate change was really motivating the policy change or just being used as pretext.
  • mcswell 1y ago
    That idea suggests there might be another way to get to the desired goal, if that goal is renewable energy adoption (quite aside from whether that goal results in reduced emissions). We have solar panels on our house, and recently installed a heat pump with gas furnace backup in place of an AC (for summer) + gas furnace (for winter). We also replaced our gas water heater (near the end of its life) with a heat pump water heater, and I drive an EV (not Tesla :)). All these were partly paid for by various tax rebates. The result is that our electric bill is zero, and our gas bill has plummeted (I think it will be nearly zero), and I spend zero at the gas station and the oil change place. One should be able to sell that idea to anyone who wants to reduce their expenses, and expects to live in a house for a few years to a decade to break even, and to drive their car for five years or so. Of course the current administration is doing its best to eliminate those tax benefits...
    • asdff 1y ago
      The thing is with all of these improvements is that if they were so easy to implement for other people, everyone would do them. It might be better to ask why people aren't installing this stuff if they save money over time? The answer is most people really don't have very much money available beyond what can cover existing routine costs. For a lot of people if they wanted to replace their water heater they would have to take on debt or part with an asset to afford that. Yes, on the whole the cost is amortized, but you still need to produce significant capital up front to make it happen at all. And maybe the water heater isn't the only couple hundred dollar purchase you've been putting on the backburner in your life. As a result, where you find homes outfitted like yours, you tend to also find incomes well above the cost of living.
• andrewstuart 1y ago
  Minds can’t be changed when a decision was based on emotion. One day I told a friend how I could make no sense of my girlfriend’s behavior in some situation. He said to me “you still think people make decisions on logic. Many people make their decisions on how they feel emotionally. Logic and facts have nothing to do with it.” Suddenly a light switched on and i realized that I’m a typical computer person who thinks that everything is based on logic and if you can just explain clearly enough, explain the facts, then the other person will change their mind when they see the facts. It doesn’t work that way. Computer people have real trouble getting their head around this concept.
• fvdessen 1y ago
  In 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' the argument is made that the most important cultural changes happen outside the debate, where new structures of thought are being built without being noticed. As without a competing thought structure we are unable to even perceive the new structure. It is the dissonances and the debates that lets us introspect our own ideas. Without the dissonance we do not notice new ideas taking hold of us and changing ourselves, and it is only unnoticed that truly radical changes can take place.
• joules77 1y ago
  In the seminaries of the world they don't teach how to make up clever stories to entrap people. For that you go to Marketing, PR or Sales school. And ofcourse the people who come out of these schools think they are very clever because they sold some widgets or politicians to the masses by some deadline. But have you heard of a sales org or a marketing dept that has been running for thousand years? They barely ever survive few decades as a coherent unit if ever. For the curious go check what the neighborhood seminary teaches. The Church (and all other religious systems) haven't stood for thousands of year through the fall of empires, nations, civil wars, revolutions, plagues, famines, collapse of economic systems, internal schisms, enlightenment, progress in science/tech etc because of the stories they tell. In fact the stories have been rewritten, branched, mutated, merged with other stories thousands of times to the point we have thousands of different versions of these stories. There is no "narrative domination". The Church has survived because when people Suffer due to the fall of empire/nations/banks/economies, war, plagues, famine, disasters etc where else do people go? Do they all head to house of the local system analyst/graph theorist?
  • moate 1y ago
    So what about the checks notes tens if not hundreds of thousands of religions and religious belief structures that have fallen apart since the inception of humanity? This is some very weird survivor bias. Also, philosophically, a the whole of organized religion is "clever stories to entrap people" from a non-believer's standpoint.
    • gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
      I would certainly like to compare the proportion of memetic* material in the IP of religious vs commercial orgs that are holdovers from more than 700 years ago. *(equivalent to "genetic" in bio organisms) Archaic phrasings and occurrences of latin should be ignored to make it more balanced :) yep the survivor bias is quite.. a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival
• pier25 1y ago
  This seems way too logical. Humans are not, for the most part, rational and logical creatures.
  • mcswell 1y ago
    I resemble that remark.
• zebomon 1y ago
  Very engaging look at a very difficult topic to approach analytically. I'm reminded of something I learned about the founder of Stormfront, the internet's first white supremacist forum. His child went on to attend college away from home, her first time away from her family, and over a period of roughly two years, she attended dinners with a group of Jewish students who challenged each of her beliefs one at a time. Each time, as she accepted the evidence her friends presented to her about a particular belief, she nonetheless would integrate the new information with her racist worldview. This continued piece by piece until there was nothing left of her racist worldview at all. It's both heartening and disheartening at the same time, because if this person can change her mind after almost two decades of constant indoctrination during her formative years, then surely anyone can change their mind. That's the heartening part: the disheartening part is, of course, that the effort it took is far from scalable at present and much more difficult to apply to someone who remains plugged into whatever information sources they are getting their current fix of nonsense from.
  • mensetmanusman 1y ago
    AI chat bots in the future may be a part of ritual mind cleansing.
    • staph 1y ago
      Wait are you writing from the past?
  • ilaksh 1y ago
    I remember my first year in college as being the time when I solidified my own first worldview. Prior to that, I had some ideas like the existence of God (in some form) that I was ambivalent about or maybe deferring final judgement. That's when I decided that I was an atheist. Coincidentally, around the same time my twin brother became a serious Christian. He was socially integrated into a group. He finished college. I did not. Then years later, maybe late 20s or early 30s, I became convinced that I had been wrong about my government my whole life and that they were not trustworthy. 9/11 being a false flag (which I still believe) was evidence of that. The interesting thing was at the time when I was in New York I had completely accepted the idea that those three buildings had all turned into dust because the jet hit them. I remember walking around lower Manhattan to pick up a check and the dust was just coating everything. I had even done some word processing on one of the twin towers leases shortly before the event while temping at Wachtell Lipton. At the time I made no connection. Anyway, I think an underappreciated aspect of belief graphs is their connection to social groups and identity. It was much easier for me to question institutions when I already felt more marginalized and actually partly blamed society for it being so hard for me to handle my needs and find a place in it. Another aspect of group membership and beliefs is practical. When groups are competing strategically, they often do so in ways that are not particularly ethical. It's much easier to justify this if you think of the other group as being deeply flawed, evil, invaders, etc. Although some of these demonization s of the other group do have some kernel of truth to them, they are largely oversimplifications in the belief graphs leading to dangerous inaccuracies. What are the practical structural and cultural differences that lead to the group divisions? They largely seem geographic, economic, ethnic. Could a more sophisticated, better integrated, and more accurate belief system help? Or do the social structures and networks largely define the groups? Are we just basically mammalian ant colonies? Brutally fighting each other for dominance any time there is a resource conflict? If the other side seems to be trying to hog important resources any time they get a chance, you perceive that you are not playing a fair game. It's not a civil interaction. The other doesn't play by the rules or tell the truth or leave any subtly in discourse. So why should your group, unless it wants to get wiped out? In my worldview the faint hope is that having more abundance of resources will somehow lead to more civility.
• csense 1y ago
  This accurately describes how my brain works. My thought process is like a bunch of graph nodes, and when new information doesn't "fit", it puts tensions on the links, and I want to resolve that tension. I can...feel it happening inside my mind when I think, more or less? -- It's hard to describe Resolving that tension may occur in several ways, in order of increasing significance: - Rejecting the new information - Refining the graph (splitting a node representing a concept into multiple sub-nodes representing sub-concepts with their own relationships) - Making local modifications to the graph - Making sweeping architectural changes to the graph as a whole The author seems to imply that cognitive biases are an inherent qualitative problem that is fundamentally forced to arise from this graph structure. I personally respectfully disagree. In my view, cognitive biases are a quantitative problem, incorrectly setting the threshold at which a large reorganization should occur. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is qualitatively a sound epistemological principle -- but to correctly apply it, you must quantitatively set a reasonable threshold for "extraordinary." I feel like we need to get better at understanding the graph structure of people we disagree with. The best example I can think of is the abortion debate [1]: If you accept the premise "Life begins at conception" [2], the pro-life camp has an enormously strong case; the rest of the graph between that premise and "Abortion should be illegal" is very strong (it's mostly tremendously well-reinforced nodes in near-universal moral foundations, like "Do unto others" or "Murder should be illegal"). Arguments against abortion are frequently just bad when looked at from the graph point of view: They often don't directly confront the premise "Life begins at conception," nor do they attack the graph between the premise and conclusion. [3] [1] I'm personally in the pro-choice camp; I do not accept the premise that a human fetus has the same moral status as a fully grown human. [2] "Life" here is not in the technical biological sense, but something more akin to "The ethical standing of human-equivalent sentience." (Bacteria and protozoa and so on are biologically alive, but nobody moralizes about killing them en masse by, e.g., cooking your food.) [3] If you're curious about my own views on this specific subject, I've talked about them here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255493#36270990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255493#36270990
  • mcswell 1y ago
    You're absolutely right about the abortion debate; the entire pro-life argument makes sense only if you deny that "life begins at conception". But I don't believe I've ever heard the pro-choice camp attack that axiom; instead, it's always about the mother having control over her body, which just ignores the pro-life axiom. (If life begins at conception, then abortion is not about the mother's body, it's about the pre-born's body.) No wonder the two sides don't communicate.
• ranger207 1y ago
  I've had this mental model for a while now, but this post lays it out better than I could've. I think the most important part of the post is this part of the conclusion: > For years, our main defense against misinformation and manipulation has been to double down on “truth”—to fact-check, debunk, and moderate. These efforts are important, but they rest on the assumption that truth is the main determinant of what people believe. The evidence, and the argument of this post, suggest otherwise: structure, coherence, and emotional resonance are far more important for the persistence and spread of beliefs. I'm still friends with one or two people who are hat-wearing MAGA supporters. WE stopped talking politics after 2018 or so, but between 2016 and 2018, and still occasionally since, I get a glimpse into their belief graph. Sometimes their facts are incorrect, but that's less common than simply them interpreting the same facts in a different light. Occasionally they'll have an interpretation of a fact pattern that I find more compelling than the interpretation I find in more liberal spaces. (The Democrat party is, after all, not the best at hypocrisy.) These patterns are the place where the point of the blog post comes out most clearly: most people aren't motivated by facts and logic; they're motivated by a vast network of feelings and emotions where each point reinforces all the other points and an individual fact is less important for its truth than its reinforcement of the overall belief graph. The most interesting thing about the MAGA belief graph though is its overall structure and maintenance. There is approximately a third of the US that simply has an entirely different basis of belief in the world than the other two thirds. How is it maintained? How does normal everyday contact between the two groups not reconcile the foundations of the two belief systems? It's not a difference in facts, although that does come up occasionally. For example, the sudden change in the truth of the Epstein client list and the effort of the MAGA belief system maintainers (news orgs, influencers, etc) to excise it from the belief graph has had some interesting effects. But the interesting part is the methods used, the way the belief system reacts to influencers and others that shape the belief system, and how particular facts and opinions are used to reinforce the effects of both new and existing parts of the belief graph. Looking at my MAGA acquaintances and seeing their belief system from the outside has made those methods and reactions more legible, and has allowed me to notice some of the times those same methods and reactions pop up in other communities. For example, I dislike the focus on fact-checking, because too often the facts are the same on both sides, and it's only a difference in interpretation. Then people who agree with the fact checkers prove to themselves that the other side is unable to see truth, while people who disagree with the fact checkers prove to themselves that the other side twists truth into lies. Yet people still push for fact checking despite the fact it only reinforces both sides opinion of themselves rather than having any chance of changing the mind of anyone on the other side. Unfortunately I am lazy or else I would've taken notes of examples of the methods and reactions used to reinforce a belief system, rather than just vague half-recollected memories that form my own belief graph. Regardless, I think it's important for people to look at their own belief system and, when presented with new facts or arguments, examining them and how they fit into their belief system, and see if maybe the argument is relying less on pure facts and more on emotional ties to the rest of their belief system.
• deleted 1y ago
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• ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
  > Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed Who am I to doubt the Church's interpretation but this seems like it literally reads as if the scripture is saying that the sun stood still and the Earth revolves around it?
• kentlyons 1y ago
  For an overview of the psychology of how people understand things (and don't!) I highly recommend this paper. It highlights a lot of ways our brains take shortcuts in terms of actually understanding things. And that facts play only one particular role amongst many other factors. Keil, F. C. (2006). Explanation and understanding. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 57(1), 227-254. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3034737/pdf/nihms268236.pdf https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3034737/pdf/nihms26...
• wjholden 1y ago
  To the author: I love this idea, but your blog has two problems that made it less enjoyable for me to read. The first is the pull quotes. I find them confusing and unnecessary, especially when they repeat sentences in the preceding paragraph. The second is that I got stuck on the moving graphs while scrolling on my phone. I suggest making them smaller with a different background color or simply make them static images.
  • staph 1y ago
    I really appreciate this feedback, I'll look into both of those before the next post. Just wanted to say thanks.
  • wintermutestwin 1y ago
    Just to add to this: I couldn’t read the text in the white boxes of the graphs. Very unfortunate choices of colors…
• 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  "Belief" doesn't actually mean "to believe", as in "I think A is true and B is false". "Belief" is the faith, trust, or alignment with in an idea planted in one's head. It has nothing to do with factual or true information. You can simultaneously know something is untrue, and have belief in it. You can't change minds because "the mind" (in this context) is the personal identity and ego of an individual, of which their "tribe" is a huge part. Any information that conflicts with the narrative of their identity or tribe will be rejected, because it threatens their identity or tribe. To question one's identity causes a crisis which most people are not capable of dealing with. The more you attack those things, the stronger they will defend them. The "culture war" is literally just that: one culture attacking another culture on its fundamental nature. This is like Christians vs Muslims. The only way to "win" that war is complete destruction. If you want the war to end without that, you're gonna have to stop fighting and come to some kind of truce.
  • duderific 1y ago
    I feel like what we're seeing now is that the uneasy truce which used to exist is breaking down. Each side is more or less openly calling for the destruction of the other, and not seeing each other as human beings.
  • kubanczyk 1y ago
    I lived through the fall of communism, so I've seen the "win" happening without any destruction. Just the arguments had to be a lot stronger than some pixels on shiny screens.
  • RumourRider 1y ago
    > You can't change minds because "the mind" (in this context) is the personal identity and ego of an individual, of which their "tribe" is a huge part. Any information that conflicts with the narrative of their identity or tribe will be rejected, because it threatens their identity or tribe. To question one's identity causes a crisis which most people are not capable of dealing with. The more you attack those things, the stronger they will defend them. This sounds like the friend-enemy distinction by Carl Schmitt.
• ngriffiths 1y ago
  In practice I think people often don't see the full structure of their own belief graph. Parts of it are clear but for 99% of important issues, it's more fuzzy than portrayed in the figures here. I still think this is an illuminating way of looking at it! Another major factor is that while the graph may be fuzzy, the people we trust are clear. Only those people are allowed to "fill in" the missing pieces, and I think it takes a lot of work to do that, so it totally makes sense. If the takeaway is "don't expect conflicting facts to convince your audience" I agree with that, but the reason is they don't trust you, not the conflicting graphs, and the trust is not really a consequence of the graph structure. (Also, I was writing about similar stuff recently here: https://blog.griffens.net/blog/no-one-reads-page-28/ https://blog.griffens.net/blog/no-one-reads-page-28/)
• xwkd 1y ago
  Galileo and the church were both correct.
• zahlman 1y ago
  > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. TFA is about the meta level of what persuasive arguments look like. I see several examples in the comments here of people appearing to share their favourite object examples of how such and such nefarious force is causing people to believe bad things with propaganda — according to them and the sources they trust. If you do this, you are missing the point completely. Instead, consider privately examining the opposed memeplex to understand why someone else might find it convincing — how their values might be understood, charitably. Re-evaluate how you know what you know; recognize the basis of your own position, and assess the soundness of that "structure" (as the author terms it). Recognize who you need to implicitly trust, and how much, in order to accept that reasoning. Consider why other people might not trust the same authorities you do. (Consider the possibility that other people might be able to trace direct harm done to themselves, to those authorities.) Recognize that reasoning from entirely absurd premises is still reasoning; consider that others do reason. This is why your own (sane, to you) premise does not resonate: it does not fit in that framework. > So when you encounter someone whose worldview seems impenetrable, remember: you’re not just arguing with a person, you’re engaging with a living, self-stabilizing information pattern—one that is enacted and protected by the very architecture of human cognition. > Truth matters—but it survives and spreads only when it is woven into a structure that people can inhabit. Time spent on the Internet complaining about others' structures, is not time spent weaving truth into them. On the contrary, should those others see you, you will only activate their defense mechanisms.
• tk90 1y ago
  If you found this interesting, I highly recommend reading "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It's deeply impacted how I think of morality and politics from a societal and psychological point of view. Some ideas in the book: - Humans are tribal, validation-seeking animals. We make emotional snap judgments first and gather reasons to support those snap judgments second. - The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left) is because they have a very consistent and shared understanding and definitions of what Haidt calls the 5 "moral taste receptors" - care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Whereas the left trades off that cohesive understanding with diversity.
  • thelittlenag 1y ago
    I've really enjoyed Haidt's book, though its really a couple of different books in one. I need to read his other work. To your point about left and right, an interesting point I heard recently is that the left is coalition-driven whereas the right is consensus-driven (at least in US politics). Mapping this back to Haidt, one of his findings is that the left tends to greatly emphasize one or two of the "moral taste receptors", with the right having a roughly equal emphasis between them. It isn't clear to me how these two points might explain each other, but I do wonder if there isn't some self-reinforcement there. If there is, I wonder how/if that might explain political systems more widely.
    • scns 1y ago
      > I need to read his other work. I can recommend his Happiness Hypothesis.
  • moate 1y ago
    >>The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left) Citation excruciatingly needed. This feels like recency bias imo. The Right (I'm assuming we're going US here?) is a coalition of people all walks just as much as the left. I mean, right now large chunks Trump voters are rioting over the Epstein non-release and all the people who were in it for the tax breaks are trying to convince them to stop.
• bentt 1y ago
  It’s worth asking ourselves “When was the last time I changed my mind?” It’s hard to really recall because the belief rewiring required seems to play havoc with our memory.
  • ethan_smith 1y ago
    Keeping a "mind-change journal" where you document when and why your views shifted on topics can help overcome hindsight bias and reveal your actual belief structure patterns over time.
  • RumourRider 1y ago
    I can answer that quite easily. I had a long held belief that Hitler escaped to South America. This belief BTW isn't that not that uncommon. This is because many other Nazis escaped to South America (including Martin Bormann) and it is perpetuated by Slop rubbish like "Hunting Hitler" TV series, stories about Hotel Bariloche etc. The reason I no longer believe it is because I was ready to unbelieve it. I was no longer personally invested in it. I was personally invested in it because I believed it was "secret knowledge". I finally accepted that it did not happen when I watched Mark Felton on Youtube do a 6 part series talking about the soviet investigation into Hitler's death. If I had watched that series several years earlier I wouldn't have accepted the facts contained within it.
  • _ea1k 1y ago
    I changed my mind about batteries for stationary storage fairly recently. The 1k reports that seemed biased (and still seem biased) didn't help. The understanding that I had not calculated depreciation correctly helped, as did a better understanding of the pricing models for the most efficient plants vs the so called "peaked plants". The world of reasons was much more complex and interesting than I had thought.
• nitwit005 1y ago
  The Galileo example is messy. I don't think they cared deeply about the issue as implied here. There's obvious power in being the only ones allowed to say what God thinks about an issue. They wanted to maintain that monopoly.
• cgio 1y ago
  Is a fair summary of this that in a belief system attacking any of its individual components can compromise the system itself? I would not find this surprising, actually rather intuitive. The insights I would be finding really interesting are the unexpected/unassessed on my end, e.g. how much harder it is to attack each of the individual components by their attributes, or if there is a type of component that is easier to compromise (e.g. edges vs nodes). Or how different systems compose over time (e.g. the venn diagram between flat earthers and Christians has significantly changed since Galileo's time).
• butlike 1y ago
  I was on board until I realized there can be an infinite number of "nodes" (as defined in the post) between one another. The idea of destabilization/destruction of ideas works in the macro examples defined in the post, but may not be effective in practice, where the amount of major nodes between one idea and the next is opaque. Any mapping of the destruction of one idea node in hindsight will suffer survivorship bias with the mapping seemingly sublimely simple. Hindsight is, as they say, always 20/20.
• simpaticoder 1y ago
  Lovely article, and he hints at something that's been on my mind lately, about how the internet enables collisions between groups that cannot (and often should not) mix. For example, the quiet, thoughtful academic giving insightful analysis of Plato's Symposium getting shouted down and called rude names. Or a rowdy bunch of young gamer kids being scolded by a priggish group of college kids for being politically incorrect. The loss of friction, the loss of gate-keeping, sounds good but feels really bad. It's like how we value biodiversity and so lament and control "invasive species" to keep these unique and interesting pockets of the biosphere alive. As a society, we benefit from having quieter, softer, kinder places where sensitive, smart people can do intense work, and yet we are ALSO served by the louder, harder, harsher places where the fighters go. But if we allow these two spaces to mix, the former is quickly eradicated, the latter loses not just its purpose, but eventually the former can no longer offer better fighting tools to the latter. Perhaps this effect has a name, or has been talked about by a more articulate author?
• isaacremuant 1y ago
  Yet another skimmable post from someone very aligned to one corporate/US party centric set of views that believes everyone else is "simply manipulated" and therefore they'll just try to "reach them" via more manipulation. Or maybe you're just wrong in peddling government/corporate bullshit as is? Maybe others have lived through things and don't align themselves to corporate or political power A or B and therefore will seem contrarian against the drowning flow of "good propaganda"? Many of us still remember how "believe in science" was used to shut people up about simple corruption and hygiene theater. If you weren't in the right side of history (anti authoritarian) then, your complains ring hollow. The whole "<X country> bad" is also such a tired narrative from the Anglo countries that can't stop invading countries for oil and supporting genocide every chance they get.
• deleted 1y ago
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• CommenterPerson 1y ago
  Hesitate to bring up politics here, but it's hard not to view the divide in the US in terms of this framework. I'm very much a progressive. But it seems focusing on lots of different (and divisive) issues affecting small parts of the population .. it exposes a lot of weaknesses to the other side to exploit. On the other hand, liberal politicians have ignored basic things like jobs, wages, housing (yes, the Uniparty is in the pockets of the oligarchs). Those are things which affect a lot of people on both sides and are worth much more effort. The results of the NYC mayoral primary show this clearly. Yet, the Democrat leaders are all in hiding, and even worse, working to undermine the NYC primary. Together with the so called liberal newspaper. Sad!
• energy123 1y ago
  Self-interest and identity is more important than what the article touches on. People form beliefs based on what serves their self-interest, with made-up lies as a front. This is why you can accurately predict people's political beliefs by simply knowing their demographics. It is downstream of self-interest. You can't change people's minds if doing so undermines their identity or their self-interest.
• ropable 1y ago
  Good article, but I found it a little too abstract to derive much actionable information. IMO the most useful point is this quote: So when you encounter someone whose worldview seems impenetrable, remember: you’re not just arguing with a person, you’re engaging with a living, self-stabilizing information pattern—one that is enacted and protected by the very architecture of human cognition.
• throw4847285 1y ago
  No mention of Kuhn or Lakatos? I don't know why people keep trying to reinvent philosophy of science without doing any of the reading. Well, I do know. Reading philosophy is hard. But that's no excuse.
• bicepjai 1y ago
  The post argues that people cling to beliefs not because they ignore facts, but because belief-change requires restructuring entire systems of interconnected ideas that is emotionally and psychologically demanding. This reminds me of a passage from yuval harari book Nexus : “…… even the most truthful accounts of reality can never represent it in full. There are always some aspects of reality that are neglected or distorted in every representation truth then isn’t a one-to-one representation of reality rather truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring our aspects, no account of reality is hundred percent accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than the others” So belief system can be thought of perceived structured reality in one’s mind organized around some supporting facts. It would be valuable for researchers to examine and model what these belief system structure DAGs look like for groups with opposing views on major issues, such as climate change or democracy
• keyserj 1y ago
  I'm a big fan of modeling causal structures like this - I think having a diagram is a really good way of getting on the same page and making conversations more constructively focused on points that each party can follow and precisely provide counterpoints for. I appreciate reading an article about this! I feel like our society would benefit a lot from investing more in this kind of information management, but it's not particularly flashy. I'm working on an app[1] for building these structures, centered around problems and solutions, with the addition that each node or edge can have its own structured auxiliary information, e.g. scores for intuitions, argument trees for supporting/critiquing the claims implied by nodes/edges, questions for identifying unknowns. Here's an example[2] of the two diagrams in the article as they'd be in the app. I want it to be easier for our discussions to be constructive, and I think software can reduce the effort required for it. [1] https://ameliorate.app/ https://ameliorate.app/ [2] https://ameliorate.app/keyserj/facts-dont-change-minds-article https://ameliorate.app/keyserj/facts-dont-change-minds-artic...
• cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  > “Attacking the connections between ideas can force a belief system to reroute its logic, making it less direct, more convoluted, and sometimes less persuasive—even if the system doesn’t collapse outright.” Beliefs and ideas are connected in a network that is unique to the individual, so to change a mind you have to understand the belief network and work your change into it.
• cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  There’s also structure created by trust: in Australia we have the Australian Bureau of Statistics which is a high-trust, apolitical institution. ABS figures can then be quoted to hang an argument off. There are high trust organizations in the US too. A product being FDA certified is a signal to buyers (in addition of course to being permission to sell to them).. the USGS reports on earthquakes. We don’t have earthquake deniers because if USGS says it happened people either believe or can trace back to underlying facts. What would it take for social media and other places people get their information to become high trust?
• ciarajoe23 1y ago
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