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My friend was saying that we just need to show people the facts to change their minds. I showed him a pile of scientific studies indicating that it doesn't work
by N_Lens 13d ago
My friend was saying that we just need to show people the facts to change their minds. I showed him a pile of scientific studies indicating that it doesn't work. His response was "I still think it'll work"!
- RealityVoid 13d agoHillarious, to be honest. It still leaves me wondering... what _does_ work?
- N_Lens 13d agoMDMA/Psychedelics on the carrot axis Torment nexii on the stick axis.
- fhe 13d agoevolution -- ppl who refuse to acknowledge reality tend not to leave many offsprings. and if they do, maybe they are adhering to a more powerful reality afterall.
- miroljub 13d agoYou cannot change people, you need to change people.
- weatherlite 13d agoThat's realy inaccurate. If anything the more religious you are the more offsprings you have. Atheist societies are below replacement levels. What makes you think fact based thinking leads to more children making?
- drekipus 13d agoCould it be that atheists are the ones who are ignoring reality?
- twawwy 13d ago[dead]
- mkrecny 13d agogiven the unknowability of reality - 'facts' in science are only hypotheses that have not yet been disproven by data - nobody knows why anything exists at all - a lot of weight has to be given to 'what works' - what things grind up against the machinery of reality and survive over the long term? there is a 'truth' to such things
- NoMoreNicksLeft 13d agoWhat facts do you think can change my preferences? I'm sitting here telling you I want apple pie, and you're harping on about how "kale salads have all the vitamins you need!". We're talking at each other, because you failed to understand. This isn't about what you think the facts are, but about what I want to happen. I can accept those as facts and it wouldn't change anything.
- lazyasciiart 13d agoThis feels unrelated to anything else being said, unless you’re arguing that literally no arguments feature a factually incorrect position.
- AuthAuth 13d agoIn your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. Then when told apple pie is not the answer and its actually kale you want them you immediately pivot to a different for ending up at apple pie. Its the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 13d ago>In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. No. I just want it. That's the part you don't seem to get. It's a preference. There's no reason or rationale that you can attempt to short-circuit with any fact. >ts the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and They're not arguing with you. They're attempting to tell you that this is their preference. That they won't change their mind. Sometimes they're bad at it, can't articulate it. Other times they say this perfectly clearly... doesn't much matter, because you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear (like above, with "you think the apple pie has vitamins!"). >and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on. It's not belief. That's actually frustration. And a little bit of spite.
- baxtr 13d agoI have looked into some of these studies and realized that it’s near impossible to change people’s minds. Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches their already held opinions.
- flutteringfool 13d agoI don't think this is particularly strange when one thinks about the effect of ideology. It has a way of filtering any common reality different people have. I'm not sure how to move towards a common understanding without a larger sense of shared experience, but even then the same experience can have different interpretations. That being said, having shared experience can help, at least anecdotally, in being able to come to terms with wildly differing views. One example I have is with my brother. With the same event we had come away with a drastically different understanding. The facts between us all checked out, and we confirmed it many times. Yet the shared vocabulary gave us a way of acknowledging the others disagreement in the shared experience.
- bambax 13d agoThere's a fantastic book[0] about positioning in a marketing sense, that explains, among many other things and IIRC, that the mind is fundamentally a WORM machine; you almost never can overwrite existing information (or, with extreme effort and time; you can add new information but for it to be accessible, it needs a different key/name/index. So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it. The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf. I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more. Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels. [0] Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981)
- prolly97 13d agoThat's funny :) Though when presenting facts and studies, it's also worthwhile to think about how much of the world these studies are accurately able to explain. For physics this number is high. " For social sciences there's good reason to be skeptical. Even if (big if) a study is directionally replicable, the total proportion of the world, that can be accurately and consistently be explained isn't great. "Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q" Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders. The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.
- dansquizsoft 13d ago> The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies This, in itself, assumes that all studies / papers are equally as good and methodologically sound, which is not a true assumption.
- prolly97 13d agoI agree, if we limit the statement to the quoted piece. But I think the full line is true as it stands. > The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate. I.e. that the danger doesn't come from being selective based on methodological soundness as you say, but based on e.g. ideology.
- card_zero 13d agoThere's also you can't get an ought from an is, the is–ought problem. The facts don't guide your action at all, not even in an imagined neutral unbiased dispassionate way. They can only change minds as part of an argument, and the argument is going to have ideology behind it.
- josefritzishere 13d agoRe: Alternative Facts. Feelings are not the same as actual facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts
- keeda 13d agoInterestingly, research shows LLMs are better than humans at persuading people, and one of the reported reasons is that their arguments are deemed to be more evidence-based. (Findings even show that people are more likely to be persuaded when they KNOW the other side is an AI... maybe the underlying dynamic is that they assume people have vested interests?) So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies. LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.
- prolly97 13d agoSounds really interesting! Do you have a link to that research? Unless you're an AI, then I'll just accept your statements as fact ;)