
Ask HN: How does one convince people and change minds in a post-fact world? - dejawu
This post was spurred on by this comment: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;AdviceAnimals&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5ntjh2&#x2F;all_this_fake_news&#x2F;dceozzo&#x2F;<p>We&#x27;ve reached a point where factual evidence is no longer sufficient to convince someone of something. Did modern discussion platforms fail us? Is there something that can be changed about them to stop this?<p>...Can this even be undone?
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devoply
No. You were living in a contrived bubble of manufactured consent that was
already post-fact. For instance did Saddam have nukes? No. But it was
validated by a controlled mass media. The century of self guaranteed this sort
of outcome. And there are other political crises looming mainly due to the way
that mass psychology has been programmed and encouraged by business interests
and the establishment.

People are presuming their desires in what they want to believe. How they want
reality to be. They don't really care about your or the elite's opinions. It's
getting more and more difficult to control people's irrational behavior and
erratic thought patterns because they are fed by desire to believe. Not what
is true, because who determines the truth? Their leaders? They don't trust
them. Business interests? They don't trust them. The Church? You get the idea.

Putin is simply catching up to the West in terms of propaganda. All the stuff
described has been going on in America and the rest of the West for a century
since Sigmund Freud turned the establishment on to the subconscious. It's been
down hill from there. It's just when the playing field is leveled then the
possibilities are scary.

~~~
noir_lord
Unfortunately I get what you are saying and its bleak, I try to avoid the trap
with the media by reading lots of different ones and finding their sources,
other stuff helps like listening to a politicians speech directly rather than
opinions on that speech (YouTube * 1.5 speed is useful).

I still question whether my worldview is an accurate inference from the
evidence prevented but that slaps bang into philosophy and navel gazing.

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User23
People have never made decisions based on facts. We decide based on emotions,
and then rationalize our decisions later if ever.

Evolution did not optimize us for accurate understanding of the world. It
optimized us for having offspring that survive. The latter by and large does
not require the former. Indeed, deception plays a big role in human
reproductive strategies.

~~~
qzxvwt
Reminds me of something Putin said to journalists regarding global balance of
power:

"International Relations is much like mathematics — there is nothing personal
about it."[1]

[1]
[https://youtu.be/kqD8lIdIMRo?t=11m25s](https://youtu.be/kqD8lIdIMRo?t=11m25s)

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BjoernKW
> We've reached a point where factual evidence is no longer sufficient to
> convince someone of something.

Has it ever been? This whole talk about a post fact world is bollocks anyway.
It's a heavy-handed device contrived to explain things like a President Trump
or Brexit that according to conventional political wisdom aren't allowed to
happen.

Well, guess what if people on either side of the political spectrum hadn't
been so bloody arrogant we'd have neither Brexit nor Trump today. More
importantly, people wouldn't believe some nonsense they read in the news if
they were treated as actual, thinking human beings.

~~~
dejawu
>we'd have neither Brexit nor Trump today

That's just it, though. Was that ever realistically avoidable? Or was the
momentum of arrogant politics such that that was inevitable?

~~~
BjoernKW
In 2016 it was too late already but it's hard to say when the exact turning
point happened. In terms of Brexit it possibly was two-fold: The hurried
Eastern enlargement (which ironically was expedited by the UK) and flaws in
the design of the euro.

After Trump's victory there were some signs of humility and contrition, which
unfortunately were very quickly replaced by the "post fact world" meme and an
arrogant "See? We were right all along." stance again.

Developments like that are no one-way road. If people come to their senses the
pendulum might swing the other way again.

~~~
drspacemonkey
>After Trump's victory there were some signs of humility and contrition, which
unfortunately were very quickly replaced by the "post fact world" meme

This chafes me to no end.

This belief that Trump/Brexit is some kind of disruption to the natural order
of things and if we just get rid of "fake news", things will go back to the
way they're supposed to be. We just need to bring back the "real news", like
pondering if airplanes get sucked into black holes or gossiping about Clooney
getting divorced. Then Hillary & Co can be in charge like the gods intended.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It seems to me that the sense of entitlement to the office is one of the
things that people found so repellent about Hillary.

~~~
drspacemonkey
Exactly.

And this doubling down that they're doing is only burying them further.

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38kkdiu
I agree with others that everything has always been post-fact in a certain
sense.

The real problem now is that opinions and attitudes are being driven so much
by ideological group membership. That is, people are explicitly or implicitly
making decisions on the basis of "is this the sort of thing that X sort of
person would or should do?" rather than "is the sort of thing that is in my
best long-term interests?" They're taking for granted what is consistent with
their ideological identifications, which often aren't flexible or nuanced
enough to deal with the real world.

To be clear, I see this as happening on both sides of the political spectrum,
although I admit in the US I see it as becoming more extreme with social
conservatives.

~~~
dejawu
I definitely see this happening on the left as well (with identity politics).
Makes sense that the response on the right follows suit.

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ihinsdale
I'm very optimistic that we can solve this problem with better tools. That's
not to deny, as others have pointed out here, that emotions drive our thinking
and that a post-fact world is as old as the art of rhetoric. It is, rather,
based on the observation that we have an incredible ability to crowdsource
information--including of an opinionated / normative variety--thanks to the
internet, and yet we're still using the same rather rudimentary tool we
started with: threaded comments. Threaded comments have their virtues, to be
sure, but one of their downsides tends to be a lack of structure in the body
of the content.

Sequiturs ([https://sequiturs.com](https://sequiturs.com)) is my attempt at a
tool that solves this problem, of how to collaboratively reason and change
people's minds about something. I've written a bit more here about why I think
the answer is better tooling: [https://sequiturs.com/blog/post/introducing-
sequiturs/](https://sequiturs.com/blog/post/introducing-sequiturs/)

------
b_emery
I just read a book about writing science proposals. You would think that
writing a proposal intended for an audience of scientists the advice would be
'stick to the facts' and make a 'scientific' argument. Yes, sort of. But it
turns out that if you want to convince people of the importance of your idea,
you need to invoke emotion and the best way to do this is with a compelling
story. So to convince people, even scientists, of the importance of any idea
the best way to do it is to use a good story.

Interesting, and not obvious to me. Though I'd guess standard knowledge for
people in marketing and sales.

~~~
joeclark77
Well, scientists often consider the two factors of relevance and rigor. A
scientific study must be rigorous in its methodology in order to pass peer
review. But it must also be relevant to a question or problem that matters. So
you often start a paper with a few paragraphs about "the problem" and how/why
your contribution is important. This would be even more important if applying
for a grant, because funders want to make sure there's a good reason for the
study.

------
joeclark77
In sales and marketing, the job becomes orders of magnitude easier if the
product is actually as good as promised. When your product is lower quality
than the competition, advertising it is possible but difficult (and I would
say ethically questionable) and you're not going to succeed with everyone.

It's the same with "convincing someone of something". The job becomes many
times easier if the thing you're trying to persuade them of is actually true.
If it's true, you can use plain facts and clear logic. If the thing you're
trying to convince them of is false, you'll have to make increasingly more
effort and will see a lower success rate. You'll also have to use dishonest
tactics, like changing the meanings of words and declaring certain lines of
argument taboo or unacceptable in polite society (i.e. political correctness).

A corollary is that, if you (from your POV) find it increasingly difficult to
persuade People of Things, it might be worth considering the possiblility of
whether those Things might in fact be wrong, rather than jumping to the
conclusion that those People are deficient. You should at least consider it,
and maybe take some time for personal study of the issues and arguments before
redoubling your advertising budget.

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grzm
The "post-fact" issue is one thing; convincing people and changing minds is
another.

As for the latter, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous
Mind". And keeping in mind that a big part of convincing others is keeping
yourself open to having your mind changed.

Going back to the post-fact issue: people are rarely convinced based on
evidence or facts alone to change their mind, so in some sense the facts are
secondary. That said, finding a common ground of ideas or facts to agree upon
is important. Figuring out how to find this common ground is an important
skill. This is what I think the crux of "post fact" comes down to. And a lot
of this means granting people the benefit of the doubt, engaging in good
faith, and refusing to let yourself get dragged into "point-scoring" and other
lesser forms of argumentation.

------
miguelrochefort
We've know the solution for decades. We need a credibility/reliability/trust
score. I will blindly trust what a highly trusted person will claim.

At the moment, it's impossible to accurately determine if someone is
trustworthy or not because we don't keep track of commitments, faults and
lies. It's a lot easier to give the appearance of trust than to be
trustworthy.

Today, those who lie the best in interviews get jobs. Tomorrow, I will hire a
person without needing an interview thanks to those scores.

It's unavoidable. Why wait?

