
Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds - ryan_j_naughton
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
======
brightball
Another factor here is when people abuse the word "fact" regularly. If you
ever get into a discussion with somebody who claims they've proved their point
by citing "facts", then actually follow up on their citations and discover
that it doesn't actually say what they think it says it creates an impression
of the messenger, not the message.

Enough messengers saying the same faulty message over and over and you
distrust the message just because it's been repeated so often.

This is an easy thing to do with conversations on subjects like guns where the
key of slanting the message is based on subtle wording changes that allow you
to leave out some data or include other data. The person presenting their
information thinks they have "facts" because they see numbers that support
their point of view without knowing what's been left out.

I seem to remember a github repo that was posted to HN a couple of years back
that did exactly that. They showed the same data set and presented 3 different
ways with 3 entirely different conclusions.

~~~
coldtea
> _then actually follow up on their citations_

Not to mention that citations are not all they are touted to be.

Just because something has been written by someone somewhere doesn't make it
an objective reality fact.

Just because something has been published on a peer reviewed journal doesn't
make it an objective reality fact.

Just because something has the consensus opinion doesn't make it an objective
reality fact.

Just because something is supported by the numbers given by some government,
state agency, NGO etc doesn't make it an objective reality fact.

And in many cases someone with actual "skin in the game", who knows a subject
empirically can be right, and know they are right, against "citations" from
all of the above.

~~~
jimbokun
All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain.

Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no
citation. Peer review is better than no review. There is probably a higher
correlation for a statement from an official state agency being true, than a
random statement with no attribution.

So yes, a statement can satisfy any of the things you mention, and still not
be true. But that doesn't mean those factors can't be helpful in assessing the
likelihood of a given assertion.

~~~
coldtea
> _All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain._

Yeah, in the sense that all you are saying is its possible to have degrees of
trust on difference sources of "facts".

That said, you'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's
"impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people.

> _Having a citation from a well regarded source is better than having no
> citation. Peer review is better than no review._

That's the problem: we can't even say that.

[http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

(Of course we shouldn't trust this paper either: it's, after all, published
too).

~~~
conistonwater
> _That said, you 'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's
> "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people._

I think David Hume was quite good on this subject. If chance of being right is
all there is to knowledge, then maximizing your chance of being right is what
knowledge is. So all the peer review, the numbers and statistics, for example,
contribute to knowledge even if it _might_ be wrong. And if you dismiss, as
you do, statistics because they just might be misleading or biased, and are
thus not "objective reality fact", that does damage to your ability to know
things, because you are discarding data without considering it, and that
damage should be avoided. Whereas the proper thing to do is consider it on
merits, whatever the actual merits are.

~~~
galdosdi
Maybe, but consider adding another constraint to the game of maximizing your
chance to being right -- you have a finite amount of resources (eg, time) to
spend on examining evidence, so you need to strategize even what evidence is
worth considering and to what extent -- looking more carefully at one thing
means you now have less time to look carefully at something else, nothing is
free

Of course, in real life, we do have this constraint

~~~
TuringTest
> Of course, in real life, we do have this constraint

Which IMO is what causes confirmation bias. But science should strive to get
rid of confirmation bias as much as possible.

~~~
galdosdi
Your comment is vacuous if you don't expand on it; it goes without saying we
want to try to minimize bias as much as possible. Science is part of a world
of limited resources too, and investigators have to decide what experiments to
try, what topics to pursue

~~~
TuringTest
In the context of confirmation bias being an evolved trait, my comment was
meant to imply that we should expect science to spend much more resources than
mere intuition, but doing so is still worthwhile.

Any scientist will be subject to cognitive bias at some level (if only by
choosing the core principles and axioms on which their reasoning is based),
but there are systematic ways to mitigate it. Applying more resources to a
particular problem will get rid of at least the superficial levels of
cognitive bias.

------
bambax
> _The fact that both we and it survive proves that it must have some adaptive
> function_

No, no, no, absolutely not, no, it doesn't. No. A feature can maintain itself
in a population for a number of reasons:

\- it's neutral or not detrimental enough to drive affected individuals to
extinction (ie, to get them killed _before_ they have a chance to reproduce)

\- it's linked to some other trait that provides actual benefits

\- it's so recent it didn't leave time to be selected against

\- or, yes, it actually has some adaptive function.

But just because a feature is found does NOT "prove" anything in and of
itself.

> _Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily
> concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t
> the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the
> cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be
> gained from winning arguments._

Excuse me, what?? There's _little advantage in reasoning clearly_ while
hunting prey and making tools and building traps to catch huge mean animals
that can and will kill you if you do anything wrong?

And there's much to be gained from "winning arguments" in a cave, while
pondering about one's _social standing_?? Come on.

* * *

I suggest a more simple and straightforward explanation for the limitations of
"reason": our brain is, in fact, write only.

We usually don't notice it because it also has a huge capacity and so we can
always write more, it never gets full.

But to one given named item corresponds a unique value, that cannot be
overwritten.

If you want to store a new value you have to create a new name to store it
with.

To "overwrite" something you can create lookup tables of sort, that tell you
that the old value is in fact "wrong" and that said item should be associated
with another, newer item. But this is costly, and so is avoided whenever
possible (because the first rule of life is to be lazy, ie to conserve
resources).

~~~
Silhouette
_I suggest a more simple and straightforward explanation for the limitations
of "reason": our brain is, in fact, write only._

That seems to be inconsistent with the research described in the article where
subjects were asked for an opinion, then in some way required to explain that
opinion, and then asked for another opinion on the same issue. People
apparently did weaken in their convictions, but only when forced to confront
them by examining the details.

~~~
bambax
If you're referring to this paragraph:

> _A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues
> neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a
> series of simple reasoning problems..._

then no. While I don't know the exact content of the experiment or the wording
of the questions, a reasoning problem isn't an opinion, it's a process.

A process (a function) can indeed yield a different result when some
parameters are tweaked or a different input is used.

But my theory is that opinions, once formed, are difficult / impossible to
change, not for some unfalsifiable evolutionary explanation, but for a very
simple structural reason that the brain is a WORM system.

Also, my theory is just that: a hypothesis, a thought experiment. I don't
pretend to know how the brain works; I'm just asking the question, if we think
of the brain as WORM, can we explain more behaviors?

~~~
majewsky
> my theory is that opinions, once formed, are difficult / impossible to
> change

How can you explain that this completely contradicts my experience, down to
basic everyday experiences like: "I didn't like this album initially, but it
has grown on me"?

------
Mikeb85
Facts don't change our minds because we make up our world views and beliefs in
a way that's expedient for us to happily continue about our lives.

For instance, we all NEED to believe we're the 'good' guys. Whether the 'we'
is our religion, our job, our state, political stance, etc... This prevents
existential angst from realizing we're in the wrong, and then needing to
change our behaviour which would disrupt our everyday lives.

This is also the reason why we stay in failed relationships, keep toxic
friends, jobs we hate, etc... It's easier and more conducive to our survival
instincts to keep the status quo, whatever it is. Only when things get
extremely bad do we ever change.

On the flip side, let's say popular opinion about a particular topic flips.
When it becomes expedient to change our opinion, then we're very quick to do
so. When keeping an archaic opinion begins to cause friction in our everyday
lives, we change to the prevailing opinion because again, staying with the
tribe is easier than going against it.

But of course, realizing all of this would be to reduce human existence to
base survival instincts, which would also ruin our self-narrative. So we think
we're all special, enlightened, unique and think for ourselves no matter how
much the evidence points to the fact that we all devolve into holding the same
popular opinions.

~~~
randcraw
That sounds like a good strategy for peace of mind, or social harmony, but a
poor strategy for individual survival. Believing that the police (or your six-
shooter) will protect you from harm, when they won't, doesn't even look good
on a tombstone.

IMO, the better question is: why is peace of mind more important to us than
actually being right? If we really are enlightened (unsuperstitious), why
isn't it more important to each of us that we know what we do/don't know and
then assess risk and reward accordingly and rationally?

Why so little faith in reason?

~~~
Mikeb85
> Believing that the police (or your six-shooter) will protect you from harm,
> when they won't, doesn't even look good on a tombstone

They won't save us, but statistically, we won't need either to save us. Even
defenseless animals often survive in herds or schools. We want to believe the
police will save us to not lead a paranoid existence, just as the herd animal
isn't betting on it being dinner.

> IMO, the better question is: why is peace of mind more important to us than
> actually being right?

Because doing things necessary for survival doesn't require a correct
worldview. Witness how many people who hold archaic beliefs manage to survive,
gain importance in society and reproduce.

Edit - a good example is religious beliefs. They give some people a sense of
purpose, a sense of kinship, and a belief that they'll personally succeed.
Even if a religious person succeeds on their own devices, they'll attribute it
to their deity as the psychological boosts from believing are more important
than the validity of the beliefs themselves.

This can even be seen in scientific studies on the brain while
praying/meditating, and the practical benefits have been observed across
religious lines.

------
sgt101
Vaccines are safer for a population, and they are safer for individuals in an
unvaccinated population. In a vaccinated population the risks to the
individual having a vaccine are low, but non zero. The risk of not having the
vaccine may well be lower. The problem is that by not being clear that having
a vaccination is an altruistic act with marginal risk but a massive social
good the way is left open for claims of duplicity. This may be the key issue;
some people won't agree with the desired position because the fact we are
using isn't a fact at all. We fail to persuade because we don't make a good
case.

~~~
crpatino
I would upvote you twice if I could. The anti-science crowd and not idiots,
but rather moderately intelligent individuals that go bersek after catching
the Science spokeperson's oversimplifications and/or white lies.

Fool me once and it's your fault, fool me twice and it is mine.

~~~
FabHK
The anti-vac crowd might not be idiots, but they're selfish as hell (free-
riding on herd immunisation while not willing to accept the (very very tiny)
risk of vaccination to their precious child).

~~~
BeetleB
>The anti-vac crowd might not be idiots, but they're selfish as hell (free-
riding on herd immunisation while not willing to accept the (very very tiny)
risk of vaccination to their precious child).

You mean, selfish like everyone else is?

Is it even appropriate to use a broad attribution like "selfish" to a specific
case of selfishness?

I know both pro and anti-vaccines. I can definitely assert that some of the
anti-vacciners are less selfish than the pro-vacciners I know.

I'd like you to examine your _need_ to make a statement like this. It's a
wonderful path of discovery (I am not being facetious here).

You could have said that the anti-vaccine folks are reducing the herd
immunization, and are benefiting from said herd immunizing without calling
them selfish. Why the _need_ to moralize? What was the purpose?

~~~
FabHK
Hi, yes, I mean selfish.

The reason I "moralise" it is that it is but an instance of a prisoner's
dilemma, tragedy of the commons. Same applies to signalling while driving, not
stealing in stores, jumping the queue, lying on your CV, etc. etc.

As in the tragedy of the commons, we have a lot to gain by cooperating, but
individually have an incentive to defect/cheat. I personally think that there
is no karma or god imposing justice or preventing cheating, thus it is
incumbent on us to police compliance and discourage cheating.

Furthermore, there are good arguments made that we have evolved capabilities
to detect cheating and a tendency to punish cheaters (even to our cost).

So, I'm both viscerally and, I think, rationally opposed to that and other
forms of selfish cheating, and it warrants opprobrium and moralising
disapproval, to minimise it. That's the purpose.

Is that what you're asking?

> I can definitely assert that some of the anti-vacciners are less selfish
> than the pro-vacciners I know.

Not entirely sure what you mean - do you mean to say that the anti-vaccine
stance is not selfish (which is in a sense a scientific issue), or that (while
it is) there are people that are (in other ways) not selfish?

~~~
BeetleB
You're throwing around terms like "selfish" and "cheating". Both have
connotations of intent. However, the disconnect is that none of the anti-
vacciners I've come across intend to do anything you are suggesting. While
from your perspective, they are gaining while not contributing, it is neither
their intent nor their observation.

So my question: Why use words like "selfish" and "cheating" when many/most of
them do not believe they are gaining anything without contributing?

>and it warrants opprobrium and moralising disapproval, to minimise it. That's
the purpose.

Forgive my skepticism, but if you are trying to tell me you are using such
words in the hope of minimizing the behavior, I have trouble believing you.
Two points:

1\. Such behavior is more likely to cause dug heels and _less_ likely to
change people.

2\. When you study the field of morality (scientifically, not just mere
philosophy), you find that almost all such acts are for selfish purposes, with
post-hoc rationalizations. I mean _your_ selfish acts. As in you feel a need
to criticize and ridicule, and your justification above is an attempt not to
make it appear so.

There are ways to persuade people. The method you cite (opprobrium and
moralising) is amongst the least effective. If your goal was very strongly
driven by trying to persuade people to use vaccines, you would focus more on
other techniques.

>Not entirely sure what you mean - do you mean to say that the anti-vaccine
stance is not selfish (which is in a sense a scientific issue), or that (while
it is) there are people that are (in other ways) not selfish?

My point is that the label is broad, and you applied it to the person, and not
just the act. Any neutral person who hears this will simply find it false. Put
another way, if someone wants to dispute your claim, it is _trivial_ to do so
- I just did it in my original comment. I know at least one anti-vacciner who
is less selfish than pretty much any pro-vacciner I know. And in general, I
find the anti-vacciners that I personally know to be less selfish.

You do not come off as one who is trying to cause change, but one who wants to
sit and criticize. As I said:

>You could have said that the anti-vaccine folks are reducing the herd
immunization, and are benefiting from said herd immunizing without calling
them selfish.

Why didn't you? The point is as valid when phrased my way.

------
methehack
I guess it should come as no surprise that the comments section for an article
called “facts don’t change our minds” would be so disappointing. For me, this
article — and many like it that point out how whimsical and feeble our
natural, undisciplined cognitive capacities are — are a rally cry to continue
the enlightenment project, as best we can and in as personal a way as we can.
Years ago I learned that my family motto from way back was “through faith we
are free”. I found that immediately alienating because for me it was always
“through doubt we are free.”

From this article to my comment to current events:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/opinion/the-
enlightenment...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/opinion/the-
enlightenment-project.html?_r=0)

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> Years ago I learned that my family motto from way back was “through faith we
> are free”. I found that immediately alienating because for me it was always
> “through doubt we are free.”

From my own experience as a reluctant religious agnostic, I see the
faith/doubt-freedom issue as less clear-cut.

Some Christians I know appear capable of doing things that I, as an agnostic,
cannot. The first thing that comes to mind is showing care for people I find
unlovable.

For those Christians, either their faith or (if real) the Holy Spirit in whom
they have faith allows them to act in a selfless way towards such people.
Those Christians have a freedom that I don't.

OTOH, their faith (or the Holy Spirit, if real) also constrains their actions
and thoughts in ways mine aren't.

------
baldfat
The issue isn't facts. The issue is our worldview. If it is a binary worldview
(Good vs Evil) then what we don't agree with is always bad/evil (Black Hat
Cowboy) and what we do agree is good/good (White Hat Cowboy).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white_hat_symbolism_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white_hat_symbolism_in_film)

So when our side makes a mistake we defend and spin till it is okay for us to
still think of them as wearing a White Cowboy Hat. Anything good will also
have conspiracies and spin so that they always wearing a Black Cowboy Hat.

If you want evidence ask anyone with a strong feeling for Trump/Clinton and
you will see this in action.

The issue is when people change their minds (with a binary worldview) it isn't
accepting a small fact but it is a whole worldview change of astronomical
proportions. I feel that people have gotten more and more binary and we need
more shades of gray where it isn't world changing to accept a problem with a
fact.

From Asia thinking about American Worldview:
[http://www.atimes.com/article/americas-binary-worldview-
kill...](http://www.atimes.com/article/americas-binary-worldview-killed-
nuance-politics/)

~~~
matt_wulfeck
That's an extremely oversimplified explanation of the world.

In my experience a lot of misunderstanding comes not from lack of facts, but a
lack or difference in perspective. Hardly anyone even feels the need to
justify their actions, let alone squeeze it into some bizarre cowboy metaphor.

~~~
Spellman
Or, put another way, no one think they're the villain/wrong.

Which aligns with what the studies seem to indicate. Often the strongest
objections arise in a subject that we hold very dear as part of our identity.

------
charles-salvia
Evolutionary explanations are often speculative just-so stories with no basis
in actual genomic research. Nobody ran a hierarchical clustering algorithm
over the human genome, inspected the dendrogram, and then found meaningful
gene expressions that indicate confirmation bias somehow.

The reality is confirmation bias is probably deeply rooted in many other
elements of human psychology. My (completely worthless) conjecture is that
your "opinions" are deeply associated with your own sense of self-identity and
self-worth, and therefore they register as very much worth protecting,
regardless of external data. Opinions also often overlap with tribal
affiliations, which makes them even more deeply rooted in evolved primate
cooperative behavior, and therefore even more worth protecting.

------
Qcombinator
I'm tempted to file this as another "Humans think oversimplistically, says
oversimplistic study". The world is a massively complicated place, and nobody
can come close to understanding it all. If your intellectual background tells
you that vaccines don't cause autism and somebody comes to you with a study
that purports to say they do, is rejecting it "confirmation bias" — or is it
in fact the rational thing to do, even if you lack the medical expertise to
explain where the study goes wrong?

Of course, your background beliefs are never going to be perfect, so sometimes
you will reject the wrong things, but that's not because our reason is
"broken" per se, it's an engineering trade-off: we have to take certain
shortcuts, make certain assumptions, apply certain guesses, because working
everything out in full mathematical detail just isn't possible.

(That said, I'm certainly not claiming that most people are brilliant thinkers
— the line "Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the
contention that people can’t think straight was shocking" would come as news
to everyone from Aristophanes to Zamyatin.)

------
hughdbrown
> This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that
> reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by
> the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers,
> our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with
> making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while
> others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning
> clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

This is every conversation ever in my extended family.

So maybe we try to elect leaders who can win arguments, not ones who reason
clearly. Then you'd find that we get politicians who favor expanding the
military while having avoided being drafted and fighting, who have illogical
ideas of how government can be expanded and paid for without increasing taxes,
who will get us all a better deal while sticking it to those other
countries/states/cities, and they'll protect us from others who are not like
us. I can see how this idea would run wild in politics.

------
makecheck
When people find out _who_ said a particular thing, the “what” seems to fall
by the wayside and the “who” seems to matter more. The statement is accepted
or rejected outright because of the person. Maybe it is time to change that.

For instance, imagine a world where every bit of text you encounter — every
news story, every tweet, every statement, every message — had no attributions
AT ALL. Meaning, you have no idea if something was written by a celebrity, a
politician with a (D) or an (R), your best friend, or your worst enemy. At
that point, quite a bit of bias should start to filter out!

Or, there could be a middle ground, a kind of “anonymous key” to recognize
statements by the same person. Say you read a story last month, and “agreed”
with that person; this month, maybe there is a way to find out if something
else you read is from _the same person_ but NOT a way to see exactly who that
is. Then, you can start to build a sense of trust in sources but are still not
able to be influenced by other factors.

~~~
coding123
I loved this thought experiment. I often feel like this too, a lot of people
identify with R or D or Trump or Clinton, not because of any specific policies
they wrote. It's almost always your community, basically what level of
shunning am I going to receive for believing X. We're all tiny machine
learning experiments that push our personal agendas. We align with an issue
that's important to us or we align with a group that's important to us. People
are very "group oriented" so specific issues, while important, are typically
less meaningful than the tribe mentality.

------
JackFr
> If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our
> opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

The complete absence of self-knowledge and high level of unintentional irony
here is astonishing. "Confirmation bias and groupthink happen to other people,
not me."

------
mkalygin
I recently was thinking on the similar topic after reading an article about
scientific myths most people believe. For example, one of such myths is that
humans are genetically predefined and can't be changed through life. It's
clear that there are a lot of social, cultural and gender factors impacts on
our nature, but still there is such a belief.

So my conclusion was that our reasoning is very restricted. We tend to
simplify our thoughts, our memories. And all this stuff is highly dependant on
emotions we feel. That's why we like to make our memories brighter than they
are, make them more romantic and ideal. Everything in the past was better,
etc. That's why we remember facts which are easier to remember and close to
our beliefs, sometimes no matter are they true or not.

~~~
marcofloriano
I have to fight against this tendency to believe past was better almost every
day. My mind seems to try to trick me every time i'm making progress in life,
bringing memories of a better past, showing why today sucks.

The solution? Reason. I just ask myself: Ok, that was the good part. Now, try
to remember the bad ones. Oh you can't? So it's obviously a fake memory pal.
There were no such time in my life without difficulties.

~~~
mkalygin
Yea, also we sometimes remember only bad things. E.g. if we play in poker, we
may lose with two aces for a number of times in a row. And because of the
emotional frustration we start thinking that two aces are not that good.

------
enord
The interactionist perspective presented is enlightening. It both motivates
and explains many of the classic reasoning snafus that we "suffer" from. In
the end our mental artefacts (including beliefs) are just tools, and their
value (or "truth") is a function of their utility.

If we were to present a 19th century carpenter with a nail gun he would agree
upon demonstration; "that is very nice and all, thanks but i'll stick to my
hammer". He would have neither a compressor, gasoline and a long enough hose,
nor a wall socket and extension chord. The nail gun has no place in his
toolshed because he doesn't have the required infrastructure and context to
put it to use, and therefore the utility of the nail gun to him is close to
zero.

Beliefs are the same, and a relation to "facts" or "truth" is not a requrement
for their utility. When presented with new facts and truths we always evaluate
their utility before we ascribe to them. We might fool ourselves that this
process is somehow "rational" but rationality is just a social preference with
some second-order effects with regards to science and the developement of
technology (which indeed has "utility" but is far from the only "utility"
beliefs can achieve).

~~~
laretluval
> Beliefs are the same, and a relation to "facts" or "truth" is not a
> requrement for their utility.

If your beliefs about the world are entirely false then you are going to have
a bad time.

~~~
coldtea
Or a very good time. One's circumstances are seldom that much dependent upon
their beliefs about the world.

~~~
laretluval
> One's circumstances are seldom that much dependent upon their beliefs about
> the world.

You are interpreting belief in a very narrow and mysterious way. If you
believe that poison is food, or that bus impacts are healthy, then you are
going to have a bad time. There are many beliefs that must be correct in order
to ensure survival. It isn't all relative.

~~~
enord
>There are many beliefs that must be correct in order to ensure survival

Or you could say, you know, that beliefs must hold some utility. There are a
lot of utilities that we need from our beliefs. I believe that the front of
the bus is a portal to hell that threatens to damn me to eternal suffering, so
I'm quite terrified when it approaches to engulf me. This shares utility with
realizing that an impact with a bus can result in awesome momentum transfer,
causing a sudden acceleration preventing my soft body from containing my
precious bodily fluids. The point is the utility, not the rationalization
(this term is loaded pretty heavy at this point, sorry).

------
veli_joza
The source of confirmation bias is explained as evolutionary mechanism that
developed capacity for reasoning not for critical thinking but for purpose of
arguing and getting others to do our bidding. In that context it would make
sense to protect our own opinion from inconvenient things such as facts.

> "This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for
> natural selection to catch up."

How can we as a society fix this? If we educated our kids about confirmation
bias (and some other cognitive biases) and taught them how to compensate for
shortcomings of their minds, would next generation grow up to be more
reasonable? If so, shouldn't this be a high priority of educational system?

~~~
p0nce
> How can we as a society fix this?

Don't mate with irrational people.

~~~
partomniscient
Additionally, as a Stanford undergraduate - refuse to participate in any
'studies'.

------
YCode
The described permanence of lies even after they are revealed as such really
lends weight (dare I say credit?) to the tactics of fake news and propaganda
in general.

The value of being the first to form an impression of an event, law, etc. on
someone even if that impression will later be proven false just can't be
overstated.

~~~
Pigo
This value never ceases to confound and frustrate me. Just like the impact of
littering every yard with a brightly-colored name campaign sign has on
elections. It must sway some people, maybe more than biased new reporters do.
So we can hate the game, but at what point can we start hating the players?

------
bambax
> _There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are
> good for kids, and handguns are dangerous._

There is: have them been born outside the US. Those two beliefs are specific
to Americans; hardly a good example of "humanity" as a whole.

~~~
fiatjaf
Strangely the most successful country in the history of mankind by all
criteria.

~~~
pklausler
"Most successful" obviously doesn't mean life expectancy, quality of
education, or infrastructure, it would seem.

~~~
js8
Nor landmass, population, nuclear capability..

------
eagsalazar2
Translation: "Why did Trump win the election even though he and his policies
are obviously nuts?"

Seriously, not trying to inject politics or my opinion on Trump, but there do
seem to be a lot of these "why do people make act so crazy" articles lately. I
too am trying to make sense of it all and failing.

~~~
77pt77
It's quite explicit:

> If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our
> opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

Not even being subtle.

~~~
eagsalazar2
Hah, well I guess I'm busted (didn't read the article, just the title and
other comments)

------
skybrian
It's important to remember that most scientific disputes can't be resolved by
two uninformed people talking on the Internet. If you can get people to share
links to well-written scientific articles, you're doing well, but these
disputes can only really be answered by actual scientific discussion between
actual experts who take the time to dig into methodology (etc), and maybe not
even then; the replication crisis is a thing.

With enough study, maybe you can become an expert. Mostly we don't. Reading a
few articles and playing "instant expert" is just a bad habit.

Remembering your ignorance is good; try not to forget that you knew nothing
about the hot topic of the day before it became news and you suddenly became
interested. Unless you have personal experience to share, we're really just
sharing links here.

~~~
leshow
> can only really be answered by actual scientific discussion between actual
> experts

I fundamentally disagree with this. For one, who gets to decide who the
'actual' experts are compared to the experts that aren't actually experts?

The stuff you're saying is specious; on the surface it looks plausible but it
actually doesn't mean anything.

Anyone can develop expertise in a topic of interest if they follow it ardently
and have good critical thinking skills. One obviously needs the ability to
read and comprehend more than just an abstract, but that's not what separates
an 'expert' from an 'actual expert' anyway.

~~~
skybrian
Oh, I totally agree that anyone can be an expert in principle, and yes, you
can even be self-taught, but you do have to do the work. On most subjects in
the news, we don't study and have no real-world experience. We don't even pick
up the phone and talk to people like reporters do.

So, we should admit (to ourselves and others) when we didn't actually study
anything, we're just borrowing other people's analyses that we read online.
One way I do that is by sharing links.

One of the ways you become an instant (not-really) expert is by relying too
much on your supposed "good critical thinking skills." They exist but are
overrated - it's not a substitute for studying or for real-world experience.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Have these studies actually been replicated? I find it interesting how even
after a lot of psychology has been called into question due to the replication
crisis, a lot of news outlets still try to use studies based mostly on how
many clicks it will generate.

------
kpwagner
This is a really tough problem. Like many in the HN community, I try to fight
against confirmation bias, but sometimes it feels like a lost cause. Compare
it to a reasonably complex math problem--I'm talking an Algebra II / Calc I
type problem. You are relying on so much previous knowledge to complete the
problem. That knowledge may have been "earned", meaning you really took the
time to build up an intuition, or "unearned", meaning you just took the word
of the instructor or book (essentially applying a procedure to get a result).
This is a MATH problem that has defined parameters and a definitive right or
wrong answer.

Moving to something in the social realm, it's like a laser hitting a geode.
When I see a talking head like Ann Coulter on a "news" program, they are often
quite adept at providing facts and statistics to support their argument. But
ironically, this usually does nothing for me to strengthen their argument or
change my mind. To start with, are these facts and statistics true and
accurate? Is there really some subjectivity in these "facts"? Are they just
outright rumors? Even if these facts are true and accurate, does it tell the
whole story, or does it simply support their position? That's a pretty loaded
question; no one really goes to the effort of presenting all relevant
information and interpretation--nor would you want to listen. Denying facts
and falling back on beliefs, ideally wisdom, is a defensive mechanism against
information overload. To aggressively change your mind again and again when
presented with new information is similar to the problem of overfitting a
neural network.

~~~
coding123
And, as we know, overfitting is bad.

I think you hit it on the nose, I mean look at our Supreme Court.. like the
TOP court, a set of people that are supposed to do their absolutely best at
leaving out bias. I mean that's the resume - NOT BIASED PERSON JUDGING THINGS.
Yet almost like clockwork, each Justice is delivering carefully crafted prose
fully backed up by legal jargon to explain their final judgement. 90% of the
time when the judgement falls into some political trap, the court is split
down to the R or D President that got them there (with exceptions of course).
Shouldn't those opinions basically be identical? Why are we not FIXING that,
instead we let them die, and feverishly get a new president that matches our
worldview more so the new Justice can fix our world.

I remember watching some news program like 60 minutes or 20/20 back in the
day. They put on two fake trials, but I think the jury thought it was all
real. In one they presented the defendant as a old man that had probably
looked ugly. In the other they presented the defendant as a young man with
good posture in a suit. All of the orchestrated words in both trials was the
same. In the end they fried the old-ugly man and let the suit go. Why don't we
change anything? Why is this acceptable? I can think of countless other crazy
things in this planet that we shockingly let slip by.

Given that THIS is the world we live in, I'm absolutely not surprised the
talking heads can easily just push completely biased information and
everything goes unchecked. In the end it's simple really, it's just a big war
of who's right and wrong, but we all lose. The EGO has taken over this planet.

------
jamesrcole
I find that subtitle a bit strange. It implies that the article is talking
about the limitations of 'reasoning' as traditionally conceived, but the
article is more about how human reasoning in practice isn't like the
traditional notion of reasoning.

~~~
jjaredsimpson
I think you are substituting reasoning with deduction.

Reasoning is the human process of deciding what one ought do. Deduction is a
mechanical process of discovering what follows from axioms.

Human reasoning is often fails by not being perfectly deductive.

I'll grant that you might think I'm nitpicking on definitions.

~~~
jamesrcole
Not that I suppose it matters that much, but I mean reasoning not deduction

------
JabavuAdams
""" Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world.
If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and
more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize
how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only
form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and
change people’s attitudes.” """

------
unabst
Fake news is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack.

Who's actually been to Iraq or Afghanistan? Who has actually seen first hand
evidence of global warming or water pollution or of anything?

Most facts are too detached from ordinary reality. That's why the person in
charge of relaying them can alter them as they see fit.

We're not to the point where we're faking wars (I don't think), so there are
starting points. But the story, the narrative, and the facts of the matter are
all subjected to manipulation. Even the "honest" media is guilty of
sensationalism and clickbait.

But the point is, when these are your "facts", you can't turn around and tell
normal people to be more scientific or to choose your sources more wisely. You
saying that just makes you another channel, waving yet another banner that
says science, and a proponent of your version of the truth.

~~~
Intermernet
> Who has actually seen first hand evidence of global warming or water
> pollution or of anything?

Many people have, they just may not have known it.

Personally I've seen the retreating glaciers of New Zealand's south island as
a stark example of global warming. As an example of water pollution, I've seen
dead fish floating in rivers after storms had caused the overflow of a
tailings dam at a mine here in Australia.

These are pretty extreme examples, but the evidence is everywhere if you know
what to look for.

~~~
unabst
Right. But seeing retreating glaciers after being _told_ why they are
retreating is still relying on something you were told.

As long as we are being "told" we can change the channel and choose our
preachers. There is nothing that can stop anyone from doing so in a "free"
country.

The point is, normal people have no way of knowing about most things anyway,
that it isn't just fake news that is fake, it's that news as we know it is
unreal. That's why they need that story of a cute cat or a new study on coffee
at the end.

The battle against fake news isn't the hard part. It's the battle to
legitimize their own that is turning out to be an uphill battle. And when you
know you go for the cookie jar once in a while, it becomes even harder.

~~~
Intermernet
I agree with your larger point "normal people have no way of knowing about
most things", but the glacier example was pretty clear. Just the change in
vegetation over the course of the valleys was a pretty obvious indication that
a huge amount of the glaciers had retreated quite suddenly from their
previous, well established positions. The moraine topology was another
indicator.

Even if you had never heard of "global warming" you'd look at these two signs
and have suspicions that something fairly significant had caused a largish
area of an entire country to increase in average temperature. You'd probably
not initially blame it on human carbon emissions, but, if you had some
understanding of global climate patterns in the short term, you'd probably
assume that this wasn't happening as just a local effect. It's pretty
difficult to locally melt all the glaciers in a few thousand square kilometers
of land without changing the rest of the world's climate.

~~~
unabst
Right. But to your advantage, here you've demonstrated how you've interpreting
evidence to fit with other evidence and knowledge to strengthen your set of
facts. Most people will not see what you saw and think what you thought. And
this can be applied to everything really. Evidence is everywhere, though even
if people saw it, they won't know what it says or how to measure it.

With the internet we can go directly to the source for evidence. Sources can
be completely open and transparent regarding their motives and research. And
anyone who wishes to learn should be able to start with learning how to
identify the bubbles of fake news and alternate facts. Then we'd be talking.
Until then, most everything you hear is just somewhere on the BS spectrum.

------
onuralp
Piggybacking on the discussion about reasoning: I found the recently proposed
'argumentative theory of reasoning' quiet insightful and provocative with
significant implications for belief formation (as well as scientific
methodology).

Here is an excerpt from the researchers who proposed the theory:

> the argumentative theory of reasoning—proposes that instead of having a
> purely individual function, reasoning has a social and, more specifically,
> argumentative function. The function of reasoning would be to find and
> evaluate reasons in dialogic contexts—more plainly, to argue with others.

Citation:
[https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/theargumentativeth...](https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/theargumentativetheoryofreasoning)

------
benmcnelly
I have some facts for you. I hate passive aggressive pop overs that take over
a page and then try and make you feel bad for not signing up. Also, against my
better judgment I continued to try and read this. It was trash so let me offer
some advice that at the least should be equally as subjective.

A good frame of mind or world view to have, is to be open to the possibility
that you don't know everything. That we are in a constant state of figuring
things out and ratifying what we know, and accept that at some point, if we
are tolerant and listen, we may learn something new. Hell, maybe modal window
hijacks ARE the best way to try and get people to subscribe.

------
RichardHeart
These are not limitations of reason.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for
themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or
goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd
when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective."

Once awareness of the game becomes more common, than playing that new game
including that new awareness will replace the old game. (Just like saying
someone else ate the cookie when caught as a child, gets replaced with more
elaborate things like, "you ate the cookie after you came home from drinking 2
nights ago."

Reason evolves.

------
known
AKA
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

------
danharaj
Reasoning is a social process as much as it is an individual cognitive
process. We're strongly conditioned to be unempathetic when reasoning, but
this severely impairs our ability to reason together. Empathy and reason
together are more powerful than either alone. The substance of reasoning comes
second to the process of reasoning. If the process is hobbled by artificial or
cultural constraints, it becomes perverse and harmful to understanding.

------
MichaelMoser123
the article says we are optimized for cooperating in groups and not for
reasoning (this supposedly had the function of controlling the free loaders).

Of course this has the political implication that people should be governed by
enlightened rulers - Plato didn't trust democracy either. Now i think that
people are perfectly competent at deciding if they are better of now rather
than they were four years ago; maybe I am fighting against a strawman here,
but no, democracy still is the best of all systems out there.

The dissident songwriter Alexander Galich has a song about this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuXx6gU5wRc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuXx6gU5wRc)
(In Russian)

[http://songpros.ru/1/Aleksandr-Galich/tekst-pesni-Boytes-
tog...](http://songpros.ru/1/Aleksandr-Galich/tekst-pesni-Boytes-togo-kto-
skajet-ya-znayu-kak-nado)

"don't fear neither praise nor blame / don't fear hunger nor thirst / only
fear but the one who says 'I know how it ought to be' / the one who says
'follow me i will teach how it has to be done' " (my attempt at translation)

------
Mikhail_Edoshin
I'd say the article's reasoning is flawed :) We cannot be experts in
everything. We can hardly be experts in a very narrow field; for all the rest
we have to trust other people. The only thing we can do is to choose who(m) we
trust. Now, there are no rational rules to do this; we do this based on I
don't know what. Experience, gut feeling, whatever; our own understanding of
the world, of course, but it's bound to be limited.

The fact that some people claim that they are devoted to science and reason
doesn't make it so. The French Revolution claimed it was scientific; they gave
us SI units everybody is so fond of. And Marx's "Capital" looked very
reasonable for a very long time and even now many people still believe in its
reasoning (or think they do; most don't understand it anyway). The Soviet
propaganda and education made it a point that the communist theory was, you
know, the only "scientific" theory of progress and everything. And it did look
convincing, especially if you were exposed to nothing else since childhood;
I'm talking as a survivor here :) And I say: no. Thanks, but the reason is not
enough.

Edit: typos.

------
orasis
Even using facts, not biased opinions, vastly different models can arise.

If the sampled facts that give rise to the models are random, then the models
will tend to be similar.

However, if the facts that make up the models are selectively placed in the
models there can arise dramatically different models pulled from the same
facts.

Since all models are simplifications or subsets of all facts in reality they
will always be prone to this fact selection bias.

------
seanxh
I have three recommendations: 1.read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel
Kahneman 2. think in Bayesian term about statistic when you see the "facts"
they claim from a report 3. being okay with the fact that you might waste time
and efforts or being wrong on thinking regarding about issues (disclaimer: I
am not a psychologist or data scientist)

------
lngnmn
Because a brain has been evolved for dealing with crude appearances which are
supplied to its centers by imprecise and unreliable sense organs and for
sloppy thinking, good-enough for successful survival and reproduction (and
necessary competition to accomplish that).

Our minds are conditioned by appearances and the conditioning is based on the
fact that things does not change too often in the physical environments -
almost everything stays the same most of the time.

The visual system, for example, has a lot of hard-wired heuristics which
reflects this assumption. The cues which a brain machinery of visual cortex is
utilizing to decode scenes is a perfect illustration how an evolved brain
structure reflects actual physical environment in which it has been evolved.

The mind, it seems, utilizes simple frequency-based machinery which strengthen
(or weaken) the representation (whatever it might be, close to what we would
call a weighted graph, perhaps) with each new impression. There is ,
obviously, no probability calculations going on in the brain, just simple
weighted structures. Similar approach is in the very core of the classic
machine learning.

To alter the representation dramatically there must be some impression with a
big weight, and this is what emotions are for. A dog getting sick after eating
drugged food would learn to avoid it after just one single exposure. An
emotionally charged experience is the simplest (and still the most effective
form of persuasion, readily exploited by memes) because a brain has been
evolved in to reflect the physical environment (its laws) and be adaptive-
enough to survive mostly-stochastic, partially-observable environment.

One single mention of a supposed fact is not enough to change one's internal
representation of reality (which, perhaps, is a structure trained with
thousands if not millions of impressions). Even direct experience sometimes is
not enough, because one cannot completely trust ones senses.

Only a rigorously trained mind could consciously deliberately alter its own
model of the world (which is not that simple and cannot be accomplished at a
whim) when it meets a single contradiction with "proven" or implicitly encoded
in brain's heuristics laws of nature, leave alone a logical contradiction
which is hard to notice given the default way of thinking we have evolved
with. The non-verbal mind is much more ancient and much more powerful, and it
does not understand the language of a newer parts.

------
tn13
In Batman Zero Year, Bruce Wayne has made his first appearance as Batman and
is almost 100% sure that people will easily find it out that Bruce is Batman.

Alfred then tells Bruce that during his performance as an actor he paid far
too attention to minor details of the characters played including dialects,
diction, consumes, makeup etc. just because he was terrified that people will
see the person behind the mask. Only after some experience he learned that
people pay to see the mask and not the face. They very willingly will refuse
to see the face behind the mask because in their hear they want that mask to
be real. People will not want to find out who is Batman.

Of course this is all fiction but it does ring a bell especially in today's
super-heated political environment where we cant even know if a fact is a
fact. Even when something becomes an obvious fact or an obvious lie it does
not seem to matter to most people because in their heart they have an
alternate view of the very facts.

------
mjw1007
The first two studies described have roughly the following form:

1: The researchers tell the students "X is true".

2: The researchers tell the students "statement 1 was a lie".

3: Many students report they still believe X is true.

It seems risky to read anything much into that.

Maybe at step 3 the students, who know they've been lied to at least once,
were reluctant to assume that step 2 provided reliable information.

------
nibstwo
Fact is a relative word, like luck or loser. Luck is someone richer than you,
and a loser is someone less rich than you. Fact is something more truthy than
the relative. There is physics, then there are leaky abstractions of physics
and culture. I think honesty in the sense of accuracy is important, rather
than the meta question of what is truth.

------
syrrim
I read an interesting explanation for how lying developed in humans: when we
became capable social creatures, lying to others would be a quick way of
gaining an advantage, so it would be selected for in the individual. However,
a culture made up of liars would be less trusting of each other, and so at a
disadvantage. In this way, we evolved to give off signals, and feel guilt,
when we are lying.

However, it remained useful to lie to others, and so we evolved to be able to
still do so. If we first lie to ourselves, trick ourselves into believing a
falsehood is true, we can then spread this to others as if it were true, and
therefore without consequences. In historical societies, it seems this was the
right balance between generally telling the truth to others, while still being
able to lie when it is important to do so. I wonder if it is time for the
balance to swing the other way again, and for lying to again be selected
against.

------
TheLilHipster
I'm constantly overhauling my own bias and opinions on subjects when presented
with new information, I don't do this actively - its more subconscious, which
is against the results of these experiments. The results were the subjects
estimating a scenario (after being told they were deceived). The scale of
measurement was the positive and negative bias they had towards themselves.

They started with a negative bias, which was then contradicted by a neutral
fact. The outcome was a negative leaning estimation.

The others started with a positive bias, which was then contradicted by a
neutral fact. The outcome was a positive leaning estimation.

A logically sound conclusion, a "mean" outcome. This doesn't seem like some
kind of eye-opening revelation... am I missing something here?

------
rvail2
So is this testing how people adjust to facts, or how they respond once they
know you have lied to them?

~~~
joe_the_user
Yeah,

The test seems like "I will screw with your sense of reasoning a bit and call
you irrational when you don't respond the way I think you should"

------
morbidhawk
If facts don't actually persuade us, then why is test-taking on fact-based
trivia so prevalent in schools? (seriously can I get all that wasted time and
energy back somehow)

I'd argue that there is only 1 useful fact that persuades us to open our minds
and learn and that's realizing that we know nothing. This is the 1 truth
Socrates held onto and helped him to learn so much. He'd never assume he knew
something well enough and instead assumed there was always more to learn and
used socratic method questioning to show contradictions in his own knowledge
and world view. I think that is really the only way to persuade someone, by
asking really good questions that cause them to question their own world views
and biases.

------
notriddle
Or, in a lot fewer words, we're dumber than pigeons [1].

[1]:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3086893/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3086893/)

~~~
dwringer
I'm all for that result, but [isn't the increase in probability of winning the
Monty Hall problem by switching doors an increase from 1/3 to 1/2]? [ED: no]
The summary claims it is "doubled". I'm also interested in some kind of
control for the concept that pigeons simply get bored inevitably with the
first choice and tend to switch in spite of whether it gives them any
advantage. I don't see evidence that this experiment covers that. Informative
and interesting nevertheless.

~~~
thefalcon
There are a lot of givens and provisos to make the Monty Hall problem work[1],
but in the end if you stick with your door you have a 1/3 chance of winning
and if you switch you have a 2/3 chance of winning.

[1]Monty must always open a non-winning door based on his insider knowledge
and always give you the chance to switch, and of course the prize has to
always remain behind its original door.

~~~
vacri
The way this was made clear to me was to use 100 doors instead of 3. Hall
opens 98 doors when you make your initial guess. It's much clearer to see how
information is added to the system with this many doors.

------
reuven
This was a fascinating article, not just because it reinforced some of my
existing thoughts.

For me, the most important statement was as follows: "If we—or our friends or
the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work
through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are
and moderate our views."

In other words, more information doesn't help people. But asking people to
understand the implications of their thoughts, and encouraging to consider
those implications, will lead people to be more moderate, thoughtful, and
deferential to experts -- who have spent lots of time considering the
implications.

------
tremon
Meh. People are so inundated with so-called "fact-based" marketing materials,
the entire word has become meaningsless. We have created entire "scientific"
fields of study that serve no other purpose but inducing people to choose
against their own interest (whether in politics, marketing, sales or PR) that
this really should not be surprising: the people that still trust "facts" have
been selected against for over four generations now.

"Facts" aren't, news at 11.

------
Mz
I find this bit ironic:

 _(Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was
wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)_

If this is written for an American audience, the odds are good that most of us
not only don't know where the Ukraine is, we don't know where Kiev and Madrid
are relative to each other. It would have made more sense to use two U.S.
cities to give some perspective on how far off people were.

~~~
chki
Well Kiev is in Ukraine and Madrid is in Spain, so that is just the full width
of Europe which makes it really funny for those who know (and those who know
are - to honestly reply to your concern here - those who read The New Yorker)

~~~
Mz
I know where Madrid is and I have lived in Europe and I just read an article
in the New Yorker. I even have a spiffy Certificate in GIS.

I still don't find it to readily be a good comparison for a mostly American
audience. If the point is to elucidate, I don't think it is a great example to
use. If the point is to be all superior and imply or emphasize the idea that
"if you don't know where these things are, you are dumb," hey, it works well.

But trying to make your audience feel stupid is not really a great place from
which to start. I mean, unless the point is to be toxic. Then, sure, go with
that.

------
agumonkey
More than facts and logic, is a big "why" ? People use "facts" to satisfy
their relative ego (point or surface) and will stop digging for reason or
distort said facts to reach that goal.

When you stop arguing and start agreeing, it's a whole different game.

That's why the whole political paradigm is obsolete. Rallies and speeches are
mostly emotional drivers. They amplify the problem naturally (it's a nice form
of competition).

------
cbanek
One small interesting point was the test where people were given their own
answers (but not told) and were more critical of them.

This almost seems natural based on my viewing of code. Sometimes you don't
know who wrote the code, or made a change, etc. Every line is suspect. I find
that I'm best at debugging when my code when at the end I say "who wrote this
crap? oh it was me."

------
miclill_kit
>Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed
world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl
filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the
water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and
from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

Why would that handle be depressed?

------
mathgenius
I change my belief's all the time. I'm incredibly empathetic to people and
quite easily take on their beliefs, at least for a little while. Why? Because
I am curious, I want to understand things, I want to see things from another
point of view.

This means I totally suck when it comes to debating anything. Sometimes I wish
I could just be a rock and not sway around so much.

------
known
Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their
illusions destroyed; [https://qz.com/924343/alternative-facts-a-psychiatrist-
expla...](https://qz.com/924343/alternative-facts-a-psychiatrist-explains-why-
our-brains-resist-reality/)

------
Noos
Why is this even a valid article? The evidence given was based on studies that
actively deceived the takers in order to prove a point. Of course if you trick
people they become defensive. You've primed them to believe one thing and then
turned around and said it was another.

~~~
benmcnelly
This was a scientific experiment. Fact.

------
darod
What happens when you have 2 scientists arguing over what they consider fact?
How do you know who to believe? It then becomes that example of requiring
everyone to understand metal work prior to picking up a knife. You don't get
very far.

------
motivic
All these discussions remind me why I loved pure mathematics so much. Every
theorem requires a proof, and nothing is really a fact on its own, but a
logical derivation from an assumption. I guess you can call these "2nd order
facts"?

------
projektir
I think the problem is that there's often a lot of risk with changing one's
mind and not all that much benefit.

How much does being right really help one in their day-to-day life? And there
are many ways it could hurt them.

~~~
Diederich
What kinds of risk are you seeing as associated with changing one's mind?

~~~
projektir
Being classified as a loser in any given argument is probably the biggest one.
You do not get a very positive response for admitting that you're wrong in the
vast majority of settings. There's generally an expectation that being wrong
is associated with fundamental problems and should be punished by suffering.
Being wrong is already perceived as a state so bad that correcting yourself
from it is only marginally beneficial. This creates a very negative
association with being wrong and kills that incentive. Yet being able to say
that you're wrong is a necessary prerequisite to changing your mind.

There's also a fairly high risk of actually changing your mind towards the
more wrong conclusion. Anything you already believe is likely rooted in
something relatively deep, like childhood experiences, experiences in general,
and a long, involved chain of partially logical, partially emotional reasoning
that you can't even remember most of anymore. The incoming "facts" are often
disembodied, not actually connected to anything, and often not that hard to
fabricate because of how disconnected they are.

Now take these two concepts together, and consider what an attempt at making a
person believe something different from what they do usually looks like.
They're going to be told some disembodied facts, given some rough evidence or
appeals as to why those facts are true, and then told that the only reason
they don't already agree with those fact is because they are dumb, mean,
uneducated, or otherwise undesirable.

------
nemacol
You are not so smart podcast did a great 3 parter on this topic.

[https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/](https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/)

#93, #94, #95

------
htns
What society tolerates in political discourse has much more to do with this
than any quirks of the brain. Politics drags objectivity through the mud.

------
laretluval
Oh boy, sweeping conclusions based on psychology research!

[http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/25/071530](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/25/071530)

"False report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature. In
light of our findings the recently reported low replication success in
psychology is realistic and worse performance may be expected for cognitive
neuroscience."

------
splintercell
Quoting myself from another comment:

I have been reading 'Mental Models' by Philip Johnson-Laird where the author
argues that we apprehend the world by building inner mental replicas of the
relations among objects and events that concern us, and then we act according
to these models.

This book tries to argue against the idea that we think in terms of logical
propositions. Take for instance this example Steven Pinker in this lecture[1]
presents a logical problem which stumps a lot of people. However, when people
are presented with a 'real world' version of the problem they do a lot better.
Phillip Johnson-Laird uses the same example and some other studies to claim
that it is because people think in terms of mental models and not in terms of
logical/deductive propositions.

Another example:

If J Edgar Hoover was born in Russia, then he would have been a communist.

If J Edgar Hoover was a Communist then he would have been a traitor.

Therefore if J Edgar Hoover was born in Russia then he would have been a
traitor.

Clearly the transitivity doesn't follow here, and this is not the only example
of apparent transitivity failure, but nearly everyone can point out the
logical problem with the transitivity inference in the third statement, but a
lot more people would fail it if presented in abstract terms.

This has been a very ameliorating book for me. It explains many things
regarding people's beliefs. When people present moral outrage, this must mean
that they need to have that mental model in their minds. Take for instance if
you started to work in a store, and the manager informs you of the following
rule:

> If the receipt is for more than $30 worth of goods, then it must have
> manager's sign on it.

Most people would have no problem in understanding and following that rule.
But if the rule was following:

> If the receipt is for less than $30 worth of goods, then it must have
> manager's sign on it.

To most people this is confusing and non-sensical. To most of us, we would try
to think for a reason behind this rule. Most probably come up with the
explanation 'There must be a lot of theft/fraud going on for smaller
receipts', or something which explains this anomaly.

This is the same reason why everytime it snows in the middle of April,
conservatives are like "Oh god, the Global Warming is killing me", and
whenever there is a hot day in winter, it's the liberals who take it as a
proof. Because to all people, the data which doesn't fit into their mental
model is noise. And all theories which people ascribe to, somehow fit in their
broader mental models.

tl:dr; It isn't that there are limitations to reason, rather everyone uses
mental models to separate signal from noise. '10 Photographs which prove that
ghosts exist' are just noise to us unless the photos come with reasoning which
provides 'patches/updates' to our mental model.

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PXy3vWZiJo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PXy3vWZiJo)

------
perseusprime11
> For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action.

Very funny and real.

------
pklausler
Some people can't tell the difference between authorities and experts.

------
sanjeetsuhag
Could somebody link the original study the author is referencing ?

------
known
People tell lies if truth hurts their self-esteem.

------
maffeis
Because it's our minds that change facts.

------
SubiculumCode
I dunno, I still think that my rationality has no limits.

^_^

------
dalbasal
There are two types of people: people who believe the first thing they hear
and people that believe the last person they hear.

The second are more unpredictable.

------
motivic
Case in point: All religions.

------
mhkool
I have seen many people who deny facts and it is interesting to guess what
their motivations are.

I am, however, not very impressed with the statement from the medical science
that the authors use as "a fact". Facts from the medical science that are
debated have changed into lies: did you hear about the fact that cholesterol
is bad for your health and one should eat eggs with moderation ? That fact is
now a lie: (see [http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/19/health/dietary-
guidelines/](http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/19/health/dietary-guidelines/))
and the Dietary Guidelines now contain "Cholesterol is not considered a
nutrient of concern for overconsumption". Another example where yesterday's
truth is today's lie: there are many scientific reports that say that the
herbicide Roundup is safe, but the court in California recently decided that a
warning must be put on the Roundup package: "THIS MAY CAUSE CANCER". For
decades the truth was "Roundup is safe". In 2016 the new truth is "Roundup
causes cancer". The new research is so overwhelming that the old research
funded by the producer of Roundup is no longer considered truthful and that
research from the producer did not convince the court.

I think that the authors walk on a slippery road when they state that
vaccinations are good and not hazardous since they ignore the fact that there
is considerable debate about the subject and do not look at the arguments of
those who are opposed. Yes there is scientific research that says that a
vaccine given at birth is safe because the researchers observed babies for
four days and there were no adverse reactions. Other scientific studies follow
children just for a maximum of 90 days. One who argues that four days is not
enough and labels the report 'unscientific' has a good point. One who shows
that autism is linked to vaccinations does not present hard evidence but
raises a valid point of attention. What is the truth? safe or unsafe?
Currently it is debated. Most likely there will not be hard evidence soon
about unsafety because nobody funds research for this.

There is also an other argument to make: if we find autism a terrible disease
that must be avoided at all costs, and there are mathematical indications that
vaccines are not safe, and there is scientific research that says that they
are safe but do not investigate the relationship between vaccines and autism,
and there is no scientific research that shows that vaccines do not cause
autism, then why do many persons accept "vaccines are safe" as a truth ?

I suggest that the authors write a new book with a title like "What happens to
people when that facts and truths that they believe in are no longer true ?"
and do not make the mistake to believe everything that others say but to
critically verify it.

------
jakeogh
dv/dt(#7) == g

------
bobbington
This is misleading article like the guys who show you optical illusions and
then say you can't trust what you see. The fact is that it is rational to let
past experiences affect you. Of course here people are told their past was a
lie - but they weren't given any additional facts about what is right now. It
was still pure conjecture as to how well they did.

I think this is a very poor conclusion, an article by a professional
journalist who just is trying to make money by posting something dumb. It's
obvious why people are "irrational". There is so stinking much information in
the world, not to mention the pressure our own minds put on us in the form of
wants and needs. We have to sift through that to make decisions. The fact is
irrationality comes from not sifting through the information correctly which
is a difficult task that takes time and training.

There are all kinds of reasons we don't sift through information correctly,
and as machine learning shows that takes time. Plus we often have pride which
keeps us from acknowledging the truth.

The of course even if we have the facts sometimes it is difficult to make
predictions based on those facts. This is in my opinion often because we don't
really understand the facts. The only way to make predictions is based on past
experience of some sort. If you don't understand the past well you can't make
a good prediction, so once again it comes down to not understanding the huge
amount of info in the world.

~~~
hashkb
Sounds like you're defending those who throw up their hands because critical
thinking is just too hard. I found your comment depressing.

------
davidf18
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
on him not understanding it." \-- _Upton Sinclair_

------
jlebrech
some facts are greater than others, and sometimes there's a stalemate and ones
bias makes the preferred fact win.

------
squozzer
Here's an application of our faulty, socially-dependent reason: Health care is
a right, yes or no? Please explain your reasoning.

The article mentions ACA so my proposal should not be too off-topic.

~~~
Eridrus
I think the discourse about "rights" is part of the problem in US politics, it
makes the default mode of reasoning about ideology, rather than outcomes.

The government should be in the healthcare business since the nature of the
service precludes a functional market.

~~~
squozzer
Sorry, I guess where I was going was when someone defines something as a
right, they should be able to explain how they arrived at that conclusion.

For instance, if you believe that we have a right to live, and healthcare has
some relation to life, then haelthcare might arguably be a right.

Another might be an analogy, such as with law enforcement. Some might say we
have a right to a life free from crime. Most jurisdictions prefer to run and
staff their own police departments, or contract with another government-run
police department. Only as a last resort would privately-run police
departments be acceptable. Additionally, police officers, given their mission
and tools, have the power of life and death over the citizens they serve. This
is a typical reason given for government-run law enforcement.

Healthcare, to a certain degree, also has the power of life and death.
Therefore, one could argue governments should run healthcare.

~~~
Eridrus
I think a rights based reasoning framework is problematic in general, it leads
people to focus too much on what is considered their "right" and ignores both
the harms associated with having that right and the reasoning on which that
right was based.

You can fall into the trap of assuming your "right to private property" means
that taxation is theft or you can start with a "right to privacy" and decide
law enforcement should never be able to access the contents of your smart
phone, rather than discussing the reasons for private property or privacy.

And in case case, rights tend to never be justified, just asserted and treated
like true axioms.

