8 ms·

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

116 points by skm 6y ago

baxtr 6y ago
Is that actually a fact?
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  No, all this evidence is made up. So: how likely do you think it is that humans really behave like this?
- willvarfar 6y ago
  I don't mean to be paranoid, but do you think the article might be misinformation in some study of the collective gullibility of the HN crowd?
  - danaris 6y ago
    Well, given that it was published in the New Yorker 3 years ago, it clearly wasn't written primarily for us. Given that it is discussing the results of actual psychological studies (that I have seen talked about in a number of other places), it is vanishingly unlikely that it is in some way intended to study anyone's gullibility.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
First of all have all these psychological studies been replicated? Part of the reason, “facts” don’t change our mind is that a lot of “facts” aren’t really facts like physics, but are rather the result of statistical games. Finally, and I think the biggest issue is that a lot of facts rely on trust, since they are practically impossible for the average person to fully verify. And I think, for a variety of reasons, trust has been lost. Think about vaccines. Say back in the 1950’s, you probably knew or heard of someone who died from polio. You mom, might have had a sibling that died from one of the other vaccine related illnesses. The doctor recommending the vaccines, was seen as a trusted friend. He(it was usually a he back then) probably spent his whole life in your town. He knew your grandparents. Maybe he delivered your parents. He would spend hours at the bedside of a sick child or a dying grandparent. Maybe he was the one who delivered your children as well. Now when he says that he recommends you give your child this vaccine, you are going to listen. Now forward to modern times. You book your appointment. You go to the office where you wait for hours. The pediatrician comes in and rushes through a 15 minute visit. Says your kid should get vaccinated. On the way home you listen to an investigative report of how doctors are paid by big pharma to prescribe drugs. By the way, you have never heard of anyone you know getting one of these vaccine preventable illnesses. Now the gap between the educated elites and regular people in this country is widening. They do t interact much socially. They do t even live together. In the United States, the non-college educated have seen a steady decline in their real wages and well-being. Of course they are going to distrust “facts” put out by the elite who are seen as out of touch. I say this as someone who totally believes in vaccines and have persuaded many of my friends that they should have their children vaccinated. The growing gap between the rich and poor in this country is at the root of many issues.
- treeman79 6y ago
  Trust is a big part of it. Facts are closely related to statistics. It’s possible to be both true and a complete lie at the same time. Abusive people will often use “facts” to control victims. You learn to be very mistrustful after awhile.
  - zzzcpan 6y ago
    Facts is a loaded term here. Facts cannot rely on trust, those are called authoritative opinions, not facts. And opinions about vaccination are still just opinions, not facts. If you say, for example, that it's hazardous not to vaccinate, like the article does, it's not a fact, it's a judgement and advertising judgements is the essence of propaganda, it's basically the opposite of a fact, dystopian use of the word fact. But actual decent factual picture about vaccines is complicated, it's about balancing many big and small risks: catching the virus while you live your life, catching something at the clinic while getting vaccinated, having complications from vaccination, being subjected to unnecessary treatments and drugs because doctors want to profit from you that may also cause complications, or just being able to afford it vaccination, and so on. Not to mention all the unknown unknowns and not knowing how to evaluate the risks involved. And poor but still factual picture would at least not advertise any judgement and would present the reasoning for everyone to make their own conclusions.
    - ghthor 6y ago
      Thank you, this is a well balanced comment and it's highly valuable to have this type of viewpoint in our world.
- simonh 6y ago
  >First of all have all these psychological studies been replicated? According to the article they have many times, yes, it describes many examples of similar experiments along these lines. This evolutionary function of reason, and it's resulting flaws in our implementation of it supports my belief that in the grand scheme of things we are actually only just barely sentient. That is, we're at the very lowermost bound of the set of possible intelligences that are capable of technological civilisation. I think this because, well, we only just recently evolved enough intelligence to actually do it. If we'd become intelligent enough earlier, we'd have done it earlier. If that's true then sure, it would be natural to expect that our reasoning powers are still impaired by flaws and fallacious tendencies. The scientific method then is a procedural set of rules we've invented to prevent our naturally somewhat irrational tendencies to mess up our ability to determine accurate actionable information. Yay us!
jstanley 6y ago
Related: Epistemic Learned Helplessness: https://web.archive.org/web/20180406150429/https://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180406150429/https://squid314....
trabant00 6y ago
I see quite a big problem with those studies: the facts where made up and the truth was contingent, not necessary. So why was it expected of the participants to change their minds? Nothing they could verify disproved their initial position. For me all this proves is what I already knew: "garbage in, garbage out". edit: as below comment pointed out this might not be the problem of the studies but of how the article tries to use them to prove its point.
- simonh 6y ago
  For example in the one where the participant's own answer was disguised as that of another person we can't discount the result so easily. That's also true of the studies where participants downgraded their confidence when asked to give an account of it. On the invented studies, bear in mind that the point wasn't to measure changing the participant's mind, only for them to rate the value of a study that either supported or contradicted their initial position. Their only basis for evaluating the value of either study was their own pre-existing bias, so objectively they had no reason to evaluate them differently. That's quite different from expecting them to change their minds, as the reasons for them holding their position might not even have been addressed by the study. For example someone who disagrees with capital punishment on moral grounds may not care whether it is an effective deterrent or not so may no have any reason to doubt a study that it is an effective deterrent.
im3w1l 6y ago
I really dislike this narrative that facts don't change our minds and we are all irrational. The thing is, truth does exert a pull on our beliefs. It's a slow force. It may take years for people to come around to it. Sometimes it even happens on a generational scale. But we are approaching the truth. Everything in history, and everything in our daily experience tells us this. A couple of experiments where researchers manage to fool the people in their studies does not disprove this overall trend. What scares me about this narrative, is that people are using it to discredit democracy. "Look how stupid people are! We have to spoonfed them the cherrypicked facts that lead them to the right beliefs. We have to decide everything for them."
- simonh 6y ago
  Whether you like it or not has no bearing on whether it's true. In fact that's a confirmation bias right there. Presented with evidence of something you find unpalatable you simply reject it outright purely on the basis you don't like it. Personally I'd rather know. The point isn't that evidence has no power, it's that it has dramatically less power than most people think. However there are strategies for getting us out of the personal bias quagmire, such as the scientific method and the approach described in the article of providing an account or explanation of your position and the reasons for it. The debating rule of first explaining your opponent's position in your own words, but in a form they accept as being accurate, before trying to rebut it is also hugely powerful. These do seem to work and help lead us to better outcomes, so this is valuable and actually useful work.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    > Presented with evidence of something you find unpalatable you simply reject it outright purely on the basis you don't like it. I presented a case for why I think it is wrong. And I presented a case for why people have reason to push it despite it being wrong: it gives them more power. Considering peoples motivations is important, and when someone stands to gain we should be suspicious and have to go over everything extra carefully.
    - 6y ago
dutch3000 6y ago
i very much enjoyed the article, but i do prefer apolitical content when possible. unsure why it was necessary to reference trump in the vaccine portion. people (authors included) that can’t control themselves from injecting politics where it doesn’t naturally belong are becoming more and more irritating imo.
- tribeofone 6y ago
  > why it was necessary to reference trump in the vaccine portion because it's the new yorker. Facts are optional, bias is required.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  > unsure why it was necessary to reference trump in the vaccine portion. It wasn't necessary, however it gave the authors the opportunity to test in just one line if the summary was true, and I guess it worked. I also don't want politics injected into scientific topics, but the role of politicians is to rule for people's good, and talk with extreme caution and responsibility because of the trust people give them. When a high profile politician says "this is good", a lot of people will follow the advice blindly, so when a politician put people lives at risk by telling for example that Hydroxychloroquine works as a cure for the Coronavirus (to date at least one dead and one intoxicated after following that advice), it's politics actually harming lives with dangerous information, which makes everyone's duty to inject back common sense into the debate. If only because scientists don't have the same exposure, and it becomes so hard or even impossible for them to undo the damages done by clueless politicians who talk about things they don't know squat. BTW. I would have the same exact opinion even in the case it was Obama or Clinton doing what Trump did.
  - dutch3000 6y ago
    i’ve purposely attempted to fully disconnect from all politically related news and i’ve begun to notice oddities in conversation patterns mostly. the pattern is mainly people injecting political comments in completely nonrelated topics being discussed. the trump references were not educational, yet a sign of the author’s inability to control himself. it’s just a complete turn off for me. people can easily make the connections in the article to today’s reality, it doesn’t need to be explicitly referenced.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
(2017)
- dang 6y ago
  Added. Thanks!
williesleg 6y ago
It's New Yorker facts! I love them, they're so open and honest!
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
I'm reminded of Tetlock and Gardner's excellent book 'Superforecasting', which was essentially a study of people who consistently score at the top of prediction markets. One key thing that these 'superforecasters' had in common was that any new information caused them to update their model of the world, but none caused them to update it very much - typical people making predictions either didn't update their model or updated it too much in response to new facts. I think it makes a lot of sense, when one is trying to identify patterns in information, that it's easy to over- or undervalue novel information. We don't necessarily know what a new fact means, so ignoring it is one common error while paying too much attention to it is another.
- roter 6y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation. I guess we just need to tune our relaxation factors [0] or, perhaps better, recalibrate our Kalman filters. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successive_over-relaxation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successive_over-relaxation
- erichocean 6y ago
  > We don't necessarily know what a new fact means We also rarely even know if a "new fact" is actually true. So many studies don't replicate that it makes sense to hold off on updating core beliefs whenever "new facts" seem unlikely or in contradiction with previously known (and reliable) facts. SSC had a nice article (now gone) that discussed this for a scientific theory that had literally hundreds of confirming studies done for it. All wrong. The "new facts" were bullshit. So even with tons of studies, it's reasonable to be skeptical in some situations. It's also great that, eventually, science was able to figure out the "new facts" were bullshit. Yay, science. But it also means that people aren't being irrational when they don't immediately alter their fundamental beliefs while the ink is still dry, especially "new facts" that seem in contradiction with everything else we know…
TopHand 6y ago
What politicians know that the authors of this study don't seem to realize, is that if we are told the same story repeatedly for long enough, no matter how absurd, we'll start believing it. If you throw in some scary outcome if we don't believe the story, we'll come around sooner. It seems that fear will cause us to re-examine our beliefs and values.
- Majromax 6y ago
  That's the illusory truth effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect), which is one of the understood cognitive biases.
gadders 6y ago
The New Yorker can't help itself, can it? Reasonably fair article, but then suddenly veers into: "When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration." And: "(They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)" The thing is with studies like this is it's used by people on the losing side of elections to start complaining about "low information voters" with the subtext being "If only everyone was as clever as me and all my friends that think the same then [thing I disagree with] would never win elections." Ironically this also lets them avoid any introspection as to whether they may lose because there are defects with their policy positions.
- noetic_techy 6y ago
  Exactly. Many times following the facts can paint BOTH sides as wrong, and those who espouse "follow the facts" often only mean "follow the facts I want you to follow and discard the rest".
- Barrin92 6y ago
  > it's used by people on the losing side of elections to start complaining about "low information voters" with the subtext being "If only everyone was as clever as me and all my friends that think the same then [thing I disagree with] would never win elections." it's pretty backed up by evidence (and honestly attending a Trump ralley), that the average voter of Trump is less educated, much more prone to misinformation, and simply holds a ton of trivially wrong beliefs about the state of the world. That's without making a value judgement about the voter or saying they shouldn't have their vote which they should of course because there's no requirement for voting in a democracy, but it seems silly to pretend that such a thing as an uninformed group of voters does not exist, or even cannot exist because it would be offensive in a way. Autocrats and corrupt leaders have banked on them throughout all of history, and measured, intelligent and truthful discourse is not always found in the majority.If we're concerned with truth then "they keep losing elections" or might makes right style arguments hold no value, in fact they're quite dangerous.
rbecker 6y ago
"Why some facts, on some topics, don't change our minds as much as they maybe should" would better reflect the article content.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
RoutinePlayer 6y ago
According to 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
- rafaelvasco 6y ago
  Oh that's a fact right there. Take any piece of evidence or information, if it is ridiculed too much or violently opposed, and has been for ages, but no one forgot it, then it's probably true or partially true.
  - danaris 6y ago
    Yep, this "round earth" nonsense that has had people ridiculing good honest flatworlders for generations will die out any minute! Aaaaany minute....
    - rafaelvasco 6y ago
      Ok you found a negative to my law. That was too easy. Now look with more attention and tell me a positive. You can do it!
- danaris 6y ago
  The problem with that quote is that it is all too often adopted by people who wish to use it to prove that their pet "ridiculed" or "violently opposed" idea is one of those that will become self-evident, when in fact, it states nothing of the kind. Many theories that are ridiculed deserve it. Many ideas that are violently opposed should never see the light of day again. Very, very few of those that reach either the first or the second stage ever make it to the third, and it is a classic logical fallacy to argue that being ridiculed implies that an idea will be proven true in the end.
btmoney06 6y ago
Were the New Yorker honest, they'd entitle this: "Why the Uneducated Don't Understand That You're Right." Which is a shame. This type of information should be used to help better the reader by asking them to understand their own blind spots--not indulge the reader by telling them that their adversary is ignorant and irraitonal.
Isamu 6y ago
It takes constant training and energy to follow where the facts lead you. Feynman used different approaches as a way to keep himself focused on the facts and not exclusively what he “knew” was true. He said the easiest person to fool is yourself. Mostly people want to validate their intuition and gut feelings and don’t want to experience the discomfort of finding out that their intuition is not magically correct.
troughway 6y ago
Jordan Peterson studied/covered this as well; here's a short clip - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWbj-2DRLps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWbj-2DRLps
- war1025 6y ago
  It's downvoted and greyed out because of a general hate of Jordan Peterson (which I've found is really independent of political affiliation), but it's a good clip in my opinion.
olah_1 6y ago
I saw that Yuri Bezmenov interview[1] ages ago and didn't really think of it until now, when crime statistics are openly denied almost as if crime doesn't really exist at all. Then I thought back to that Bezmenov interview with what he said about "demoralization". When a population is demoralized, they cannot discern true information when it is staring them in the face. I think ignoring facts has less to do with some kind of esoteric psychological process and more to do with raising multiple generations to believe that they've been lied to and the whole "system" is evil. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaR7mWxuf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaR7mWxuf8
- mistermann 6y ago
  The general public has been lied to, to a significant degree. People who have full trust in entities that have and continue to publish untruths seem more irrational to me than supposedly irrational skeptics, etc (it is unknowable what the aggregate rationality of a given group is, but good luck finding anyone rational enough to realize that).
  - olah_1 6y ago
    This comment is too vague and general for me to interact with. I have a notion that I disagree with what you’re getting at here, but I can’t be sure. I agree that the public is lied to. But that is usually through editorialization of headline news that omits or emphasizes convenient information for the sake of a narrative. What I’m talking about is being presented with raw information and considering it.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      > I agree that the public is lied to. But that is usually through editorialization of headline news that omits or emphasizes convenient information for the sake of a narrative. How would you have any way of knowing this? And I mean that as a serious question, not as snark.
082349872349872 6y ago
An ancient (albeit trivial) argument for facts not changing minds is that rhetoric was a distinct discipline from logic.
dlkf 6y ago
IMO the conclusion "facts don't change our minds" is a stronger conclusion than the first two experiments show. On my reading, the first two experiments show that: 1. if I have a uniform/undefined prior (how the fuck should I know how risky/conservative firefighters are?) 2. and then I'm given an anchor 3. and then told the anchor is bunk 4. the anchor still affects me But I suspect this hinges very heavily on the fact that our initial prior is basically non-existent. By contrast, if you: 1. picked a topic where I actually have some prior belief (What country is colder: Sweden or Germany?) 2. gave me some information "Germany is actually colder on average than Sweden because of a weird atmospheric thing that affects the nordics" 3. told me that 2 was BS I highly doubt you'd be able to replicate 4.
- syrrim 6y ago
  Why not? There are many strange facts in the world. Some of them are even true. It is very difficult, when recalling a strange facts, to remember whether it was one of the true ones or not. So naturally, things we've heard will tend to exert a pull, even if we later found out they were wrong.
  - dlkf 6y ago
    In virtue of the experimental design, you were just now told that the "strange fact" is bullshit. If you had a clear opinion prior to receiving the strange fact, you'd revert to it
- eagsalazar2 6y ago
  Specific facts are orthogonal to the actual underlying positions held, which are presented outwardly as other positions for the sake of political cover, hence the illusion of facts not changing minds. What's needed is an understanding of the actual underlying, usually hidden, positions, then present facts to disrupt those positions.
  - dlkf 6y ago
    This is unclear to me. Can you explain what you mean in the context of my alternative example?
abetusk 6y ago
Interesting read. They're basically proposing that our anti-rational behavior came out as a type of 'hyper-socialization'. I can believe it and, if true, would point to why things like changing the Overton window [1] and other mass public perception shifts change individual perception. I don't think it's the only way to change peoples minds and I hesitate to dive into "just employ emotional reasoning" as that seems dangerous. From personal experience, another effective way is to change people's minds is by giving them "skin in the game". I've tried, over the years, to convince friends of the solution to the Monty Hall [2] problem. After explaining the solution and them either not believing it or not understanding it, I then play the game with them with 100 doors and revealing 98 after the first pick. Once this game is played a couple times, they understand the solution much more readily. My take on this is that they suddenly have a personal stake in the game, even if it's weak. There's a personal cost that takes the form as social shame or loss aversion, even for a game that's played between friends with no money involved, that gives them a stake. Once they start wanting to actively avoid losing, they're much more willing to listen to reason. The article points out that our anti-rational behavior is at odds with survival but I would bet there's a level of abstraction below which our survival minded rationality kicks in and above which we don't have enough of a stake in the answer to use our rationality to good effect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
dang 6y ago
Why they didn't in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099488 Why they didn't at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764
bigpumpkin 6y ago
The Stanford experiment forgot to account for the fact that the students could've used the fake score they first received as a useful prior on how difficult the task was. It does not show that "Facts Don't Change Our Minds".
SmokeyHamster 6y ago
Slightly misleading headline. The study tested how much a lie persists in someone's mind even after they're told the truth. The study found that facts do indeed change people's minds, just not as much as we'd like, because the initial impression sets expectations. Caldini talks about this in some of his books on persuasion.
pier25 6y ago
> strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding I've thought about this too on my own strong feelings. The more I know about something, the more I understand its nuances, pros and cons, etc, the less I feel strongly about it. Now when I spot myself with a strong feeling about something I try to remind myself that I'm most likely missing something. We see this constantly in the dev world. Younger devs feel very strongly about languages, libraries, frameworks, etc, probably because they have a shallower understanding of the thing.
iconjack 6y ago
The fundamental problem is that our beliefs become part of our identity, and thus most of the time we're not actually seeking the "truth". This is obviously true when it comes to religion, and almost as bad when it comes to politics. And these days, a lot of "science" has become hyper political: race, climate, gender, evolution. Forget changing anyone's mind on those topics, no matter what facts you have in your arsenal.
thisrod 6y ago
"Knowledge advances one funeral at a time" - old physics saying.
mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y ago
Truth is only important to us as long as it contributes positively to our well-being. This sort of mushrooms is edible and this one is poisonous - everyone would agree on that. As far as more abstract truths are concerned: people believed for centuries that the Earth is flat. Many still do. If you said otherwise, society would probably burn you for heresy, so the cost of truth was hugely negative.

116 points by skm 6y ago

baxtr 6y ago

Is that actually a fact?

wizzwizz4 6y ago
No, all this evidence is made up. So: how likely do you think it is that humans really behave like this?
willvarfar 6y ago
I don't mean to be paranoid, but do you think the article might be misinformation in some study of the collective gullibility of the HN crowd?
- danaris 6y ago
  Well, given that it was published in the New Yorker 3 years ago, it clearly wasn't written primarily for us. Given that it is discussing the results of actual psychological studies (that I have seen talked about in a number of other places), it is vanishingly unlikely that it is in some way intended to study anyone's gullibility.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

First of all have all these psychological studies been replicated? Part of the reason, “facts” don’t change our mind is that a lot of “facts” aren’t really facts like physics, but are rather the result of statistical games. Finally, and I think the biggest issue is that a lot of facts rely on trust, since they are practically impossible for the average person to fully verify. And I think, for a variety of reasons, trust has been lost. Think about vaccines. Say back in the 1950’s, you probably knew or heard of someone who died from polio. You mom, might have had a sibling that died from one of the other vaccine related illnesses. The doctor recommending the vaccines, was seen as a trusted friend. He(it was usually a he back then) probably spent his whole life in your town. He knew your grandparents. Maybe he delivered your parents. He would spend hours at the bedside of a sick child or a dying grandparent. Maybe he was the one who delivered your children as well. Now when he says that he recommends you give your child this vaccine, you are going to listen. Now forward to modern times. You book your appointment. You go to the office where you wait for hours. The pediatrician comes in and rushes through a 15 minute visit. Says your kid should get vaccinated. On the way home you listen to an investigative report of how doctors are paid by big pharma to prescribe drugs. By the way, you have never heard of anyone you know getting one of these vaccine preventable illnesses. Now the gap between the educated elites and regular people in this country is widening. They do t interact much socially. They do t even live together. In the United States, the non-college educated have seen a steady decline in their real wages and well-being. Of course they are going to distrust “facts” put out by the elite who are seen as out of touch. I say this as someone who totally believes in vaccines and have persuaded many of my friends that they should have their children vaccinated. The growing gap between the rich and poor in this country is at the root of many issues.

treeman79 6y ago
Trust is a big part of it. Facts are closely related to statistics. It’s possible to be both true and a complete lie at the same time. Abusive people will often use “facts” to control victims. You learn to be very mistrustful after awhile.
- zzzcpan 6y ago
  Facts is a loaded term here. Facts cannot rely on trust, those are called authoritative opinions, not facts. And opinions about vaccination are still just opinions, not facts. If you say, for example, that it's hazardous not to vaccinate, like the article does, it's not a fact, it's a judgement and advertising judgements is the essence of propaganda, it's basically the opposite of a fact, dystopian use of the word fact. But actual decent factual picture about vaccines is complicated, it's about balancing many big and small risks: catching the virus while you live your life, catching something at the clinic while getting vaccinated, having complications from vaccination, being subjected to unnecessary treatments and drugs because doctors want to profit from you that may also cause complications, or just being able to afford it vaccination, and so on. Not to mention all the unknown unknowns and not knowing how to evaluate the risks involved. And poor but still factual picture would at least not advertise any judgement and would present the reasoning for everyone to make their own conclusions.
  - ghthor 6y ago
    Thank you, this is a well balanced comment and it's highly valuable to have this type of viewpoint in our world.
simonh 6y ago
>First of all have all these psychological studies been replicated? According to the article they have many times, yes, it describes many examples of similar experiments along these lines. This evolutionary function of reason, and it's resulting flaws in our implementation of it supports my belief that in the grand scheme of things we are actually only just barely sentient. That is, we're at the very lowermost bound of the set of possible intelligences that are capable of technological civilisation. I think this because, well, we only just recently evolved enough intelligence to actually do it. If we'd become intelligent enough earlier, we'd have done it earlier. If that's true then sure, it would be natural to expect that our reasoning powers are still impaired by flaws and fallacious tendencies. The scientific method then is a procedural set of rules we've invented to prevent our naturally somewhat irrational tendencies to mess up our ability to determine accurate actionable information. Yay us!

jstanley 6y ago

Related: Epistemic Learned Helplessness: https://web.archive.org/web/20180406150429/https://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180406150429/https://squid314....

trabant00 6y ago

I see quite a big problem with those studies: the facts where made up and the truth was contingent, not necessary. So why was it expected of the participants to change their minds? Nothing they could verify disproved their initial position. For me all this proves is what I already knew: "garbage in, garbage out". edit: as below comment pointed out this might not be the problem of the studies but of how the article tries to use them to prove its point.

simonh 6y ago
For example in the one where the participant's own answer was disguised as that of another person we can't discount the result so easily. That's also true of the studies where participants downgraded their confidence when asked to give an account of it. On the invented studies, bear in mind that the point wasn't to measure changing the participant's mind, only for them to rate the value of a study that either supported or contradicted their initial position. Their only basis for evaluating the value of either study was their own pre-existing bias, so objectively they had no reason to evaluate them differently. That's quite different from expecting them to change their minds, as the reasons for them holding their position might not even have been addressed by the study. For example someone who disagrees with capital punishment on moral grounds may not care whether it is an effective deterrent or not so may no have any reason to doubt a study that it is an effective deterrent.

im3w1l 6y ago

I really dislike this narrative that facts don't change our minds and we are all irrational. The thing is, truth does exert a pull on our beliefs. It's a slow force. It may take years for people to come around to it. Sometimes it even happens on a generational scale. But we are approaching the truth. Everything in history, and everything in our daily experience tells us this. A couple of experiments where researchers manage to fool the people in their studies does not disprove this overall trend. What scares me about this narrative, is that people are using it to discredit democracy. "Look how stupid people are! We have to spoonfed them the cherrypicked facts that lead them to the right beliefs. We have to decide everything for them."

simonh 6y ago
Whether you like it or not has no bearing on whether it's true. In fact that's a confirmation bias right there. Presented with evidence of something you find unpalatable you simply reject it outright purely on the basis you don't like it. Personally I'd rather know. The point isn't that evidence has no power, it's that it has dramatically less power than most people think. However there are strategies for getting us out of the personal bias quagmire, such as the scientific method and the approach described in the article of providing an account or explanation of your position and the reasons for it. The debating rule of first explaining your opponent's position in your own words, but in a form they accept as being accurate, before trying to rebut it is also hugely powerful. These do seem to work and help lead us to better outcomes, so this is valuable and actually useful work.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  > Presented with evidence of something you find unpalatable you simply reject it outright purely on the basis you don't like it. I presented a case for why I think it is wrong. And I presented a case for why people have reason to push it despite it being wrong: it gives them more power. Considering peoples motivations is important, and when someone stands to gain we should be suspicious and have to go over everything extra carefully.
  - 6y ago

dutch3000 6y ago

i very much enjoyed the article, but i do prefer apolitical content when possible. unsure why it was necessary to reference trump in the vaccine portion. people (authors included) that can’t control themselves from injecting politics where it doesn’t naturally belong are becoming more and more irritating imo.

tribeofone 6y ago
> why it was necessary to reference trump in the vaccine portion because it's the new yorker. Facts are optional, bias is required.
squarefoot 6y ago
> unsure why it was necessary to reference trump in the vaccine portion. It wasn't necessary, however it gave the authors the opportunity to test in just one line if the summary was true, and I guess it worked. I also don't want politics injected into scientific topics, but the role of politicians is to rule for people's good, and talk with extreme caution and responsibility because of the trust people give them. When a high profile politician says "this is good", a lot of people will follow the advice blindly, so when a politician put people lives at risk by telling for example that Hydroxychloroquine works as a cure for the Coronavirus (to date at least one dead and one intoxicated after following that advice), it's politics actually harming lives with dangerous information, which makes everyone's duty to inject back common sense into the debate. If only because scientists don't have the same exposure, and it becomes so hard or even impossible for them to undo the damages done by clueless politicians who talk about things they don't know squat. BTW. I would have the same exact opinion even in the case it was Obama or Clinton doing what Trump did.
- dutch3000 6y ago
  i’ve purposely attempted to fully disconnect from all politically related news and i’ve begun to notice oddities in conversation patterns mostly. the pattern is mainly people injecting political comments in completely nonrelated topics being discussed. the trump references were not educational, yet a sign of the author’s inability to control himself. it’s just a complete turn off for me. people can easily make the connections in the article to today’s reality, it doesn’t need to be explicitly referenced.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

(2017)

dang 6y ago
Added. Thanks!

williesleg 6y ago

It's New Yorker facts! I love them, they're so open and honest!

SuoDuanDao 6y ago

I'm reminded of Tetlock and Gardner's excellent book 'Superforecasting', which was essentially a study of people who consistently score at the top of prediction markets. One key thing that these 'superforecasters' had in common was that any new information caused them to update their model of the world, but none caused them to update it very much - typical people making predictions either didn't update their model or updated it too much in response to new facts. I think it makes a lot of sense, when one is trying to identify patterns in information, that it's easy to over- or undervalue novel information. We don't necessarily know what a new fact means, so ignoring it is one common error while paying too much attention to it is another.

roter 6y ago
Thanks for the recommendation. I guess we just need to tune our relaxation factors [0] or, perhaps better, recalibrate our Kalman filters. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successive_over-relaxation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successive_over-relaxation
erichocean 6y ago
> We don't necessarily know what a new fact means We also rarely even know if a "new fact" is actually true. So many studies don't replicate that it makes sense to hold off on updating core beliefs whenever "new facts" seem unlikely or in contradiction with previously known (and reliable) facts. SSC had a nice article (now gone) that discussed this for a scientific theory that had literally hundreds of confirming studies done for it. All wrong. The "new facts" were bullshit. So even with tons of studies, it's reasonable to be skeptical in some situations. It's also great that, eventually, science was able to figure out the "new facts" were bullshit. Yay, science. But it also means that people aren't being irrational when they don't immediately alter their fundamental beliefs while the ink is still dry, especially "new facts" that seem in contradiction with everything else we know…

TopHand 6y ago

What politicians know that the authors of this study don't seem to realize, is that if we are told the same story repeatedly for long enough, no matter how absurd, we'll start believing it. If you throw in some scary outcome if we don't believe the story, we'll come around sooner. It seems that fear will cause us to re-examine our beliefs and values.

Majromax 6y ago
That's the illusory truth effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect), which is one of the understood cognitive biases.

gadders 6y ago

The New Yorker can't help itself, can it? Reasonably fair article, but then suddenly veers into: "When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration." And: "(They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)" The thing is with studies like this is it's used by people on the losing side of elections to start complaining about "low information voters" with the subtext being "If only everyone was as clever as me and all my friends that think the same then [thing I disagree with] would never win elections." Ironically this also lets them avoid any introspection as to whether they may lose because there are defects with their policy positions.

noetic_techy 6y ago
Exactly. Many times following the facts can paint BOTH sides as wrong, and those who espouse "follow the facts" often only mean "follow the facts I want you to follow and discard the rest".
Barrin92 6y ago
> it's used by people on the losing side of elections to start complaining about "low information voters" with the subtext being "If only everyone was as clever as me and all my friends that think the same then [thing I disagree with] would never win elections." it's pretty backed up by evidence (and honestly attending a Trump ralley), that the average voter of Trump is less educated, much more prone to misinformation, and simply holds a ton of trivially wrong beliefs about the state of the world. That's without making a value judgement about the voter or saying they shouldn't have their vote which they should of course because there's no requirement for voting in a democracy, but it seems silly to pretend that such a thing as an uninformed group of voters does not exist, or even cannot exist because it would be offensive in a way. Autocrats and corrupt leaders have banked on them throughout all of history, and measured, intelligent and truthful discourse is not always found in the majority.If we're concerned with truth then "they keep losing elections" or might makes right style arguments hold no value, in fact they're quite dangerous.

rbecker 6y ago

"Why some facts, on some topics, don't change our minds as much as they maybe should" would better reflect the article content.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

RoutinePlayer 6y ago

According to 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”

rafaelvasco 6y ago
Oh that's a fact right there. Take any piece of evidence or information, if it is ridiculed too much or violently opposed, and has been for ages, but no one forgot it, then it's probably true or partially true.
- danaris 6y ago
  Yep, this "round earth" nonsense that has had people ridiculing good honest flatworlders for generations will die out any minute! Aaaaany minute....
  - rafaelvasco 6y ago
    Ok you found a negative to my law. That was too easy. Now look with more attention and tell me a positive. You can do it!
danaris 6y ago
The problem with that quote is that it is all too often adopted by people who wish to use it to prove that their pet "ridiculed" or "violently opposed" idea is one of those that will become self-evident, when in fact, it states nothing of the kind. Many theories that are ridiculed deserve it. Many ideas that are violently opposed should never see the light of day again. Very, very few of those that reach either the first or the second stage ever make it to the third, and it is a classic logical fallacy to argue that being ridiculed implies that an idea will be proven true in the end.

btmoney06 6y ago

Were the New Yorker honest, they'd entitle this: "Why the Uneducated Don't Understand That You're Right." Which is a shame. This type of information should be used to help better the reader by asking them to understand their own blind spots--not indulge the reader by telling them that their adversary is ignorant and irraitonal.

Isamu 6y ago

It takes constant training and energy to follow where the facts lead you. Feynman used different approaches as a way to keep himself focused on the facts and not exclusively what he “knew” was true. He said the easiest person to fool is yourself. Mostly people want to validate their intuition and gut feelings and don’t want to experience the discomfort of finding out that their intuition is not magically correct.

troughway 6y ago

Jordan Peterson studied/covered this as well; here's a short clip - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWbj-2DRLps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWbj-2DRLps

war1025 6y ago
It's downvoted and greyed out because of a general hate of Jordan Peterson (which I've found is really independent of political affiliation), but it's a good clip in my opinion.

olah_1 6y ago

I saw that Yuri Bezmenov interview[1] ages ago and didn't really think of it until now, when crime statistics are openly denied almost as if crime doesn't really exist at all. Then I thought back to that Bezmenov interview with what he said about "demoralization". When a population is demoralized, they cannot discern true information when it is staring them in the face. I think ignoring facts has less to do with some kind of esoteric psychological process and more to do with raising multiple generations to believe that they've been lied to and the whole "system" is evil. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaR7mWxuf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYaR7mWxuf8

mistermann 6y ago
The general public has been lied to, to a significant degree. People who have full trust in entities that have and continue to publish untruths seem more irrational to me than supposedly irrational skeptics, etc (it is unknowable what the aggregate rationality of a given group is, but good luck finding anyone rational enough to realize that).
- olah_1 6y ago
  This comment is too vague and general for me to interact with. I have a notion that I disagree with what you’re getting at here, but I can’t be sure. I agree that the public is lied to. But that is usually through editorialization of headline news that omits or emphasizes convenient information for the sake of a narrative. What I’m talking about is being presented with raw information and considering it.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    > I agree that the public is lied to. But that is usually through editorialization of headline news that omits or emphasizes convenient information for the sake of a narrative. How would you have any way of knowing this? And I mean that as a serious question, not as snark.

082349872349872 6y ago

An ancient (albeit trivial) argument for facts not changing minds is that rhetoric was a distinct discipline from logic.

dlkf 6y ago

IMO the conclusion "facts don't change our minds" is a stronger conclusion than the first two experiments show. On my reading, the first two experiments show that: 1. if I have a uniform/undefined prior (how the fuck should I know how risky/conservative firefighters are?) 2. and then I'm given an anchor 3. and then told the anchor is bunk 4. the anchor still affects me But I suspect this hinges very heavily on the fact that our initial prior is basically non-existent. By contrast, if you: 1. picked a topic where I actually have some prior belief (What country is colder: Sweden or Germany?) 2. gave me some information "Germany is actually colder on average than Sweden because of a weird atmospheric thing that affects the nordics" 3. told me that 2 was BS I highly doubt you'd be able to replicate 4.

syrrim 6y ago
Why not? There are many strange facts in the world. Some of them are even true. It is very difficult, when recalling a strange facts, to remember whether it was one of the true ones or not. So naturally, things we've heard will tend to exert a pull, even if we later found out they were wrong.
- dlkf 6y ago
  In virtue of the experimental design, you were just now told that the "strange fact" is bullshit. If you had a clear opinion prior to receiving the strange fact, you'd revert to it
eagsalazar2 6y ago
Specific facts are orthogonal to the actual underlying positions held, which are presented outwardly as other positions for the sake of political cover, hence the illusion of facts not changing minds. What's needed is an understanding of the actual underlying, usually hidden, positions, then present facts to disrupt those positions.
- dlkf 6y ago
  This is unclear to me. Can you explain what you mean in the context of my alternative example?

abetusk 6y ago

Interesting read. They're basically proposing that our anti-rational behavior came out as a type of 'hyper-socialization'. I can believe it and, if true, would point to why things like changing the Overton window [1] and other mass public perception shifts change individual perception. I don't think it's the only way to change peoples minds and I hesitate to dive into "just employ emotional reasoning" as that seems dangerous. From personal experience, another effective way is to change people's minds is by giving them "skin in the game". I've tried, over the years, to convince friends of the solution to the Monty Hall [2] problem. After explaining the solution and them either not believing it or not understanding it, I then play the game with them with 100 doors and revealing 98 after the first pick. Once this game is played a couple times, they understand the solution much more readily. My take on this is that they suddenly have a personal stake in the game, even if it's weak. There's a personal cost that takes the form as social shame or loss aversion, even for a game that's played between friends with no money involved, that gives them a stake. Once they start wanting to actively avoid losing, they're much more willing to listen to reason. The article points out that our anti-rational behavior is at odds with survival but I would bet there's a level of abstraction below which our survival minded rationality kicks in and above which we don't have enough of a stake in the answer to use our rationality to good effect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

dang 6y ago

Why they didn't in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099488 Why they didn't at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810764

bigpumpkin 6y ago

The Stanford experiment forgot to account for the fact that the students could've used the fake score they first received as a useful prior on how difficult the task was. It does not show that "Facts Don't Change Our Minds".

SmokeyHamster 6y ago

Slightly misleading headline. The study tested how much a lie persists in someone's mind even after they're told the truth. The study found that facts do indeed change people's minds, just not as much as we'd like, because the initial impression sets expectations. Caldini talks about this in some of his books on persuasion.

pier25 6y ago

> strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding I've thought about this too on my own strong feelings. The more I know about something, the more I understand its nuances, pros and cons, etc, the less I feel strongly about it. Now when I spot myself with a strong feeling about something I try to remind myself that I'm most likely missing something. We see this constantly in the dev world. Younger devs feel very strongly about languages, libraries, frameworks, etc, probably because they have a shallower understanding of the thing.

iconjack 6y ago

The fundamental problem is that our beliefs become part of our identity, and thus most of the time we're not actually seeking the "truth". This is obviously true when it comes to religion, and almost as bad when it comes to politics. And these days, a lot of "science" has become hyper political: race, climate, gender, evolution. Forget changing anyone's mind on those topics, no matter what facts you have in your arsenal.

thisrod 6y ago

"Knowledge advances one funeral at a time" - old physics saying.

mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y ago

Truth is only important to us as long as it contributes positively to our well-being. This sort of mushrooms is edible and this one is poisonous - everyone would agree on that. As far as more abstract truths are concerned: people believed for centuries that the Earth is flat. Many still do. If you said otherwise, society would probably burn you for heresy, so the cost of truth was hugely negative.