[im3w1l]

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]

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]

> 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.

[simonh]

I suppose I was a bit antagonistic in my post sorry, but if anything your observation supports the article's position. Why should facts exert only a slow, painstaking generational force on belief if people are actually rational? Surely it should have immediate effect?

I really don't see what these researchers or journalists have to gain, beyond what they would gain from doing any research or journalism. I'm just not seeing any credible counter-arguments.

[im3w1l]

> Why should facts exert only a slow, painstaking generational force on belief if people are actually rational? Surely it should have immediate effect?

If you look at rational as a binary, then people aren't rational. But people are a little bit rational. Sufficiently rational, to eventually find the truth.

I like the parallel with machine learning. Many, many bright minds have tried to formalize our intuitions into automatic systems. Gradually they make progress. But it's plain to see that it's not as easy as "just incorporate the new fact". We have systems that can deal with facts, and systems that can learn from experience. But systems that do both, that can learn from experience and express that in terms of facts, or use facts to guide it's exploration, that's an open problem.

As for who has to gain, I do think journalists, and editors, and newspaper owners have something to gain. Their role transforms from giving people "just the facts", to manipulating people into the right beliefs. What the right beliefs are? That's for the journalists and their benefactors to decide.

[michaelmrose]

A small minority of people are rational enough to forge new truths in the face of conflicting and complicated information usually in a small narrowly focused way. A much larger minority is capable of digesting and making use of the work product of the former group in a productive way again within the scope of a broader but still narrow scope.

The majority is too stupid to make up their own minds and needs to be educated at a young age to accept the work product of prior generations experts because they are just too unintelligent to evaluate it for themselves. This is literally most people.

The fact that this is unpleasant doesn't make it untrue.

[simonh]

>If you look at rational as a binary, then people aren't rational. But people are a little bit rational. Sufficiently rational, to eventually find the truth.

Right, which is pretty much exactly what the article says. It shows what forms the flaws in our rationality take, and suggests procedural methods we can use to help the process of rational analysis along.

[Nasrudith]

Why should facts exert a slow pull? In addition to any unknown constraints with neural mechanisms an overly high learning rate has been noted with neural networks as resembling schizophrenia in some ways. Plus whatvever physiological constraints limit how fast minds could change.

I suspect it effectively functions as minor anti-mindhacking measure as bizzare and dumb as it sounds. It would protect against adversarial input.

If there was no mental inertia then "false facts" which check out to all verification measures could prove quite dangerous as input which outweighs all past known could be easily exploited by bad actors to change what they "know" and exploit it from there.

[wizzwizz4]

An Untrollable Mathematician, Illustrated: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CvKnhXTu9BPcdKE4W/an-untroll...

To summarise: for reasons, it's possible for somebody to endlessly drive up and down a computationally-limited agent's credence estimate for mathematical conjecture X (so long as the agent hasn't found a proof yet) just by stating implications of the conjecture, if the agent is trying to use ideal Bayesian reasoning. It's possible to make this "trolling" impossible, by basically turning your "mental inertia" up to 11 – but that proves it's possible to be untrollable.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Why should facts exert only a slow, painstaking generational force on belief if people are actually rational? Surely it should have immediate effect?

Kind of like Bayesian inference. You have a prior and the different evidence moves the probability.

And it works a lot. For example, if you see a magician levitating, the evidence of your eyes seems to suggest that they are actually levititating. However, your priors tell you that the chance of that is still pretty low even with the new evidence. So this way, you don’t go run across a street magician and suddenly believe humans can levitate.

[bluntfang]

Sounds like it's time to submit some peer reviewed scientific papers to refute the current popular science opinion!

Oh you don't have the credentials to run experiments and talk about your findings? Oh well that's too bad, I guess we'll all live in the dark and you'll have your truth.

[ARandomerDude]

You have the OP's causality chain backwards.

OP: I dislike the claim because I reject the claim.

Your version of OP: I reject the claim because I dislike the claim.

[simonh]

That's not a rejection of the claim at all though, even though OP dislikes it. Why should objective proof exert a 'slow force' on our reason? Surely it should be decisive. Saying it can take a generation is tantamount to admitting that objective proof can have to wait for the people who reject it anyway to literally die off before it gets accepted.

So what OP seems to be actually rejecting is an extreme version of the claim, along the lines that humans aren't rational at all, which isn't there in the article.

[waterhouse]

There are cognitive metastrategies that can look like irrationality in the small, but are pretty sensible for people with limited information and research time.

Consider: "a stranger makes a sophisticated argument, which seems convincing, whose conclusion is that you're wrong about something important". If you always respond to this by doing whatever the stranger advocates, you're likely to end up getting scammed or getting eaten up by a political movement or otherwise doing something you later regret.

Even if the argument is true as far as it goes, sometimes true facts are presented in a misleading context. One favorite tactic to discredit a group seems to be to find some of its worst members and do truthful reporting on them; one can also try to suggest "policy X is working/not working" by choosing the statistical measures that paint it in the best/worst light, and failing to mention the other measures that might portray it more accurately.

A general strategy of "remember new information, but don't let it affect your actions until you've had time to reflect / consult with those wiser than yourself / do further research" is useful in a wide range of situations. (And if you don't bother to do further research for years, it follows that either the new information sits in abeyance for years, or you take the risk of acting on it without having validated it.)

[simonh]

>If you always respond to this by doing whatever the stranger advocates, you're likely to end up getting scammed or getting eaten up by a political movement or otherwise doing something you later regret.

That's amazing, it's an excellent summary of the theory the article proposes for why we instinctively discount evidence against our preconceived opinions. Basically it's to stop us getting scammed, but in the hunter-gatherer context in which we evolved, not a modern society with robust systems for validating evidence.

The pre-conceived opinions the studies test aren't always even things the test subjects actually care about though. They can be opinions about things they were only just exposed to and wouldn't be expected to have any personal investment in, such as opinions about fictional characters that only exist in the test. We're not talking about proving to conservatives that liberalism is right, or vice versa, some of the tests are literally concerning beliefs about issues that only exist in the test. It doesn't matter, as soon as an opinion is formed it's incredibly hard to change it no matter how strong the counter evidence, and even if it's shown conclusively the initial opinion was based on false data.

[michaelmrose]

It takes generations because it takes generations to indoctrinate new generations in the truths gleaned by a small minority of experts in various fields have learned. This isn't strong a indication that people are rational. It's more like indication that societies can magnify the gains of a minority of rational individuals to improve the position of all including the majority not smart enough to have made those gains.

[santoshalper]

He literally starts out describing it as a "narrative" and the first statement he makes is that he dislikes it. It is clear that he is not interested in finding out whether it is true, he simply doesn't like what it implies and is suspicious of the messenger. The actual argument against it is weak and really just reinforces it (it takes entire generations to come around on an issue - we know dude, that's what we're talking about!)

We are all doing this shit all the time. Denying it just gives it more power. Admitting you have biases that color every interaction at least gives you a fighting chance to examine them.

[ARandomerDude]

I think you've misunderstood. I didn't say I agree (or disagree) with the OP. My point is that simonh got the cause-effect relationship of im3w1l's argument backwards. The cause is not necessarily stated before the effect.

For example: "I don't like eating brisket. It always gives me heartburn." In that case, the heartburn causes the dislike, even though it was stated after the effect (non-enjoyment).

In this case, im3w1l described an emotional state (effect), followed by his reasons (cause). You're free to disagree with his reasons, but it's important to understand the argument or you're responding to a straw-man.

[btmoney06]

Academics and the New Yorker staff: "Everybody is biased, except for me of course."

[jbotz]

> I really dislike this narrative that facts don't change our minds and we are all irrational.

I don't think that is the real "narrative" here, although reading this article may make it seem like that. The "narrative", or rather the modern scientific understanding which this article tries to present to a lay audience, is that real rational thinking is not our default, even though it seems to us that way.

But we can think more rationally. It just takes a lot more work. We can do all of the following...

* Subject our thinking to a rigorous framework such as the scientific method, in which we have to declare what evidence would falsify our argument (hypothesis) as we make it.

* Study cognitive biases to become more aware of their effects on our thinking and hopefully "immunize" our mind against some of their effects.

* Train our capacity for meta-cognition with mindfulness practices to become more aware of why we think what we think as we think it.

As for using the limitations of human rationality as an argument against democracy... I don't think that's a logical conclusion at all since leaders and lawmakers are subject to these limitations no matter how they come into power. But it is an argument that we still need to improve the processes by which policy is decided and that we need to watch out for and guard against those who would abuse the specific ways that humans can be tricked because of these factors (such as the Cambridge Analytica crowd).

[bumby]

> Study cognitive biases to become more aware of their effects on our thinking and hopefully "immunize" our mind against some of their effects.

I’m not sure this works. In fact, Daniel Khaneman has said in the into to “Thinking: Fast and Slow” that all his study into cognitive biases has led him to believe he’s powerless to stop them in himself, and still only able to recognize them in others

[jbotz]

That's where my third bullet comes in... you need a high degree of metacognitive awareness (mindfulness) to be able recognize your own biases. Together they do make a difference. If you're well versed in cognitive biases, then as you increase your mindfulness you will begin to recognize them in yourself, at first with a delay, upon reflection, and later --- when you're practically a Zen master ;-) --- you may recognize them in real-time and be able to correct them immediately.

[bumby]

I think what Khaneman was getting at is that it's hopeless futile to try and recognize your own biases in a meaningful. So why I understand your statement, I'm skeptical that's it's possible if someone at the forefront of cognitive science admits he can't do it. I'm still enough of an optimist to try and use mindfulness myself to accomplish that though.

Of course, maybe he's just really bad at being mindful ;-)

[MaxBarraclough]

> I really dislike this narrative that facts don't change our minds and we are all irrational.

To mirror simonh's comment, it's rather ironic that you're responding to a claim of fact, with an opinion. Whether it's true or not is a question of science, not wishful thinking, and you've not given a solid reason to reject the findings of this research.

It's like the way the theory of evolution remains true whether or not some nasty elements of the far right try to use it to justify an atrocious ideology like 'social Darwinism'.

> people are using it to discredit democracy

Who does this? I don't see researchers like Dan Ariely [0] lurching to the far right when they make discoveries about our psychology. (It's odd that neither Ariely nor the field of behavioural economics [1] are mentioned in the article.)

Nothing about this research indicates that non-democratic systems of government are the best way to run things after all.

> truth does exert a pull on our beliefs

Broadly speaking mankind seems to get less ignorant over time, but sometimes the pull on our beliefs can act in the opposite direction. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#backfire_eff...

[rbecker]

> To mirror simonh's comment, it's rather ironic that you're responding to a claim of fact, with an opinion.

Are they? "But we are approaching the truth. Everything in history, and everything in our daily experience tells us this." sounds like a claim of fact. Do you disagree with it? Have we not, collectively, changed our minds on a great many things?

Evolution, heliocentrism, the importance of doctors washing their hands, the non-determinism of quantum physics - all of these are a result of people changing their minds when presented with new facts. Even the importance of car safety belts and harmfulness of smoking. You are literally surrounded by evidence of people changing their minds when presented with new facts, but choose to instead focus on a few experiments where some people didn't change their minds when presented with some evidence on certain topics.

How did the article call it.. confirmation bias?

[zzzcpan]

This is just a logical fallacy. Some people changed their minds when presented with new facts, sure, but only some, some didn't and most people likely changed their minds when presented and bombarded with opinions, propaganda, etc., but not facts.

[simonh]

Nobody has suggested humans are not capable of rationality, that's an absurd exaggeration. Clearly we are. The article even points out the scientific method as a valuable procedural tool we can use to help overcome the effects of biases, and suggests a method of self-reflection that has proved in studies to help obtain useful results. The better we understand those biases the better we are able to develop new approaches and procedures to mitigate them. But the first step is to understand ourselves and our limitations. Without that, we're a flailing bunch of tribal apes screaming at each other.

[rbecker]

> Nobody has suggested humans are not capable of rationality, that's an absurd exaggeration.

It's the title of the article.

[simonh]

If articles could be distilled entirely down to titles, we wouldn't have articles. The authors are clearly not saying humans are incapable of rational thought, we're just not perfectly rational and in fact rational thinking can be surprisingly difficult for us, that's all. You know that, everybody who has read the article knows that whether they agree with the article or not, so why say this?

It's exactly this sort of hit and run straw man argument the article describes as being behind a lot of fallacious thinking. Scoring a 'hit' on an opponent, no matter how absurd or irrelevant, or how much it distorts the opponent's actual position, grants an immediate dopamine shot. It feels fantastic.

That's a really crucial part of the puzzle. It's why asking participants in a debate to first state the position of their opponent in their own words, but in terms their opponent accepts is accurate, before arguing against them is such a useful tool. It eliminates retorts based on knowing misrepresentations like this, which are a serious impediment to productive discourse.

[rbecker]

The 'often' is missing not just from the title, but the entire article. It fails to draw any attention to the weaknesses or limited applicability of the experiments, and implies they're more universal, overstating their results.

I believe this is deliberate - "humans sometimes don't change their minds on some topics when given some types of new evidence" is uncontroversial, it generates few clicks, little argument. But "facts don't change our minds" (and nothing in the article text about the limitations of that statement), gets you a flame war with one side eager to embrace science, while the other struggles with the contradiction between the article and their own experience.

[Lendal]

The article doesn't say facts never change minds. Clearly, facts do change minds. Just not always. The article simply focuses on the latter case, because that's a more interesting thing to read about.

It's like boring headlines don't get voted up in Hacker News. It has to be something interesting. Facts change peoples' minds. Facts don't change people's minds. Both are true. But only one is interesting.

[aeternum]

It also makes sense for humans to have some amount of hysteresis. Evidence or 'facts' can be misleading, data can be cherry-picked. It takes some time to sort it out.

I do think too many people get blinded by that hysteresis and the want to be 'right'.

[gmadsen]

its not that its just boring, but it doesn't provide any insight. We all have experienced changing our minds due to facts , there is nothing to write about that statement. What is interesting is that despite thinking that we are very logical with what we believe, study after study show that to be not the case on average. Confirmation bias is pervasive

[WhompingWindows]

Only certain truth exerts a pull on our beliefs: the truth that we use to justify our beliefs post-hoc. It's well established in psychology, from books I've read like "thinking fast and slow" or "The Righteous Mind", psychological study points to people building their beliefs THEN finding facts to justify them.

I do agree that, over generations, the correct and truthful views tend to gain the upper-hand. This arises from each generation downloading a new set of facts and learning in school, when they are young and their minds haven't formed their belief system yet. However, if we allowed all children to enter school at their place of worship from 5 to 18, we'd find college students remarkably unwilling to learn many more facts.

So, more broadly, why does it bother you that facts don't change our minds and we're all irrational? We are Homo Sapiens, a mammalian primate who made the jump from the jungle to the Savannah and learned to work together to gather food and hunt game. We haven't left behind our animal software, it is still active in and exploited by our modern society.

[majormajor]

> But we are approaching the truth. Everything in history, and everything in our daily experience tells us this.

I think this needs substantiation. You present this like a fact, but it looks entirely like an opinion: your interpretation of history.

It presents a sense of inevitability that I find extremely dangerous.

The only thing that keeps us from losing what we have today - as many civilizations have done in the past - is our actions. Presenting it as historical inevitability cheapens both the meaning of our actions but also discourages people from seeing just how important active effort is.

[loudtieblahblah]

Truth on some things are simple.

Truth on others, like medicine, psychiatry, nutrition, etc.. Are really really conflicting. And people build cultures and tribes around their truths, each backed by science. Get some keto people, vegetarians and run of the mill nutrtion experts to sit around debating and your head will spin

There's such a complexity there, conflicting studies, poorly done studies.. Finding a "truth" in how we should eat, how often, etc.. Is near impossible.

And that's just that subject.

[mc32]

Maybe part of it is expectation of instant gratification. But given how things change over time, slow adoption may not be worse than quick disruptive adoption that needs recalibration.

[BariumBlue]

Agreed. One mental example I use is that imagine someone brought you proof of a ghost. Maybe it's a testimony from someone who is rational and wouldn't ever lie, maybe it's some unexplainable photograph or phenomenon.

If you didn't believe in ghosts before and then suddenly switched to believing in them, then your entire worldview changes - the soul exists and can exert itself into reality, the afterlife is real, maybe emotions exert some real phenomenon too, and so maybe wishing makes things happen too!

That, in and of itself, would be irrational, to change your entire worldview based on single pieces of evidence, even if they do appear to be true

[Chazprime]

I think you've just described religion ;)

[brightball]

It also assumes a few other critical things.

1. The person learning the fact trusts the source

2. The fact can be easily proven if the person doesn’t trust the source

3. There are no other facts which provide context that are missing

These are all critical in how the general public receives “facts”.

[quacked]

Yeah, those points are crucial. I always cringe when I see anyone say anything along the lines of "we've got the facts". How do we know?

You can't trust any major media publication, because they'll play both sides of a story. For instance, a major newspaper reports that someone is predicting a recession. If there's a recession, the newspaper will crow about how smart they are, but if there's not a recession, the newspaper will run reports about why the recession predictions were wrong, and then crow about how smart they are. What were the facts?

You can't trust any major political figure, because they have an agenda by default of existing in the political system. If there exists a fact that damages their agenda, they would lose their career if they admitted it.

A lot of the time the "facts" that people are often the most angry about are actually either predictions of the future (ex: it's a 'fact' that global warming will lead to +2 deg C by 2100) or they're summaries of statistical models (ex: it's a 'fact' that X subgroup is n% more or less likely to earn less/more).

Even things we know are "facts" don't necessarily lend real understanding to the person believing them. Every high school physics student knows the fact that light is a particle and a wave. Does that mean they actually understand light?

How many "facts" were known to citizens in the past that we now laugh at?

[eagsalazar2]

I think there is a more holistic POV here that resolves the tension you are worried about which is simply to accept that the beliefs people openly espouse are not what they actually believe, there is outward cognitive dissonance but inwardly people are making sense of the world in a fairly rational way that is consistent with their own goals and needs, not with objective/mathematically consistent reality. It only seems like irrational denial of facts because you incorrectly assume (a) you understand their needs and goals and (b) what they say they believe is about a position being objectively true or false and not a model of reality that works for them. If you want to "change people's minds" what you need to do is understand their needs and goals, how the most brutal version of "the truth" does or doesn't support those needs, and then "convince people" by creating coherent world views that are both "true" and allow them psychological coherence and safety (aka, +empathy and diplomacy).

[btmoney06]

I tend to agree. The problem is that the elites weaponize stuff like this, because they think it applies only to the masses--not the highly educated. Instead of asking why somebody might have different views (and instead of actually learning what the different viewpoints are), they just assume that that other, less educated people fail to actually analyze the data.

[santoshalper]

And even as the facts indicate that it is true, you will continue not to believe them. As you said, you dislike the narrative - whether it is true or not never really mattered to you, you just didn't like the implications.

You are doing a remarkably effective job at demonstrating this phenomenon.

[michaelmrose]

Generational shifts are literally driven by indoctrinating children in increasingly less stupid sets of beliefs in childhood as understood by minorities of experts in each field.

[desipis]

> The thing is, truth does exert a pull on our beliefs. It's a slow force.

What is the nature of this force? Where does it come from and how does it influence our minds?

[commandlinefan]

> truth does exert a pull on our beliefs

I'm more cynical than that. I believe that facts do change people's minds, but most people harbor hidden agendas that they try to adjust convenient facts to while ignoring inconvenient ones.

[fullshark]

I don't know if it's to discredit democracy so much as humanism. A lot of people right now seem to be fantasizing about a collectivist democracy, which can be as oppressive and destructive as an autocracy.