[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."