- Contradictory facts often shouldn't change beliefs because it is extremely rare for a single fact in isolation to undermine a belief. If you believe in climate change and encounter a situation where a group of scientists were proven to have falsified data in a paper on climate change, it really isn't enough information to change your belief in climate change, because the evidence of climate change is much larger than any single paper. It's only really after reviewing a lot of facts on both sides of an issue that you can really know enough to change your belief about something.
- The facts we're exposed to today are often extremely unrepresentative of the larger body of relevant facts. Say what you want about the previous era of corporate controlled news media, at least the journalists in that era tried to present the relevant facts to the viewer. The facts you are exposed to today are usually decided by an algorithm that is trying to optimize for engagement. And the people creating the content ("facts") that you see are usually extremely motivated/biased participants. There is zero effort by the algorithms or the content creators to present a reasonably representative set of facts on both sides of an issue
I remember reading an article on one of the classic rationalist blogs (but they write SO MUCH I can't possibly find it) describing something like "rational epistemic skepticism" – or maybe a better term I can't recall either. (As noted below: "Epistemic learned helplessness")
The basic idea: an average person can easily be intellectually overwhelmed by a clever person (maybe the person is smarter, or more educated, or maybe they just studied up on a subject a lot). They basically know this... and also know that it's not because the clever person is always right. Because there's lots of these people, and not every clever person thinks the same thing, so they obviously can't all be right. But the average person (average with respect to whatever subject) is still rational and isn't going to let their beliefs bounce around. So they develop a defensive stance, a resistance to being convinced. And it's right that they do!
If someone confronts you with the PERFECT ARGUMENT, is it because the argument is true and revelatory? Or does it involve some slight of hand? The latter is much more likely
I tend to like the ethos/logos/pathos model. Arguments from clever people can sound convincing because ethos gets mixed in. And anyone can temporarily confuse someone by using pathos. This is why it's better to have arguments externalized in a form that can be reviewed on their own, logos only. It's the only style that can stand on its own without that ephemeral effect (aside from facts changing), and it's also the only one that can be adopted and owned by any listener that reviews it and proves it true to themselves.
It's usually dumb people that have so many facts and different arguments that one can't keep up with.
And they usually have so many of those because they were convinced to pay disproportionate attention to it and don't see the need to check anything or reject bad sources.
I noticed something similar. People who believe in absolute garbage tend to be the ones that don't have robust bs filter that would let them quickly reject absolute garbage. And it's surprisingly orthogonal to person's intelligence. There's correlation but even very intelligent people can have very weak bs filter and their intelligence post-rationalizes the absolute garbage they were unable to reject.
Robust bs detectors may also leave a person susceptible to rejecting novel or unorthodox ideas. Theres a balance somewhere between not being overwhelmed by the sea of crazy and still being open to a good idea when it comes along.
Edit: This thread is amazing. 12 years of pre-uni schooling and no mention of any of this stuff... Also fair criticism of IRA too in the article. Still, seems a little ironic that the people crying foul benefited from the status quo of an uneducated populace.
I don't think you can have too strong bs detector. After it rejects something it's not forever. When the thing you rejected occurs in new contexts or produces new results you will reevaluate and either reject it again or withdraw your rejection. That's the point where intelligence comes in so that you won't withdraw your rejection too soon or reject a valid thing too persistently. But from what I noticed evaluation made at this stage are rarely a problem. The bulk of the problem is not strong enough bs filter for the initial rejection to happen. And once someone believes in something it's very hard for him to lose that belief. Garbage sticks.
The problem isn't the PERFECT ARGUMENT, it's the argument that doesn't look like an argument at all.
Take anti-vaxxers. If you try to argue with the science, you've already lost, because anti-vaxxers have been propagandised into believing they're protecting their kids.
How? By being told that vaccinations are promoted by people who are trying to harm their kids and exploit the public for cash.
And who tells them? People like them. Not scientists. Not those smart people who look down on you for being stupid.
No, it's influencers who are just like them, part of the same tribe. Someone you could socialise with. Someone like you.
Someone who only has your best interests at heart.
And that's how it works. That's why the anti-vax and climate denial campaigns run huge bot farms with vast social media holdings which insert, amplify, and reinforce the "These people are evil and not like us and want to make you poor and harm your kids" messaging, combined with "But believe this and you will keep your kids safe".
Far-right messaging doesn't argue rationally at all. It's deliberate and cynically calculated to trigger fear, disgust, outrage, and protectiveness.
Consider how many far-right hot button topics centre on protecting kids from "weird, different, not like us" people - foreigners, intellectuals, scientists, unorthodox creatives and entertainers, people with unusual sexualities, outgroup politicians. And so on.
So when someone tries to argue with it rationally, they get nowhere. The "argument" is over before it starts.
It's not even about rhetoric or cleverness - both of which are overrated. It's about emotional conditioning using emotional triggers, tribal framing, and simple moral narratives, embedded with constant repetition and aggressive reinforcement.
I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe is more rational than another you're just feeding into more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.
I think the real problem is that zero friction global communication and social media has dramatically decreased the incentive to be thoughtful about anything. The winning strategy for anyone in the public eye is just to use narratives that resonate with people's existing worldview, because there is so much information out there and our civilization has become so complex that it's overwhelming to think about anything from first principles. Combine that with the dilution of local power as more and more things have gone online and global, a lot of the incentives for people to be truthful and have integrity are gone or at least dramatically diminished compared to the entirety of human history prior to the internet.
>I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe is more rational than another you're just feeding into more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.
That was largely the case until these most recent electoral cycle, where the Great Crank Realignment, driven by the COVID response, pushed conspiracy theorists, health and wellness grifters, supplement hawkers, and many others to the right.
Umm, the COVID response itself was just as much a religion as it was science. There were people walking nature trails with nobody around with their masks securely on their faces. There were requirements for people whose job was to sit in a truck's cab by themselves all day to vaccinate or lose said job. There were unnecessarily draconian shutdowns. There was uncontrolled and unaudited spending on saving nonexistent businesses and buying enough vaccines for several more years of COVID (but with expiry dates within a year).
If the harsh response to COVID had been necessary, the places that didn't do it should have died out. They did not. You simply don't hear about the Great Depopulation of Africa.
And yet you will read the above, label me a crank, and downvote this. Meaning that you are just as tribal as the people you look down upon.
> There were people walking nature trails with nobody around with their masks securely on their faces.
Rogan got really worried about masks and health and at the same time was for instance having a guy on who does underwater weight lifting for training NBA players and gave him the highest praise and started advertising his tumeric coffee. Were masks during that kind of activity really harmful to people but underwater weight lifting and extreme in-sauna exercize good?
If California had held their restrictions a month or two longer until the vaccine they would have had many less deaths.
I’ll push back - the term is rational as in logical.
Rational in the sense that it flows from what emotional choices resonate ? That’s more in terms of faithful to their beliefs. I wouldn’t call that rational per se.
And being scared of tribalism is not necessary, because tribalism is what is currently being highly effective at creating political power.
So some degree of tribalism, is simply matching the competition.
I really think most of these statements apply to both political sides of messaging in a majority of cases. You can't talk about in-group out-group unless you draw a line somewhere, and in your comment you drew a line between people who represent science and rationality and those that are fearful and reactionary, which you'd believe to be a sensible place to draw that line if you habitually consume basically any media. The actual science seems mostly incidental to any kind of conversation about it.
Some people are crippled by anxiety and fear of the unknown or fear of their neighbors. It's sad, but it's not unique to political alignment.
I think that what they were saying was that in-groups are trusted because of familiarity which can be exploited in order to instill messaging which drives emotional decision making over reasoned contemplation. 'Scientists' were part of the exampled used which invoked a contemporary issue (anti-vax). They are attributing these messaging systems to be a component of organized right wing campaigns; an attribution which at this point in time is rather uncontroversial.
That they would see themselves as part of the rational group opposed to a campaign of weaponized social levers which turn people against evidence in order to further the goals of a different group which is not actually aligned with those they are manipulating is not insightful or provocative. It seems to reason they would.
The implication that it means there is some sort of political 'both sides'ism that degrades their point is incredibly weak.
> The implication that it means there is some sort of political 'both sides'ism that degrades their point is incredibly weak.
I didn't intend to imply that, I interpreted their comment in roughly the same way you did and just think it's the same high level kind of messaging being leveraged regardless of which one you align with, and that issue specifically isn't inherently a right or left dividing line.
If you're inclined to be anti-vaxx, the messaging that the right will try to deliver to you will certainly capitalize on whatever they think will compound those feelings. The government is trying to control you, take your job away, your freedoms, and you should be wary of the others who say yes. It's easy to manipulate people if you're chipping away at their sense of reality.
If you're inclined to be pro-vaxx, the messaging was similarly delivered to compound a feeling of paranoia, and people who felt differently were worth considering an enemy, because they didn't care about your kids, or your grandma, or public health in general (is what messaging at the time seemed to indicate).
Regardless of this discussion not being specifically about the pandemic, my actual perception of either group of people, (the ones that absorbed as much as they could and fell down their respective doom holes) was that they were rather annoying and just avoided the topic at all costs. I wore a mask in situations that seemed to call for it, got some of the vaccinations, kept a reasonable distance, etc.. It didn't need to be more than that. I concluded that there were shreds of truth, scientific and otherwise among the feelings that everyone had, but if I accidentally found myself in conversation that had any strong opinion, it wasn't going to go well; that person was just living out their personal hellscape of paranoia that they were vulnerable to and became targets because of.
It was a very divisive and tribal moment that I hope we've learned something from.
I'm sorry that I misunderstood you, it seemed to me that you were trying to invoke a 'gotcha' in that the commenter's lack self-examination in how they may have been in a similar dynamic invalidated their judgment of others.
With this explanation as context, I don't think the commenter was attributing it as a left vs right issue except that the targeting was being done by right-wing groups.
I think a paranoid world view, broad rejection of evidence, and othering of groups based on existential fear are hallmarks of the right-wing and regardless of initial beliefs can only manifest themselves as such. Thus it is natural that such messaging, once internalized, would lead anyone to be clearly viewed as no longer aligned with anything except a right wing view.
I’d like to mildly point out that this style of caricaturing ideologies is one of the most effective at entrenching those same ideologies. If you can recognize that those critiquing you are doing so in bad faith, not only does it make the critique easy to dismiss, it provides evidence for the prior that all critiques are in bad faith and can be safely ignored.
Bit of a problem when we can see the bad faith factory. As the OP article points out, there are troll farms which are "working" both sides of an argument by supplying bad faith arguments. With the intent of provoking conflict, rather than a victory for either side.
It's also mentioned in "the authoritarians" (search for the book and the short-form essay) - roughly half the population is driven by intellectual curiosity about all kinds of things and don't always agree on much - they just want freedom to be individuals.
The other half is driven by fear, disgust, paranoia, etc.. That second group is much easier to trigger / convince - just play on their fears about their kids, their friends, their church ("will ban Bibles and churches"), etc.. (I was raised in this kind of environment).
Authoritarians WANT a "strong leader" to tell them what to think, how to act, etc. That's how they show they belong to the tribe: they believe everything that is said, they give the most $$ to their church, etc.
A complicating factor when talking about rationality and propensity towards either left- or right-wing authoritarian impulses is brain structure, according to a recently publish study.
"Young adults who scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism had less gray matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social reasoning. Meanwhile, those who endorsed more extreme forms of left-wing authoritarianism showed reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, a brain area tied to empathy and emotion regulation."
Not only is it tribalism, it's also individuals fundamental anatomy. This seems like a very challenging problem if the people you are hoping to convince are hardwired against your message.
Exactly. The problem is largely due to biology. Someone might try to change this at some point for future "better" humans (eugenics of a sort), but basically impossible to change in existing adults.
> Take anti-vaxxers. If you try to argue with the science, you've already lost, because anti-vaxxers have been propagandised into believing they're protecting their kids
What do you think causes vaccine injury?
Do you believe in these zoonotic origin theory of Covid, rather than the Wuhan coronavirus Institute accidentally releasing a coronavirus in Wuhan? Why do you think that is?
Why do you think vaccine manufacturers asked governments for blanket immunity from prosecution?
Why does the United States require children to get so many more vaccines than other developed western countries?
Do you think you are assuming which side is rational?
Vaccine injury is a thing that actually happens. It really does.
Also, unvaccinated people die from diseases that vaccines prevent. That happens too.
The problem with the anti-vaxxers is their assessment of the balance of risks is distorted.
The problem with the "vaccine establishment" is that it's so certain that the balance of risks are in favor of vaccines that it's willing to hide the actual risks in order to get more people to take the vaccines. That's not only morally wrong, it also may do more harm than good in the end. (Which is the same thing if you take a consequentialist view of morals.)
Ah yes. People who think like you and agree with you are rational, not prone to fear, disgust outrage, or protectiveness. But people who disagree with you are obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with. You are "educated" and they are "fear-mongers".
> But people who disagree with you are obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with.
You are saying this with sarcasm, but it is a tautology.
If I am factually correct, by definition, everyone who disagrees with me is irrational and can't be reasoned with.
Anti-vax is a great example of this. We have loads and loads and loads of evidence of the harm that not being vaccinated can do (now including dead children thanks to measles) and very scant evidence to the contrary (there is some for specific vaccines for specific diseases like Polio). However, until it hits an anti-vaxxer personally, they simply will refuse to believe it.
Of course, once an anti-vaxxer personally gets a disease, NOW the anti-vaxxers want the vaccine. Thus, demonstrating simultaneously that they actually don't understand a single damn thing about vaccines and that their "anti-vaxx belief" was irrational as well.
> If I am factually correct, by definition, everyone who disagrees with me is irrational and can't be reasoned with.
No, that doesn’t follow at all. Your arguments could be bad or irrational in themselves (right for the wrong reasons), and other people could hold beliefs logically follow from plausible, but wrong, premises.
Ignoring the strawman at the end, you're making their point for them.
Anti-vax is actually a horrible example of this because it can never be proven that vaccines don't harm us. Any non-infinite evidence will never reduce the probability to zero. You even allude to this point. If there is a single case of a harmful vaccine, or even a reasonable probability of one, then it isn't irrational to be cautious of vaccines. Just because the evidence is enough for you doesnt make anyone who disagrees irrational. That line of thinking just makes you irrational.
I say this as a fully vaccinated (including COVID) vaccine enjoyer.
> If there is a single case of a harmful vaccine, or even a reasonable probability of one, then it isn't irrational to be cautious of vaccines
The problem is that humans are really unsuited to statistical thinking, especially about risk, and what it means to "be cautious" about something. In this context, "being cautious" about vaccines means "being reckless" about disease, because you're rejecting the mitigation measures. It is not a good bet to roll the dice for your children against measles.
We have to recognize that there have been both incidents of vaccine contamination and of individuals who have had unexpected negative reactions to vaccines. You get advised about this every time you have one!
Perhaps the diagrams should include "one sided scale" as an argument.
Oh, no. You don't get to ignore my actual experience with people and Covid vaccines. I watched 3 different anti-vaxxers in my family die begging for a vaccine while doctors struggled to save their dumb asses (yeah, mass spreading event).
> it can never be proven that vaccines don't harm us.
That's your job to prove, Mr. Skeptical. Not mine.
I very much can prove that not getting a vaccine does harm you. I've got a handful of measles deaths to point to right now. We've got step function decreases in reproductive cancers due to HPV vaccination. We've got shingles vaccines showing decreases in dementia and Alzheimers. I can go on and on.
It's up to YOU to show the contrary that the harm a vaccine does outweighs it's benefits.
People don't seem to get that "being skeptical" is simply the first step. After that, you are required to begin the hard work of massing factual evidence as well as cause/effect relationships for your argument.
Otherwise you are simply "obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with".
> I say this as a fully vaccinated (including COVID) vaccine enjoyer.
"I'm not racist, but ..."
Sorry. Statement gives you no credibility or authority.
It’s impossible to argue with the biased framing you’ve setup: any single good outcome due to vaccines is sufficient to declare victory for your argument while opponents face defeat unless they show that all harms outweigh all benefits based on your evaluation methodology.
Anyway, for everyone else, the J&J COVID vaccine is known to cause heart problems in certain men and boys. Here’s an article about the issue from the pre-RFK HHS era:
>J&J COVID vaccine is known to cause heart problems in certain men and boys
And what is the risk if you get COVID and are unvaccinated? I can't say there is no risk to drinking water, but I can say that there is a huge risk of dying of dehydration from not drinking water.
How is your framing any better? Who claimed vaccines are 100% harmless and have zero chance of injury? The claim was that the chances are vanishingly small.
> If there is a single case of a harmful vaccine, or even a reasonable probability of one, then it isn't irrational to be cautious of vaccines. Just because the evidence is enough for you doesnt make anyone who disagrees irrational. That line of thinking just makes you irrational.
There's a difference between "(ir)rational" and "(ab)normal human thinking". What you describe is both irrational and also very normal for humans.
To illustrate what I mean, I'll put the probabilities into terms of dice rolls:
Before vaccines:
Roll a normal, fair, six-sided dice, once. If it's even, you died. (Pre-industrial society, half of us died young of what are now easily preventable illnesses).
With vaccines, at current safety thresholds for fatal reactions:
Roll a normal, fair, six-sided dice, seven times. Even for borderline cases where the vaccines are covering serious illnesses, you'd need to roll 1-2-3-4-5-6-1 in that order to see a fatal adverse reaction, otherwise the vaccine is withdrawn from the market. (~1 per quarter million cases).
But, just like people don't really have a rational intuition for how a "billionaire" is a thousand times richer than a "millionaire", people don't really have rational intuition for probabilities like these. I suspect our intuition on probability is more like "here's 8 bushes, a deer is hiding behind one, which one?", because of how often people act as though being unlucky for long enough means they're due for a win. And I really do mean eight bushes, because of how badly we handle probabilities even in the 5% range.
Just to add a little to the discussion, I suspect that the "not like us" messaging is mostly a right-wing thing, while there's more of a "don't contaminate my fluids" argument from the far-left.
Neither is a rational argument, and still trigger the same disgust and fear, but tend to have different implications for outgroups.
repetition breeds rationalism.
variety of phrasing breeds facts.
it's how the brain works. the more cognitive and perceptive angles agree on the observed, the more likely it is, that the observed is really / actually observed.
polysemous language (ambiguity) makes it easy to manipulate the observed. reinterpretation, mere exposure and thus coopted, portfolio communist media and journalism, optimize, while using AI for everything will make it as efficient as it gets.
keep adding new real angles and they'll start to sweat or throw towels and tantrums and aim for the weak.
To add to your second point, those algorithms are extremely easy to game by states with the resources and desire to craft narratives. Specifically Russia and China.
There has actually been a pretty monumental shift in Russian election meddling tactics in the last 8 years. Previously we had the troll army, in which the primary operating tactic of their bot farms were to pose as Americans (as well as Poles, Czechs, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Brits, etc.) but push Russian propaganda. Those bot farms were fairly easy to spot and ban, and there was a ton of focus on it after the 2016 election, so that strategy was short lived.
Since then, Russia has shifted a lot closer to Chinese style tactics, and now have a "goblin" army (contrasted with their troll army). This group no longer pushes the narratives themselves, but rather uses seemingly mindless engagement interactions like scrolling, upvoting, clicking on comments, replying to comments with LLMs, etc., in order to game what the social media algorithms show people. They merely push the narratives of actual Americans (not easily bannable bots) who happen to push views that are either in line with Russian propaganda, or rhetoric that Russian intelligence views as being harmful to the US. These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons: the dopamine boost to users who say abominable shit as a way of encouraging them to do more, and as a morale-killer to people who might oppose such abominable shit but see how "popular" it is.
> These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons
Do they work spectacularly well, though? E.g. the article you link shows that Twitter accounts holding anti-Ukrainian views received 49 reposts less on average during a 2-hour internet outage in Russia. Even granting that all those reposts were part of an organized campaign (its hardly surprising that people reposting anti-Ukrainian content are primarily to be found in Russia) and that 49 reposts massively boosted the visibility of this content, its effect is still upper bounded by the effect of propaganda exposure on people's opinions, which is generally low. https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-never-w...
Notice that the two reasons I mentioned don't hinge on changing anyones mind.
1 - They boost dopamine reward systems in people who get "social" validation of their opinions/persona as an influencer. This isn't something specific to propaganda...this is a well-observed phenomenon of social media behavior. This not only gives false validation to the person spreading the misinformation/opinions, but it influences other people who desire that sort of influence by giving them an example of something successful to replicate.
2 - In aggregate, it demoralizes those who disagree with the opinions by demonstrating a false popularity. Imagine, for example, going to the comments of an instagram post of something and you see a blatant neo-nazi holocaust denial comment with 50,000 upvotes. It hasn't changed your mind, but it absolutely will demoralize you from thinking you have any sort of democratic power to overcome it.
No opinions have changed, but more people are willing to do things that are destructive to social discourse, and fewer people are willing to exercise democratic methods to curb it.
Do you have any evidence that a substantial number of people will be influenced in the way you claim? Again, propaganda generally has no or almost no effect.
That is tricky. I think some propaganda has no effect while some propaganda is so impactful that it is the sole cause of some major, major things. I know you said "generally" but I think that doesn't present the full picture.
The Russian state's hack and leak of Podesta's emails caused Pizzagate and QAnon. Russian propagandists also fanned the flames of both. It's not quite clear if this was a propaganda victory (it could be that it was propaganda from other sources commenting on the hacked emails which bears almost all responsibility for Pizzagate and what followed) or simply an offensive cybercapabilities victory, but this is an example of the complex chains of actions which can affect societal opinions and attitudes.
I am skeptical random LLM nonsense from Russian farms is shifting sentiment. But I think it's prudent to remain open to the possibility that the aggregate effect of all propaganda, intelligence, and interference efforts by the Russian state in the past decade could have created the impetus for several significant things which otherwise would likely not have occurred.
The best way to lie is not presenting false facts, it's curating facts to suit your narrative. It's also often that you accidentally lie to yourself or others in this way. See a great many news stories.
The act of curating facts itself is required to communicate anything because there are an infinite number of facts. You have to include some and exclude others, and you arrange them in a hierarchy of value that matches your sensibilities. This is necessary in order to perceive the world at all, because there are too many facts and most of them need to be filtered. Everyone does this by necessity. Your entire perceptual system and senses are undergirded by this framework.
There is no such thing as "objective" because it would include all things, which means it could not be perceived by anyone.
The subjective/objective split is useful. What good is raising the bar for objectivity such that it can never be achieved? Better to have objective just mean that nobody in the current audience cares to suggest contradictory evidence.
It's for indicating what's in scope for debate, and what's settled. No need to invoke "Truth". Being too stringent about objectivity means that everything is always in scope for debate, which is a terrible place to be if you want to get anything done.
Another very good way to lie is to set up the framing such that any interpretation of any fact skews in your desired direction. Including which things are to be considered important/relevant, what kind of argument is considered valid/not. Done well, people might not even pick up that there is lying/misdirection involved. Rig the game.
The idea that people believe in climate change (or evolution) is odd considering people don't say they believe in General Relativity or atomic theory of chemistry. They just accept those as the best explanations for the evidence we have. But because climate change and evolution run counter to some people's values (often religious but also financially motivated), they get called beliefs.
You generally don't oppose to things you can grasp to the point you could understand how it challenges other beliefs you culturally or intuitively integrated.
Evolution directly challenges the idea that humans are very special creatures in a universe where mighty mystic forces care about them a lot.
Climate changes, and the weight of human industry in it, challenges directly the life style expectations of the wealthiests.
To some extent, physics/chemistry/etc. challenge the notion that free will exists, but that challenge is far enough removed and rarely touched upon that people who believe in free will don't feel that modern science is attacking that belief, and the scientists working on it generally see free will or any mechanisms of the brain as far too complex when they are studying things on the order for a few particles or few molecules.
Some of neurology/psychology gets a bit closer, but science of the brain doesn't have major theories that are taught on the same level nor have much impact on public policy. The closest I can think of is how much public awareness of what constitutes a mental disorder lags behind science, but that area is still constantly contested even among the researchers themselves and thus prevents a unified message being given to the public that they must then respond to (choosing to believe the science or not).
> But because climate change and evolution run counter to some people's values (often religious but also financially motivated), they get called beliefs
Thanks for your thoughts, they perfectly extend mine. I agree that it would be a sign of a very fragile belief system if it gets unwound by a single bit of contradictory evidence. And as to the "facts" that we're getting 24/7 coming out of every microwave is just a sign of complete decoupling of people's beliefs from empirical reality, in my humble opinion. Supply and demand and all that.
I would contend that empiricism is inadequate to discern what is real and what is true. Much of human experience and what is meaningful to being a person is not measurable nor quantifiable.
> Say what you want about the previous era of corporate controlled news media, at least the journalists in that era tried to present the relevant facts to the viewer.
If you think this reduced bias, you couldn't be more wrong - it only made the bias harder to debunk. Deciding which facts are "relevant" is one easy way to bias reporting, but the much easier, much more effective way is deciding which stories are "relevant". Journalists have their own convictions and causes, motivating which incidents they cast as isolated and random, and get buried in the news, and which are part of a wider trend, a "conversation that we as a nation must have", etc., getting front-page treatment.
> If you believe in climate change and encounter a situation where a group of scientists were proven to have falsified data in a paper on climate change, it really isn't enough information to change your belief in climate change, because the evidence of climate change is much larger than any single paper.
Although your wider point is sound that specific example should undermine your belief quite significantly if you're a rational person.
1. It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest.
2. They did it because they expected it to work.
3. If they expected it to work it's likely that they did it before and got away with it, or saw others getting away with it, or both.
4. If there's a culture of people falsifying data and getting away with it, that means there's very likely to be more than one paper with falsified data. Possibly many such papers. After all, the authors have probably authored papers previously and those are all now in doubt too, even if fraud can't be trivially proven in every case.
5. Scientists often take data found in papers at face value. That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published. Scientists also build on each other's data. Therefore, there are likely to not only be undetected fraudulent papers, but also many papers that aren't directly fraudulent but build on them without the problem being detected.
6. Therefore, it's likely the evidence base is not as robust as previously believed.
7. Therefore, your belief in the likelihood of their claims being true should be lowered.
In reality how much you should update your belief will depend on things like how the fraud was discovered, whether there were any penalties, and whether the scientists showed contrition. If the fraud was discovered by people outside of the field, nothing happened to the miscreants and the scientists didn't care that they got caught, the amount you should update your belief should be much larger than if they were swiftly detected by robust systems, punished severely and showed genuine regret afterwards.
You're making a chain of assumptions and deductions that are not necessarily true given the initial statement of the scenario. Just because you think those things logically follow doesn't mean that they do.
You also make throw away assertions line "That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published." What is "so many claims?" The majority? 10%? 0.5%?
I totally agree with you that the nuances of the situation are very important to consider, and the things you mention are possibilities, but you are too eager to reject things if you think "that specific example should undermine your belief quite significantly if you're a rational person." You made lots of assumptions in these statements and I think a rational person with humility would not make those assumptions so quickly.
> What is "so many claims?" The majority? 10%? 0.5%?
Wikipedia has a good intro to the topic. Some quick stats: "only 36% of the replications [in psychology] yielded significant findings", "Overall, 50% of the 28 findings failed to replicate despite massive sample sizes", "only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies", "A survey of cancer researchers found that half of them had been unable to reproduce a published result".
The example is hypothetical and each step is probabilistic, so we can't say anything is necessarily true. But which parts of the reasoning do you think are wrong?
Oh so you're talking about replications in a very specific field, one completely different from the example you're using elsewhere of climate change.
Your first step is "It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest."
Even that is an unreasonable step. It is very possible for a single person to deceive their peers.
Deductive reasoning like this works so much better for Sherlock Holmes, in fiction. In reality, deductive reasoning tends to re-enforce your biases and ignore the vast possibility space of alternatives.
I didn't pick the example of climate change, but the field is irrelevant. It was just an example. The argument applies equally well regardless of what the hypothetical scientists are inventing data for.
It is possible for a single person to deceive all their peers if you assume unlimited incompetence and naiveity, but that should reduce your faith in what they say just as much!
The argument uses logical induction, not deduction. Induction works fine and is the sort of ordinary reasoning used by people every day. It's normal to trust a group of people less after they were caught lying. If you don't do this, you're the one being irrational, not other people.
> It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest.
Peer review is a very basic check, more or less asking someone else in the field "Does this paper, as presented, make any sense?". It's often overvalued by people outside the field, but it's table stakes to the scientific conversation, not a seal of approval by the field as a whole.
>Scientists often take data found in papers at face value. That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published. Scientists also build on each other's data. Therefore, there are likely to not only be undetected fraudulent papers, but also many papers that aren't directly fraudulent but build on them without the problem being detected.
I think it's rare that scientists take things completely at face value. Even without fraud, it's easy for people to make mistakes and it's rare that everyone in a field actually agrees on all the details, so if someone is relying on a paper for something, they will generally examine things quite closely, talk to the original authors, and to whatever extent practical attempt to verify it themselves. The publishing process doesn't tend to reward this behavior, though, unfortunately (And also as a result, an external observer does not generally see the results of this: if someone concludes that a result is BS as a result of this process, they're much more likely to drop it than try to publish a rebuttal, unless it's something that is particularly important)
Sorry, what I meant was that the authors on a paper are supposed to be reviewing each other's contributions. They should all have access to the same data and understand what's going on. In practice, that doesn't always happen of course. But it should. Peer review where a journal just asks someone to read the final result is indeed a much weaker form of check.
There's way too many cases of bogus papers being cited hundreds or thousands of times for me to believe scientists check papers they are building on. It probably depends on a lot on the field, though, this stuff always does.
Even if only 0.1% of Chinese people engaged in theft, and that would be a much lower rate than in any developed country, you'd still get a million Chinese thieves. You could show a new one every day, bombarding people with images and news reports of how untrustworthy Chinese people are. The news reports themselves wouldn't even be misinformation, as all the people shown would actually be guilty of the crimes they were accused of. Nevertheless, people would draw the wrong conclusion.
Many people are curious about truth. But because of gaslighting and no single source of truth and too much noise level, people have checked out completely. People know something is fishy, they know barbarians are at the gate. But they also know that the gate is 10,000 km away so they think, "Let me live my life peacefully in the meantime." They have lost hope in the system.
CS Peirce has a famous essay "The Fixation of Belief" where he describes various processes by which we form beliefs and what it takes to surprise/upset/unsettle them.
This blog post gestures at that idea while being an example of what Peirce calls the "a priori method". A certain framework is first settled upon for (largely) aesthetic reasons and then experience is analyzed in light of that framework. This yields comfortable conclusions (for those who buy the framework, anyhow).
For Peirce, all inquiry begins with surprise, sometimes because we've gone looking for it but usually not. About the a priori method, he says:
“[The a priori] method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the others which we have noticed. But its failure has been the most manifest. It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest. And so from this, which has been called the a priori method, we are driven, in Lord Bacon's phrase, to a true induction.”
Wow. I'm reminded of a great essay/blgo I read years ago that I'll never find again that said a good, engaging talk/presentation has to have an element of surprise. More specifically, you start with an exposition of what your audience already knows/believes, then you introduce your thesis which is SURPRISING in terms of what they already know. Not too out of the realm of belief, but just enough.
The bigger/more thought-diverse the audience, the harder this is to do.
I had a grad school mentor William Wells who taught us something similar. A good research publication or presentation should aim for "just the right amount of surprise".
Too much surprise and the scientific audience will dismiss you out of hand. How could you be right while all the prior research is dead wrong?
Conversely, too little surprise and the reader / listener will yawn and say but of course we all know this. You are just repeating standard knowledge in the field.
Despite the impact on audience reception we tend to believe that most fields would benefit from robust replication studies and the researchers shouldn't be penalized for confirming the well known.
And, sometimes there really is paradigm breaking research and common knowledge is eventually demonstrated to be very wrong. But often the initial researchers face years or decades of rejection.
my understanding (which is definitely not exhaustive!) is that the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced than is popularly retold, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still.
Paul Feyerabend has a book called Against Method in which he essentially argues that it was the Catholic Church who was following the classical "scientific method" of weighing evidence between theories, and Galileo's hypothesis was rationally judged to be inferior to the existing models. Very fun read.
I completely agree with your comment. The common narrative about Galileo and the Church is often oversimplified and overlooks the intellectual context of the time. As you pointed out, it wasn’t about a crude Biblical literalism—after all, even centuries before Galileo, figures like Saint Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, already accepted that the Earth is spherical.
By Galileo’s era, the Catholic Church was well aware of this scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and natural philosophy. The dispute was far more about competing models and the standards of evidence required, not a refusal to accept reason or observation.
Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?
> Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?
That seems pretty unfair. The article is clearly structured to treat the Galileo thing as an example, not a premise. It is supposed to be a familiar case to consider before going into unfamiliar ones. In that sense it clearly still works as an example even if it's false: does it not set you up to think about the general problem, even if it's a fictional anecdote? It's no different than using some observation about Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter as an example before setting into a point. The fact that it's fictional doesn't affect its illustrative merits.
> The fact that it's fictional doesn't affect its illustrative merits.
Indeed, it may even reinforce the overall argument being made in the post we're discussing; the "Galileo vs. Catholicism" narrative is itself a linchpin trope in an empirical scientific worldview, with the trope reinforcing (among other beliefs) that "it's right and proper to pursue and advocate for objective truth even to the extent of making enemies of the most powerful."
Considering the likely audience for a piece like this post we're discussing, that the Galileo narrative doesn't necessarily reflect what actually happened historically makes it a pretty good example on a meta-level. Are any of us who have the belief in the ultimate value of objectivity going to give up on it because a potentially weak example was used to support it?
Galileo started the troll himself depicting the opponent theory in the mouth of Simplicius.
And even with its acquaintances with the pope, he finished jailed at home. Far better than being burned alive like the Church did with Giordano Bruno.
So, yes, they are more nuances to the affair, but the case around lack of observable parallax or other indeed judicious reasoning is not going to create a great narrative to sell on the one hand, and on the other hand focusing on technical details is kind of missing the forest for the tree of what where the social issues at stake the trial examplified.
Was it during Galileo's era or was it a much earlier time with Greek philosophers when the idea of heliocentrism was rejected because the lack of parallax movement of the stars? The idea of stars being so far away they wouldn't show parallax movement wasn't acceptable without stronger evidence than what was available at the time, given how massive that would make outer space, so the simpler explanation was that the sun moved.
Earlier, for the most part. There was a fairly well known set of standard objections. A lot of the others were to do with the implications of the earth rotating, like the fact that things seem to fall straight down (not quite, but it was only after Galileo's death that someone managed to demonstrate this clearly, and not for lack of trying), and that you don't get a huge wind generated by the rotation (it does affect the winds, but you need a far more sophisticated framework for understanding motion that only really started to take shape with Newton to put this together). The star parallax thing was further complicated by an quirk of optics, which is that stars don't appear to be perfect point objects, they (to the naked eye and to telescopes) do have some apparent diameter, and that diameter implied that if they were far away enough to not have parallax, not only would the universe need to be much bigger, the stars themselves would need to be huge, many times the size of the solar system.
It also didn't help that Galileo's model was still incorrect and inelegant, due to the insistence on circles and epicycles. It actually needed more cycles to explain than the geocentric version of the model! It was Kepler that actually got things right and elegant by allowing orbits to be ellipses.
(As an aside, there's one exchange of letters between Galileo and a bigwig member of the church, where amusingly, to modern observers, the church guy was more correct about the astronomy and Galileo was more correct on the theology!)
> It actually needed more cycles to explain than the geocentric version of the model!
This part is not true. The main advantage of Copernicus's model was that it reduced the number of epicycles needed. In the Ptolemaic system every planet (except the Moon and Sun) required an epicycle with a period of one year, which we now know was needed in order to account for the relative motion of the Earth on its own orbit. In a heliocentric system these epicycles could be eliminated. Copernicus presented his model more in terms of it requiring fewer calculations.
The Ptolemaic system was already not particularly favored and was well and truly killed in Gallileo's time (in part by his observations). The competition was Tycho Brahe's model, in which the sun revolves around the earth but the planets revolve around the sun. They for the most part make identical predictions as far as astronomical observations, but Brahe's was very slightly simpler and didn't cause the other objections.
> By Galileo’s era, the Catholic Church was well aware of this scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and natural philosophy.
I'm confused. Are you saying that the Church knew the Earth was round or not? If they knew, then it doesn't matter what arguments were made, it was all in bad faith and therefore wasn't scientific.
The sphericity of the Earth was not what Galileo and the Church were arguing about--they were arguing about whether the Sun revolved around the Earth, or the Earth around the Sun.
The idea that people used to think the Earth was flat is a common misconception. Sometimes medieval painters would draw the Earth that way for artistic purposes, but nobody seriously thought it worked that way for real.
Why not? It's obvious to anyone who watched a ship sail over the horizon that the Earth must be a sphere because you see the body of the ship disappear before its sail mast does.
The church knew that the earth was round. Which is largely irrelevant, because Galileo argued for a heliocentric model vs the (at the time popular) geocentric model. Nobody argued that the earth was round
The author doesn't use the Galileo episode as a premise, only as a catchy illustration. If anything, the more nuanced version of the story seems to support their argument better than the simplified version does.
> Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?
Same way Galileo could be correct about Earth circling the Sun despite basing it on incorrect assumptions :)
> the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced than is popularly retold
Ex historian here. This is true. It’s a complicated episode and its interpretation is made more murky by generations of people trying to use it to make a particular rhetorical point. Paul Feyerabend is guilty of this too, although he’s at least being very original in the contrarian philosophy of science he’s using it for.
If anyone is interested in the episode for its own sake (which is rare actually, unless you’re a renaissance history buff first and foremost), I’d probably recommend John Heilbron’s biography which has a pretty balanced take on the whole thing.
I just recently watched a lecture about this and was fascinated.
Specifically, the (incorrect) model of the universe that was used in Europe at the time had been refined to the point that it was absurdly accurate. Even had they adopted a heliocentric model, there would have been no direct benefit for for a long, long time. If anything, Galileo's work was rife with errors and mathematical problems that would have taken a lot of work to figure out.
So the argument was to take on a bunch of technical debt and switching costs for almost no benefits.
I have always thought the lesson here is to be careful when insulting those with a great deal of power over you. Pope Urban VIII was originally a patron and supporter of Galileo:
>...Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name "Simplicio" in Italian also had the connotation of "simpleton."[55] Authors Langford and Stillman Drake asserted that Simplicio was modeled on philosophers Lodovico delle Colombe and Cesare Cremonini. Pope Urban demanded that his own arguments be included in the book, which resulted in Galileo putting them in the mouth of Simplicio. Some months after the book's publication, Pope Urban VIII banned its sale and had its text submitted for examination by a special commission
It wasn't his theory, it was that he presented it in the form of a dialogue with a character who was an obvious stand-in for the Pope, and then made that character sound like a complete idiot.
The heresy charges were an excuse to punish him for being disrespectful. He'd gotten approval from the Pope to publish; he would have been fine if he'd just been polite.
Obviously that's still petty and unjustified, but science denial wasn't the real reason for it.
The Catholic Church was quite tyrannical about opining on matters of theology. Heliocentrism vs Geocentrism, which discussed in terms of whether it's really true or not (as opposed to merely an interesting mathematical model), was considered to be this. That didn't mean that the church was unwilling to discuss it, but that they wanted the public discourse to be controlled to avoid it seeming to conflict with their domain, at least until they could be convinced (and Galileo's main problem is that he could convince very few people inside and outside the church, due to lack of available evidence) and change their official line themselves.
The other problem for Galileo was that he did basically just piss off a bunch of people (he was, by all accounts, very good at publicly dunking on people, whether they were right or wrong. He'd be a natural on modern social media). There was a large group who basically started conspiring against him, trying to implicate him in going against the church, and then his book (which was 'approved' through a very chaotic, almost comical sequence of bad timings and missed communication) managed to insult and piss off the Pope, who was previously a very close friend.
So, ultimately the broad thrust of the situation is not changed: the church was ultimately wrong and unreasonable in their demands, and Galileo was ultimately correct in rejecting Geocentrism, but the church was more reasonable than generally implied in the simplified telling, and Galileo was a lot less correct, and especially lacked good rational arguments and evidence for his specific model.
Galileo's friend Barberini became Pope and asked Galileo to write a book. But Barberini became paranoid about conspiracies and thought it had seditious, secretly-critical undertones.
Regardless of what the standards of evidence were at the time, it surely wasn't "scientific" to threaten someone with prosecution for publishing a supposedly inferior hypothesis. That was politics.
Speaking of politics, the Reformation happened with nearly perfect timing and several countries became safe havens for those who had disagreements with the Catholic Church. This window of safety helped incubate modern science during its critical early years. Less than 50 years after Gelileo died, Newton published Principia. By then it was already well accepted, at least in England, that the Earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around.
Absolutely agree that it was politics, not science, but it wasn't really anti-science either. In a nutshell, his theory was fine on its own; he was punished for insulting the Pope.
> and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still.
The church is and was a large, often heterogenous institution. For some the issue was about conflict with literal interpretations of the bible, not merely the predominate allegorical interpretations (a more widely held concern, at least as a pedagogic matter). AFAIU, while the pope wasn't of this mind, some of the clerics tapped to investigate were. See, e.g., the 1616 Consultant's Report,
> All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology.
Galileo had a trial 20 years before the second, more famous one, where he was banned from promoting Copernican ideas, and Copernican books in general were banned by the Inquisition and by papal order. But because 20 years later he insulted the Pope that was protecting him from being arrested, some people act like that means it had nothing to do with Heliocentrism.
The important thing is not why they thought they were right but the fact they could not tolerate being wrong, or even tolerate dissidence on that one little inconsequential thing.
That's why you have people today pushing for flat earth and creationism.
Because their whole shtick is we are always right about absolutely everything.
To be honest, I don't ever saw the reason to make him some sort of almost-martyr. People were wrong and fighting for a good cause many times in history, stuff is always way more complex than surface glance reveals.
The moral of the story isn't how great he was, but how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent (which itself was a highly political process) and how ridiculous it was that they had any sort of power over whole society. And power they had, and rarely used it for some greater good.
As I’ve grown older and witnessed history in action I’ve begun to understand that reality is much, much more complicated than the simple narratives of history we lean on as a society.
Just think of how many different competing narratives are currently in existence surrounding this tumultuous point in history and realize that at some point some of these narratives will become dominant. Over time as the events leave social memory the key conclusions will likely be remembered but a lot of the reasoning behind them will not. As it exits living memory most of the nuance and context is lost. Over time we may change the narrative by reconsidering aspects that were forgotten, recontextualizing events based on modern concepts and concerns, misunderstanding what happened, or even surreptitiously “modifying” what happened for political ends. Or to put it more plainly, history is written by the victors and can be rewritten as time goes on and the victors change.
I wish Hacker News would let me use emojis so I could put three red sirens after this man’s name.
Sungenis isn’t a good-faith investigator trying to shed light on nuances around Galileo’s argument. He’s a tradcath (old-school Catholic who rejects Vatican II) hack who wants to cast shadows on Galileo from as many directions as possible in the hopes that he can soften people up on the idea of Geocentrism. His approach is very cautious and incremental and relies a lot on innuendo; he makes it difficult to really pin him down on the things I just said about him. But if you look up the things this guy’s written and the kinds of people he hires to “write the dirty work” when necessary, it’s pretty clear what his project is.
Edit: I will note that I am not familiar with Paul Feyerabend and the book mentioned in the top comment, it’s totally possible that those are from a different school of thought more interested in good faith discussion about the scientific method (or not, I don’t know). I would just advise taking any “turns out” argument about Galileo and the Church with huge grains of salt, given that this topic attracts some very slippery people with ulterior motives who intentionally appeal to contrarians like many of us on this site.
> I will note that I am not familiar with Paul Feyerabend and the book mentioned in the top comment, it’s totally possible that those are from a different school of thought more interested in good faith discussion about the scientific method
I haven't read Against Method yet, but my understanding is that Feyeraband's point is that the scientific process, as it is actually practiced, is a lot less sterile than is generally described. He argues it involves a lot of ad-hoc hypothesis and unjustified intuitive leaps. He's not saying the Church was right to believe in Geocentrism, he's saying that strict adherence to a particular methodology is neither desirable nor how science is actually practiced.
The tagline is "anything goes," as in any methodology may or may not be useful in creating knowledge, and it's utility is subject to change. So we can't rule any of them in or out and must constantly test them against reality.
Yes, he’s a magisterial fundamentalist. He views the idea of a non-Geocentric cosmos as destabilizing to the (to him) necessary hierarchies of nature, man and society ordained in the Bible according to traditionalist readings. But unlike a lot of fundamentalists, he’s good at “hiding his power level” enough to occasionally sneak into more serious conversations, and he’s patient enough to stick to a more incrementalist approach to changing people’s minds (instead of constantly yelling about people being damned if they don’t listen to him). He’s a bad and dangerous dude.
Dan Olson did a great job breaking down Sungenis’ film “The Principle” back in 2020, this Folding Ideas video is a great watch: https://youtu.be/icwDF8wRgF4
(Have got to say the video is interesting, if, a bit frightening ...)
PS. "Drake's Imbecility Corollary: Aliens have not found us given how they decided to occupy increasingly non-scientific positions, for effect, being now sufficiently developmentally degraded so as to make contact imposible".-
That title is ultimately swinging too far the other way. Galileo was a lot less correct than commonly assumed, and the church was more reasonable, but the church was still wrong in the end, both factually and morally for the level of control over the discussion which they wielded.
> Robert A. Sungenis (born c. 1955) is an American Catholic apologist and advocate of the pseudoscientific belief that the Earth is the center of the universe. He has made statements about Jews and Judaism which have been criticized as being antisemitic, which he denies. Sungenis is a member of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, a Catholic Young Earth creationist group.
Very engaging look at a very difficult topic to approach analytically.
I'm reminded of something I learned about the founder of Stormfront, the internet's first white supremacist forum. His child went on to attend college away from home, her first time away from her family, and over a period of roughly two years, she attended dinners with a group of Jewish students who challenged each of her beliefs one at a time. Each time, as she accepted the evidence her friends presented to her about a particular belief, she nonetheless would integrate the new information with her racist worldview. This continued piece by piece until there was nothing left of her racist worldview at all.
It's both heartening and disheartening at the same time, because if this person can change her mind after almost two decades of constant indoctrination during her formative years, then surely anyone can change their mind. That's the heartening part: the disheartening part is, of course, that the effort it took is far from scalable at present and much more difficult to apply to someone who remains plugged into whatever information sources they are getting their current fix of nonsense from.
I think this is just gloating. Children leaving home for college and quickly abandoning the belief systems of their family is almost more common than the opposite, where they maintain them. Especially if the belief system is something as unpopular as white supremacy mythology; not easy to make new friends at your new school if you don't give that up.
I'm sure she maintains many beliefs that may people would see as racist, along with her classmates. She hasn't been educated or fixed, she just left home.
IIRC, the stats say that overwhelmingly, children will become a version of their parents, including beliefs, etc. This actually seems more like the exception than the rule.
I remember my first year in college as being the time when I solidified my own first worldview. Prior to that, I had some ideas like the existence of God (in some form) that I was ambivalent about or maybe deferring final judgement. That's when I decided that I was an atheist.
Coincidentally, around the same time my twin brother became a serious Christian. He was socially integrated into a group. He finished college. I did not.
Then years later, maybe late 20s or early 30s, I became convinced that I had been wrong about my government my whole life and that they were not trustworthy. 9/11 being a false flag (which I still believe) was evidence of that.
The interesting thing was at the time when I was in New York I had completely accepted the idea that those three buildings had all turned into dust because the jet hit them. I remember walking around lower Manhattan to pick up a check and the dust was just coating everything.
I had even done some word processing on one of the twin towers leases shortly before the event while temping at Wachtell Lipton. At the time I made no connection.
Anyway, I think an underappreciated aspect of belief graphs is their connection to social groups and identity. It was much easier for me to question institutions when I already felt more marginalized and actually partly blamed society for it being so hard for me to handle my needs and find a place in it.
Another aspect of group membership and beliefs is practical. When groups are competing strategically, they often do so in ways that are not particularly ethical. It's much easier to justify this if you think of the other group as being deeply flawed, evil, invaders, etc.
Although some of these demonization s of the other group do have some kernel of truth to them, they are largely oversimplifications in the belief graphs leading to dangerous inaccuracies.
What are the practical structural and cultural differences that lead to the group divisions? They largely seem geographic, economic, ethnic.
Could a more sophisticated, better integrated, and more accurate belief system help? Or do the social structures and networks largely define the groups?
Are we just basically mammalian ant colonies? Brutally fighting each other for dominance any time there is a resource conflict?
If the other side seems to be trying to hog important resources any time they get a chance, you perceive that you are not playing a fair game. It's not a civil interaction. The other doesn't play by the rules or tell the truth or leave any subtly in discourse. So why should your group, unless it wants to get wiped out?
In my worldview the faint hope is that having more abundance of resources will somehow lead to more civility.
To the author: I love this idea, but your blog has two problems that made it less enjoyable for me to read. The first is the pull quotes. I find them confusing and unnecessary, especially when they repeat sentences in the preceding paragraph. The second is that I got stuck on the moving graphs while scrolling on my phone. I suggest making them smaller with a different background color or simply make them static images.
Some of the core ideas here seem good, but the node/edge distinction feels too fuzzy. The node "Climate Change Threat" is a claim. Is the node "Efficiency" a claim? Can one challenge the existence of Efficiency? If one instead challenges the benefit of Efficiency, isn't that an edge attack?
I could give a bunch of other examples where the nodes in the article don't feel like apples-to-apples things. I feel less motivated to try to internalize the article due to this.
I think the structure inherently enables each node to be a claim (like "this thing exists"), but that there's value in making a node even if that node's claim is not particularly disagreeable, because the edges to that node might be disagreeable, or to provide more detail about how one node relates to another (e.g. through some intermediate node). In this case, maybe the main value in modeling "Efficiency" is to convey how innovation might lead to profit.
To me, it feels less fuzzy when you assume that all nodes and edges imply their own claims, and that it's just a matter of whether or not those claims are worth arguing. The fuzziness imo is based on the fact that the curator picks which nodes and edges exist, which therefore determines which claims exist and can be agreed or disagreed with, not to mention the overall legibility of the graph itself. But I would argue that a causal graph like this is better at representing reality than something like an argument tree, and that, while it might be fuzzy to determine which nodes should exist, at least there's less opinion involved about where nodes should be placed in relation to each other. Which imo makes the structure easier to refine given time and feedback.
The edges are labeled by transitive verbs, where the arrow points from the subject of that verb to the direct object. (I'm counting particle verbs, like "leads to", as verbs.) The nodes are labeled by nouns. If you can change a noun to a verb, I guess you would be changing what is an edge and what is a node.
Example: In the article's first diagram, there is a node labeled "Innovation". This could be replaced by a node labeled "Capitalist" and a node labeled "Improvement", with an arrow from the first to the second labeled "innovates."
So yes, if you can replace a node by an edge (and vice versa, although I don't give an example), this node vs. edge thing is fuzzy.
In 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' the argument is made that the most important cultural changes happen outside the debate, where new structures of thought are being built without being noticed. As without a competing thought structure we are unable to even perceive the new structure. It is the dissonances and the debates that lets us introspect our own ideas. Without the dissonance we do not notice new ideas taking hold of us and changing ourselves, and it is only unnoticed that truly radical changes can take place.
I'm wary of making an "arguments are soldiers" assumption where facts are mostly useful for making arguments, in an attempt to change people's minds.
We should be curious about what's going on in the world regardless of what ideologies we might find appealing. Knowing what's going on in the world is an end in itself. An article with some interesting evidence in it is useful even if you disagree with the main argument.
Facts may not change minds, but we should still support people who do the reporting that brings us the facts.
Minds can’t be changed when a decision was based on emotion.
One day I told a friend how I could make no sense of my girlfriend’s behavior in some situation.
He said to me “you still think people make decisions on logic. Many people make their decisions on how they feel emotionally. Logic and facts have nothing to do with it.”
Suddenly a light switched on and i realized that I’m a typical computer person who thinks that everything is based on logic and if you can just explain clearly enough, explain the facts, then the other person will change their mind when they see the facts. It doesn’t work that way.
Computer people have real trouble getting their head around this concept.
I disagree with Rapoport's taxonomy, not least "Chinese brainwashing" in the Korean war was not Pavolivan and was rather closer to the T-group method developed in Bethel, ME.
Reminds me of the time that I was in a class on geoengineering and was supposed to have a debate with another student about "Should we fund BECCS in Brazil or fund efforts to protect the rainforest?" (I was advocating for the first)
Two days before the debate I went to a talk about the rainforest with my debating partner, then the night before his friend was stabbed at a bar trying to break up a fight and he rode up to Syracuse in an ambulance so it turned out I was well prepared to give his presentation.
In practice I think people often don't see the full structure of their own belief graph. Parts of it are clear but for 99% of important issues, it's more fuzzy than portrayed in the figures here. I still think this is an illuminating way of looking at it!
Another major factor is that while the graph may be fuzzy, the people we trust are clear. Only those people are allowed to "fill in" the missing pieces, and I think it takes a lot of work to do that, so it totally makes sense.
If the takeaway is "don't expect conflicting facts to convince your audience" I agree with that, but the reason is they don't trust you, not the conflicting graphs, and the trust is not really a consequence of the graph structure.
If you found this interesting, I highly recommend reading "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It's deeply impacted how I think of morality and politics from a societal and psychological point of view.
Some ideas in the book:
- Humans are tribal, validation-seeking animals. We make emotional snap judgments first and gather reasons to support those snap judgments second.
- The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left) is because they have a very consistent and shared understanding and definitions of what Haidt calls the 5 "moral taste receptors" - care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Whereas the left trades off that cohesive understanding with diversity.
I've really enjoyed Haidt's book, though its really a couple of different books in one. I need to read his other work.
To your point about left and right, an interesting point I heard recently is that the left is coalition-driven whereas the right is consensus-driven (at least in US politics). Mapping this back to Haidt, one of his findings is that the left tends to greatly emphasize one or two of the "moral taste receptors", with the right having a roughly equal emphasis between them. It isn't clear to me how these two points might explain each other, but I do wonder if there isn't some self-reinforcement there. If there is, I wonder how/if that might explain political systems more widely.
>>The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left)
Citation excruciatingly needed. This feels like recency bias imo. The Right (I'm assuming we're going US here?) is a coalition of people all walks just as much as the left. I mean, right now large chunks Trump voters are rioting over the Epstein non-release and all the people who were in it for the tax breaks are trying to convince them to stop.
I have come to believe that there is no such thing as 'true rationality' in the universe. There are true events and true facts, but rationality is a shared framework for communication. Rationality exists between people.
People always have a framing story or perspective or viewpoint or system prompt for how they understand facts and events.
If you want to influence beliefs you have to understand the framing story that a person is using - even when that framing story is invalid or untrue.
Also, if you want to influence beliefs, you have to provide some emotional validation. You can't remove a load bearing core belief from someone's story, you can only replace it.
---
Another partial explanation is trauma - you can think about 'conspiracy theories' in a number of ways, but these low information, high satisfaction theories often arise after traumatic experiences. You can't properly address the facts of the situation while a person is hurting.
We should expect to see more conspiracy theories after natural and unnatural disasters. Think wildfires caused space lasers, floods caused by cloud seeding, storms caused by radar installations, melting of steel beams by various means. The people who believe these things are generally not having a good time in life.
Agreed, I'd phrase it slightly differently in that symbolized reality exists inside our heads, but we often operate as if[1] it exists outside our heads and some, possibly a majority of people, believe that there is not difference - that they are in fact the same thing, that the symbolic universe is real universe.
Every frame is the act of assuming a symbolic correspondence. The only problem is that we've incredibly bad at disproving the veracity of frames.
Yes. There are true facts, but the concept of "rationality" presupposes that there is one correct way to interpret these facts and translate them into behavior.
Two people observe someone beating another person. One person moves forward to intervene and stop the violence. The other moves away to protect themselves. Which person has acted rationally? They may have both acted in complete alignment with their personal philosophies, and they may each view the other as irrational.
"Rationality" is completely subjective to your own values and belief systems. Human behavior is infinitely more complex than formal logic allows.
> There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of them
See:
> Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.
> The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge, while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain that the justification of basic beliefs does not depend on other beliefs. Internalism and externalism debate whether justification is determined solely by mental states or also by external circumstances.
> When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge.
In the "Climate Change Threat" example, one vector of attack is when the policy changes do not lead to renewable energy adoption or to reduced emissions.
That justifies the questioning of whether the climate change was really motivating the policy change or just being used as pretext.
That idea suggests there might be another way to get to the desired goal, if that goal is renewable energy adoption (quite aside from whether that goal results in reduced emissions).
We have solar panels on our house, and recently installed a heat pump with gas furnace backup in place of an AC (for summer) + gas furnace (for winter). We also replaced our gas water heater (near the end of its life) with a heat pump water heater, and I drive an EV (not Tesla :)). All these were partly paid for by various tax rebates. The result is that our electric bill is zero, and our gas bill has plummeted (I think it will be nearly zero), and I spend zero at the gas station and the oil change place. One should be able to sell that idea to anyone who wants to reduce their expenses, and expects to live in a house for a few years to a decade to break even, and to drive their car for five years or so.
Of course the current administration is doing its best to eliminate those tax benefits...
The thing is with all of these improvements is that if they were so easy to implement for other people, everyone would do them. It might be better to ask why people aren't installing this stuff if they save money over time? The answer is most people really don't have very much money available beyond what can cover existing routine costs. For a lot of people if they wanted to replace their water heater they would have to take on debt or part with an asset to afford that. Yes, on the whole the cost is amortized, but you still need to produce significant capital up front to make it happen at all. And maybe the water heater isn't the only couple hundred dollar purchase you've been putting on the backburner in your life.
As a result, where you find homes outfitted like yours, you tend to also find incomes well above the cost of living.
Self-interest and identity is more important than what the article touches on. People form beliefs based on what serves their self-interest, with made-up lies as a front.
This is why you can accurately predict people's political beliefs by simply knowing their demographics. It is downstream of self-interest.
You can't change people's minds if doing so undermines their identity or their self-interest.
I'm a big fan of modeling causal structures like this - I think having a diagram is a really good way of getting on the same page and making conversations more constructively focused on points that each party can follow and precisely provide counterpoints for. I appreciate reading an article about this! I feel like our society would benefit a lot from investing more in this kind of information management, but it's not particularly flashy.
I'm working on an app[1] for building these structures, centered around problems and solutions, with the addition that each node or edge can have its own structured auxiliary information, e.g. scores for intuitions, argument trees for supporting/critiquing the claims implied by nodes/edges, questions for identifying unknowns. Here's an example[2] of the two diagrams in the article as they'd be in the app. I want it to be easier for our discussions to be constructive, and I think software can reduce the effort required for it.
The post argues that people cling to beliefs not because they ignore facts, but because belief-change requires restructuring entire systems of interconnected ideas that is emotionally and psychologically demanding.
This reminds me of a passage from yuval harari book Nexus : “…… even the most truthful accounts of reality can never represent it in full. There are always some aspects of reality that are neglected or distorted in every representation truth then isn’t a one-to-one representation of reality rather truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring our aspects, no account of reality is hundred percent accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than the others”
So belief system can be thought of perceived structured reality in one’s mind organized around some supporting facts. It would be valuable for researchers to examine and model what these belief system structure DAGs look like for groups with opposing views on major issues, such as climate change or democracy
I was on board until I realized there can be an infinite number of "nodes" (as defined in the post) between one another. The idea of destabilization/destruction of ideas works in the macro examples defined in the post, but may not be effective in practice, where the amount of major nodes between one idea and the next is opaque.
Any mapping of the destruction of one idea node in hindsight will suffer survivorship bias with the mapping seemingly sublimely simple. Hindsight is, as they say, always 20/20.
It’s worth asking ourselves “When was the last time I changed my mind?” It’s hard to really recall because the belief rewiring required seems to play havoc with our memory.
Keeping a "mind-change journal" where you document when and why your views shifted on topics can help overcome hindsight bias and reveal your actual belief structure patterns over time.
I changed my mind about batteries for stationary storage fairly recently. The 1k reports that seemed biased (and still seem biased) didn't help.
The understanding that I had not calculated depreciation correctly helped, as did a better understanding of the pricing models for the most efficient plants vs the so called "peaked plants".
The world of reasons was much more complex and interesting than I had thought.
I had a long held belief that Hitler escaped to South America. This belief BTW isn't that not that uncommon. This is because many other Nazis escaped to South America (including Martin Bormann) and it is perpetuated by Slop rubbish like "Hunting Hitler" TV series, stories about Hotel Bariloche etc.
The reason I no longer believe it is because I was ready to unbelieve it. I was no longer personally invested in it. I was personally invested in it because I believed it was "secret knowledge".
I finally accepted that it did not happen when I watched Mark Felton on Youtube do a 6 part series talking about the soviet investigation into Hitler's death. If I had watched that series several years earlier I wouldn't have accepted the facts contained within it.
"Belief" doesn't actually mean "to believe", as in "I think A is true and B is false". "Belief" is the faith, trust, or alignment with in an idea planted in one's head. It has nothing to do with factual or true information. You can simultaneously know something is untrue, and have belief in it.
You can't change minds because "the mind" (in this context) is the personal identity and ego of an individual, of which their "tribe" is a huge part. Any information that conflicts with the narrative of their identity or tribe will be rejected, because it threatens their identity or tribe. To question one's identity causes a crisis which most people are not capable of dealing with. The more you attack those things, the stronger they will defend them.
The "culture war" is literally just that: one culture attacking another culture on its fundamental nature. This is like Christians vs Muslims. The only way to "win" that war is complete destruction. If you want the war to end without that, you're gonna have to stop fighting and come to some kind of truce.
> You can't change minds because "the mind" (in this context) is the personal identity and ego of an individual, of which their "tribe" is a huge part. Any information that conflicts with the narrative of their identity or tribe will be rejected, because it threatens their identity or tribe. To question one's identity causes a crisis which most people are not capable of dealing with. The more you attack those things, the stronger they will defend them.
This sounds like the friend-enemy distinction by Carl Schmitt.
I feel like what we're seeing now is that the uneasy truce which used to exist is breaking down. Each side is more or less openly calling for the destruction of the other, and not seeing each other as human beings.
There’s also structure created by trust: in Australia we have the Australian Bureau of Statistics which is a high-trust, apolitical institution. ABS figures can then be quoted to hang an argument off.
There are high trust organizations in the US too. A product being FDA certified is a signal to buyers (in addition of course to being permission to sell to them).. the USGS reports on earthquakes. We don’t have earthquake deniers because if USGS says it happened people either believe or can trace back to underlying facts.
What would it take for social media and other places people get their information to become high trust?
No mention of Kuhn or Lakatos? I don't know why people keep trying to reinvent philosophy of science without doing any of the reading. Well, I do know. Reading philosophy is hard. But that's no excuse.
> “Attacking the connections between ideas can force a belief system to reroute its logic, making it less direct, more convoluted, and sometimes less persuasive—even if the system doesn’t collapse outright.”
Beliefs and ideas are connected in a network that is unique to the individual, so to change a mind you have to understand the belief network and work your change into it.
Is a fair summary of this that in a belief system attacking any of its individual components can compromise the system itself? I would not find this surprising, actually rather intuitive. The insights I would be finding really interesting are the unexpected/unassessed on my end, e.g. how much harder it is to attack each of the individual components by their attributes, or if there is a type of component that is easier to compromise (e.g. edges vs nodes). Or how different systems compose over time (e.g. the venn diagram between flat earthers and Christians has significantly changed since Galileo's time).
The Galileo example is messy. I don't think they cared deeply about the issue as implied here. There's obvious power in being the only ones allowed to say what God thinks about an issue. They wanted to maintain that monopoly.
Good article, but I found it a little too abstract to derive much actionable information. IMO the most useful point is this quote:
So when you encounter someone whose worldview seems impenetrable, remember: you’re not just arguing with a person, you’re engaging with a living, self-stabilizing information pattern—one that is enacted and protected by the very architecture of human cognition.
In the seminaries of the world they don't teach how to make up clever stories to entrap people. For that you go to Marketing, PR or Sales school. And ofcourse the people who come out of these schools think they are very clever because they sold some widgets or politicians to the masses by some deadline.
But have you heard of a sales org or a marketing dept that has been running for thousand years? They barely ever survive few decades as a coherent unit if ever.
For the curious go check what the neighborhood seminary teaches.
The Church (and all other religious systems) haven't stood for thousands of year through the fall of empires, nations, civil wars, revolutions, plagues, famines, collapse of economic systems, internal schisms, enlightenment, progress in science/tech etc because of the stories they tell.
In fact the stories have been rewritten, branched, mutated, merged with other stories thousands of times to the point we have thousands of different versions of these stories. There is no "narrative domination".
The Church has survived because when people Suffer due to the fall of empire/nations/banks/economies, war, plagues, famine, disasters etc where else do people go?
Do they all head to house of the local system analyst/graph theorist?
So what about the checks notes tens if not hundreds of thousands of religions and religious belief structures that have fallen apart since the inception of humanity?
This is some very weird survivor bias.
Also, philosophically, a the whole of organized religion is "clever stories to entrap people" from a non-believer's standpoint.
I would certainly like to compare the proportion of memetic* material in the IP of religious vs commercial orgs that are holdovers from more than 700 years ago.
*(equivalent to "genetic" in bio organisms)
Archaic phrasings and occurrences of latin should be ignored to make it more balanced :) yep the survivor bias is quite.. a thing
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
TFA is about the meta level of what persuasive arguments look like.
I see several examples in the comments here of people appearing to share their favourite object examples of how such and such nefarious force is causing people to believe bad things with propaganda — according to them and the sources they trust. If you do this, you are missing the point completely.
Instead, consider privately examining the opposed memeplex to understand why someone else might find it convincing — how their values might be understood, charitably. Re-evaluate how you know what you know; recognize the basis of your own position, and assess the soundness of that "structure" (as the author terms it). Recognize who you need to implicitly trust, and how much, in order to accept that reasoning. Consider why other people might not trust the same authorities you do. (Consider the possibility that other people might be able to trace direct harm done to themselves, to those authorities.) Recognize that reasoning from entirely absurd premises is still reasoning; consider that others do reason. This is why your own (sane, to you) premise does not resonate: it does not fit in that framework.
> So when you encounter someone whose worldview seems impenetrable, remember: you’re not just arguing with a person, you’re engaging with a living, self-stabilizing information pattern—one that is enacted and protected by the very architecture of human cognition.
> Truth matters—but it survives and spreads only when it is woven into a structure that people can inhabit.
Time spent on the Internet complaining about others' structures, is not time spent weaving truth into them. On the contrary, should those others see you, you will only activate their defense mechanisms.
For an overview of the psychology of how people understand things (and don't!) I highly recommend this paper. It highlights a lot of ways our brains take shortcuts in terms of actually understanding things. And that facts play only one particular role amongst many other factors.
Lovely article, and he hints at something that's been on my mind lately, about how the internet enables collisions between groups that cannot (and often should not) mix. For example, the quiet, thoughtful academic giving insightful analysis of Plato's Symposium getting shouted down and called rude names. Or a rowdy bunch of young gamer kids being scolded by a priggish group of college kids for being politically incorrect. The loss of friction, the loss of gate-keeping, sounds good but feels really bad. It's like how we value biodiversity and so lament and control "invasive species" to keep these unique and interesting pockets of the biosphere alive. As a society, we benefit from having quieter, softer, kinder places where sensitive, smart people can do intense work, and yet we are ALSO served by the louder, harder, harsher places where the fighters go. But if we allow these two spaces to mix, the former is quickly eradicated, the latter loses not just its purpose, but eventually the former can no longer offer better fighting tools to the latter. Perhaps this effect has a name, or has been talked about by a more articulate author?
Hesitate to bring up politics here, but it's hard not to view the divide in the US in terms of this framework.
I'm very much a progressive. But it seems focusing on lots of different (and divisive) issues affecting small parts of the population .. it exposes a lot of weaknesses to the other side to exploit. On the other hand, liberal politicians have ignored basic things like jobs, wages, housing (yes, the Uniparty is in the pockets of the oligarchs). Those are things which affect a lot of people on both sides and are worth much more effort. The results of the NYC mayoral primary show this clearly. Yet, the Democrat leaders are all in hiding, and even worse, working to undermine the NYC primary. Together with the so called liberal newspaper. Sad!
Eh, the whole em dash thing is a low accuracy tell. Most of my writing uses em dashes; iOS/macOS replaces "--" (dash dash) with an em dash. Fwiw, in your example, an em dash is the correct choice, not a dash.
Ran this through a few AI-detection analyzers and, yeah, it's being pegged as AI-written. I'm guessing the author used it to do a final tidying up (not that I think that's acceptable- just proof-read your work) and the em dashes came out in force.
The core of the problem lies not in facts failing to persuade, but in our obsession with trying to change minds.
We've developed systems to facilitate this. Parliamentary debate, for instance, was meant to force parties to justify their positions through public reasons, not private convictions. Religious institutions, too, have long shaped minds with varying degrees of success.
But attempts to reshape humanity, especially on a grand scale, have consistently produced devastating and unintended consequences.
We now live in an age where political expedience trumps truth; what matters is not whether something is right, but whether it plays well. The public is expected to absorb politicized half-truths while being shielded from the real issues....because complexity isn’t expedient. The current obsession with labeling ideas as “misinformation” or “disinformation” is a desperate, often incoherent attempt to control discourse, and it breeds more cynicism than clarity.
In the end, good ideas tend to survive, but not on any schedule we can manage. Trying to micromanage thought or the flow of information is not only futile, it’s unworthy of the very rationality we claim to protect.
You say the misinformation label is counterproductive. But what if we cannot even agree on what the facts are? There's no productive discussion to be had. We cannot solve problems collaboratively when facts are ignored or denied.
Disagreement about facts is not new and you're assuming too much about how truth operates in public discourse.
Obviously, facts matter but disagreement is rarely about facts themselves. What counts as 'fact' is often embedded in a web of assumptions, models, and values. A lot of what passes as fact are merely claims dressed up as indisputable but often laden with interpretation, ideology, or selective framing.
To say there's 'no productive discussion' unless facts are agreed upon is to misunderstand how knowledge and consensus actually work. History shows that productive discourse often begins in spite of disagreement over facts. Scientific progress, legal systems, and democratic deliberation rely not on perfect consensus but on procedures that tolerate disagreement and test claims over time.
Labeling something as 'misinformation' may feel like asserting the truth, but epistemologically it's simple a kind of speech act... one that can shut down inquiry rather than promote it. It assumes a finality that's likely not justified, and worse, it can become a tool of political expedience. This is especially dangerous when wielded by institutions that are pursuing their own interests, are fallible, or are compromised.
The path to truth is not paved with censorship and labeling. It's built through dialogue, humility, and robust mechanisms for testing competing claims. Dissent is not the enemy of truth, it's often the precondition.
I agree with everything you've said one hundred percent.
However, I'm not talking about honest discussion, truth seeking and competing perspectives etc. But about literal dishonesty, actual lies and complete disregard of proof and data in order to achieve a goal (usually power or attention).
Like "no troops in Crimea", "Jewish space lasers" or "windmills cause cancer"...
There is a qualitative difference between honestly believing X versus constructing X in order to manipulate and deceive. It seems to be that the latter has become much more prevalent, aggressive and even automated in recent years in public discourse. That's what is meant by "misinformation".
I don't believe in systemically/institutionally policing speech (with exceptions like calling for violence, doxxing and similar). And I don't have a solution in mind. But it sure as hell is tiring, because it takes a lot more effort to deconstruct lies and misinformation than to spread them.
It's an honest question: Are the tools for honest public discourse even effective against this in the long term? Is that how we go forward?
This accurately describes how my brain works. My thought process is like a bunch of graph nodes, and when new information doesn't "fit", it puts tensions on the links, and I want to resolve that tension. I can...feel it happening inside my mind when I think, more or less? -- It's hard to describe
Resolving that tension may occur in several ways, in order of increasing significance:
- Rejecting the new information
- Refining the graph (splitting a node representing a concept into multiple sub-nodes representing sub-concepts with their own relationships)
- Making local modifications to the graph
- Making sweeping architectural changes to the graph as a whole
The author seems to imply that cognitive biases are an inherent qualitative problem that is fundamentally forced to arise from this graph structure. I personally respectfully disagree. In my view, cognitive biases are a quantitative problem, incorrectly setting the threshold at which a large reorganization should occur. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is qualitatively a sound epistemological principle -- but to correctly apply it, you must quantitatively set a reasonable threshold for "extraordinary."
I feel like we need to get better at understanding the graph structure of people we disagree with. The best example I can think of is the abortion debate [1]: If you accept the premise "Life begins at conception" [2], the pro-life camp has an enormously strong case; the rest of the graph between that premise and "Abortion should be illegal" is very strong (it's mostly tremendously well-reinforced nodes in near-universal moral foundations, like "Do unto others" or "Murder should be illegal").
Arguments against abortion are frequently just bad when looked at from the graph point of view: They often don't directly confront the premise "Life begins at conception," nor do they attack the graph between the premise and conclusion. [3]
[1] I'm personally in the pro-choice camp; I do not accept the premise that a human fetus has the same moral status as a fully grown human.
[2] "Life" here is not in the technical biological sense, but something more akin to "The ethical standing of human-equivalent sentience." (Bacteria and protozoa and so on are biologically alive, but nobody moralizes about killing them en masse by, e.g., cooking your food.)
You're absolutely right about the abortion debate; the entire pro-life argument makes sense only if you deny that "life begins at conception". But I don't believe I've ever heard the pro-choice camp attack that axiom; instead, it's always about the mother having control over her body, which just ignores the pro-life axiom. (If life begins at conception, then abortion is not about the mother's body, it's about the pre-born's body.) No wonder the two sides don't communicate.
I've had this mental model for a while now, but this post lays it out better than I could've. I think the most important part of the post is this part of the conclusion:
> For years, our main defense against misinformation and manipulation has been to double down on “truth”—to fact-check, debunk, and moderate. These efforts are important, but they rest on the assumption that truth is the main determinant of what people believe. The evidence, and the argument of this post, suggest otherwise: structure, coherence, and emotional resonance are far more important for the persistence and spread of beliefs.
I'm still friends with one or two people who are hat-wearing MAGA supporters. WE stopped talking politics after 2018 or so, but between 2016 and 2018, and still occasionally since, I get a glimpse into their belief graph. Sometimes their facts are incorrect, but that's less common than simply them interpreting the same facts in a different light. Occasionally they'll have an interpretation of a fact pattern that I find more compelling than the interpretation I find in more liberal spaces. (The Democrat party is, after all, not the best at hypocrisy.) These patterns are the place where the point of the blog post comes out most clearly: most people aren't motivated by facts and logic; they're motivated by a vast network of feelings and emotions where each point reinforces all the other points and an individual fact is less important for its truth than its reinforcement of the overall belief graph.
The most interesting thing about the MAGA belief graph though is its overall structure and maintenance. There is approximately a third of the US that simply has an entirely different basis of belief in the world than the other two thirds. How is it maintained? How does normal everyday contact between the two groups not reconcile the foundations of the two belief systems? It's not a difference in facts, although that does come up occasionally. For example, the sudden change in the truth of the Epstein client list and the effort of the MAGA belief system maintainers (news orgs, influencers, etc) to excise it from the belief graph has had some interesting effects.
But the interesting part is the methods used, the way the belief system reacts to influencers and others that shape the belief system, and how particular facts and opinions are used to reinforce the effects of both new and existing parts of the belief graph. Looking at my MAGA acquaintances and seeing their belief system from the outside has made those methods and reactions more legible, and has allowed me to notice some of the times those same methods and reactions pop up in other communities. For example, I dislike the focus on fact-checking, because too often the facts are the same on both sides, and it's only a difference in interpretation. Then people who agree with the fact checkers prove to themselves that the other side is unable to see truth, while people who disagree with the fact checkers prove to themselves that the other side twists truth into lies. Yet people still push for fact checking despite the fact it only reinforces both sides opinion of themselves rather than having any chance of changing the mind of anyone on the other side.
Unfortunately I am lazy or else I would've taken notes of examples of the methods and reactions used to reinforce a belief system, rather than just vague half-recollected memories that form my own belief graph. Regardless, I think it's important for people to look at their own belief system and, when presented with new facts or arguments, examining them and how they fit into their belief system, and see if maybe the argument is relying less on pure facts and more on emotional ties to the rest of their belief system.
> For example, the sudden change in the truth of the Epstein client list and the effort of the MAGA belief system maintainers (news orgs, influencers, etc) to excise it from the belief graph has had some interesting effects.
Interesting. My own experience has been that they are actually upset at Trump about this.
I'm struggling to understand this article. I think it's for a couple of reasons:
1. The capitalism graph seems OK but the climate change graph doesn't look right. I've never heard anyone argue that "resilient communities" automatically lead to "policy changes". What does that mean? If you have a resilient community already, why would you need to change anything? It seems to suggest that people with this belief system would end up in an infinite loop of wanting to change policies even when the original motivating problem is solved, which sounds like a very uncharitable view of climate activists.
2. After setting up this very abstract argument, the author ends by claiming, "The evidence, and the argument of this post, suggest [truth doesn't determine what people believe]: structure, coherence, and emotional resonance are far more important for the persistence and spread of beliefs". But he hasn't supplied any arguments. He outlined an abstract theoretical model, but it makes no testable predictions and he doesn't try to prove it's correct. Then he claims there are no real debates in the west about climate change, vaccines, or race, it's all driven by the evil Ruskies "creating social chaos". This claim isn't linked in any way to the first part with the graphs.
It's all based on a bunch of academic papers that don't replicate and which use pseudo-scientific methodologies. They misuse ML in ways that generate noise, identify random people as "Russian bots", conclude that "Russian bots" support every possible opinion simultaneously and from there assume there must be some nefarious psychological strategy behind it. In reality they're just doing bad social science and casting the results through the prism of their ideological biases. It works because social science is full of people who are easily impressed by maths they don't understand, and who are surrounded by people with identical ideologies to themselves (often extreme ones). So there's nobody to give them a reality check. Eventually people who understand computer science come along and write a rebuttal, but academia is a closed system so they just ignore it and keep pumping journalists/politicians full of conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Given that, it's kind of ironic that the author is writing about the difficulty of changing people's minds with truth.
The point of the argument is agnostic to the contents and structure of the graphs. They are only there to illustrate that a) there exists a conflict; b) both sides of this conflict have a graph; c) even though these graphs inform positions on the same policy, they are composed of completely unrelated ideas.
> But he hasn't supplied any arguments. He outlined an abstract theoretical model, but it makes no testable predictions and he doesn't try to prove it's correct.
You're meant, I think, to find the argument intuitively persuasive. It's easy to map the model's concept onto one's own beliefs, at least if you consider yourself to be rational (and most people do, even if they end up believing absurdities).
I think there is a testable prediction: if you just go in guns blazing to a "culture war" argument and try to convince people of your viewpoint, you are not going to make any progress. Further, in order to even challenge individual beliefs, you will have to understand how they relate to the rest of the other side's memeplex.
> Then he claims there are no real debates in the west about climate change, vaccines, or race, it's all driven by the evil Ruskies "creating social chaos". This claim isn't linked in any way to the first part with the graphs.
Blaming Russia for this is indeed very much out of pocket, and an example of the kind of culture warring that the article seems to want to discourage. However, there is ample evidence of the existence of the groups cited (granted there are others from other countries as well), even if they can't really explain more than a small part of the problem — at least directly. I think it's fair to say that a small number of agitators can produce large amounts of social tension, if they hit just the right talking points (qv. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/).
More importantly, I'd say the dearth of "real debate" is abundantly clear from looking at pretty much any social media. Even on sites that allow users to take either side of an issue, even on the subset of those where one side isn't clearly being continually persecuted and driven off, you find very heavy siloing of each side into its own echo chamber.
> even though these graphs inform positions on the same policy, they are composed of completely unrelated ideas
I'm still confused :( The two graphs shown at the start aren't two sides of the same issue, they're two different issues.
> I think there is a testable prediction: if you just go in guns blazing to a "culture war" argument and try to convince people of your viewpoint, you are not going to make any progress.
I think that was the observation that his theory is trying to explain, not a novel prediction of it. The theory would have to make a testable prediction that isn't just the original phenomenon existing.
The Slate Star Codex article is fun but it's a fictional story. It doesn't let us say anything about reality.
From the responses elsewhere in this thread the author of TFA (@staph here) sounds like a very agreeable & articulate person, but I can't shake off the feeling he's a post-Soviet plant attacking the very spirit of Western Civilization. Understating his intellect just like a mob boss.
A sign of actual good faith would be to provide a compelling (alternative) reasoning structure for climate change activists. Not a strawman graph*.
As you know the post Soviets need to believe in growth. They can't even get to solar without climate change! Therefore, anything to divide the opposition can only help the cause.
*A subgraph "potatoes -> vodka -> biofuels" would only be satire but quite uplifting to all involved.. and almost provides the prediction you are looking for
Yet another skimmable post from someone very aligned to one corporate/US party centric set of views that believes everyone else is "simply manipulated" and therefore they'll just try to "reach them" via more manipulation.
Or maybe you're just wrong in peddling government/corporate bullshit as is? Maybe others have lived through things and don't align themselves to corporate or political power A or B and therefore will seem contrarian against the drowning flow of "good propaganda"?
Many of us still remember how "believe in science" was used to shut people up about simple corruption and hygiene theater.
If you weren't in the right side of history (anti authoritarian) then, your complains ring hollow.
The whole "<X country> bad" is also such a tired narrative from the Anglo countries that can't stop invading countries for oil and supporting genocide every chance they get.
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
I don't think there's anything more curmudgeonly or generic than just pasting rules.
Crackpots don't deserve thoughtful replies and practically they cannot be given thoughtful replies. Thoughtfully replying to every crackpot would absorb all the non crackpot resources.
And before it's suggested that "calling someone a crackpot is an ad-hominem" or the more advanced "who is the arbiter of what is a crackpot? Wouldn't that just let you dismiss any argument you don't like by saying it's made by a crackpot?"
This theory has sufficient characteristics of a crackpot theory:
Immune to falsification
There's no actual theory here
Exhibiting specific rhetorical markers
Central position of Galileo or Einstein
Dense jargon that mimics academic language but lacks coherent meaning
"When belief systems interact, the real contest isn’t just about exchanging arguments—it’s about trying to reshape each other’s underlying structures. Each side looks for ways to weaken, sever, or absorb the connections that make the other system stable."
What does it mean for two belief systems to interact?
What does reshaping the other sides structure mean?
How do you absorb connections and how is that an advantage? What does it even mean?
The notion of stability is vague and undefined, but does all the heavy lifting in this argument. This shows a complete lack of even familiarity with how actual philosophical and academic writing is conducted or how arguments such as this must be constructed.
Characterized by specific behavioral patterns
Claiming fundamental insights in a field where they lack sufficient training to have mastered the basics
Bypassing peer review to appeal directly to media or public
Misunderstanding or misrepresenting fundamental facts
example: "The Church’s liturgical calendar—including the calculation of Easter—relied on the apparent movements of the Sun and Moon around a stationary Earth."
I certainly agree that it's generic (and therefore boring). Such mod comments are an out-of-band side channel—not at all the intended use of the site, necessary for it to function (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). (I can't see what's curmudgeonly about it though)
Even if you're right about the OP's theory, your post was obviously against HN's rules. It would be better to take responsibility for that instead of pointing the finger at someone else. Even assuming you're right about their ideas, you damage the community here by posting snarky putdowns. Most readers won't notice the subtle difference in this snarky putdown; they'll just take it as another indication that it's ok to be snarky and aggressive here, which it's not.
p.s. I was going to add something about your account history, but looking at more recent comments, they seem to be much more in keeping with HN's intended spirit than I remember from the past. It might be that my memory is tricking me, but if not, thanks for that—it is greatly appreciated!
I'm glad to hear that you are becoming mature enough to appreciate my comments. Kudos to you as well!
I don't know if a link to you saying the thing you are saying again is as convincing as you would hope. Now, obviously I'm just being obnoxious, but to respond to your question: It's curmudgeonly because you are pasting rules verbatim without engaging. Your second message here is a model of a positive interaction, treating participants as people first and rule violators to be managed second.
I appreciate what you do as a moderator, and thank you, genuinely, for doing it. As someone who has been here a long time and posted hundreds of long, very thoughtful and what I try to make be well supported or well reasoned posts, it's slightly irritating to just get rules pasted at me.
I wish more writing was framed in such a way that shows it is more of an opinion than an absolute truth. When I read the title "Why facts don't change minds" it sounds like they are explaining a natural law of the universe to you. Why can't they be framed as some ideas they have had and wanted to share?
There's no claim to expertise or empirical support. There isn't even a claim that it applies an existing framework. Why would you think it was anything other than opinion?
I get tired endless unnecessary invocations of "I could be wrong" and "this is just my opinion" as if every author needs to actively steer readers away from the mistake of assuming the author's omniscience and infallibility.
If he is close and trusts you then this might work as well for you (has for me):
Don't start discussions with a concrete (recent) topic, but focus on fundamental things: Values, hopes, fears... Strengthen their argument. Tell them how you feel and why instead of making judgements.
The topical stuff is always under attack through misinformation, social media spam and propaganda. It's far more effective to honestly nurture human connection and focusing on core values. Without the fog of BS, people can see what's happening more easily themselves.
I'm in the same boat. In my case it's especially disturbing because prior to this whole gestures broadly thing, we had nuanced debates on many topics. Now, he just dismisses everything as 'narratives' if he disagrees with it.
Sadly, it seems to be based on the propaganda style I've seen out of authoritarians in general. It doesn't hurt 'their side' to break everything down to narratives, because at the end of the day, you just have to swallow the current one and you don't have to think about it again.
In another way it seems almost like a form of burnout. Like 'fuck this, I'm settling on cognitive ease from now on'.
The only way to help these kind of people is by reactivating their critical thinking. This is only possible if you tell them something that is so absurd, that even they have to reject it. For example: „Trump is Putins father.“ „Kennedy was killed by aliens, because he wanted to land on the moon.“ „We live on the inside of a hollow world with the sun in the middle.“ „The mothership will come soon and send all humans with a chip inside their brain to Beteigeuze.“ At some point they start rejecting your outlandish ideas, because their brain simply can‘t stand that nonsense. And this is the first step in the right direction for these kind of people.
It argues the way to engage with these people is to first understand the psychological manipulation tactics they have been subjected to. That what you should focus on is not their false beliefs, but the underlying reasons why they were vulnerable to that manipulation in the first place; and to realize that everybody can become a victim of such cults helps to empathize with them. Don't give up on your friend.
Religion is a good analogy because ultimately every argument boils down to a matter of faith. The believer has it and the unbeliever does not. No facts or evidence, no matter how well presented/articulated, will change that.
With religion it’s different. To take the example from TFA, well the Bible says the Sun goes around the Earth.
He doesn’t even get an inch deep like that. Specifically I’m talking about the “rigged” 2020 election. He has no evidence, not even fake evidence and isn’t interested in trying to find any.
I know it's overused and incorrectly applied, but I can't get past the thought that the people doing this have a silent, burning mentality of "Rule 1: You don't talk about fight club!"
> Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed
Who am I to doubt the Church's interpretation but this seems like it literally reads as if the scripture is saying that the sun stood still and the Earth revolves around it?
> If we want to counter manipulation and polarization, we need to focus on strengthening the structural integrity and resilience of our own belief systems. This means fostering internal coherence, building bridges between different templates, and cultivating narratives that are not just factually accurate, but also emotionally compelling and structurally robust.
I fear we are already increasingly too late on much of these things because there also exists communities that maintain structural integrity by resisting bridge building between different cultural templates. I.E. You must refuse bridge building in order to maintain your own community, such as wizard, blackpill, or MGTOW actively discouraging bonding with women as equal people to men.
This is a good blog post. Two thoughts about it:
- Contradictory facts often shouldn't change beliefs because it is extremely rare for a single fact in isolation to undermine a belief. If you believe in climate change and encounter a situation where a group of scientists were proven to have falsified data in a paper on climate change, it really isn't enough information to change your belief in climate change, because the evidence of climate change is much larger than any single paper. It's only really after reviewing a lot of facts on both sides of an issue that you can really know enough to change your belief about something.
- The facts we're exposed to today are often extremely unrepresentative of the larger body of relevant facts. Say what you want about the previous era of corporate controlled news media, at least the journalists in that era tried to present the relevant facts to the viewer. The facts you are exposed to today are usually decided by an algorithm that is trying to optimize for engagement. And the people creating the content ("facts") that you see are usually extremely motivated/biased participants. There is zero effort by the algorithms or the content creators to present a reasonably representative set of facts on both sides of an issue
I remember reading an article on one of the classic rationalist blogs (but they write SO MUCH I can't possibly find it) describing something like "rational epistemic skepticism" – or maybe a better term I can't recall either. (As noted below: "Epistemic learned helplessness")
The basic idea: an average person can easily be intellectually overwhelmed by a clever person (maybe the person is smarter, or more educated, or maybe they just studied up on a subject a lot). They basically know this... and also know that it's not because the clever person is always right. Because there's lots of these people, and not every clever person thinks the same thing, so they obviously can't all be right. But the average person (average with respect to whatever subject) is still rational and isn't going to let their beliefs bounce around. So they develop a defensive stance, a resistance to being convinced. And it's right that they do!
If someone confronts you with the PERFECT ARGUMENT, is it because the argument is true and revelatory? Or does it involve some slight of hand? The latter is much more likely
I tend to like the ethos/logos/pathos model. Arguments from clever people can sound convincing because ethos gets mixed in. And anyone can temporarily confuse someone by using pathos. This is why it's better to have arguments externalized in a form that can be reviewed on their own, logos only. It's the only style that can stand on its own without that ephemeral effect (aside from facts changing), and it's also the only one that can be adopted and owned by any listener that reviews it and proves it true to themselves.
It's usually dumb people that have so many facts and different arguments that one can't keep up with.
And they usually have so many of those because they were convinced to pay disproportionate attention to it and don't see the need to check anything or reject bad sources.
I noticed something similar. People who believe in absolute garbage tend to be the ones that don't have robust bs filter that would let them quickly reject absolute garbage. And it's surprisingly orthogonal to person's intelligence. There's correlation but even very intelligent people can have very weak bs filter and their intelligence post-rationalizes the absolute garbage they were unable to reject.
Robust bs detectors may also leave a person susceptible to rejecting novel or unorthodox ideas. Theres a balance somewhere between not being overwhelmed by the sea of crazy and still being open to a good idea when it comes along.
Edit: This thread is amazing. 12 years of pre-uni schooling and no mention of any of this stuff... Also fair criticism of IRA too in the article. Still, seems a little ironic that the people crying foul benefited from the status quo of an uneducated populace.
I don't think you can have too strong bs detector. After it rejects something it's not forever. When the thing you rejected occurs in new contexts or produces new results you will reevaluate and either reject it again or withdraw your rejection. That's the point where intelligence comes in so that you won't withdraw your rejection too soon or reject a valid thing too persistently. But from what I noticed evaluation made at this stage are rarely a problem. The bulk of the problem is not strong enough bs filter for the initial rejection to happen. And once someone believes in something it's very hard for him to lose that belief. Garbage sticks.
Was it this one? “Epistemic learned helplessness”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
Yes, that's the one, thank you!
The problem isn't the PERFECT ARGUMENT, it's the argument that doesn't look like an argument at all.
Take anti-vaxxers. If you try to argue with the science, you've already lost, because anti-vaxxers have been propagandised into believing they're protecting their kids.
How? By being told that vaccinations are promoted by people who are trying to harm their kids and exploit the public for cash.
And who tells them? People like them. Not scientists. Not those smart people who look down on you for being stupid.
No, it's influencers who are just like them, part of the same tribe. Someone you could socialise with. Someone like you.
Someone who only has your best interests at heart.
And that's how it works. That's why the anti-vax and climate denial campaigns run huge bot farms with vast social media holdings which insert, amplify, and reinforce the "These people are evil and not like us and want to make you poor and harm your kids" messaging, combined with "But believe this and you will keep your kids safe".
Far-right messaging doesn't argue rationally at all. It's deliberate and cynically calculated to trigger fear, disgust, outrage, and protectiveness.
Consider how many far-right hot button topics centre on protecting kids from "weird, different, not like us" people - foreigners, intellectuals, scientists, unorthodox creatives and entertainers, people with unusual sexualities, outgroup politicians. And so on.
So when someone tries to argue with it rationally, they get nowhere. The "argument" is over before it starts.
It's not even about rhetoric or cleverness - both of which are overrated. It's about emotional conditioning using emotional triggers, tribal framing, and simple moral narratives, embedded with constant repetition and aggressive reinforcement.
I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe is more rational than another you're just feeding into more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.
I think the real problem is that zero friction global communication and social media has dramatically decreased the incentive to be thoughtful about anything. The winning strategy for anyone in the public eye is just to use narratives that resonate with people's existing worldview, because there is so much information out there and our civilization has become so complex that it's overwhelming to think about anything from first principles. Combine that with the dilution of local power as more and more things have gone online and global, a lot of the incentives for people to be truthful and have integrity are gone or at least dramatically diminished compared to the entirety of human history prior to the internet.
>I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe is more rational than another you're just feeding into more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.
That was largely the case until these most recent electoral cycle, where the Great Crank Realignment, driven by the COVID response, pushed conspiracy theorists, health and wellness grifters, supplement hawkers, and many others to the right.
Umm, the COVID response itself was just as much a religion as it was science. There were people walking nature trails with nobody around with their masks securely on their faces. There were requirements for people whose job was to sit in a truck's cab by themselves all day to vaccinate or lose said job. There were unnecessarily draconian shutdowns. There was uncontrolled and unaudited spending on saving nonexistent businesses and buying enough vaccines for several more years of COVID (but with expiry dates within a year).
If the harsh response to COVID had been necessary, the places that didn't do it should have died out. They did not. You simply don't hear about the Great Depopulation of Africa.
And yet you will read the above, label me a crank, and downvote this. Meaning that you are just as tribal as the people you look down upon.
> There were people walking nature trails with nobody around with their masks securely on their faces.
Rogan got really worried about masks and health and at the same time was for instance having a guy on who does underwater weight lifting for training NBA players and gave him the highest praise and started advertising his tumeric coffee. Were masks during that kind of activity really harmful to people but underwater weight lifting and extreme in-sauna exercize good?
If California had held their restrictions a month or two longer until the vaccine they would have had many less deaths.
I’ll push back - the term is rational as in logical.
Rational in the sense that it flows from what emotional choices resonate ? That’s more in terms of faithful to their beliefs. I wouldn’t call that rational per se.
And being scared of tribalism is not necessary, because tribalism is what is currently being highly effective at creating political power.
So some degree of tribalism, is simply matching the competition.
I really think most of these statements apply to both political sides of messaging in a majority of cases. You can't talk about in-group out-group unless you draw a line somewhere, and in your comment you drew a line between people who represent science and rationality and those that are fearful and reactionary, which you'd believe to be a sensible place to draw that line if you habitually consume basically any media. The actual science seems mostly incidental to any kind of conversation about it.
Some people are crippled by anxiety and fear of the unknown or fear of their neighbors. It's sad, but it's not unique to political alignment.
I think that what they were saying was that in-groups are trusted because of familiarity which can be exploited in order to instill messaging which drives emotional decision making over reasoned contemplation. 'Scientists' were part of the exampled used which invoked a contemporary issue (anti-vax). They are attributing these messaging systems to be a component of organized right wing campaigns; an attribution which at this point in time is rather uncontroversial.
That they would see themselves as part of the rational group opposed to a campaign of weaponized social levers which turn people against evidence in order to further the goals of a different group which is not actually aligned with those they are manipulating is not insightful or provocative. It seems to reason they would.
The implication that it means there is some sort of political 'both sides'ism that degrades their point is incredibly weak.
> The implication that it means there is some sort of political 'both sides'ism that degrades their point is incredibly weak.
I didn't intend to imply that, I interpreted their comment in roughly the same way you did and just think it's the same high level kind of messaging being leveraged regardless of which one you align with, and that issue specifically isn't inherently a right or left dividing line.
If you're inclined to be anti-vaxx, the messaging that the right will try to deliver to you will certainly capitalize on whatever they think will compound those feelings. The government is trying to control you, take your job away, your freedoms, and you should be wary of the others who say yes. It's easy to manipulate people if you're chipping away at their sense of reality.
If you're inclined to be pro-vaxx, the messaging was similarly delivered to compound a feeling of paranoia, and people who felt differently were worth considering an enemy, because they didn't care about your kids, or your grandma, or public health in general (is what messaging at the time seemed to indicate).
Regardless of this discussion not being specifically about the pandemic, my actual perception of either group of people, (the ones that absorbed as much as they could and fell down their respective doom holes) was that they were rather annoying and just avoided the topic at all costs. I wore a mask in situations that seemed to call for it, got some of the vaccinations, kept a reasonable distance, etc.. It didn't need to be more than that. I concluded that there were shreds of truth, scientific and otherwise among the feelings that everyone had, but if I accidentally found myself in conversation that had any strong opinion, it wasn't going to go well; that person was just living out their personal hellscape of paranoia that they were vulnerable to and became targets because of.
It was a very divisive and tribal moment that I hope we've learned something from.
I'm sorry that I misunderstood you, it seemed to me that you were trying to invoke a 'gotcha' in that the commenter's lack self-examination in how they may have been in a similar dynamic invalidated their judgment of others.
With this explanation as context, I don't think the commenter was attributing it as a left vs right issue except that the targeting was being done by right-wing groups.
I think a paranoid world view, broad rejection of evidence, and othering of groups based on existential fear are hallmarks of the right-wing and regardless of initial beliefs can only manifest themselves as such. Thus it is natural that such messaging, once internalized, would lead anyone to be clearly viewed as no longer aligned with anything except a right wing view.
I’d like to mildly point out that this style of caricaturing ideologies is one of the most effective at entrenching those same ideologies. If you can recognize that those critiquing you are doing so in bad faith, not only does it make the critique easy to dismiss, it provides evidence for the prior that all critiques are in bad faith and can be safely ignored.
Bit of a problem when we can see the bad faith factory. As the OP article points out, there are troll farms which are "working" both sides of an argument by supplying bad faith arguments. With the intent of provoking conflict, rather than a victory for either side.
It's also mentioned in "the authoritarians" (search for the book and the short-form essay) - roughly half the population is driven by intellectual curiosity about all kinds of things and don't always agree on much - they just want freedom to be individuals.
The other half is driven by fear, disgust, paranoia, etc.. That second group is much easier to trigger / convince - just play on their fears about their kids, their friends, their church ("will ban Bibles and churches"), etc.. (I was raised in this kind of environment).
Authoritarians WANT a "strong leader" to tell them what to think, how to act, etc. That's how they show they belong to the tribe: they believe everything that is said, they give the most $$ to their church, etc.
A complicating factor when talking about rationality and propensity towards either left- or right-wing authoritarian impulses is brain structure, according to a recently publish study.
"Young adults who scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism had less gray matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social reasoning. Meanwhile, those who endorsed more extreme forms of left-wing authoritarianism showed reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, a brain area tied to empathy and emotion regulation."
Not only is it tribalism, it's also individuals fundamental anatomy. This seems like a very challenging problem if the people you are hoping to convince are hardwired against your message.
https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-attitudes-linked-to-al... (layperson's summary)
https://www.ibroneuroscience.org/article/S0306-4522(25)00304... (actual study)
Exactly. The problem is largely due to biology. Someone might try to change this at some point for future "better" humans (eugenics of a sort), but basically impossible to change in existing adults.
There's an essay on thinking styles: fuzzy narrative big picture culture versus logical detail culture. https://www.someweekendreading.blog/math-illiterate-rulers/
> Take anti-vaxxers. If you try to argue with the science, you've already lost, because anti-vaxxers have been propagandised into believing they're protecting their kids
What do you think causes vaccine injury?
Do you believe in these zoonotic origin theory of Covid, rather than the Wuhan coronavirus Institute accidentally releasing a coronavirus in Wuhan? Why do you think that is?
Why do you think vaccine manufacturers asked governments for blanket immunity from prosecution?
Why does the United States require children to get so many more vaccines than other developed western countries?
Do you think you are assuming which side is rational?
Vaccine injury is a thing that actually happens. It really does.
Also, unvaccinated people die from diseases that vaccines prevent. That happens too.
The problem with the anti-vaxxers is their assessment of the balance of risks is distorted.
The problem with the "vaccine establishment" is that it's so certain that the balance of risks are in favor of vaccines that it's willing to hide the actual risks in order to get more people to take the vaccines. That's not only morally wrong, it also may do more harm than good in the end. (Which is the same thing if you take a consequentialist view of morals.)
Ah yes. People who think like you and agree with you are rational, not prone to fear, disgust outrage, or protectiveness. But people who disagree with you are obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with. You are "educated" and they are "fear-mongers".
> But people who disagree with you are obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with.
You are saying this with sarcasm, but it is a tautology.
If I am factually correct, by definition, everyone who disagrees with me is irrational and can't be reasoned with.
Anti-vax is a great example of this. We have loads and loads and loads of evidence of the harm that not being vaccinated can do (now including dead children thanks to measles) and very scant evidence to the contrary (there is some for specific vaccines for specific diseases like Polio). However, until it hits an anti-vaxxer personally, they simply will refuse to believe it.
Of course, once an anti-vaxxer personally gets a disease, NOW the anti-vaxxers want the vaccine. Thus, demonstrating simultaneously that they actually don't understand a single damn thing about vaccines and that their "anti-vaxx belief" was irrational as well.
> If I am factually correct, by definition, everyone who disagrees with me is irrational and can't be reasoned with.
No, that doesn’t follow at all. Your arguments could be bad or irrational in themselves (right for the wrong reasons), and other people could hold beliefs logically follow from plausible, but wrong, premises.
Ignoring the strawman at the end, you're making their point for them.
Anti-vax is actually a horrible example of this because it can never be proven that vaccines don't harm us. Any non-infinite evidence will never reduce the probability to zero. You even allude to this point. If there is a single case of a harmful vaccine, or even a reasonable probability of one, then it isn't irrational to be cautious of vaccines. Just because the evidence is enough for you doesnt make anyone who disagrees irrational. That line of thinking just makes you irrational.
I say this as a fully vaccinated (including COVID) vaccine enjoyer.
> If there is a single case of a harmful vaccine, or even a reasonable probability of one, then it isn't irrational to be cautious of vaccines
The problem is that humans are really unsuited to statistical thinking, especially about risk, and what it means to "be cautious" about something. In this context, "being cautious" about vaccines means "being reckless" about disease, because you're rejecting the mitigation measures. It is not a good bet to roll the dice for your children against measles.
We have to recognize that there have been both incidents of vaccine contamination and of individuals who have had unexpected negative reactions to vaccines. You get advised about this every time you have one!
Perhaps the diagrams should include "one sided scale" as an argument.
> Ignoring the strawman at the end
Oh, no. You don't get to ignore my actual experience with people and Covid vaccines. I watched 3 different anti-vaxxers in my family die begging for a vaccine while doctors struggled to save their dumb asses (yeah, mass spreading event).
> it can never be proven that vaccines don't harm us.
That's your job to prove, Mr. Skeptical. Not mine.
I very much can prove that not getting a vaccine does harm you. I've got a handful of measles deaths to point to right now. We've got step function decreases in reproductive cancers due to HPV vaccination. We've got shingles vaccines showing decreases in dementia and Alzheimers. I can go on and on.
It's up to YOU to show the contrary that the harm a vaccine does outweighs it's benefits.
People don't seem to get that "being skeptical" is simply the first step. After that, you are required to begin the hard work of massing factual evidence as well as cause/effect relationships for your argument.
Otherwise you are simply "obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with".
> I say this as a fully vaccinated (including COVID) vaccine enjoyer.
"I'm not racist, but ..."
Sorry. Statement gives you no credibility or authority.
It’s impossible to argue with the biased framing you’ve setup: any single good outcome due to vaccines is sufficient to declare victory for your argument while opponents face defeat unless they show that all harms outweigh all benefits based on your evaluation methodology.
Anyway, for everyone else, the J&J COVID vaccine is known to cause heart problems in certain men and boys. Here’s an article about the issue from the pre-RFK HHS era:
https://health.mountsinai.org/blog/wynk-heart-inflammation-m...
>J&J COVID vaccine is known to cause heart problems in certain men and boys
And what is the risk if you get COVID and are unvaccinated? I can't say there is no risk to drinking water, but I can say that there is a huge risk of dying of dehydration from not drinking water.
How is your framing any better? Who claimed vaccines are 100% harmless and have zero chance of injury? The claim was that the chances are vanishingly small.
> If there is a single case of a harmful vaccine, or even a reasonable probability of one, then it isn't irrational to be cautious of vaccines. Just because the evidence is enough for you doesnt make anyone who disagrees irrational. That line of thinking just makes you irrational.
There's a difference between "(ir)rational" and "(ab)normal human thinking". What you describe is both irrational and also very normal for humans.
To illustrate what I mean, I'll put the probabilities into terms of dice rolls:
Before vaccines:
Roll a normal, fair, six-sided dice, once. If it's even, you died. (Pre-industrial society, half of us died young of what are now easily preventable illnesses).
With vaccines, at current safety thresholds for fatal reactions:
Roll a normal, fair, six-sided dice, seven times. Even for borderline cases where the vaccines are covering serious illnesses, you'd need to roll 1-2-3-4-5-6-1 in that order to see a fatal adverse reaction, otherwise the vaccine is withdrawn from the market. (~1 per quarter million cases).
But, just like people don't really have a rational intuition for how a "billionaire" is a thousand times richer than a "millionaire", people don't really have rational intuition for probabilities like these. I suspect our intuition on probability is more like "here's 8 bushes, a deer is hiding behind one, which one?", because of how often people act as though being unlucky for long enough means they're due for a win. And I really do mean eight bushes, because of how badly we handle probabilities even in the 5% range.
Just to add a little to the discussion, I suspect that the "not like us" messaging is mostly a right-wing thing, while there's more of a "don't contaminate my fluids" argument from the far-left.
Neither is a rational argument, and still trigger the same disgust and fear, but tend to have different implications for outgroups.
> "don't contaminate my fluids" argument from the far-left
What does this refer to? I assume it has nothing to do with Flint, Michigan ;-)
Probably from one of the crazies in Dr. Strangelove (the movie)
Was it this one? https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
repetition breeds rationalism. variety of phrasing breeds facts.
it's how the brain works. the more cognitive and perceptive angles agree on the observed, the more likely it is, that the observed is really / actually observed.
polysemous language (ambiguity) makes it easy to manipulate the observed. reinterpretation, mere exposure and thus coopted, portfolio communist media and journalism, optimize, while using AI for everything will make it as efficient as it gets.
keep adding new real angles and they'll start to sweat or throw towels and tantrums and aim for the weak.
[dead]
To add to your second point, those algorithms are extremely easy to game by states with the resources and desire to craft narratives. Specifically Russia and China.
There has actually been a pretty monumental shift in Russian election meddling tactics in the last 8 years. Previously we had the troll army, in which the primary operating tactic of their bot farms were to pose as Americans (as well as Poles, Czechs, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Brits, etc.) but push Russian propaganda. Those bot farms were fairly easy to spot and ban, and there was a ton of focus on it after the 2016 election, so that strategy was short lived.
Since then, Russia has shifted a lot closer to Chinese style tactics, and now have a "goblin" army (contrasted with their troll army). This group no longer pushes the narratives themselves, but rather uses seemingly mindless engagement interactions like scrolling, upvoting, clicking on comments, replying to comments with LLMs, etc., in order to game what the social media algorithms show people. They merely push the narratives of actual Americans (not easily bannable bots) who happen to push views that are either in line with Russian propaganda, or rhetoric that Russian intelligence views as being harmful to the US. These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons: the dopamine boost to users who say abominable shit as a way of encouraging them to do more, and as a morale-killer to people who might oppose such abominable shit but see how "popular" it is.
https://www.bruegel.org/first-glance/russian-internet-outage...
> These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons
Do they work spectacularly well, though? E.g. the article you link shows that Twitter accounts holding anti-Ukrainian views received 49 reposts less on average during a 2-hour internet outage in Russia. Even granting that all those reposts were part of an organized campaign (its hardly surprising that people reposting anti-Ukrainian content are primarily to be found in Russia) and that 49 reposts massively boosted the visibility of this content, its effect is still upper bounded by the effect of propaganda exposure on people's opinions, which is generally low. https://www.persuasion.community/p/propaganda-almost-never-w...
Notice that the two reasons I mentioned don't hinge on changing anyones mind.
1 - They boost dopamine reward systems in people who get "social" validation of their opinions/persona as an influencer. This isn't something specific to propaganda...this is a well-observed phenomenon of social media behavior. This not only gives false validation to the person spreading the misinformation/opinions, but it influences other people who desire that sort of influence by giving them an example of something successful to replicate.
2 - In aggregate, it demoralizes those who disagree with the opinions by demonstrating a false popularity. Imagine, for example, going to the comments of an instagram post of something and you see a blatant neo-nazi holocaust denial comment with 50,000 upvotes. It hasn't changed your mind, but it absolutely will demoralize you from thinking you have any sort of democratic power to overcome it.
No opinions have changed, but more people are willing to do things that are destructive to social discourse, and fewer people are willing to exercise democratic methods to curb it.
Do you have any evidence that a substantial number of people will be influenced in the way you claim? Again, propaganda generally has no or almost no effect.
That is tricky. I think some propaganda has no effect while some propaganda is so impactful that it is the sole cause of some major, major things. I know you said "generally" but I think that doesn't present the full picture.
The Russian state's hack and leak of Podesta's emails caused Pizzagate and QAnon. Russian propagandists also fanned the flames of both. It's not quite clear if this was a propaganda victory (it could be that it was propaganda from other sources commenting on the hacked emails which bears almost all responsibility for Pizzagate and what followed) or simply an offensive cybercapabilities victory, but this is an example of the complex chains of actions which can affect societal opinions and attitudes.
I am skeptical random LLM nonsense from Russian farms is shifting sentiment. But I think it's prudent to remain open to the possibility that the aggregate effect of all propaganda, intelligence, and interference efforts by the Russian state in the past decade could have created the impetus for several significant things which otherwise would likely not have occurred.
Another example: the old Russian KGB propaganda about America inventing AIDS as a bioweapon was extremely effective and damaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Denver
More recent Russian propaganda about America running a bioweapon lab in Ukraine has been quite effective and is still believed by many.
> Again, propaganda generally has no or almost no effect.
This is a wild claim.
I read the early article, it claimed that most of the pro trump russian propaganda was consumed by republicans so it didn't change any viewpoints.
Ignoring the idea that it might have prevented a change, it's a pretty small sample size compared to, you know, all of human history.
> a "goblin" army
Hah, a "monkey amplifier" army! Look at garbage coming out of infinite monkeys keyboards and boost what fits. Sigh
> Specifically Russia and China.
...or USA
In this context, the USA does not need a "goblin army" for pushing domestic propaganda.
Silicon valley is already fully compliant.
What should make us believe any other state propaganda is better, even for its own general population?
The best way to lie is not presenting false facts, it's curating facts to suit your narrative. It's also often that you accidentally lie to yourself or others in this way. See a great many news stories.
The act of curating facts itself is required to communicate anything because there are an infinite number of facts. You have to include some and exclude others, and you arrange them in a hierarchy of value that matches your sensibilities. This is necessary in order to perceive the world at all, because there are too many facts and most of them need to be filtered. Everyone does this by necessity. Your entire perceptual system and senses are undergirded by this framework.
There is no such thing as "objective" because it would include all things, which means it could not be perceived by anyone.
The subjective/objective split is useful. What good is raising the bar for objectivity such that it can never be achieved? Better to have objective just mean that nobody in the current audience cares to suggest contradictory evidence.
It's for indicating what's in scope for debate, and what's settled. No need to invoke "Truth". Being too stringent about objectivity means that everything is always in scope for debate, which is a terrible place to be if you want to get anything done.
I often put it this way: you can lie with the truth. I feel like most people don't get this.
Another very good way to lie is to set up the framing such that any interpretation of any fact skews in your desired direction. Including which things are to be considered important/relevant, what kind of argument is considered valid/not. Done well, people might not even pick up that there is lying/misdirection involved. Rig the game.
The idea that people believe in climate change (or evolution) is odd considering people don't say they believe in General Relativity or atomic theory of chemistry. They just accept those as the best explanations for the evidence we have. But because climate change and evolution run counter to some people's values (often religious but also financially motivated), they get called beliefs.
You generally don't oppose to things you can grasp to the point you could understand how it challenges other beliefs you culturally or intuitively integrated.
Evolution directly challenges the idea that humans are very special creatures in a universe where mighty mystic forces care about them a lot.
Climate changes, and the weight of human industry in it, challenges directly the life style expectations of the wealthiests.
To some extent, physics/chemistry/etc. challenge the notion that free will exists, but that challenge is far enough removed and rarely touched upon that people who believe in free will don't feel that modern science is attacking that belief, and the scientists working on it generally see free will or any mechanisms of the brain as far too complex when they are studying things on the order for a few particles or few molecules.
Some of neurology/psychology gets a bit closer, but science of the brain doesn't have major theories that are taught on the same level nor have much impact on public policy. The closest I can think of is how much public awareness of what constitutes a mental disorder lags behind science, but that area is still constantly contested even among the researchers themselves and thus prevents a unified message being given to the public that they must then respond to (choosing to believe the science or not).
> But because climate change and evolution run counter to some people's values (often religious but also financially motivated), they get called beliefs
Hey, weren't we just talking about propaganda?
Thanks for your thoughts, they perfectly extend mine. I agree that it would be a sign of a very fragile belief system if it gets unwound by a single bit of contradictory evidence. And as to the "facts" that we're getting 24/7 coming out of every microwave is just a sign of complete decoupling of people's beliefs from empirical reality, in my humble opinion. Supply and demand and all that.
I would contend that empiricism is inadequate to discern what is real and what is true. Much of human experience and what is meaningful to being a person is not measurable nor quantifiable.
> the previous era of corporate controlled news media... The facts you are exposed to today are usually decided by an algorithm
... But that algorithm is still corporate controlled.
> Say what you want about the previous era of corporate controlled news media, at least the journalists in that era tried to present the relevant facts to the viewer.
If you think this reduced bias, you couldn't be more wrong - it only made the bias harder to debunk. Deciding which facts are "relevant" is one easy way to bias reporting, but the much easier, much more effective way is deciding which stories are "relevant". Journalists have their own convictions and causes, motivating which incidents they cast as isolated and random, and get buried in the news, and which are part of a wider trend, a "conversation that we as a nation must have", etc., getting front-page treatment.
A typical example: And third, the failure of its findings to attract much notice, at least so far, suggests that scholars, medical institutions and members of the media are applying double standards to such studies. - https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/10/27/the-data-... (unpaywalled: https://archive.md/Mwjb4)
> If you believe in climate change and encounter a situation where a group of scientists were proven to have falsified data in a paper on climate change, it really isn't enough information to change your belief in climate change, because the evidence of climate change is much larger than any single paper.
Although your wider point is sound that specific example should undermine your belief quite significantly if you're a rational person.
1. It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest.
2. They did it because they expected it to work.
3. If they expected it to work it's likely that they did it before and got away with it, or saw others getting away with it, or both.
4. If there's a culture of people falsifying data and getting away with it, that means there's very likely to be more than one paper with falsified data. Possibly many such papers. After all, the authors have probably authored papers previously and those are all now in doubt too, even if fraud can't be trivially proven in every case.
5. Scientists often take data found in papers at face value. That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published. Scientists also build on each other's data. Therefore, there are likely to not only be undetected fraudulent papers, but also many papers that aren't directly fraudulent but build on them without the problem being detected.
6. Therefore, it's likely the evidence base is not as robust as previously believed.
7. Therefore, your belief in the likelihood of their claims being true should be lowered.
In reality how much you should update your belief will depend on things like how the fraud was discovered, whether there were any penalties, and whether the scientists showed contrition. If the fraud was discovered by people outside of the field, nothing happened to the miscreants and the scientists didn't care that they got caught, the amount you should update your belief should be much larger than if they were swiftly detected by robust systems, punished severely and showed genuine regret afterwards.
You're making a chain of assumptions and deductions that are not necessarily true given the initial statement of the scenario. Just because you think those things logically follow doesn't mean that they do.
You also make throw away assertions line "That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published." What is "so many claims?" The majority? 10%? 0.5%?
I totally agree with you that the nuances of the situation are very important to consider, and the things you mention are possibilities, but you are too eager to reject things if you think "that specific example should undermine your belief quite significantly if you're a rational person." You made lots of assumptions in these statements and I think a rational person with humility would not make those assumptions so quickly.
> What is "so many claims?" The majority? 10%? 0.5%?
Wikipedia has a good intro to the topic. Some quick stats: "only 36% of the replications [in psychology] yielded significant findings", "Overall, 50% of the 28 findings failed to replicate despite massive sample sizes", "only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies", "A survey of cancer researchers found that half of them had been unable to reproduce a published result".
The example is hypothetical and each step is probabilistic, so we can't say anything is necessarily true. But which parts of the reasoning do you think are wrong?
Oh so you're talking about replications in a very specific field, one completely different from the example you're using elsewhere of climate change.
Your first step is "It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest."
Even that is an unreasonable step. It is very possible for a single person to deceive their peers.
Deductive reasoning like this works so much better for Sherlock Holmes, in fiction. In reality, deductive reasoning tends to re-enforce your biases and ignore the vast possibility space of alternatives.
I didn't pick the example of climate change, but the field is irrelevant. It was just an example. The argument applies equally well regardless of what the hypothetical scientists are inventing data for.
It is possible for a single person to deceive all their peers if you assume unlimited incompetence and naiveity, but that should reduce your faith in what they say just as much!
The argument uses logical induction, not deduction. Induction works fine and is the sort of ordinary reasoning used by people every day. It's normal to trust a group of people less after they were caught lying. If you don't do this, you're the one being irrational, not other people.
> It's a group of scientists and their work was reviewed, so they are probably all dishonest.
Peer review is a very basic check, more or less asking someone else in the field "Does this paper, as presented, make any sense?". It's often overvalued by people outside the field, but it's table stakes to the scientific conversation, not a seal of approval by the field as a whole.
>Scientists often take data found in papers at face value. That's why so many claims are only found to not replicate years or decades after they were published. Scientists also build on each other's data. Therefore, there are likely to not only be undetected fraudulent papers, but also many papers that aren't directly fraudulent but build on them without the problem being detected.
I think it's rare that scientists take things completely at face value. Even without fraud, it's easy for people to make mistakes and it's rare that everyone in a field actually agrees on all the details, so if someone is relying on a paper for something, they will generally examine things quite closely, talk to the original authors, and to whatever extent practical attempt to verify it themselves. The publishing process doesn't tend to reward this behavior, though, unfortunately (And also as a result, an external observer does not generally see the results of this: if someone concludes that a result is BS as a result of this process, they're much more likely to drop it than try to publish a rebuttal, unless it's something that is particularly important)
Sorry, what I meant was that the authors on a paper are supposed to be reviewing each other's contributions. They should all have access to the same data and understand what's going on. In practice, that doesn't always happen of course. But it should. Peer review where a journal just asks someone to read the final result is indeed a much weaker form of check.
There's way too many cases of bogus papers being cited hundreds or thousands of times for me to believe scientists check papers they are building on. It probably depends on a lot on the field, though, this stuff always does.
See also: the Chinese robber fallacy.
Even if only 0.1% of Chinese people engaged in theft, and that would be a much lower rate than in any developed country, you'd still get a million Chinese thieves. You could show a new one every day, bombarding people with images and news reports of how untrustworthy Chinese people are. The news reports themselves wouldn't even be misinformation, as all the people shown would actually be guilty of the crimes they were accused of. Nevertheless, people would draw the wrong conclusion.
Many people are curious about truth. But because of gaslighting and no single source of truth and too much noise level, people have checked out completely. People know something is fishy, they know barbarians are at the gate. But they also know that the gate is 10,000 km away so they think, "Let me live my life peacefully in the meantime." They have lost hope in the system.
[dead]
CS Peirce has a famous essay "The Fixation of Belief" where he describes various processes by which we form beliefs and what it takes to surprise/upset/unsettle them.
The essay: https://www.peirce.org/writings/p107.html
This blog post gestures at that idea while being an example of what Peirce calls the "a priori method". A certain framework is first settled upon for (largely) aesthetic reasons and then experience is analyzed in light of that framework. This yields comfortable conclusions (for those who buy the framework, anyhow).
For Peirce, all inquiry begins with surprise, sometimes because we've gone looking for it but usually not. About the a priori method, he says:
“[The a priori] method is far more intellectual and respectable from the point of view of reason than either of the others which we have noticed. But its failure has been the most manifest. It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest. And so from this, which has been called the a priori method, we are driven, in Lord Bacon's phrase, to a true induction.”
Wow. I'm reminded of a great essay/blgo I read years ago that I'll never find again that said a good, engaging talk/presentation has to have an element of surprise. More specifically, you start with an exposition of what your audience already knows/believes, then you introduce your thesis which is SURPRISING in terms of what they already know. Not too out of the realm of belief, but just enough.
The bigger/more thought-diverse the audience, the harder this is to do.
I had a grad school mentor William Wells who taught us something similar. A good research publication or presentation should aim for "just the right amount of surprise".
Too much surprise and the scientific audience will dismiss you out of hand. How could you be right while all the prior research is dead wrong?
Conversely, too little surprise and the reader / listener will yawn and say but of course we all know this. You are just repeating standard knowledge in the field.
Despite the impact on audience reception we tend to believe that most fields would benefit from robust replication studies and the researchers shouldn't be penalized for confirming the well known.
And, sometimes there really is paradigm breaking research and common knowledge is eventually demonstrated to be very wrong. But often the initial researchers face years or decades of rejection.
my understanding (which is definitely not exhaustive!) is that the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced than is popularly retold, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still.
Paul Feyerabend has a book called Against Method in which he essentially argues that it was the Catholic Church who was following the classical "scientific method" of weighing evidence between theories, and Galileo's hypothesis was rationally judged to be inferior to the existing models. Very fun read.
I completely agree with your comment. The common narrative about Galileo and the Church is often oversimplified and overlooks the intellectual context of the time. As you pointed out, it wasn’t about a crude Biblical literalism—after all, even centuries before Galileo, figures like Saint Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, already accepted that the Earth is spherical.
By Galileo’s era, the Catholic Church was well aware of this scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and natural philosophy. The dispute was far more about competing models and the standards of evidence required, not a refusal to accept reason or observation.
Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?
> Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?
That seems pretty unfair. The article is clearly structured to treat the Galileo thing as an example, not a premise. It is supposed to be a familiar case to consider before going into unfamiliar ones. In that sense it clearly still works as an example even if it's false: does it not set you up to think about the general problem, even if it's a fictional anecdote? It's no different than using some observation about Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter as an example before setting into a point. The fact that it's fictional doesn't affect its illustrative merits.
> The fact that it's fictional doesn't affect its illustrative merits.
Indeed, it may even reinforce the overall argument being made in the post we're discussing; the "Galileo vs. Catholicism" narrative is itself a linchpin trope in an empirical scientific worldview, with the trope reinforcing (among other beliefs) that "it's right and proper to pursue and advocate for objective truth even to the extent of making enemies of the most powerful."
Considering the likely audience for a piece like this post we're discussing, that the Galileo narrative doesn't necessarily reflect what actually happened historically makes it a pretty good example on a meta-level. Are any of us who have the belief in the ultimate value of objectivity going to give up on it because a potentially weak example was used to support it?
Indeed, thanks for pointing out. I tried to edit my comment, but it's not possible anymore.
Galileo started the troll himself depicting the opponent theory in the mouth of Simplicius.
And even with its acquaintances with the pope, he finished jailed at home. Far better than being burned alive like the Church did with Giordano Bruno.
So, yes, they are more nuances to the affair, but the case around lack of observable parallax or other indeed judicious reasoning is not going to create a great narrative to sell on the one hand, and on the other hand focusing on technical details is kind of missing the forest for the tree of what where the social issues at stake the trial examplified.
Was it during Galileo's era or was it a much earlier time with Greek philosophers when the idea of heliocentrism was rejected because the lack of parallax movement of the stars? The idea of stars being so far away they wouldn't show parallax movement wasn't acceptable without stronger evidence than what was available at the time, given how massive that would make outer space, so the simpler explanation was that the sun moved.
Earlier, for the most part. There was a fairly well known set of standard objections. A lot of the others were to do with the implications of the earth rotating, like the fact that things seem to fall straight down (not quite, but it was only after Galileo's death that someone managed to demonstrate this clearly, and not for lack of trying), and that you don't get a huge wind generated by the rotation (it does affect the winds, but you need a far more sophisticated framework for understanding motion that only really started to take shape with Newton to put this together). The star parallax thing was further complicated by an quirk of optics, which is that stars don't appear to be perfect point objects, they (to the naked eye and to telescopes) do have some apparent diameter, and that diameter implied that if they were far away enough to not have parallax, not only would the universe need to be much bigger, the stars themselves would need to be huge, many times the size of the solar system.
It also didn't help that Galileo's model was still incorrect and inelegant, due to the insistence on circles and epicycles. It actually needed more cycles to explain than the geocentric version of the model! It was Kepler that actually got things right and elegant by allowing orbits to be ellipses.
(As an aside, there's one exchange of letters between Galileo and a bigwig member of the church, where amusingly, to modern observers, the church guy was more correct about the astronomy and Galileo was more correct on the theology!)
This is a really good overview. However:
> It actually needed more cycles to explain than the geocentric version of the model!
This part is not true. The main advantage of Copernicus's model was that it reduced the number of epicycles needed. In the Ptolemaic system every planet (except the Moon and Sun) required an epicycle with a period of one year, which we now know was needed in order to account for the relative motion of the Earth on its own orbit. In a heliocentric system these epicycles could be eliminated. Copernicus presented his model more in terms of it requiring fewer calculations.
The Ptolemaic system was already not particularly favored and was well and truly killed in Gallileo's time (in part by his observations). The competition was Tycho Brahe's model, in which the sun revolves around the earth but the planets revolve around the sun. They for the most part make identical predictions as far as astronomical observations, but Brahe's was very slightly simpler and didn't cause the other objections.
> By Galileo’s era, the Catholic Church was well aware of this scientific truth and actively engaged with astronomy and natural philosophy.
I'm confused. Are you saying that the Church knew the Earth was round or not? If they knew, then it doesn't matter what arguments were made, it was all in bad faith and therefore wasn't scientific.
EDIT: Never mind, I misread
The sphericity of the Earth was not what Galileo and the Church were arguing about--they were arguing about whether the Sun revolved around the Earth, or the Earth around the Sun.
The idea that people used to think the Earth was flat is a common misconception. Sometimes medieval painters would draw the Earth that way for artistic purposes, but nobody seriously thought it worked that way for real.
Why not? It's obvious to anyone who watched a ship sail over the horizon that the Earth must be a sphere because you see the body of the ship disappear before its sail mast does.
The church knew that the earth was round. Which is largely irrelevant, because Galileo argued for a heliocentric model vs the (at the time popular) geocentric model. Nobody argued that the earth was round
The author doesn't use the Galileo episode as a premise, only as a catchy illustration. If anything, the more nuanced version of the story seems to support their argument better than the simplified version does.
> Then I can’t help but think: if the author of the article didn’t even understand this, how can the rest of the article be correct if it started from a biased and almost false premise?
Same way Galileo could be correct about Earth circling the Sun despite basing it on incorrect assumptions :)
> the case between Galileo and the church was way more nuanced than is popularly retold
Ex historian here. This is true. It’s a complicated episode and its interpretation is made more murky by generations of people trying to use it to make a particular rhetorical point. Paul Feyerabend is guilty of this too, although he’s at least being very original in the contrarian philosophy of science he’s using it for.
If anyone is interested in the episode for its own sake (which is rare actually, unless you’re a renaissance history buff first and foremost), I’d probably recommend John Heilbron’s biography which has a pretty balanced take on the whole thing.
I just recently watched a lecture about this and was fascinated.
Specifically, the (incorrect) model of the universe that was used in Europe at the time had been refined to the point that it was absurdly accurate. Even had they adopted a heliocentric model, there would have been no direct benefit for for a long, long time. If anything, Galileo's work was rife with errors and mathematical problems that would have taken a lot of work to figure out.
So the argument was to take on a bunch of technical debt and switching costs for almost no benefits.
Does Feyerabend explain why Galileo was placed under house arrest?
Perhaps I'm missing some nuance here, but I don't see why a rational argument about competing models would require such drastic suppression.
I have always thought the lesson here is to be careful when insulting those with a great deal of power over you. Pope Urban VIII was originally a patron and supporter of Galileo:
>...Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name "Simplicio" in Italian also had the connotation of "simpleton."[55] Authors Langford and Stillman Drake asserted that Simplicio was modeled on philosophers Lodovico delle Colombe and Cesare Cremonini. Pope Urban demanded that his own arguments be included in the book, which resulted in Galileo putting them in the mouth of Simplicio. Some months after the book's publication, Pope Urban VIII banned its sale and had its text submitted for examination by a special commission
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
It wasn't his theory, it was that he presented it in the form of a dialogue with a character who was an obvious stand-in for the Pope, and then made that character sound like a complete idiot.
The heresy charges were an excuse to punish him for being disrespectful. He'd gotten approval from the Pope to publish; he would have been fine if he'd just been polite.
Obviously that's still petty and unjustified, but science denial wasn't the real reason for it.
He indirectly called the Pope a simpleton, and the Pope took offense.
The Catholic Church was quite tyrannical about opining on matters of theology. Heliocentrism vs Geocentrism, which discussed in terms of whether it's really true or not (as opposed to merely an interesting mathematical model), was considered to be this. That didn't mean that the church was unwilling to discuss it, but that they wanted the public discourse to be controlled to avoid it seeming to conflict with their domain, at least until they could be convinced (and Galileo's main problem is that he could convince very few people inside and outside the church, due to lack of available evidence) and change their official line themselves.
The other problem for Galileo was that he did basically just piss off a bunch of people (he was, by all accounts, very good at publicly dunking on people, whether they were right or wrong. He'd be a natural on modern social media). There was a large group who basically started conspiring against him, trying to implicate him in going against the church, and then his book (which was 'approved' through a very chaotic, almost comical sequence of bad timings and missed communication) managed to insult and piss off the Pope, who was previously a very close friend.
So, ultimately the broad thrust of the situation is not changed: the church was ultimately wrong and unreasonable in their demands, and Galileo was ultimately correct in rejecting Geocentrism, but the church was more reasonable than generally implied in the simplified telling, and Galileo was a lot less correct, and especially lacked good rational arguments and evidence for his specific model.
> why Galileo was placed under house arrest
Galileo's friend Barberini became Pope and asked Galileo to write a book. But Barberini became paranoid about conspiracies and thought it had seditious, secretly-critical undertones.
Regardless of what the standards of evidence were at the time, it surely wasn't "scientific" to threaten someone with prosecution for publishing a supposedly inferior hypothesis. That was politics.
Speaking of politics, the Reformation happened with nearly perfect timing and several countries became safe havens for those who had disagreements with the Catholic Church. This window of safety helped incubate modern science during its critical early years. Less than 50 years after Gelileo died, Newton published Principia. By then it was already well accepted, at least in England, that the Earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around.
Absolutely agree that it was politics, not science, but it wasn't really anti-science either. In a nutshell, his theory was fine on its own; he was punished for insulting the Pope.
Reminds me of the Galileo podcast series in the Opinionated History of Mathematics by Viktor Blasjo: https://intellectualmathematics.com/opinionated-history-of-m...
> and had nothing whatsoever to do with Biblical literalism like the passage in Joshua about making the sun stand still.
The church is and was a large, often heterogenous institution. For some the issue was about conflict with literal interpretations of the bible, not merely the predominate allegorical interpretations (a more widely held concern, at least as a pedagogic matter). AFAIU, while the pope wasn't of this mind, some of the clerics tapped to investigate were. See, e.g., the 1616 Consultant's Report,
> All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words and according to the common interpretation and understanding of the Holy Fathers and the doctors of theology.
https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/sacred-space-astronomy/in...
Galileo had a trial 20 years before the second, more famous one, where he was banned from promoting Copernican ideas, and Copernican books in general were banned by the Inquisition and by papal order. But because 20 years later he insulted the Pope that was protecting him from being arrested, some people act like that means it had nothing to do with Heliocentrism.
The important thing is not why they thought they were right but the fact they could not tolerate being wrong, or even tolerate dissidence on that one little inconsequential thing.
That's why you have people today pushing for flat earth and creationism.
Because their whole shtick is we are always right about absolutely everything.
To be honest, I don't ever saw the reason to make him some sort of almost-martyr. People were wrong and fighting for a good cause many times in history, stuff is always way more complex than surface glance reveals.
The moral of the story isn't how great he was, but how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent (which itself was a highly political process) and how ridiculous it was that they had any sort of power over whole society. And power they had, and rarely used it for some greater good.
> To be honest, I don't ever saw the reason to make him some sort of almost-martyr.
I think the best reason is what you already describe:
> how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent
> how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent
Cancel culture of the time.
> but how horrible the church was in punishing any dissent
I mean, he was put under a house arrest. Many nobles would make his life far more unpleasant if he would present them as he did present pope.
As I’ve grown older and witnessed history in action I’ve begun to understand that reality is much, much more complicated than the simple narratives of history we lean on as a society.
Just think of how many different competing narratives are currently in existence surrounding this tumultuous point in history and realize that at some point some of these narratives will become dominant. Over time as the events leave social memory the key conclusions will likely be remembered but a lot of the reasoning behind them will not. As it exits living memory most of the nuance and context is lost. Over time we may change the narrative by reconsidering aspects that were forgotten, recontextualizing events based on modern concepts and concerns, misunderstanding what happened, or even surreptitiously “modifying” what happened for political ends. Or to put it more plainly, history is written by the victors and can be rewritten as time goes on and the victors change.
Thanks for the book recommendation! I wasn't there for the Galileo spat, so I can't be certain, but I always appreciate more reading.
https://www.amazon.com/Galileo-Was-Wrong-Church-Right/dp/097...
Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right CD-ROM – September 1, 2007 by Robert A. Sungenis (Author), Robert J. Bennett (Author)
> Robert A. Sungenis
I wish Hacker News would let me use emojis so I could put three red sirens after this man’s name.
Sungenis isn’t a good-faith investigator trying to shed light on nuances around Galileo’s argument. He’s a tradcath (old-school Catholic who rejects Vatican II) hack who wants to cast shadows on Galileo from as many directions as possible in the hopes that he can soften people up on the idea of Geocentrism. His approach is very cautious and incremental and relies a lot on innuendo; he makes it difficult to really pin him down on the things I just said about him. But if you look up the things this guy’s written and the kinds of people he hires to “write the dirty work” when necessary, it’s pretty clear what his project is.
Edit: I will note that I am not familiar with Paul Feyerabend and the book mentioned in the top comment, it’s totally possible that those are from a different school of thought more interested in good faith discussion about the scientific method (or not, I don’t know). I would just advise taking any “turns out” argument about Galileo and the Church with huge grains of salt, given that this topic attracts some very slippery people with ulterior motives who intentionally appeal to contrarians like many of us on this site.
> I will note that I am not familiar with Paul Feyerabend and the book mentioned in the top comment, it’s totally possible that those are from a different school of thought more interested in good faith discussion about the scientific method
I haven't read Against Method yet, but my understanding is that Feyeraband's point is that the scientific process, as it is actually practiced, is a lot less sterile than is generally described. He argues it involves a lot of ad-hoc hypothesis and unjustified intuitive leaps. He's not saying the Church was right to believe in Geocentrism, he's saying that strict adherence to a particular methodology is neither desirable nor how science is actually practiced.
The tagline is "anything goes," as in any methodology may or may not be useful in creating knowledge, and it's utility is subject to change. So we can't rule any of them in or out and must constantly test them against reality.
> the hopes that he can soften people up on the idea of Geocentrism
He's actually trying to sell Geocentrism, you mean?
Yes, he’s a magisterial fundamentalist. He views the idea of a non-Geocentric cosmos as destabilizing to the (to him) necessary hierarchies of nature, man and society ordained in the Bible according to traditionalist readings. But unlike a lot of fundamentalists, he’s good at “hiding his power level” enough to occasionally sneak into more serious conversations, and he’s patient enough to stick to a more incrementalist approach to changing people’s minds (instead of constantly yelling about people being damned if they don’t listen to him). He’s a bad and dangerous dude.
Dan Olson did a great job breaking down Sungenis’ film “The Principle” back in 2020, this Folding Ideas video is a great watch: https://youtu.be/icwDF8wRgF4
(Have got to say the video is interesting, if, a bit frightening ...)
PS. "Drake's Imbecility Corollary: Aliens have not found us given how they decided to occupy increasingly non-scientific positions, for effect, being now sufficiently developmentally degraded so as to make contact imposible".-
yep.
As in, in earnest? Or click-rage bait style?
(I guess at some point you start arguing "I guess none of us have been out there to know better ...
... so it's all a hoax". A millenary hoax -
That title is ultimately swinging too far the other way. Galileo was a lot less correct than commonly assumed, and the church was more reasonable, but the church was still wrong in the end, both factually and morally for the level of control over the discussion which they wielded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sungenis
> Robert A. Sungenis (born c. 1955) is an American Catholic apologist and advocate of the pseudoscientific belief that the Earth is the center of the universe. He has made statements about Jews and Judaism which have been criticized as being antisemitic, which he denies. Sungenis is a member of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, a Catholic Young Earth creationist group.
Persevered through the article and comments in hopes someone would point this out.
Very engaging look at a very difficult topic to approach analytically.
I'm reminded of something I learned about the founder of Stormfront, the internet's first white supremacist forum. His child went on to attend college away from home, her first time away from her family, and over a period of roughly two years, she attended dinners with a group of Jewish students who challenged each of her beliefs one at a time. Each time, as she accepted the evidence her friends presented to her about a particular belief, she nonetheless would integrate the new information with her racist worldview. This continued piece by piece until there was nothing left of her racist worldview at all.
It's both heartening and disheartening at the same time, because if this person can change her mind after almost two decades of constant indoctrination during her formative years, then surely anyone can change their mind. That's the heartening part: the disheartening part is, of course, that the effort it took is far from scalable at present and much more difficult to apply to someone who remains plugged into whatever information sources they are getting their current fix of nonsense from.
It's also noteworthy that she was willing to sit with and listen to them in the first place.
I think this is just gloating. Children leaving home for college and quickly abandoning the belief systems of their family is almost more common than the opposite, where they maintain them. Especially if the belief system is something as unpopular as white supremacy mythology; not easy to make new friends at your new school if you don't give that up.
I'm sure she maintains many beliefs that may people would see as racist, along with her classmates. She hasn't been educated or fixed, she just left home.
IIRC, the stats say that overwhelmingly, children will become a version of their parents, including beliefs, etc. This actually seems more like the exception than the rule.
AI chat bots in the future may be a part of ritual mind cleansing.
Wait are you writing from the past?
I remember my first year in college as being the time when I solidified my own first worldview. Prior to that, I had some ideas like the existence of God (in some form) that I was ambivalent about or maybe deferring final judgement. That's when I decided that I was an atheist.
Coincidentally, around the same time my twin brother became a serious Christian. He was socially integrated into a group. He finished college. I did not.
Then years later, maybe late 20s or early 30s, I became convinced that I had been wrong about my government my whole life and that they were not trustworthy. 9/11 being a false flag (which I still believe) was evidence of that.
The interesting thing was at the time when I was in New York I had completely accepted the idea that those three buildings had all turned into dust because the jet hit them. I remember walking around lower Manhattan to pick up a check and the dust was just coating everything.
I had even done some word processing on one of the twin towers leases shortly before the event while temping at Wachtell Lipton. At the time I made no connection.
Anyway, I think an underappreciated aspect of belief graphs is their connection to social groups and identity. It was much easier for me to question institutions when I already felt more marginalized and actually partly blamed society for it being so hard for me to handle my needs and find a place in it.
Another aspect of group membership and beliefs is practical. When groups are competing strategically, they often do so in ways that are not particularly ethical. It's much easier to justify this if you think of the other group as being deeply flawed, evil, invaders, etc.
Although some of these demonization s of the other group do have some kernel of truth to them, they are largely oversimplifications in the belief graphs leading to dangerous inaccuracies.
What are the practical structural and cultural differences that lead to the group divisions? They largely seem geographic, economic, ethnic.
Could a more sophisticated, better integrated, and more accurate belief system help? Or do the social structures and networks largely define the groups?
Are we just basically mammalian ant colonies? Brutally fighting each other for dominance any time there is a resource conflict?
If the other side seems to be trying to hog important resources any time they get a chance, you perceive that you are not playing a fair game. It's not a civil interaction. The other doesn't play by the rules or tell the truth or leave any subtly in discourse. So why should your group, unless it wants to get wiped out?
In my worldview the faint hope is that having more abundance of resources will somehow lead to more civility.
To the author: I love this idea, but your blog has two problems that made it less enjoyable for me to read. The first is the pull quotes. I find them confusing and unnecessary, especially when they repeat sentences in the preceding paragraph. The second is that I got stuck on the moving graphs while scrolling on my phone. I suggest making them smaller with a different background color or simply make them static images.
I really appreciate this feedback, I'll look into both of those before the next post. Just wanted to say thanks.
Just to add to this: I couldn’t read the text in the white boxes of the graphs. Very unfortunate choices of colors…
Some of the core ideas here seem good, but the node/edge distinction feels too fuzzy. The node "Climate Change Threat" is a claim. Is the node "Efficiency" a claim? Can one challenge the existence of Efficiency? If one instead challenges the benefit of Efficiency, isn't that an edge attack?
I could give a bunch of other examples where the nodes in the article don't feel like apples-to-apples things. I feel less motivated to try to internalize the article due to this.
I think the structure inherently enables each node to be a claim (like "this thing exists"), but that there's value in making a node even if that node's claim is not particularly disagreeable, because the edges to that node might be disagreeable, or to provide more detail about how one node relates to another (e.g. through some intermediate node). In this case, maybe the main value in modeling "Efficiency" is to convey how innovation might lead to profit.
To me, it feels less fuzzy when you assume that all nodes and edges imply their own claims, and that it's just a matter of whether or not those claims are worth arguing. The fuzziness imo is based on the fact that the curator picks which nodes and edges exist, which therefore determines which claims exist and can be agreed or disagreed with, not to mention the overall legibility of the graph itself. But I would argue that a causal graph like this is better at representing reality than something like an argument tree, and that, while it might be fuzzy to determine which nodes should exist, at least there's less opinion involved about where nodes should be placed in relation to each other. Which imo makes the structure easier to refine given time and feedback.
The edges are labeled by transitive verbs, where the arrow points from the subject of that verb to the direct object. (I'm counting particle verbs, like "leads to", as verbs.) The nodes are labeled by nouns. If you can change a noun to a verb, I guess you would be changing what is an edge and what is a node.
Example: In the article's first diagram, there is a node labeled "Innovation". This could be replaced by a node labeled "Capitalist" and a node labeled "Improvement", with an arrow from the first to the second labeled "innovates."
So yes, if you can replace a node by an edge (and vice versa, although I don't give an example), this node vs. edge thing is fuzzy.
In 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' the argument is made that the most important cultural changes happen outside the debate, where new structures of thought are being built without being noticed. As without a competing thought structure we are unable to even perceive the new structure. It is the dissonances and the debates that lets us introspect our own ideas. Without the dissonance we do not notice new ideas taking hold of us and changing ourselves, and it is only unnoticed that truly radical changes can take place.
I'm wary of making an "arguments are soldiers" assumption where facts are mostly useful for making arguments, in an attempt to change people's minds.
We should be curious about what's going on in the world regardless of what ideologies we might find appealing. Knowing what's going on in the world is an end in itself. An article with some interesting evidence in it is useful even if you disagree with the main argument.
Facts may not change minds, but we should still support people who do the reporting that brings us the facts.
I just really wish most people had this same kind of attitude, but can't in good faith say that's what I'm observing.
Minds can’t be changed when a decision was based on emotion.
One day I told a friend how I could make no sense of my girlfriend’s behavior in some situation.
He said to me “you still think people make decisions on logic. Many people make their decisions on how they feel emotionally. Logic and facts have nothing to do with it.”
Suddenly a light switched on and i realized that I’m a typical computer person who thinks that everything is based on logic and if you can just explain clearly enough, explain the facts, then the other person will change their mind when they see the facts. It doesn’t work that way.
Computer people have real trouble getting their head around this concept.
Feelings aren't facts but they are important for persuasion. The methods most able to create radical change are the gentlest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument
I disagree with Rapoport's taxonomy, not least "Chinese brainwashing" in the Korean war was not Pavolivan and was rather closer to the T-group method developed in Bethel, ME.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-groups
Interesting. I often hear/read the term "steelmanning" instead, as in the opposite of constructing a straw man argument.
Reminds me of the time that I was in a class on geoengineering and was supposed to have a debate with another student about "Should we fund BECCS in Brazil or fund efforts to protect the rainforest?" (I was advocating for the first)
Two days before the debate I went to a talk about the rainforest with my debating partner, then the night before his friend was stabbed at a bar trying to break up a fight and he rode up to Syracuse in an ambulance so it turned out I was well prepared to give his presentation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... the economics of which are particularly good for Brazilian ethanol plants
In practice I think people often don't see the full structure of their own belief graph. Parts of it are clear but for 99% of important issues, it's more fuzzy than portrayed in the figures here. I still think this is an illuminating way of looking at it!
Another major factor is that while the graph may be fuzzy, the people we trust are clear. Only those people are allowed to "fill in" the missing pieces, and I think it takes a lot of work to do that, so it totally makes sense.
If the takeaway is "don't expect conflicting facts to convince your audience" I agree with that, but the reason is they don't trust you, not the conflicting graphs, and the trust is not really a consequence of the graph structure.
(Also, I was writing about similar stuff recently here: https://blog.griffens.net/blog/no-one-reads-page-28/)
If you found this interesting, I highly recommend reading "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. It's deeply impacted how I think of morality and politics from a societal and psychological point of view.
Some ideas in the book:
- Humans are tribal, validation-seeking animals. We make emotional snap judgments first and gather reasons to support those snap judgments second.
- The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left) is because they have a very consistent and shared understanding and definitions of what Haidt calls the 5 "moral taste receptors" - care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Whereas the left trades off that cohesive understanding with diversity.
I've really enjoyed Haidt's book, though its really a couple of different books in one. I need to read his other work.
To your point about left and right, an interesting point I heard recently is that the left is coalition-driven whereas the right is consensus-driven (at least in US politics). Mapping this back to Haidt, one of his findings is that the left tends to greatly emphasize one or two of the "moral taste receptors", with the right having a roughly equal emphasis between them. It isn't clear to me how these two points might explain each other, but I do wonder if there isn't some self-reinforcement there. If there is, I wonder how/if that might explain political systems more widely.
> I need to read his other work.
I can recommend his Happiness Hypothesis.
>>The reason the political right is so cohesive (vs the left)
Citation excruciatingly needed. This feels like recency bias imo. The Right (I'm assuming we're going US here?) is a coalition of people all walks just as much as the left. I mean, right now large chunks Trump voters are rioting over the Epstein non-release and all the people who were in it for the tax breaks are trying to convince them to stop.
I have come to believe that there is no such thing as 'true rationality' in the universe. There are true events and true facts, but rationality is a shared framework for communication. Rationality exists between people.
People always have a framing story or perspective or viewpoint or system prompt for how they understand facts and events.
If you want to influence beliefs you have to understand the framing story that a person is using - even when that framing story is invalid or untrue.
Also, if you want to influence beliefs, you have to provide some emotional validation. You can't remove a load bearing core belief from someone's story, you can only replace it.
---
Another partial explanation is trauma - you can think about 'conspiracy theories' in a number of ways, but these low information, high satisfaction theories often arise after traumatic experiences. You can't properly address the facts of the situation while a person is hurting.
We should expect to see more conspiracy theories after natural and unnatural disasters. Think wildfires caused space lasers, floods caused by cloud seeding, storms caused by radar installations, melting of steel beams by various means. The people who believe these things are generally not having a good time in life.
---
BONUS Link: Tim Minchin - Confirmation Bias
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1juPBoxBdc
Agreed, I'd phrase it slightly differently in that symbolized reality exists inside our heads, but we often operate as if[1] it exists outside our heads and some, possibly a majority of people, believe that there is not difference - that they are in fact the same thing, that the symbolic universe is real universe.
Every frame is the act of assuming a symbolic correspondence. The only problem is that we've incredibly bad at disproving the veracity of frames.
1. To great success even
Yes. There are true facts, but the concept of "rationality" presupposes that there is one correct way to interpret these facts and translate them into behavior.
Two people observe someone beating another person. One person moves forward to intervene and stop the violence. The other moves away to protect themselves. Which person has acted rationally? They may have both acted in complete alignment with their personal philosophies, and they may each view the other as irrational.
"Rationality" is completely subjective to your own values and belief systems. Human behavior is infinitely more complex than formal logic allows.
There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of them
There is such a thing as valid logic, but truthful results depend on the priors being correct.
> There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of them
See:
> Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.
> The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge, while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain that the justification of basic beliefs does not depend on other beliefs. Internalism and externalism debate whether justification is determined solely by mental states or also by external circumstances.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
A philosophy joke:
> When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge.
* Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
Yes, I am using the word 'rationality' somewhat informally.
In the "Climate Change Threat" example, one vector of attack is when the policy changes do not lead to renewable energy adoption or to reduced emissions.
That justifies the questioning of whether the climate change was really motivating the policy change or just being used as pretext.
That idea suggests there might be another way to get to the desired goal, if that goal is renewable energy adoption (quite aside from whether that goal results in reduced emissions).
We have solar panels on our house, and recently installed a heat pump with gas furnace backup in place of an AC (for summer) + gas furnace (for winter). We also replaced our gas water heater (near the end of its life) with a heat pump water heater, and I drive an EV (not Tesla :)). All these were partly paid for by various tax rebates. The result is that our electric bill is zero, and our gas bill has plummeted (I think it will be nearly zero), and I spend zero at the gas station and the oil change place. One should be able to sell that idea to anyone who wants to reduce their expenses, and expects to live in a house for a few years to a decade to break even, and to drive their car for five years or so.
Of course the current administration is doing its best to eliminate those tax benefits...
The thing is with all of these improvements is that if they were so easy to implement for other people, everyone would do them. It might be better to ask why people aren't installing this stuff if they save money over time? The answer is most people really don't have very much money available beyond what can cover existing routine costs. For a lot of people if they wanted to replace their water heater they would have to take on debt or part with an asset to afford that. Yes, on the whole the cost is amortized, but you still need to produce significant capital up front to make it happen at all. And maybe the water heater isn't the only couple hundred dollar purchase you've been putting on the backburner in your life.
As a result, where you find homes outfitted like yours, you tend to also find incomes well above the cost of living.
Self-interest and identity is more important than what the article touches on. People form beliefs based on what serves their self-interest, with made-up lies as a front.
This is why you can accurately predict people's political beliefs by simply knowing their demographics. It is downstream of self-interest.
You can't change people's minds if doing so undermines their identity or their self-interest.
I'm a big fan of modeling causal structures like this - I think having a diagram is a really good way of getting on the same page and making conversations more constructively focused on points that each party can follow and precisely provide counterpoints for. I appreciate reading an article about this! I feel like our society would benefit a lot from investing more in this kind of information management, but it's not particularly flashy.
I'm working on an app[1] for building these structures, centered around problems and solutions, with the addition that each node or edge can have its own structured auxiliary information, e.g. scores for intuitions, argument trees for supporting/critiquing the claims implied by nodes/edges, questions for identifying unknowns. Here's an example[2] of the two diagrams in the article as they'd be in the app. I want it to be easier for our discussions to be constructive, and I think software can reduce the effort required for it.
[1] https://ameliorate.app/ [2] https://ameliorate.app/keyserj/facts-dont-change-minds-artic...
The post argues that people cling to beliefs not because they ignore facts, but because belief-change requires restructuring entire systems of interconnected ideas that is emotionally and psychologically demanding.
This reminds me of a passage from yuval harari book Nexus : “…… even the most truthful accounts of reality can never represent it in full. There are always some aspects of reality that are neglected or distorted in every representation truth then isn’t a one-to-one representation of reality rather truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring our aspects, no account of reality is hundred percent accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than the others”
So belief system can be thought of perceived structured reality in one’s mind organized around some supporting facts. It would be valuable for researchers to examine and model what these belief system structure DAGs look like for groups with opposing views on major issues, such as climate change or democracy
I was on board until I realized there can be an infinite number of "nodes" (as defined in the post) between one another. The idea of destabilization/destruction of ideas works in the macro examples defined in the post, but may not be effective in practice, where the amount of major nodes between one idea and the next is opaque.
Any mapping of the destruction of one idea node in hindsight will suffer survivorship bias with the mapping seemingly sublimely simple. Hindsight is, as they say, always 20/20.
It’s worth asking ourselves “When was the last time I changed my mind?” It’s hard to really recall because the belief rewiring required seems to play havoc with our memory.
Keeping a "mind-change journal" where you document when and why your views shifted on topics can help overcome hindsight bias and reveal your actual belief structure patterns over time.
I changed my mind about batteries for stationary storage fairly recently. The 1k reports that seemed biased (and still seem biased) didn't help.
The understanding that I had not calculated depreciation correctly helped, as did a better understanding of the pricing models for the most efficient plants vs the so called "peaked plants".
The world of reasons was much more complex and interesting than I had thought.
I can answer that quite easily.
I had a long held belief that Hitler escaped to South America. This belief BTW isn't that not that uncommon. This is because many other Nazis escaped to South America (including Martin Bormann) and it is perpetuated by Slop rubbish like "Hunting Hitler" TV series, stories about Hotel Bariloche etc.
The reason I no longer believe it is because I was ready to unbelieve it. I was no longer personally invested in it. I was personally invested in it because I believed it was "secret knowledge".
I finally accepted that it did not happen when I watched Mark Felton on Youtube do a 6 part series talking about the soviet investigation into Hitler's death. If I had watched that series several years earlier I wouldn't have accepted the facts contained within it.
"Belief" doesn't actually mean "to believe", as in "I think A is true and B is false". "Belief" is the faith, trust, or alignment with in an idea planted in one's head. It has nothing to do with factual or true information. You can simultaneously know something is untrue, and have belief in it.
You can't change minds because "the mind" (in this context) is the personal identity and ego of an individual, of which their "tribe" is a huge part. Any information that conflicts with the narrative of their identity or tribe will be rejected, because it threatens their identity or tribe. To question one's identity causes a crisis which most people are not capable of dealing with. The more you attack those things, the stronger they will defend them.
The "culture war" is literally just that: one culture attacking another culture on its fundamental nature. This is like Christians vs Muslims. The only way to "win" that war is complete destruction. If you want the war to end without that, you're gonna have to stop fighting and come to some kind of truce.
> You can't change minds because "the mind" (in this context) is the personal identity and ego of an individual, of which their "tribe" is a huge part. Any information that conflicts with the narrative of their identity or tribe will be rejected, because it threatens their identity or tribe. To question one's identity causes a crisis which most people are not capable of dealing with. The more you attack those things, the stronger they will defend them.
This sounds like the friend-enemy distinction by Carl Schmitt.
I feel like what we're seeing now is that the uneasy truce which used to exist is breaking down. Each side is more or less openly calling for the destruction of the other, and not seeing each other as human beings.
I lived through the fall of communism, so I've seen the "win" happening without any destruction.
Just the arguments had to be a lot stronger than some pixels on shiny screens.
There’s also structure created by trust: in Australia we have the Australian Bureau of Statistics which is a high-trust, apolitical institution. ABS figures can then be quoted to hang an argument off.
There are high trust organizations in the US too. A product being FDA certified is a signal to buyers (in addition of course to being permission to sell to them).. the USGS reports on earthquakes. We don’t have earthquake deniers because if USGS says it happened people either believe or can trace back to underlying facts.
What would it take for social media and other places people get their information to become high trust?
Structure for facts and information is just communication.
You can have the facts but not be persuasive due to poor communication skills.
No mention of Kuhn or Lakatos? I don't know why people keep trying to reinvent philosophy of science without doing any of the reading. Well, I do know. Reading philosophy is hard. But that's no excuse.
> “Attacking the connections between ideas can force a belief system to reroute its logic, making it less direct, more convoluted, and sometimes less persuasive—even if the system doesn’t collapse outright.”
Beliefs and ideas are connected in a network that is unique to the individual, so to change a mind you have to understand the belief network and work your change into it.
Is a fair summary of this that in a belief system attacking any of its individual components can compromise the system itself? I would not find this surprising, actually rather intuitive. The insights I would be finding really interesting are the unexpected/unassessed on my end, e.g. how much harder it is to attack each of the individual components by their attributes, or if there is a type of component that is easier to compromise (e.g. edges vs nodes). Or how different systems compose over time (e.g. the venn diagram between flat earthers and Christians has significantly changed since Galileo's time).
The Galileo example is messy. I don't think they cared deeply about the issue as implied here. There's obvious power in being the only ones allowed to say what God thinks about an issue. They wanted to maintain that monopoly.
Good article, but I found it a little too abstract to derive much actionable information. IMO the most useful point is this quote:
In the seminaries of the world they don't teach how to make up clever stories to entrap people. For that you go to Marketing, PR or Sales school. And ofcourse the people who come out of these schools think they are very clever because they sold some widgets or politicians to the masses by some deadline.
But have you heard of a sales org or a marketing dept that has been running for thousand years? They barely ever survive few decades as a coherent unit if ever.
For the curious go check what the neighborhood seminary teaches.
The Church (and all other religious systems) haven't stood for thousands of year through the fall of empires, nations, civil wars, revolutions, plagues, famines, collapse of economic systems, internal schisms, enlightenment, progress in science/tech etc because of the stories they tell.
In fact the stories have been rewritten, branched, mutated, merged with other stories thousands of times to the point we have thousands of different versions of these stories. There is no "narrative domination".
The Church has survived because when people Suffer due to the fall of empire/nations/banks/economies, war, plagues, famine, disasters etc where else do people go?
Do they all head to house of the local system analyst/graph theorist?
So what about the checks notes tens if not hundreds of thousands of religions and religious belief structures that have fallen apart since the inception of humanity?
This is some very weird survivor bias.
Also, philosophically, a the whole of organized religion is "clever stories to entrap people" from a non-believer's standpoint.
I would certainly like to compare the proportion of memetic* material in the IP of religious vs commercial orgs that are holdovers from more than 700 years ago.
*(equivalent to "genetic" in bio organisms)
Archaic phrasings and occurrences of latin should be ignored to make it more balanced :) yep the survivor bias is quite.. a thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival
This seems way too logical. Humans are not, for the most part, rational and logical creatures.
I resemble that remark.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
TFA is about the meta level of what persuasive arguments look like.
I see several examples in the comments here of people appearing to share their favourite object examples of how such and such nefarious force is causing people to believe bad things with propaganda — according to them and the sources they trust. If you do this, you are missing the point completely.
Instead, consider privately examining the opposed memeplex to understand why someone else might find it convincing — how their values might be understood, charitably. Re-evaluate how you know what you know; recognize the basis of your own position, and assess the soundness of that "structure" (as the author terms it). Recognize who you need to implicitly trust, and how much, in order to accept that reasoning. Consider why other people might not trust the same authorities you do. (Consider the possibility that other people might be able to trace direct harm done to themselves, to those authorities.) Recognize that reasoning from entirely absurd premises is still reasoning; consider that others do reason. This is why your own (sane, to you) premise does not resonate: it does not fit in that framework.
> So when you encounter someone whose worldview seems impenetrable, remember: you’re not just arguing with a person, you’re engaging with a living, self-stabilizing information pattern—one that is enacted and protected by the very architecture of human cognition.
> Truth matters—but it survives and spreads only when it is woven into a structure that people can inhabit.
Time spent on the Internet complaining about others' structures, is not time spent weaving truth into them. On the contrary, should those others see you, you will only activate their defense mechanisms.
For an overview of the psychology of how people understand things (and don't!) I highly recommend this paper. It highlights a lot of ways our brains take shortcuts in terms of actually understanding things. And that facts play only one particular role amongst many other factors.
Keil, F. C. (2006). Explanation and understanding. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 57(1), 227-254. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3034737/pdf/nihms26...
Lovely article, and he hints at something that's been on my mind lately, about how the internet enables collisions between groups that cannot (and often should not) mix. For example, the quiet, thoughtful academic giving insightful analysis of Plato's Symposium getting shouted down and called rude names. Or a rowdy bunch of young gamer kids being scolded by a priggish group of college kids for being politically incorrect. The loss of friction, the loss of gate-keeping, sounds good but feels really bad. It's like how we value biodiversity and so lament and control "invasive species" to keep these unique and interesting pockets of the biosphere alive. As a society, we benefit from having quieter, softer, kinder places where sensitive, smart people can do intense work, and yet we are ALSO served by the louder, harder, harsher places where the fighters go. But if we allow these two spaces to mix, the former is quickly eradicated, the latter loses not just its purpose, but eventually the former can no longer offer better fighting tools to the latter. Perhaps this effect has a name, or has been talked about by a more articulate author?
Aside: For the Mermaid graph, what library or how is it being shown like this?
It's a brutally simple combination of `@kevingimbel/eleventy-plugin-mermaid` with `svg-pan-zoom` :)
Hesitate to bring up politics here, but it's hard not to view the divide in the US in terms of this framework.
I'm very much a progressive. But it seems focusing on lots of different (and divisive) issues affecting small parts of the population .. it exposes a lot of weaknesses to the other side to exploit. On the other hand, liberal politicians have ignored basic things like jobs, wages, housing (yes, the Uniparty is in the pockets of the oligarchs). Those are things which affect a lot of people on both sides and are worth much more effort. The results of the NYC mayoral primary show this clearly. Yet, the Democrat leaders are all in hiding, and even worse, working to undermine the NYC primary. Together with the so called liberal newspaper. Sad!
Galileo and the church were both correct.
For some reason the article seems to really like the — symbol, even as far as replacing most of it's commas with it
That dash is indicative of AI. Unlike the "-" - which I use often - the "--" is reportedly an AI tell.
Eh, the whole em dash thing is a low accuracy tell. Most of my writing uses em dashes; iOS/macOS replaces "--" (dash dash) with an em dash. Fwiw, in your example, an em dash is the correct choice, not a dash.
Ran this through a few AI-detection analyzers and, yeah, it's being pegged as AI-written. I'm guessing the author used it to do a final tidying up (not that I think that's acceptable- just proof-read your work) and the em dashes came out in force.
The core of the problem lies not in facts failing to persuade, but in our obsession with trying to change minds.
We've developed systems to facilitate this. Parliamentary debate, for instance, was meant to force parties to justify their positions through public reasons, not private convictions. Religious institutions, too, have long shaped minds with varying degrees of success.
But attempts to reshape humanity, especially on a grand scale, have consistently produced devastating and unintended consequences.
We now live in an age where political expedience trumps truth; what matters is not whether something is right, but whether it plays well. The public is expected to absorb politicized half-truths while being shielded from the real issues....because complexity isn’t expedient. The current obsession with labeling ideas as “misinformation” or “disinformation” is a desperate, often incoherent attempt to control discourse, and it breeds more cynicism than clarity.
In the end, good ideas tend to survive, but not on any schedule we can manage. Trying to micromanage thought or the flow of information is not only futile, it’s unworthy of the very rationality we claim to protect.
> Religious institutions, too, have long shaped minds with varying degrees of success.
Given that a huge portion of the world's population is religious (a quick google search say 84%), I'd say with a very high success.
You say the misinformation label is counterproductive. But what if we cannot even agree on what the facts are? There's no productive discussion to be had. We cannot solve problems collaboratively when facts are ignored or denied.
Disagreement about facts is not new and you're assuming too much about how truth operates in public discourse.
Obviously, facts matter but disagreement is rarely about facts themselves. What counts as 'fact' is often embedded in a web of assumptions, models, and values. A lot of what passes as fact are merely claims dressed up as indisputable but often laden with interpretation, ideology, or selective framing.
To say there's 'no productive discussion' unless facts are agreed upon is to misunderstand how knowledge and consensus actually work. History shows that productive discourse often begins in spite of disagreement over facts. Scientific progress, legal systems, and democratic deliberation rely not on perfect consensus but on procedures that tolerate disagreement and test claims over time.
Labeling something as 'misinformation' may feel like asserting the truth, but epistemologically it's simple a kind of speech act... one that can shut down inquiry rather than promote it. It assumes a finality that's likely not justified, and worse, it can become a tool of political expedience. This is especially dangerous when wielded by institutions that are pursuing their own interests, are fallible, or are compromised.
The path to truth is not paved with censorship and labeling. It's built through dialogue, humility, and robust mechanisms for testing competing claims. Dissent is not the enemy of truth, it's often the precondition.
I agree with everything you've said one hundred percent.
However, I'm not talking about honest discussion, truth seeking and competing perspectives etc. But about literal dishonesty, actual lies and complete disregard of proof and data in order to achieve a goal (usually power or attention).
Like "no troops in Crimea", "Jewish space lasers" or "windmills cause cancer"...
There is a qualitative difference between honestly believing X versus constructing X in order to manipulate and deceive. It seems to be that the latter has become much more prevalent, aggressive and even automated in recent years in public discourse. That's what is meant by "misinformation".
I don't believe in systemically/institutionally policing speech (with exceptions like calling for violence, doxxing and similar). And I don't have a solution in mind. But it sure as hell is tiring, because it takes a lot more effort to deconstruct lies and misinformation than to spread them.
It's an honest question: Are the tools for honest public discourse even effective against this in the long term? Is that how we go forward?
This accurately describes how my brain works. My thought process is like a bunch of graph nodes, and when new information doesn't "fit", it puts tensions on the links, and I want to resolve that tension. I can...feel it happening inside my mind when I think, more or less? -- It's hard to describe
Resolving that tension may occur in several ways, in order of increasing significance:
- Rejecting the new information
- Refining the graph (splitting a node representing a concept into multiple sub-nodes representing sub-concepts with their own relationships)
- Making local modifications to the graph
- Making sweeping architectural changes to the graph as a whole
The author seems to imply that cognitive biases are an inherent qualitative problem that is fundamentally forced to arise from this graph structure. I personally respectfully disagree. In my view, cognitive biases are a quantitative problem, incorrectly setting the threshold at which a large reorganization should occur. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is qualitatively a sound epistemological principle -- but to correctly apply it, you must quantitatively set a reasonable threshold for "extraordinary."
I feel like we need to get better at understanding the graph structure of people we disagree with. The best example I can think of is the abortion debate [1]: If you accept the premise "Life begins at conception" [2], the pro-life camp has an enormously strong case; the rest of the graph between that premise and "Abortion should be illegal" is very strong (it's mostly tremendously well-reinforced nodes in near-universal moral foundations, like "Do unto others" or "Murder should be illegal").
Arguments against abortion are frequently just bad when looked at from the graph point of view: They often don't directly confront the premise "Life begins at conception," nor do they attack the graph between the premise and conclusion. [3]
[1] I'm personally in the pro-choice camp; I do not accept the premise that a human fetus has the same moral status as a fully grown human.
[2] "Life" here is not in the technical biological sense, but something more akin to "The ethical standing of human-equivalent sentience." (Bacteria and protozoa and so on are biologically alive, but nobody moralizes about killing them en masse by, e.g., cooking your food.)
[3] If you're curious about my own views on this specific subject, I've talked about them here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36255493#36270990
You're absolutely right about the abortion debate; the entire pro-life argument makes sense only if you deny that "life begins at conception". But I don't believe I've ever heard the pro-choice camp attack that axiom; instead, it's always about the mother having control over her body, which just ignores the pro-life axiom. (If life begins at conception, then abortion is not about the mother's body, it's about the pre-born's body.) No wonder the two sides don't communicate.
I've had this mental model for a while now, but this post lays it out better than I could've. I think the most important part of the post is this part of the conclusion:
> For years, our main defense against misinformation and manipulation has been to double down on “truth”—to fact-check, debunk, and moderate. These efforts are important, but they rest on the assumption that truth is the main determinant of what people believe. The evidence, and the argument of this post, suggest otherwise: structure, coherence, and emotional resonance are far more important for the persistence and spread of beliefs.
I'm still friends with one or two people who are hat-wearing MAGA supporters. WE stopped talking politics after 2018 or so, but between 2016 and 2018, and still occasionally since, I get a glimpse into their belief graph. Sometimes their facts are incorrect, but that's less common than simply them interpreting the same facts in a different light. Occasionally they'll have an interpretation of a fact pattern that I find more compelling than the interpretation I find in more liberal spaces. (The Democrat party is, after all, not the best at hypocrisy.) These patterns are the place where the point of the blog post comes out most clearly: most people aren't motivated by facts and logic; they're motivated by a vast network of feelings and emotions where each point reinforces all the other points and an individual fact is less important for its truth than its reinforcement of the overall belief graph.
The most interesting thing about the MAGA belief graph though is its overall structure and maintenance. There is approximately a third of the US that simply has an entirely different basis of belief in the world than the other two thirds. How is it maintained? How does normal everyday contact between the two groups not reconcile the foundations of the two belief systems? It's not a difference in facts, although that does come up occasionally. For example, the sudden change in the truth of the Epstein client list and the effort of the MAGA belief system maintainers (news orgs, influencers, etc) to excise it from the belief graph has had some interesting effects.
But the interesting part is the methods used, the way the belief system reacts to influencers and others that shape the belief system, and how particular facts and opinions are used to reinforce the effects of both new and existing parts of the belief graph. Looking at my MAGA acquaintances and seeing their belief system from the outside has made those methods and reactions more legible, and has allowed me to notice some of the times those same methods and reactions pop up in other communities. For example, I dislike the focus on fact-checking, because too often the facts are the same on both sides, and it's only a difference in interpretation. Then people who agree with the fact checkers prove to themselves that the other side is unable to see truth, while people who disagree with the fact checkers prove to themselves that the other side twists truth into lies. Yet people still push for fact checking despite the fact it only reinforces both sides opinion of themselves rather than having any chance of changing the mind of anyone on the other side.
Unfortunately I am lazy or else I would've taken notes of examples of the methods and reactions used to reinforce a belief system, rather than just vague half-recollected memories that form my own belief graph. Regardless, I think it's important for people to look at their own belief system and, when presented with new facts or arguments, examining them and how they fit into their belief system, and see if maybe the argument is relying less on pure facts and more on emotional ties to the rest of their belief system.
Economist Paul Samuelson: "When events change, I change my mind. What do you do?" Unfortunately--as you say--most of us don't.
> For example, the sudden change in the truth of the Epstein client list and the effort of the MAGA belief system maintainers (news orgs, influencers, etc) to excise it from the belief graph has had some interesting effects.
Interesting. My own experience has been that they are actually upset at Trump about this.
I'm struggling to understand this article. I think it's for a couple of reasons:
1. The capitalism graph seems OK but the climate change graph doesn't look right. I've never heard anyone argue that "resilient communities" automatically lead to "policy changes". What does that mean? If you have a resilient community already, why would you need to change anything? It seems to suggest that people with this belief system would end up in an infinite loop of wanting to change policies even when the original motivating problem is solved, which sounds like a very uncharitable view of climate activists.
2. After setting up this very abstract argument, the author ends by claiming, "The evidence, and the argument of this post, suggest [truth doesn't determine what people believe]: structure, coherence, and emotional resonance are far more important for the persistence and spread of beliefs". But he hasn't supplied any arguments. He outlined an abstract theoretical model, but it makes no testable predictions and he doesn't try to prove it's correct. Then he claims there are no real debates in the west about climate change, vaccines, or race, it's all driven by the evil Ruskies "creating social chaos". This claim isn't linked in any way to the first part with the graphs.
I've written about this belief twice in the past.
https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
It's all based on a bunch of academic papers that don't replicate and which use pseudo-scientific methodologies. They misuse ML in ways that generate noise, identify random people as "Russian bots", conclude that "Russian bots" support every possible opinion simultaneously and from there assume there must be some nefarious psychological strategy behind it. In reality they're just doing bad social science and casting the results through the prism of their ideological biases. It works because social science is full of people who are easily impressed by maths they don't understand, and who are surrounded by people with identical ideologies to themselves (often extreme ones). So there's nobody to give them a reality check. Eventually people who understand computer science come along and write a rebuttal, but academia is a closed system so they just ignore it and keep pumping journalists/politicians full of conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Given that, it's kind of ironic that the author is writing about the difficulty of changing people's minds with truth.
> graph seems OK but
The point of the argument is agnostic to the contents and structure of the graphs. They are only there to illustrate that a) there exists a conflict; b) both sides of this conflict have a graph; c) even though these graphs inform positions on the same policy, they are composed of completely unrelated ideas.
> But he hasn't supplied any arguments. He outlined an abstract theoretical model, but it makes no testable predictions and he doesn't try to prove it's correct.
You're meant, I think, to find the argument intuitively persuasive. It's easy to map the model's concept onto one's own beliefs, at least if you consider yourself to be rational (and most people do, even if they end up believing absurdities).
I think there is a testable prediction: if you just go in guns blazing to a "culture war" argument and try to convince people of your viewpoint, you are not going to make any progress. Further, in order to even challenge individual beliefs, you will have to understand how they relate to the rest of the other side's memeplex.
> Then he claims there are no real debates in the west about climate change, vaccines, or race, it's all driven by the evil Ruskies "creating social chaos". This claim isn't linked in any way to the first part with the graphs.
Blaming Russia for this is indeed very much out of pocket, and an example of the kind of culture warring that the article seems to want to discourage. However, there is ample evidence of the existence of the groups cited (granted there are others from other countries as well), even if they can't really explain more than a small part of the problem — at least directly. I think it's fair to say that a small number of agitators can produce large amounts of social tension, if they hit just the right talking points (qv. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/).
More importantly, I'd say the dearth of "real debate" is abundantly clear from looking at pretty much any social media. Even on sites that allow users to take either side of an issue, even on the subset of those where one side isn't clearly being continually persecuted and driven off, you find very heavy siloing of each side into its own echo chamber.
> even though these graphs inform positions on the same policy, they are composed of completely unrelated ideas
I'm still confused :( The two graphs shown at the start aren't two sides of the same issue, they're two different issues.
> I think there is a testable prediction: if you just go in guns blazing to a "culture war" argument and try to convince people of your viewpoint, you are not going to make any progress.
I think that was the observation that his theory is trying to explain, not a novel prediction of it. The theory would have to make a testable prediction that isn't just the original phenomenon existing.
The Slate Star Codex article is fun but it's a fictional story. It doesn't let us say anything about reality.
From the responses elsewhere in this thread the author of TFA (@staph here) sounds like a very agreeable & articulate person, but I can't shake off the feeling he's a post-Soviet plant attacking the very spirit of Western Civilization. Understating his intellect just like a mob boss.
A sign of actual good faith would be to provide a compelling (alternative) reasoning structure for climate change activists. Not a strawman graph*.
As you know the post Soviets need to believe in growth. They can't even get to solar without climate change! Therefore, anything to divide the opposition can only help the cause.
*A subgraph "potatoes -> vodka -> biofuels" would only be satire but quite uplifting to all involved.. and almost provides the prediction you are looking for
Yet another skimmable post from someone very aligned to one corporate/US party centric set of views that believes everyone else is "simply manipulated" and therefore they'll just try to "reach them" via more manipulation.
Or maybe you're just wrong in peddling government/corporate bullshit as is? Maybe others have lived through things and don't align themselves to corporate or political power A or B and therefore will seem contrarian against the drowning flow of "good propaganda"?
Many of us still remember how "believe in science" was used to shut people up about simple corruption and hygiene theater.
If you weren't in the right side of history (anti authoritarian) then, your complains ring hollow.
The whole "<X country> bad" is also such a tired narrative from the Anglo countries that can't stop invading countries for oil and supporting genocide every chance they get.
[dead]
[flagged]
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
I don't think there's anything more curmudgeonly or generic than just pasting rules.
Crackpots don't deserve thoughtful replies and practically they cannot be given thoughtful replies. Thoughtfully replying to every crackpot would absorb all the non crackpot resources.
And before it's suggested that "calling someone a crackpot is an ad-hominem" or the more advanced "who is the arbiter of what is a crackpot? Wouldn't that just let you dismiss any argument you don't like by saying it's made by a crackpot?"
This theory has sufficient characteristics of a crackpot theory:
I certainly agree that it's generic (and therefore boring). Such mod comments are an out-of-band side channel—not at all the intended use of the site, necessary for it to function (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). (I can't see what's curmudgeonly about it though)
Even if you're right about the OP's theory, your post was obviously against HN's rules. It would be better to take responsibility for that instead of pointing the finger at someone else. Even assuming you're right about their ideas, you damage the community here by posting snarky putdowns. Most readers won't notice the subtle difference in this snarky putdown; they'll just take it as another indication that it's ok to be snarky and aggressive here, which it's not.
p.s. I was going to add something about your account history, but looking at more recent comments, they seem to be much more in keeping with HN's intended spirit than I remember from the past. It might be that my memory is tricking me, but if not, thanks for that—it is greatly appreciated!
I'm glad to hear that you are becoming mature enough to appreciate my comments. Kudos to you as well!
I don't know if a link to you saying the thing you are saying again is as convincing as you would hope. Now, obviously I'm just being obnoxious, but to respond to your question: It's curmudgeonly because you are pasting rules verbatim without engaging. Your second message here is a model of a positive interaction, treating participants as people first and rule violators to be managed second.
I appreciate what you do as a moderator, and thank you, genuinely, for doing it. As someone who has been here a long time and posted hundreds of long, very thoughtful and what I try to make be well supported or well reasoned posts, it's slightly irritating to just get rules pasted at me.
I wish more writing was framed in such a way that shows it is more of an opinion than an absolute truth. When I read the title "Why facts don't change minds" it sounds like they are explaining a natural law of the universe to you. Why can't they be framed as some ideas they have had and wanted to share?
>Why can't they be framed as some ideas they have had and wanted to share?
Because if you make a weak title it wouldn't have been on HN to begin with. And thus the ideas ha have been shared with as many people.
There's no claim to expertise or empirical support. There isn't even a claim that it applies an existing framework. Why would you think it was anything other than opinion?
I get tired endless unnecessary invocations of "I could be wrong" and "this is just my opinion" as if every author needs to actively steer readers away from the mistake of assuming the author's omniscience and infallibility.
Yeah it's almost like I'm human and have the same cranial jelly that everyone else does.
how dare other people learn to write!!!!?
[flagged]
If he is close and trusts you then this might work as well for you (has for me):
Don't start discussions with a concrete (recent) topic, but focus on fundamental things: Values, hopes, fears... Strengthen their argument. Tell them how you feel and why instead of making judgements.
The topical stuff is always under attack through misinformation, social media spam and propaganda. It's far more effective to honestly nurture human connection and focusing on core values. Without the fog of BS, people can see what's happening more easily themselves.
I'm in the same boat. In my case it's especially disturbing because prior to this whole gestures broadly thing, we had nuanced debates on many topics. Now, he just dismisses everything as 'narratives' if he disagrees with it.
Sadly, it seems to be based on the propaganda style I've seen out of authoritarians in general. It doesn't hurt 'their side' to break everything down to narratives, because at the end of the day, you just have to swallow the current one and you don't have to think about it again.
In another way it seems almost like a form of burnout. Like 'fuck this, I'm settling on cognitive ease from now on'.
The only way to help these kind of people is by reactivating their critical thinking. This is only possible if you tell them something that is so absurd, that even they have to reject it. For example: „Trump is Putins father.“ „Kennedy was killed by aliens, because he wanted to land on the moon.“ „We live on the inside of a hollow world with the sun in the middle.“ „The mothership will come soon and send all humans with a chip inside their brain to Beteigeuze.“ At some point they start rejecting your outlandish ideas, because their brain simply can‘t stand that nonsense. And this is the first step in the right direction for these kind of people.
I saw an interesting interview on the subject: https://youtu.be/6Ibk5vJ-4-o?t=1678
It argues the way to engage with these people is to first understand the psychological manipulation tactics they have been subjected to. That what you should focus on is not their false beliefs, but the underlying reasons why they were vulnerable to that manipulation in the first place; and to realize that everybody can become a victim of such cults helps to empathize with them. Don't give up on your friend.
Same reason for religion. Community and a feeling of self righteousness.
Religion is a good analogy because ultimately every argument boils down to a matter of faith. The believer has it and the unbeliever does not. No facts or evidence, no matter how well presented/articulated, will change that.
With religion it’s different. To take the example from TFA, well the Bible says the Sun goes around the Earth.
He doesn’t even get an inch deep like that. Specifically I’m talking about the “rigged” 2020 election. He has no evidence, not even fake evidence and isn’t interested in trying to find any.
>the Bible says the Sun goes around the Earth
Where? I don't see it in the passages TFA gave
> These passages were cited as literal proof that the Earth was stationary and central.
Where were they cited in such a way? How?
[flagged]
[flagged]
I know it's overused and incorrectly applied, but I can't get past the thought that the people doing this have a silent, burning mentality of "Rule 1: You don't talk about fight club!"
[flagged]
[flagged]
Yeah honestly I’m afraid to find out what he actually believes.
> Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed
Who am I to doubt the Church's interpretation but this seems like it literally reads as if the scripture is saying that the sun stood still and the Earth revolves around it?
> If we want to counter manipulation and polarization, we need to focus on strengthening the structural integrity and resilience of our own belief systems. This means fostering internal coherence, building bridges between different templates, and cultivating narratives that are not just factually accurate, but also emotionally compelling and structurally robust.
I fear we are already increasingly too late on much of these things because there also exists communities that maintain structural integrity by resisting bridge building between different cultural templates. I.E. You must refuse bridge building in order to maintain your own community, such as wizard, blackpill, or MGTOW actively discouraging bonding with women as equal people to men.