Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds <comment><USER2> Another factor here is when people abuse the word "fact" regularly. If you ever get into a discussion with somebody who claims they've proved their point by citing "facts", then actually follow up on their citations and discover that it doesn't actually say what they think it says it creates an impression of the messenger, not the message.

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

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

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

<comment><USER3> > _then actually follow up on their citations_

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER4> All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain.

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

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

<comment><USER3> > _All you are really saying is its impossible to know anything for certain._

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

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER5> > _That said, you 'd be surprised how often the fact (pun intended) that it's > "impossible to know anything for certain" is lost on people._

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

<comment><USER6> Maybe, but consider adding another constraint to the game of maximizing your chance to being right -- you have a finite amount of resources (eg, time) to spend on examining evidence, so you need to strategize even what evidence is worth considering and to what extent -- looking more carefully at one thing means you now have less time to look carefully at something else, nothing is free

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

<comment><USER7> > Of course, in real life, we do have this constraint

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

<comment><USER6> Your comment is vacuous if you don't expand on it; it goes without saying we want to try to minimize bias as much as possible. Science is part of a world of limited resources too, and investigators have to decide what experiments to try, what topics to pursue

<comment><USER7> In the context of confirmation bias being an evolved trait, my comment was meant to imply that we should expect science to spend much more resources than mere intuition, but doing so is still worthwhile.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _The fact that both we and it survive proves that it must have some adaptive > function_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER9> _I suggest a more simple and straightforward explanation for the limitations of "reason": our brain is, in fact, write only._

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

<comment><USER8> If you're referring to this paragraph:

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER10> > my theory is that opinions, once formed, are difficult / impossible to > change

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Facts don't change our minds because we make up our world views and beliefs in a way that's expedient for us to happily continue about our lives.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER12> That sounds like a good strategy for peace of mind, or social harmony, but a poor strategy for individual survival. Believing that the police (or your six- shooter) will protect you from harm, when they won't, doesn't even look good on a tombstone.

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

Why so little faith in reason?

<comment><USER11> > Believing that the police (or your six-shooter) will protect you from harm, > when they won't, doesn't even look good on a tombstone

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

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

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Vaccines are safer for a population, and they are safer for individuals in an unvaccinated population. In a vaccinated population the risks to the individual having a vaccine are low, but non zero. The risk of not having the vaccine may well be lower. The problem is that by not being clear that having a vaccination is an altruistic act with marginal risk but a massive social good the way is left open for claims of duplicity. This may be the key issue; some people won't agree with the desired position because the fact we are using isn't a fact at all. We fail to persuade because we don't make a good case.

<comment><USER14> I would upvote you twice if I could. The anti-science crowd and not idiots, but rather moderately intelligent individuals that go bersek after catching the Science spokeperson's oversimplifications and/or white lies.

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

<comment><USER15> The anti-vac crowd might not be idiots, but they're selfish as hell (free- riding on herd immunisation while not willing to accept the (very very tiny) risk of vaccination to their precious child).

<comment><USER16> >The anti-vac crowd might not be idiots, but they're selfish as hell (free- riding on herd immunisation while not willing to accept the (very very tiny) risk of vaccination to their precious child).

You mean, selfish like everyone else is?

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER15> Hi, yes, I mean selfish.

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

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

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

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

Is that what you're asking?

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

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

<comment><USER16> You're throwing around terms like "selfish" and "cheating". Both have connotations of intent. However, the disconnect is that none of the anti- vacciners I've come across intend to do anything you are suggesting. While from your perspective, they are gaining while not contributing, it is neither their intent nor their observation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess it should come as no surprise that the comments section for an article called "facts don't change our minds" would be so disappointing. For me, this article — and many like it that point out how whimsical and feeble our natural, undisciplined cognitive capacities are — are a rally cry to continue the enlightenment project, as best we can and in as personal a way as we can. Years ago I learned that my family motto from way back was "through faith we are free". I found that immediately alienating because for me it was always "through doubt we are free."

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

<comment><USER18> > Years ago I learned that my family motto from way back was "through faith we > are free". I found that immediately alienating because for me it was always > "through doubt we are free."

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

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

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The issue isn't facts. The issue is our worldview. If it is a binary worldview (Good vs Evil) then what we don't agree with is always bad/evil (Black Hat Cowboy) and what we do agree is good/good (White Hat Cowboy).

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

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER20> That's an extremely oversimplified explanation of the world.

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

<comment><USER21> Or, put another way, no one think they're the villain/wrong.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm tempted to file this as another "Humans think oversimplistically, says oversimplistic study". The world is a massively complicated place, and nobody can come close to understanding it all. If your intellectual background tells you that vaccines don't cause autism and somebody comes to you with a study that purports to say they do, is rejecting it "confirmation bias" — or is it in fact the rational thing to do, even if you lack the medical expertise to explain where the study goes wrong?

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

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

</comment><comment><USER23> > This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that > reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by > the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, > our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with > making sure that they weren't the ones risking their lives on the hunt while > others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning > clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

This is every conversation ever in my extended family.

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

</comment><comment><USER24> When people find out _who_ said a particular thing, the "what" seems to fall by the wayside and the "who" seems to matter more. The statement is accepted or rejected outright because of the person. Maybe it is time to change that.

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

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

<comment><USER25> I loved this thought experiment. I often feel like this too, a lot of people identify with R or D or Trump or Clinton, not because of any specific policies they wrote. It's almost always your community, basically what level of shunning am I going to receive for believing X. We're all tiny machine learning experiments that push our personal agendas. We align with an issue that's important to us or we align with a group that's important to us. People are very "group oriented" so specific issues, while important, are typically less meaningful than the tribe mentality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our > opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

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

</comment><comment><USER27> I recently was thinking on the similar topic after reading an article about scientific myths most people believe. For example, one of such myths is that humans are genetically predefined and can't be changed through life. It's clear that there are a lot of social, cultural and gender factors impacts on our nature, but still there is such a belief.

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

<comment><USER28> I have to fight against this tendency to believe past was better almost every day. My mind seems to try to trick me every time i'm making progress in life, bringing memories of a better past, showing why today sucks.

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

<comment><USER27> Yea, also we sometimes remember only bad things. E.g. if we play in poker, we may lose with two aces for a number of times in a row. And because of the emotional frustration we start thinking that two aces are not that good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The interactionist perspective presented is enlightening. It both motivates and explains many of the classic reasoning snafus that we "suffer" from. In the end our mental artefacts (including beliefs) are just tools, and their value (or "truth") is a function of their utility.

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

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

<comment><USER30> > Beliefs are the same, and a relation to "facts" or "truth" is not a > requrement for their utility.

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

<comment><USER3> Or a very good time. One's circumstances are seldom that much dependent upon their beliefs about the world.

<comment><USER30> > One's circumstances are seldom that much dependent upon their beliefs about > the world.

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

<comment><USER29> >There are many beliefs that must be correct in order to ensure survival

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The source of confirmation bias is explained as evolutionary mechanism that developed capacity for reasoning not for critical thinking but for purpose of arguing and getting others to do our bidding. In that context it would make sense to protect our own opinion from inconvenient things such as facts.

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

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

<comment><USER32> > How can we as a society fix this?

Don't mate with irrational people.

<comment><USER33> Additionally, as a Stanford undergraduate - refuse to participate in any 'studies'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The described permanence of lies even after they are revealed as such really lends weight (dare I say credit?) to the tactics of fake news and propaganda in general.

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

<comment><USER35> This value never ceases to confound and frustrate me. Just like the impact of littering every yard with a brightly-colored name campaign sign has on elections. It must sway some people, maybe more than biased new reporters do. So we can hate the game, but at what point can we start hating the players?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are > good for kids, and handguns are dangerous._

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

<comment><USER36> Strangely the most successful country in the history of mankind by all criteria.

<comment><USER37> "Most successful" obviously doesn't mean life expectancy, quality of education, or infrastructure, it would seem.

<comment><USER38> Nor landmass, population, nuclear capability..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Translation: "Why did Trump win the election even though he and his policies are obviously nuts?"

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

<comment><USER40> It's quite explicit:

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

Not even being subtle.

<comment><USER39> Hah, well I guess I'm busted (didn't read the article, just the title and other comments)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's important to remember that most scientific disputes can't be resolved by two uninformed people talking on the Internet. If you can get people to share links to well-written scientific articles, you're doing well, but these disputes can only really be answered by actual scientific discussion between actual experts who take the time to dig into methodology (etc), and maybe not even then; the replication crisis is a thing.

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

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

<comment><USER42> > can only really be answered by actual scientific discussion between actual > experts

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

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

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

<comment><USER41> Oh, I totally agree that anyone can be an expert in principle, and yes, you can even be self-taught, but you do have to do the work. On most subjects in the news, we don't study and have no real-world experience. We don't even pick up the phone and talk to people like reporters do.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Have these studies actually been replicated? I find it interesting how even after a lot of psychology has been called into question due to the replication crisis, a lot of news outlets still try to use studies based mostly on how many clicks it will generate.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is a really tough problem. Like many in the HN community, I try to fight against confirmation bias, but sometimes it feels like a lost cause. Compare it to a reasonably complex math problem--I'm talking an Algebra II / Calc I type problem. You are relying on so much previous knowledge to complete the problem. That knowledge may have been "earned", meaning you really took the time to build up an intuition, or "unearned", meaning you just took the word of the instructor or book (essentially applying a procedure to get a result). This is a MATH problem that has defined parameters and a definitive right or wrong answer.

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

<comment><USER25> And, as we know, overfitting is bad.

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

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I find that subtitle a bit strange. It implies that the article is talking about the limitations of 'reasoning' as traditionally conceived, but the article is more about how human reasoning in practice isn't like the traditional notion of reasoning.

<comment><USER46> I think you are substituting reasoning with deduction.

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

Human reasoning is often fails by not being perfectly deductive.

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

<comment><USER45> Not that I suppose it matters that much, but I mean reasoning not deduction

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> """ Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we'd realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, "may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people's attitudes." """

</comment><comment><USER48> Fake news is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack.

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

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

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

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

<comment><USER49> > Who has actually seen first hand evidence of global warming or water > pollution or of anything?

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

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

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

<comment><USER48> Right. But seeing retreating glaciers after being _told_ why they are retreating is still relying on something you were told.

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

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

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

<comment><USER49> I agree with your larger point "normal people have no way of knowing about most things", but the glacier example was pretty clear. Just the change in vegetation over the course of the valleys was a pretty obvious indication that a huge amount of the glaciers had retreated quite suddenly from their previous, well established positions. The moraine topology was another indicator.

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

<comment><USER48> Right. But to your advantage, here you've demonstrated how you've interpreting evidence to fit with other evidence and knowledge to strengthen your set of facts. Most people will not see what you saw and think what you thought. And this can be applied to everything really. Evidence is everywhere, though even if people saw it, they won't know what it says or how to measure it.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Piggybacking on the discussion about reasoning: I found the recently proposed 'argumentative theory of reasoning' quiet insightful and provocative with significant implications for belief formation (as well as scientific methodology).

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER51> I have some facts for you. I hate passive aggressive pop overs that take over a page and then try and make you feel bad for not signing up. Also, against my better judgment I continued to try and read this. It was trash so let me offer some advice that at the least should be equally as subjective.

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

</comment><comment><USER52> These are not limitations of reason.

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

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

Reason evolves.

</comment><comment><USER53> AKA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

</comment><comment><USER54> Reasoning is a social process as much as it is an individual cognitive process. We're strongly conditioned to be unempathetic when reasoning, but this severely impairs our ability to reason together. Empathy and reason together are more powerful than either alone. The substance of reasoning comes second to the process of reasoning. If the process is hobbled by artificial or cultural constraints, it becomes perverse and harmful to understanding.

</comment><comment><USER55> the article says we are optimized for cooperating in groups and not for reasoning (this supposedly had the function of controlling the free loaders).

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER56> I'd say the article's reasoning is flawed :) We cannot be experts in everything. We can hardly be experts in a very narrow field; for all the rest we have to trust other people. The only thing we can do is to choose who(m) we trust. Now, there are no rational rules to do this; we do this based on I don't know what. Experience, gut feeling, whatever; our own understanding of the world, of course, but it's bound to be limited.

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

Edit: typos.

</comment><comment><USER57> Even using facts, not biased opinions, vastly different models can arise.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER58> I have three recommendations: 1.read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman 2. think in Bayesian term about statistic when you see the "facts" they claim from a report 3. being okay with the fact that you might waste time and efforts or being wrong on thinking regarding about issues (disclaimer: I am not a psychologist or data scientist)

</comment><comment><USER59> Because a brain has been evolved for dealing with crude appearances which are supplied to its centers by imprecise and unreliable sense organs and for sloppy thinking, good-enough for successful survival and reproduction (and necessary competition to accomplish that).

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

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

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER60> In Batman Zero Year, Bruce Wayne has made his first appearance as Batman and is almost 100% sure that people will easily find it out that Bruce is Batman.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER61> The first two studies described have roughly the following form:

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

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

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

It seems risky to read anything much into that.

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

</comment><comment><USER62> Fact is a relative word, like luck or loser. Luck is someone richer than you, and a loser is someone less rich than you. Fact is something more truthy than the relative. There is physics, then there are leaky abstractions of physics and culture. I think honesty in the sense of accuracy is important, rather than the meta question of what is truth.

</comment><comment><USER63> I read an interesting explanation for how lying developed in humans: when we became capable social creatures, lying to others would be a quick way of gaining an advantage, so it would be selected for in the individual. However, a culture made up of liars would be less trusting of each other, and so at a disadvantage. In this way, we evolved to give off signals, and feel guilt, when we are lying.

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

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm constantly overhauling my own bias and opinions on subjects when presented with new information, I don't do this actively - its more subconscious, which is against the results of these experiments. The results were the subjects estimating a scenario (after being told they were deceived). The scale of measurement was the positive and negative bias they had towards themselves.

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER65> So is this testing how people adjust to facts, or how they respond once they know you have lied to them?

<comment><USER66> Yeah,

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> If facts don't actually persuade us, then why is test-taking on fact-based trivia so prevalent in schools? (seriously can I get all that wasted time and energy back somehow)

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

</comment><comment><USER68> Or, in a lot fewer words, we're dumber than pigeons [1].

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

<comment><USER69> I'm all for that result, but [isn't the increase in probability of winning the Monty Hall problem by switching doors an increase from 1/3 to 1/2]? [ED: no] The summary claims it is "doubled". I'm also interested in some kind of control for the concept that pigeons simply get bored inevitably with the first choice and tend to switch in spite of whether it gives them any advantage. I don't see evidence that this experiment covers that. Informative and interesting nevertheless.

<comment><USER70> There are a lot of givens and provisos to make the Monty Hall problem work[1], but in the end if you stick with your door you have a 1/3 chance of winning and if you switch you have a 2/3 chance of winning.

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

<comment><USER71> The way this was made clear to me was to use 100 doors instead of 3. Hall opens 98 doors when you make your initial guess. It's much clearer to see how information is added to the system with this many doors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> This was a fascinating article, not just because it reinforced some of my existing thoughts.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER73> Meh. People are so inundated with so-called "fact-based" marketing materials, the entire word has become meaningsless. We have created entire "scientific" fields of study that serve no other purpose but inducing people to choose against their own interest (whether in politics, marketing, sales or PR) that this really should not be surprising: the people that still trust "facts" have been selected against for over four generations now.

"Facts" aren't, news at 11.

</comment><comment><USER74> I find this bit ironic:

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

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

<comment><USER75> Well Kiev is in Ukraine and Madrid is in Spain, so that is just the full width of Europe which makes it really funny for those who know (and those who know are - to honestly reply to your concern here - those who read The New Yorker)

<comment><USER74> I know where Madrid is and I have lived in Europe and I just read an article in the New Yorker. I even have a spiffy Certificate in GIS.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> More than facts and logic, is a big "why" ? People use "facts" to satisfy their relative ego (point or surface) and will stop digging for reason or distort said facts to reach that goal.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER77> One small interesting point was the test where people were given their own answers (but not told) and were more critical of them.

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

</comment><comment><USER78> >Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that's been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

Why would that handle be depressed?

</comment><comment><USER79> I change my belief's all the time. I'm incredibly empathetic to people and quite easily take on their beliefs, at least for a little while. Why? Because I am curious, I want to understand things, I want to see things from another point of view.

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

</comment><comment><USER53> Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed; [https://qz.com/924343/alternative-facts-a-psychiatrist- expla...](https://qz.com/924343/alternative-facts-a-psychiatrist-explains-why- our-brains-resist-reality/)

</comment><comment><USER80> Why is this even a valid article? The evidence given was based on studies that actively deceived the takers in order to prove a point. Of course if you trick people they become defensive. You've primed them to believe one thing and then turned around and said it was another.

<comment><USER51> This was a scientific experiment. Fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> What happens when you have 2 scientists arguing over what they consider fact? How do you know who to believe? It then becomes that example of requiring everyone to understand metal work prior to picking up a knife. You don't get very far.

</comment><comment><USER82> All these discussions remind me why I loved pure mathematics so much. Every theorem requires a proof, and nothing is really a fact on its own, but a logical derivation from an assumption. I guess you can call these "2nd order facts"?

</comment><comment><USER83> I think the problem is that there's often a lot of risk with changing one's mind and not all that much benefit.

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

<comment><USER84> What kinds of risk are you seeing as associated with changing one's mind?

<comment><USER83> Being classified as a loser in any given argument is probably the biggest one. You do not get a very positive response for admitting that you're wrong in the vast majority of settings. There's generally an expectation that being wrong is associated with fundamental problems and should be punished by suffering. Being wrong is already perceived as a state so bad that correcting yourself from it is only marginally beneficial. This creates a very negative association with being wrong and kills that incentive. Yet being able to say that you're wrong is a necessary prerequisite to changing your mind.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> You are not so smart podcast did a great 3 parter on this topic.

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

#93, #94, #95

</comment><comment><USER86> What society tolerates in political discourse has much more to do with this than any quirks of the brain. Politics drags objectivity through the mud.

</comment><comment><USER30> Oh boy, sweeping conclusions based on psychology research!

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

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

</comment><comment><USER87> Quoting myself from another comment:

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

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

Another example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER88> > For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action.

Very funny and real.

</comment><comment><USER37> Some people can't tell the difference between authorities and experts.

</comment><comment><USER89> Could somebody link the original study the author is referencing ?

</comment><comment><USER53> People tell lies if truth hurts their self-esteem.

</comment><comment><USER90> Because it's our minds that change facts.

</comment><comment><USER91> I dunno, I still think that my rationality has no limits.

^_^

</comment><comment><USER92> There are two types of people: people who believe the first thing they hear and people that believe the last person they hear.

The second are more unpredictable.

</comment><comment><USER82> Case in point: All religions.

</comment><comment><USER93> I have seen many people who deny facts and it is interesting to guess what their motivations are.

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

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER94> dv/dt(#7) == g

</comment><comment><USER95> This is misleading article like the guys who show you optical illusions and then say you can't trust what you see. The fact is that it is rational to let past experiences affect you. Of course here people are told their past was a lie - but they weren't given any additional facts about what is right now. It was still pure conjecture as to how well they did.

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

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

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

<comment><USER96> Sounds like you're defending those who throw up their hands because critical thinking is just too hard. I found your comment depressing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it." \-- _Upton Sinclair_

</comment><comment><USER98> some facts are greater than others, and sometimes there's a stalemate and ones bias makes the preferred fact win.

</comment><comment><USER99> Here's an application of our faulty, socially-dependent reason: Health care is a right, yes or no? Please explain your reasoning.

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

<comment><USER100> I think the discourse about "rights" is part of the problem in US politics, it makes the default mode of reasoning about ideology, rather than outcomes.

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

<comment><USER99> Sorry, I guess where I was going was when someone defines something as a right, they should be able to explain how they arrived at that conclusion.

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

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

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

<comment><USER100> I think a rights based reasoning framework is problematic in general, it leads people to focus too much on what is considered their "right" and ignores both the harms associated with having that right and the reasoning on which that right was based.

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

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


Show HN: Exchange bitcoins locally using Telegram bot - <AUTHOR> https://megadeals.io <comment> viko-h Co-developer: Happy to answer any questions or feedback.</comment>


Ask HN: Does everything have to be social? - <AUTHOR>

The big buzzword these days is "social".  Every major company seems to be working on technologies that allow people to do more and more things together.  Social networking, social gaming, social browsing, social TV, social music libraries. I will not deny the benefits these services provide, but to me, "social" is just another way of saying "public".
Perhaps I'm more introverted than the average consumer, but when I get home after a long day of work or perhaps a weekend night spent with friends, I like to unplug from society.
What are your thoughts about this?  Are we heading toward a society where no one is ever truly alone? <comment><USER2> Yeah - I generally interpret Social as crowdsourced for a lot of services, or at least having the option of having friends involved.

The problem with so many online services is that they ASSUME by default that the value is only in the social elements, and fundamentally that people only have valuable interactions when they are social creatures. That is certainly majorly faulted.

</comment><comment><USER3> I choose to interpret the useful version of 'social' as 'socially curated'.

news is great, but news that has contributions from my friends is better. same with tv, food, workout habits, events, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's helpful yes, but I'm not sure everyone would agree that it's better.

For example, many people wish to form their own opinions about the news they read, before being told what everyone else thinks about it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Cloudron – Get Your Own Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloudron.io/?showhn <comment><USER2> Site looks great, the video down the bottom has a pricing model in it, and the sites does not. From the looks of it, the price model in the video was just set for development reasons because it's listing at $0.2/month.

I would fix this, you don't want to give people any wrong ideas about your price model if you haven't finalized it yet.

The software and setup ease, from what I'm able to read, seems pretty nifty. There's a good product here just be careful not to sell yourself short.

From a product identification point of view, I think it would be good for you to list the specifications (at least hard drive space for example) of the VPS you're using in the backend. It would only make sense especially for some of the apps you want to provide such as OwnCloud which is basically to stores files and such.

These were just some thoughts from a first look at the site, take them with a grain of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for hint, the video was taken by me from a developer build. We have not yet figured out the pricing model.

<comment><USER2> If you'd like some instant feedback, or a test user to help with dev feel free to shoot me an email:

james -at- royalholdings.net

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your enthusiasm! Let me at email@example.com know if you haven't received the invite. Looking forward to any feedback from your side.

<comment><USER3> Would love to poke around sooner than later also. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure thing. I just checked and we have multiple email ids with your first name. Can you send me a mail? Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really understand this. "Private Cloud", to me, means a cloud that only I have access too. If you actually have access to my infrastructure, what's "private" about it?

<comment><AUTHOR> If we take the term "private" to an extreme, you are absolutely right. We took the term in a similar way as it is used with virtual private servers. Also our business model will be based on providing the logistics around a private cloud, which focuses on convenience.

<comment><USER5> Is there any plan to allow the service to point at one's own DO or AWS account? That would remove one more privacy concern some folk seem to have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not currently, but we will be working with VPS providers to provide this option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks very similar to [https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

</comment><comment><USER7> How is this not just a regular VPS with the word "cloud" nailed on?

<comment><AUTHOR> VPS only gets you a server. If you were to install apps (gitlab or wordpress or a wiki) on your server, you need to take care of keeping the server updated, the apps updated, backing up the apps, configuring dns, installing certs. etc. In addition, each of the apps need authentication as well.

This is the pain we intend to solve - you can install apps from our App Store. We take care of backups, updates, dns, certs etc. You can install apps using the same set of credentials / single Sign On. You can read more at [https://cloudron.io/features.html](https://cloudron.io/features.html).

Think of this as a 'smart server', a server intended to be used by anyone without deep technical knowledge (or doesn't want to put in the effort of self-hosting).

There's also a video on the landing page, please check it out.

<comment><USER8> How does it differ from cPanel/Plesk and similar non-cloud-branded server management solutions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rule of thumb: mutually distrusting users sharing physical resources typically creates vulnerabilities. Do everything right and you still have covert channels. So long as they use _physical_ separation rather than virtual then I'm excited to see this development. Separation that's (a) physically isolated per customer and (b) behind a stable interface allow the specifics of the security to constantly improve without work on the customer's end while blocking risks that come with virtualization.

See the co-founder in the comments. nebulon, would you clarify if it's physical and how do the boxes interface at the networking layer? That would be a start on upper-bounds of security.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do not run physical servers and have only virtual separation between users. Thanks for the input, we will work to clarify that. Please see [https://www.cloudron.io/faq.html](https://www.cloudron.io/faq.html)

<comment><USER9> So it's basically still in same ballpark as other cloud providers with pro's and con's. You've just added some logical isolation, extra functions like authentication, and procedural/policy protections for customers as a differentiator, yes?

<comment><AUTHOR> While the features you list are important and true, our main focus is on convenience. To be able setup your personal cloud without deep technical knowledge. You can read up our intentions at [https://dev.cloudron.io/about.html](https://dev.cloudron.io/about.html)

<comment><USER9> I appreciate you clarifying. Yeah, that's certainly helpful to all kinds of people. Much easier to get started and grow in that market than pricey, bare- metal. Good luck on your business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The video does look cool. I keep on intending to use my primary Linux dev box as an outwards facing web server, but every time I take steps towards this, I realize how much I would be dropping my shorts in the process.

You people should be targeting professional photographers, smug mug and friends offer really limited functionality to content owners who really should control their own material.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, co-founder here. We are now in developer beta. Please request an invite if you would like to develop Cloudron apps. [https://www.cloudron.io/documentation.html](https://www.cloudron.io/documentation.html)

<comment><USER11> How Cloudron differs from the following projects?

\- [http://cozy.io/en/](http://cozy.io/en/)

\- [https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

\- [http://www.cloudstead.io/](http://www.cloudstead.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I understand cozy.io and cloudstead.io are focusing on specific services around personal information, like owncloud. Our architecture allows installing arbitrary apps like owncloud as an app. Cozy.io and cloudstead.io would not have gogs or gitlab as apps.

Sandstorm and us are trying to solve very similar issues, but the approach and architecture is different.

<comment><USER12> Can you go into more detail on the differences between Cloudron and Sandstorm?

<comment><AUTHOR> From a developer point of view we try to keep changes required for existing apps to be ported to a minimum. To achieve this, we use docker as well as an heroku inspired deployment approach.

Sandstorm have their own containerization.

You can see how much porting effort is required for Cloudron, by looking at our current samples of ported apps [https://www.cloudron.io/documentation.html#samples](https://www.cloudron.io/documentation.html#samples)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just did some research. Turns out there is a combo of physical servers and cloud-style provisioning/pricing: it's called bare metal clouds. Gotta watch it as some say that but are virtual. Here's one I found that's physical:

[http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers](http://www.softlayer.com/bare- metal-servers)

The physical separation is a prerequisite for any real security as you need control over what executes in the box and definitely don't want untrusted processes sharing resources outside of what's already in TCB. Combining a rapid-provisioning, paid-hourly, physical hosting solution with strong privacy policies (e.g. MyKolab's) and terms of service backed by contract would be _an awesome offing_ for a niche market.

The niche, off top of head, is essentially two groups: (a) people needing temporary and/or scalable resources for operation on private data; (b) people wanting steady, scalable, private servers who don't want to go all out on running their own. Category (b) would put the physical cloud in competition with with dedicated, hosting market. Potential advantages are manageability, scaling, cost reduction due to pay-per-use, and integration with popular cloud tech (eg Docker) pre-installed on that server. So, anyone looking for a business plan to submit to YCombinator feel free to do an assessment of this market as I think it has potential. The existence of the above company confirms that but I can't say how big this niche is.

<comment><USER2> I don't mean to be an asshole, but your criticism is basically along the lines of "You're doing this all wrong, do it how I say this should be done"

They don't have physical servers, he's already answered that in your last comment. Each user is going to get their own VPS through AWS or another provider, so most likely these "hosts" are technically physically separated.

This service is basically a drag and drop app foundation, its a glorified SaaS. It's adding a layer of ease between having to purchase your own VPS and deploy these apps. Now someone can just purchase through this service, get their VPS purchased for them and deployed with a nice interface that magically sets up software.

What you're mentioning is an entirely different business plan on its own. You're talking about buying physical hardware, servers, switches, etc. Which would require setting up VLans...etc for true separation.

Cloudron is making an argument about privacy through the features they offer. I'm sure they would have loved to buy hundreds of servers and allow for everyone to have their own little Fort Knox in a Box but this is unobtainable from their viewpoint. They've come up with compromises to create a unified and monetarily obtainable product.

A good product is a compromise between what's needed, and what's available. You can't make something out of nothing (most of the time). If the resources aren't available, or if implementability isn't possible then you start to compromise. This is what happened here. Two guys who had a similar idea of privacy wanted to get together to provide a nice server/cloud service, and this cool little website is the result of that. Maybe in the future they can get their Fort Knox going, but for right now I don't see that happening because of the costs associated with it.

<comment><USER9> That comment was directed at any readers who clicked on this interested in a more private cloud offering comparable to dedicated servers in isolation. I clicked it hoping for something like that. Every similar link on private clouds was something like Cloudron or a hybrid cloud that scaled up using something like Cloudron. It was all virtualization.

So, far from a gripe at Cloudron, this second comment is for HN readers who were looking for what I was looking for. Also found the appropriate buzzword ("bare metal") to help them find comparable offerings. Far as Cloudron, the co-founder already helpfully told me what their goals/market were, they made sense, and I wished them well on that. That I had nothing more to say on that tangent is why I made a separate comment for bare-metal, cloud hosting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What are you guys looking at price-wise for these tiers? Kind of annoying that you don't even attempt to list them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, sorry for not listing them yet. We are currently not able to provide any numbers, as we are figuring out how much resources the various models will need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great to see this launched at last. Congratulations guys! Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks good!

Great Job!

</comment><comment><USER15> a hypervisor is the only private cloud :)</comment>


EFF Releases 'Know Your Digital Rights' Guide to Your Constitutional Liberties - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/wp/know-your-rights

<comment><USER2> Q: If the police ask for my encryption keys or passwords, do I have to turn them over?

A: No. The police can't force you to divulge anything. However, a judge or a grand jury may be able to. The Fifth Amendment protects you from being forced to give the government self-incriminating testimony. If turning over an encryption key or password triggers this right, not even a court can force you to divulge the information. But whether that right is triggered is a difficult question to answer. If turning over an encryption key or password will reveal to the government information it does not have (such as demonstrating that you have control over files on a computer), there is a strong argument that the Fifth Amendment protects you.14 If, however, turning over passwords and encryption keys will not incriminate you, then the Fifth Amendment does not protect you. Moreover, even if you have a Fifth Amendment right that protects your encryption keys or passwords, a grand jury or judge may still order you to disclose your data in an unencrypted format under certain circumstances.15 If you find yourself in a situation where the police are demanding that you turn over encryption keys or passwords, let EFF know.

I'm very interested to see the case law behind this interpretation. As people are being held in contempt for not turning their encryption keys over to the courts. If there is case law supporting the notion that an encryption key is protected under the 5th Amendment then we need to direct more attention to those cases.</comment>