cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10902481
But if he did change his mind after reading your sources he would have disproved the sources.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
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Statistically and scientifically speaking, no
Facts don’t change people’s minds because most people wield them rhetorically as thinly veiled appeals to authority.
At the end of the day, facts are meaningless themselves. Facts are the residue science leaves behind but the living process of science is one of skepticism.
We let oil companies steal the word “skepticism” and change it from meaning the process of learning something extremely well but still retaining doubt along with a curious impulse to question deeply held beliefs about said thing… to meaning someone has just decided impulsively not to believe something in favor of some random conspiracy theory they found on the ground next to them.
Often I think the best defense of science isn’t to lay down a barrage of facts but to jump into the exciting and curious aspects of the particular science and overpower the conspiracies with the truth that has far more weird details anyways. Convey how weird, strange and mysterious the real scientific truth is, imbue it with the energy of the unknown while still being careful to keep sticking to the real science.
It is that emotional experience that people desire that leads them to believing in conspiracies and I think in some strange way it isn’t that different from the emotional experience of being a scientist driven by the weird mysteries they keep uncovering.
A lot of people turn to conspiracies and dumb ideas because they want to feel like there is something more to the world around them than meets the eye (even if it is sinister). Meeting that energy with facts doesn’t work because it is like trying to smush desire away with banality.
I have a cousin who is 100% convinced that the US government or someone is hiding anti-gravity from everyone. Something about wheel manufacturers having a chokehold on the world.
Have to be careful to not upset Big Wheel
That guy is someone you do not want to upset
About 13 years ago I had a debate with a friend about some political thing. He repeated something from the media (AM radio) I knew was BS so I told him I'd email him evidence to the contrary, he told me he'd send evidence in support. I sent him a mountain of evidence but never heard from him. The next time we met I brought it up he told me he didn't have time to read my email, his body language said otherwise. That's when I realized it was a cult
Something I find funny - uncanny even - is how easily the roles swap. If someone sent you a mountain of 'evidence' for a flat earth or magnetising vaccines, and you threw it out saying obviously it's BS and you can't be bothered to read it, the internet would agree and laud you for common sense.
But OP-of-the-tweet sends her friend two 'sources' and we all agree the friend is an idiot for not believing the 'facts'.
I suppose what it means is, quantity of evidence isn't useless, but is only part of the search for knowledge.
My favourite thing is that guy wondering when Rage Against The Machine got so political.
LOL and then Green Day apparently.
I was a green day fan when they were new. You couldn't possibly follow them without knowing their politics, it's not like they sucked you in with pot then hit you with politics, it was politics, pot, and unsuccessful love the whole time
And Tom Morello saying he wasn't aware they had any non-political songs and would remove any he found.
if showing people facts doesn't change their mind then how do you do it
One of the biggest general things is giving them a graceful out.
One of the biggest markers of an intelligent person is the ability to accept they were wrong about something and update their world view. This leads them to finding the best understanding they currently can, rather than the first that stuck.
For most people this is extremely hard. If you also put them in a position where they feel like an idiot if they agree with you, many will just dig their heels in. Once this happens, the more you push the more they dig in. It has become part of their identity, and you are attacking it.
Unfortunately, the details about how to guide someone through are different depending on the person. Generally you want to align your new knowledge with their mindset, give them a good reason why they held their previous view, and how updating it improves them.
It's analogous to clearing sand with a hose Vs a sledge hammer. The sledge hammer will often compact the sand, rather than move it. Water can wash it away, but the process is slower. It also gets harder if it's previously been pounded with the hammer.
And rereading my word salad, I've got no idea how helpful it actually is as advice, but I'll post it anyway, in case it's actually useful to someone.
If the past 10 years have told me anything, by being a large hard-right media conglomerate consistently pounding the same facts as the reason for everyone's fear, unifying desperate people against a windmill you propped up yourself.
Belief is social. If you can appeal to a group they have membership in, they're more likely to switch. If it sounds like you're a member of an out group, you're going to struggle.
So like if you're trying to get a evangelical to stop littering, framing it as like Jesus told us to shepherd the earth will probably work better than saying anything about scientists.
Also if you're trying to get someone to, like, stop believing in qanon, you're probably going to need to get them to leave that group. If they keep hanging out on those forums and groups, the brain is going to treat you coming with facts similar to how it would treat a threat to its physical safety. The brain really strongly prioritizes group membership. Probably because in prehistory, getting kicked from the group was extremely dangerous. If you can get them to no longer see the other cultists as their primary group, the transition is easier.
stories about lived experiences are more effective, but ultimately it depends on the person being willing to introspect and change their mind
here's a full article about how to change people's mind, if you want to read more on the subject: https://time.com/6224300/how-to-change-someones-mind/
Reminds me of a guy I worked with. He even started the occasional sentence with "contrary to fact" before telling me you can order super powerful quantum computers on Ali express that can run your entire steam library concurrently.
That's not how quantum computers work. They'd be terribly bad at doing the things that transistor-based computers do. They are run in a completely different way.
run your entire steam library concurrently.
What's hilarious about this assertion, is what the intersection of quantum computing and conventional gaming would look like. Quantum is, roughly, all about taking a vast array of possible outcomes for a system and collapsing all of that into a single, highly probable, result*. So running a game through a quantum computer would effectively "solve" it. So, enjoy watching the most statistically likely ending for every AAA game out there - no controller required.
(* "In linear time." Which is fancy computer science talk for "many orders of magnitude faster than the conventional way." But you still have to stack the math to make this work, which isn't always easy or possible.)
That's not what a "game" is. A "game" has interactivity and would not be solved by the computer automatically
Yeah, I’m picturing 500 headless window processes that – if you connected to them with a display – would show a different game screen variation of “press any key to start “.
TAS would like a word