For many years I have stated “Facts are the last thing that will matter”.
Usually in a debate over something scientific, (like climate, weather or the mass of glaciers in Greenland), things that you would think science and technology ( with modern instruments like satellites with advanced sensors and massive computing power processing that data) would have made a matter of fact.
Almost always it’s viewed as sarcastic, ironic, or even trolling, never as a statement of my own view of things. (the medium does not lend itself to earnest statements of honest opinion)
I just ran across something that inspired me to start a debate topic, which of course (in my opinion) will devolve into either a bunch of conflicting opinions, or people using facts and science to argue their opinions, which is not unusual. Considering the nature of the debate, will anything change anyone’s mind about anything?
At which point of course, one could say Lambert’s statement is opinion, making it also useless. Of course he follows up with facts, which is ineffable in it’s irony.
So he dismissed Flannery by saying it’s just his opinion, and then goes on to tell us facts are even worse in regards to swaying opinions! While the opinion piece is about climate change, that isn’t as interesting as the logical conundrum being presented, over how to change other people’s minds and behaviors.
“The fact is that the time for fact-based arguments is over.” - source
I actually don’t know how to respond to such a claim. But I’m also sure it’s up for debate.
I think it’s wrong to see opinion and fact as wholly separate in a debate. Typically, you and I state our opinions. If they differ, we trade facts and logical arguments until our positions can converge somewhere.
Facts and opinions don’t make any sense as separate entities in a debate. If I just give you a list of facts…so what? If I just give you an opinion, you have no reason to agree with it.
…which doesn’t rule out him being right, of course. It’s not self-refuting. Because I would read “useless” here as meaning that they don’t, in themselves, prove anything. But Flannery could separately give reasons to support this opinion.
(of course I don’t agree with it, however, for the reasons I’ve already stated)
Personally, I believe in facts. Sure, they can be narrowly chosen and presented. They can be exaggerated and lies or mistakes can be disguised as facts. I still put my faith in people’s ability to eventually recognize what is true and what is misleading.
More opinion isn’t going to help either. If a person is unwilling to change their mind, then there’s nothing that can force them to.
We have whole fields of endeavor that look at determine what facts are and how to best apply them. The scientific method, for example, demands that facts should be testable, verifiable and repeatable, so a certain amount of skepticism about facts is warranted. Even if we agree on the facts, we may come up with different hypotheses to explain them. Further observations (i.e. additional facts) should provide additional facts to test the those hypotheses.
But most people - even plenty of scientists - fall in love with a particular position and then they’ve short-circuited the whole method. A person who starts with a conclusion and then justifies it can’t be reasoned with…
Everyone uses both logos and mythos to form their pictures of the world – but nowadays liberals mostly emphasize logos, conservatives mythos. Think “truthiness.”
Facts are good things and I like them, but I think you’re right that people’s minds can’t generally be changed by facts. They can, sometimes, obviously. If you want to go to Al’s Diner for lunch, and then find out that the restaurant is under investigation by the board of health because half the people who ate there in the past month have gotten ptomaine poisoning, then, sure, knowing that fact will probably change your mind about what restaurant you go to.
However, that being said, we filter all of the facts we get through our mindset and set of values, which is made up of all the experiences we’ve had so far in our life, and which, if it changes, only changes really gradually, and we accept those facts that support our worldview and reject or rationalize those that don’t. So, for instance, you probably can’t use facts to turn somebody prolife or prochoice, or homophobic or progay rights. At least not in the short term. Mindsets don’t change that easily.
Frankly, the situation with the OP is a good example of this. It doesn’t matter how many facts or how much evidence people put up to show that anthropogenic climate change is happening. The OP won’t believe it, and he’ll downplay or ignore any facts that show it.
I think it’s more that everybody thinks that their position is the logical one. Conservatives think that their beliefs are backed by logic and facts too.
As someone already stated, I, too, am not sure what this is supposed to be about, or what the “debate” is here. But to address two points that I’ve managed to dredge out of this…
The problem is that, on the topic of climate change, “your own view of things” has very frequently – in fact, almost constantly – been shown to be wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but categorically wrong. With all respect, your postings on this subject have been shown to be grossly incorrect with regard to well established scientific facts, to be inconsistent from one occasion to another in their denialist reasoning as you seemingly hop from one incorrect fantasy to another, to sometimes be absurdly diametrically opposed to the known facts, and generally to fairly dependably be a pile of steaming nonsense promoting denialism. The list of such refutations of your postings on this subject is long and revealing, and I’ve posted parts of it from time to time out of sheer frustration with the mass of garbage that you write about this subject.
Perhaps you wouldn’t find yourself on the defending end of accusations of being “sarcastic, ironic, or even trolling” if you actually got some facts right once in a while.
No, I do not. I understand it, though, because some scientists and science communicators are thoroughly fed up with the well-funded denialist disinformation campaigns that infest the media. The New Scientist issue of October 29 - Nov 4 2011 has a number of articles that offer a far better and more insightful treatment of the gap between climate science and the denialist activists than the examples that you’ve dredged up. The theme of the issue is well expressed by the illustration and two words on the cover: “Unscientific America”. One of the articles begins thus:
JOHN HOLDREN, science adviser to President Barack Obama, is a clever man. But when it comes to the science of communication, he can say some dumb things. In January, Holdren welcomed the prospect of climatologists being called to testify before Congress: “I think we’ll probably move the opinions of some of the members of Congress who currently call themselves sceptics, because I think a lot of good scientists are going to come in and explain very clearly what we know and how we know it and what it means, and it’s a very persuasive case.”
Fat chance. In March, an impressive array of climate scientists did exactly what Holdren wanted, but their efforts seemed only to inflame the scepticism of Republicans opposed to regulation of emissions.
For researchers who study how people form their opinions, and how we are influenced by the messages we receive, it was all too predictable. Holdren’s prescription was a classic example of the “deficit model” of science communication, which assumes that mistrust of unwelcome scientific findings stems from a lack of knowledge. Ergo, if you provide more facts, scepticism should melt away. This approach appeals to people trained to treat evidence as the ultimate arbiter of truth. The problem is that in many cases, it just doesn’t work. Perversely, just giving people more information can sometimes polarise views and cause sceptics to harden their line. “We can preach the scientific facts as long as we want,” says Dietram Scheufele, a specialist in science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This is replicating the same failed experiment over and over again.”
They do not, however, suggest employing the same shrill and dishonest tactics as denialists. They do suggest employing learnings from the social sciences about effective honest communication, and one strategy that has been very poorly employed to date is to recruit representatives for the scientific message that the skeptical public – particularly the right in general and Republicans specifically – can trust and identify with. People like Al Gore, despite their best intentions and generally scientifically literate presentations, have no effectiveness with the political right because they hate him on general principle. Some of the growing number of moderate politicians on the right who are beginning to understand and acknowledge the rudiments of the science are likely to be far more effective at getting the message across.
It’s also entirely possible that evidence presented is unconvincing not because evidence is unconvincing in general, but because the specific evidence is really, really bad. For example: badly-cherry-picked climate trends from specific regions only for certain months. That shouldn’t be enough to convince anyone or anything.
I’m not quite convinced you have a firm grasp of what some of those words mean.
In any case, the big irony here is that the author of the “Stop using facts and use the AGW denialists’ tactics instead” argument is employed as (from the linked article) Deputy Director, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science. (Bolding added.) Lamberts seems to believe the public should be aware of scientific consensus, but that they should accept that consensus on faith, and that it should be communicated via polemics rather than rational argument.
I don’t think the guy’s very good at his job.
That’s not to say that he’s entirely off base about the utility of dry recitations of fact in public policy arguments. Good arguments must rest on factual bases, but in order to be persuasive they must appeal to the concerns of the groups you’re trying to persuade. So yeah, “throwing facts at opposing opinions” is a very dumb way to promote smart policy.
But Lamberts loses me when he says the unconvinced have “fundamentally different” values and motivations. This in fact is so far from reality it’s almost preternaturally ironic coming from someone railing against ideological resistance to persuasion.
The truth is that relentless communication of verifiable facts eventually does work to sway public opinion. The flip side is that sometimes that takes too long. But that’s why the really good missionaries of science (Asimov, Sagan, Neil de Grasse Tyson, et al) find ways to make their points that appeal to commonalities in the values and motivations of ordinary humans. Not through ad hominem attacks, special pleading or any of the other favorite tactics of charlatans and hucksters, as Lamberts would have it done.
I suspect that a scientist-driven propaganda campaign would look a lot like a hardline conservative-driven comedy campaign. And that’s because science works very hard at *removing *bias, exaggeration and prevarication from its methodologies. Those are the wrong tools to use if you want to promote reality based public policy.
A debate is about convincing the audience that you made the better argument. It is not about changing your opponent’s mind.
Facts are one tool to do this. As the old lawyer joke goes, if the facts are against you, hammer on the law; if the law is against you, hammer on the facts; if both are against you hammer on the table.
A good pit on personal suffering gets off the rails when pseudoscience about the actual risks of dental mercury amalgams enters the picture on post #19
And then it does not matter how much the facts are against the poster, the ignorance is strong and if there is only one point that I do agree with Lambert is that in this case one has to eventually ignore the ones claiming a conspiracy among dentists because in the end the authorities and scientific groups already looked at the issue and the recommendations they gave are reasonable, unlike the draconian ones proposed by the pseudoscience followers. Point being that there is really no support for those peculiar ideas where it counts.
When it becomes a problem is when the ones setting policy are themselves followers of the conspiracies and misleading non-scientific ideas.
Well, for starters, the conclusion of the opinion piece quoted in the OP, “What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before.” - source
Does anyone here agree with that? That certainly seems like something that would start a debate, about almost anything.
It’s easy enough to use that for anything, to claim those who disagree with “something”, and facts won’t work, that they need to " become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means". That sort of talk, combined with the claim that facts aren’t going to work, might make a thoughtful person wonder about where that will lead. I’ve seen this exact sort of thing in action, and so have you. People who actually believe they are right, but that isn’t enough, they also believe the “end” they are seeking, (which almost always means forcing somebody else to do, or not do something), is so important, that it justifies the means they will go to, to achieve their goal.
In the example used, he seems to be just saying one should flood the commons with more and more opinions. Drown everyone out with opinions. “Flood the airwaves and apply tactics advertisers have successfully used for years.” Obviously not advertisements of facts, but of “something”. But, the bigger issue is, do you agree that “the end justifies the means”? What does that actually mean?
Which is another issue that has to come up. If facts won’t matter, and opinions certainly won’t, no matter how much flooding of them there is, what’s the point? How is his “solution” going to make any difference? Who is the audience for the ads? The flood of opinion based advertising?
Of course, but the argument he seems to make, is that none of that will matter in this regard. Do you think that is actually true? Is it a fact?
That’s the other side of the coin. If all this is true (facts won’t sway anyone, and opinions won’t sway anyone), and it certainly isn’t proven, but if it’s true, then how can the scientific method even work? or is the author trying to say facts only work on some people? It can’t be true or no actual science could ever happen. It’s actually quite complicated. And it’s going to get far worse.
Now there is … something … but what? Is that statement a fact? Is it opinion? Is it a combination of both? If we apply reason and logic to the part that is most seemingly true, what do we find out?
“Facts are good things and I like them”
Would anyone actually disagree with that? My first reaction was “Of course! Who would want the reverse?”. Nobody wants falsehoods, and nobody likes being fed lies, or statements-presented-as-fact that are just not true is any way. So that’s a no brainer, until you think about it. What is a fact? What are facts? Can we even, in this thread, agree on that? (we have to agree on something, just to be able to communicate at this point)
So using that general definition, facts are not “good things” at all, in fact (pun intended) many facts, like my bank numbers, PINs, passwords and private information are the opposite of “good things”, if somebody else has them. So even “facts” are not something that exist apart, but are in context either good or bad. Certainly, with no doubt at all, facts about defense systems, server passwords and root directories are very bad things, if the wrong people get hold of them. (one could say the exact same thing about other facts, like nude self pictures on your phone. They are factual, and good, unless somebody hacks them and puts them online, and you don’t want them online). While it seems pedantic in the extreme, just thinking about “Facts are good things and I like them” can have much more meaning that at first glance. many facts are good, and I like them, but I sure as hell don’t want other people having them. That would be not good. So facts are real, but what they mean certainly is up for discussion, and opinion. For example
You would think. Except some people very well might say “In that case I’m sure the health department has been all over them, and they have taken care of the problems. In fact, it’s probably the cleanest kitchen in town right now, with all the attention they got, lets go there. I love their crab soup so much”.
Which brings us to the scientific/marketing/research area, which has found, using science and logic, that it really seems like showering somebody with facts has the opposite effect. It either makes them stop listening, or hate your guts. (that is a slightly humorous take on the research, it doesn’t actually say that)
But there is good reason to think that if somebody DOES NOT BELIEVE YOU, then you are not going to change their mind about anything, especially not by overwhelming them with the facts. The reverse is also often true. If somebody has faith in you, your authority, your person, who you are, they very well may believe you, even if you are telling them the most atrocious lies. This is, in essence, human nature at work. For example, many people reading these words, already have a mental construct, an opinion, or belief, about the source, so they might not be swayed by any of it. It will not matter to them if it is true at all.
They might not even read this far. Such is the way of the world. For example
Isn’t that just perfect? It’s goddamn priceless.
No, really it is.
And one reason I believe facts are the last thing that will matter, is the many years of experience discussing things with seemingly very intelligent people, who are obviously educated, well spoken, well read, people who can think, and often write well, but when it comes to something they believe with all their heart, facts are worse than useless. So in a sense I agree with the author quoted in the OP. But I also very much agree with Flannery. The last thing we need is more opinion.
