My mind is changed by facts all the time. Therefore, by The Law of the Exception That Proves the Rule, I have proven the OP true. QED.
I can’t put words in the author’s mouth, but I certainly don’t see any way that will effectively convince people of anything. I mean, you can’t even brainwash POWs with any reliability even in an environment where you control every input and every output and are willing to use inhumane means of “persuasion.” If changing a mind could be achieved through volume and repetition, surely they’d have figured that out.
Some people’s minds can’t be changed because of mental illness, as simple as that.
So society is full of all kinds of ways to help us live together. Democracy says that we’ll all live with the choice of the majority and the actions of elected representatives, even if we disagree. The US courts say that juries must be unanimous. A veto of the President needs a super-majority of the US Congress. Scientific breakthroughs need statistical confirmation to some level of precision (95% or 99% being common levels). All of these are arbitrary ways of saying “Here’s how we’re going to keep working together even if we don’t agree.”
But changing their minds? Not gonna happen.
This might be the single most unintentional funny thing I’ve ever read. Dude, the reason you’ve come to this conclusion isn’t “everyone else is unreasonable”, it’s “your evidence is terrible and you can’t/won’t admit it”.
Well, yeah, just as I said in my post #9.
As several of us have already said, what the hell is the purpose of this thread?
Of course it is, everybody who isn’t completely insane changes their mind, based on the facts, all the time. Unless it’s about something that is a matter of faith, or belief if you will, or maybe self interest, there are many reasons people deny reality. Hell, somebody may have actually changed their mind when faced with evidence, and then lied about not having changed their mind. It’s very complicated, because this about human beings, and we are complicated. The example in the OP is about a vast complicated system, the world if you will. But the same mentality in regards to getting people to believe as you do, applies to many many things.
Until you mentioned all that, I didn’t really know who these people were, or why one would be so concerned over what the other said. It’s a little clearer now
There are so many levels of irony and such involved. Layers of it. It’s an irony layer cake, with irony frosting.
Good points. Nothing is more certain (IMNSHO of course) than the fact, that being an insulting fuckbag, seemingly to the people you are trying to persuade, makes pretty much every decent person not want to listen to you anymore. Even if you are right, people won’t care.
Well, that’s a particularly ill formed opinion, but it’s all yours, so there is that. Of course that is my opinion.
Of course, if it didn’t, the world would be chaos. Of course for most things, verifiable facts is exactly what everyone wants. And many people are skeptical, because we know how often “the facts” turn out to anything but facts.
Your assumption is that it was not by intent. But that’s fine by me, because it made you laugh.
That is a fantastic quote, even with out the quote tags.
“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.”
Even that is misleading, as we have seen already in this topic, facts often need interpretation, a framework, a theory, or the same facts can be explained by different mechanisms. It’s not always “the facts” that people have serious disagreements over. It’s what the facts mean, or what should be done, in light of the facts.
And of course, the facts themselves may not actually be facts, or they may be twisted, slanted or even semi-facts, which is often the best way to deceive people. You give them half truths, and then insist they believe everything you say, based on your being better at understanding facts, than they are.
We can see examples of this already posted here.
That is just one definition of debate. It also means, as a noun, deliberation; consideration.
And as a verb to deliberate; consider. But certainly in this topic, the debate is about the topic title, which makes it almost a Meta debate, or an ironic debate, in that if you wish to convince somebody that facts can change their mind, you must use facts to do so. Or, if you are of the opinion that facts won’t matter, you must use opinions to sway the audience, which is mostly imaginary, but that is a matter of opinion as well.
So then you are saying facts will change somebodies mind? In essence you are trying to say facts can work.
Very old, very funny and so often true.
In the example that inspired this debate, he seems to think shouting louder, and flooding the commons with even more opinions, and advertising, will somehow change the skeptics mind, so they will somehow now believe as he does.
And of course, his beliefs are based on facts, while his opposition use something else, but not facts.
It’s a most interesting argument.
Jesus, half of this thread consists of attacks on Fx Mastermind in violation of several rules on this board.
The reason facts don’t matter to many people is that they are engaging in motivated reasoning and/or signalling their membership in a group of fellow travelers.
To get it away from politics, check out any ‘audiophile’ board, and you’re bound to find a lot of people ranting about how useless double-blind tests are - because they show conclusively that their high dollar cables and isolators and moon-rock needles are snake oil and a complete waste of money. And this is not a fuzzy area like sociology, economics, history, or other areas where the facts may be in dispute. This is a hard science we are talking about, with straightfordward means of testing if a claim is true.
Some audiophile boards have even gone to the extreme of banning any mention of actually testing the wacky claims. It’s nuts.
There was a study recently which took people from both the right and left (not just the right, Brainglutton), then gave each group facts which contradicted their beliefs. What they found was that the two sides actually became more partisan, and the people affected the most were the smartest people in each group. See, the smarter you are the easier it is to engage in motivated reasoning. And everyone reading this probably does it on one issue or another,
Ah yes, motivated reasoning, and it’s the bane of scientific research as well. Double blind studies make this impossible to ignore. It’s an actual thing.
What I’ve seen happens frequently in the “great global warming war”, is that evidence, data, measurements, even cold hard facts at times, isn’t enough to reach any sort of ending, there is no real point where anyone can say “Well that’s settled then”, and move forward to the next step.
It is exactly that sort of argument, at it’s most basic, an opinion, that I find absolutely useless. First, you state “The problem is”, as if that means anything. You don’t define what your problem actually is, but go on to describe your opinion. It’s meaningless.
“An opinion is useless, what we need are facts”
“Flannery’s assertion about the uselessness of opinions is itself an opinion, so by his own logic, useless.”
The thing is, if somebody is an esteemed scientific expert, their opinion means a lot, and not just to other scientist. Is that what Tim Flannery means when he says “what we need are facts”, that no matter how many expert opinions we hear (and we do hear them day and night), it’s facts that are needed to make a difference? We need Tim himself to get that answer.
But back to the uselessness of opinions, and maybe even some motivated reasoning.
There is an example of “the facts aren’t right”, in it’s purest sense. It’s actually another reason facts don’t matter, because people actually, and they don’t even realize it, people actually dismiss “facts they don’t like”, and there are all kinds of ways to do so.
It’s probably an entire field of psychology, since it is so prevalent, and so maddening to deal with.
Generally speaking this makes sense, but I’m also aware that in many subjects like GMOs (that it is not so partisan in reality but there is a good number of leftists against it) experts in the matter can be even a socialist like Paul Nurse and they are in favor of it because they have done the research.
I have also seen many conservative scientists that looked or did work in the research concluding that humans are a big cause of the current global warming. Many of those researches started also as skeptics but concluded the evidence was overwhelming. And they paid a price for not conforming to the current dogmatism seen among Republicans.
The point here is that on top of the regular evidence what we have here is evidence that while most smart people can fall for political motivations, there is evidence also that most experts can control their bias when confronted with evidence that they deal with.
Of course this bit of evidence is one item that it is ignored/dismissed by many smart people that are trapped in partisanship but like Neil deGrasse Tyson said, eventually science (and the expert scientists) can not be dismissed so cavalierly because the bottom line will be affected in the long run:
Like, f’rinstance:
That Pit thread is a giant elephant in the room. It is no personal attack to note that the OP himself has over 1,000 posts himself in that thread, many of which, if not most, exemplify the very thing he is describing here.
Greater than 1,000 posts in a single thread coming from one person…
And of course, among the examples that the Skeptics Dictionary mentions:
In the link they made about the ones that think that climate change is a hoax the skeptic dictionary people, that look at pseudoscience for a living, are not kind to the ones that indeed do not “move forward to the next step.” Even **Sam Stone **is on the record of criticizing the unscientific conspiracies contrarians are using constantly.
I don’t agree – although I recognize the validity of the idea.
A lot of us learned some real crap at our parents’ knees. My dad was full of “Calvin’s Dad” wisdom. He told me that compasses pointed north because of immense veins of lodestone in Canada.
I didn’t “reason myself into” that belief; I believed it because my father told me so. But I read an essay by Isaac Asimov, which explains why that idea is completely wrong, and where the magnetic field really comes from. Asimov did “Reason me out of a position that I did not reason myself into.”
Thank you.
That kind of digression from scientific facts to abstract rationalizing seems to be the goal of the OP, being premised as it is on the unstated assumption that there is some vast uncertainty about AGW, resulting in a bickering stalemate between the interpretations of two equivalent “sides”. One should perhaps ask oneself how motivated reasoning fits here when there is, in fact, no uncertainty at all about the climate forcing of CO2. There is no uncertainty at all about where the sudden and massive post-industrial CO2 spike came from, and there is broad agreement about the range of consequences under different continuing emissions scenarios, and all have serious implications across a broad spectrum of negative impacts.
The vast preponderance of “motivated reasoning” going on in this subject area seems to be on the part of those with direct and indirect connections to the fossil fuel industry or who otherwise perceive their well-being to be threatened by unpalatable facts. Upton Sinclair perfectly described this form of motivated reasoning when he said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
There is, to be sure, a whole continuum of denialism in what is a very complex field of science, some of the claims more nuanced than others, targeting and exaggerating such uncertainties as do exist. For example exaggerating uncertainties about climate sensitivity, and falsely claiming that it’s allegedly lower than the consensus IPCC estimates, or falsely claiming that consequences of AGW are largely unknown and suggesting that they may even be beneficial. Refuting these claims is a bit more complex than refuting the simplistic idiotic ones, and the complexity provides the motivated-reasoning skeptics with the priceless opportunity to cast doubt among scientific illiterates, if not on the basic science of AGW, then doubt on the specific quantified magnitude thereof, which for the PR goals of the fossil fuel industry is just about as good. Indeed a reticent acknowledgment of the reality of AGW with a misleading emphasis on alleged uncertainties, along with fatalistic assertions about the inevitability of continuing oil use forever, is pretty much the contemporary PR-approved position of the major players in the oil industry. The coal industry seems to prefer to avoid the topic altogether, simply making the outrageously ridiculous claim that its product is “clean”, and continuing their dark funding of denialist front groups. (Last April, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity CEO Robert Duncan, asked whether he believed burning coal is a factor in climate change, replied “I’m not answering your question.”)
I’m still uncertain what the purpose of this thread is. Perhaps, having given up the scientific argument on climate change as a lost cause, the OP now wishes to start a meta-argument about what “facts” actually are. There’s a valid discussion to be had about how to bridge the gap between the scientific knowledge of climate change and the disturbingly inaccurate public perceptions partly encouraged by the vast machinery promoting denialism, and I made some comments about that earlier. But by and large perceptions seem to be gradually changing as more and more unassailable facts and a sort of dawning understanding make their way into the public domain.
I’m familiar with some of the audiophile nonsense and mildly amused by it, but I don’t see that it has much to do with the topic. Although lots of things like frequency response can be scientifically quantified, the audio hobby is not science and its values are intrinsically subjective. Nor are audiophiles scientists, and their discussion boards are not scientific journals; many are probably not scientifically trained and may have all kinds of wacky beliefs – sort of like climate change denialists. It’s a very poor analogy to the processes that govern scientific inquiry.
Be still, my beating heart! FXMastermind thinks I’m not completely insane!
Shows what you know, buddy. 
Well, I was thinking of things like changing direction to avoid walking into an obstruction, or driving with out crashing, that kind of thing.
Opinion | Hating Good Government - The New York Times
It’s a very old story, and anyone who has lived a long time, and has open eyes, knows the story well.