Sinfest

[Usagi Miyamoto]

I really liked the three bad assumptions we make about people who disagree with us in Kathryn Schulz' TED presentation.

1. They must be ignorant, all they need is to have the facts explained to them.

2. They have the facts but they don't come to the right conclusions, so they must be idiots.

3. They have the facts, and they're not stupid, so they must be disagreeing for their own malevolent purposes - they MUST BE EVIL!

How many internet debates have you seen or, admit it, participated in, that followed this pattern?
_________________
The reward for a good life is a good life.

[Thy Brilliance]

Anyone that assumes they have all the facts must be wrong.

No person or organization can act as a repository for all knowledge.

[Sam the Eagle]

Quite a few debates both online or face to face, I must admit.

But from my experience so far the prevailing reason being:

4 - They have the same facts we do, but comes from a different angle.

Each of us is right, but wrong if seen from the other one's seat. The smaller the debate is about, the more anal we become.

Funny how roundabout we go isn't it?.

[edit] : frakkin tyops
_________________
Meu aerobarca esta cheoi de enguias

[Usagi Miyamoto]

If you will let me, I will restate that as, they have the same facts, but they come at them with different values. You can call it perspective, or point of view, or background, whatever, but it boils down to our disparate underlying emotional reactions to a given situation. Those reactions govern whether we will choose to emphasize or ignore certain facts in our reasoning. It is distressingly easy to be blind to some facts, even when they may be objectively incontrovertible, and open to others that are more akin to fiction from an objective standpoint, because they do or don't fit our preconceptions, our expectations, or the way we want the world to be. They are our Invisible Gorillas and our Bêtes Noirs. They are either immune to perception, or they loom much larger in our imagination than they do in reality.

It's a lot easier to communicate with people with shared values, because your underlying assumptions and reactions to facts will be similar. When we encounter people with different values, we run through the three bad assumptions about them (they're ignorant, they're stupid, they're evil) before we recognize that they may be none of those things (if we ever do) but that they value things differently. And it is really tough to argue about values. We can argue about their consistency, or their ontological ground, or their logical consequences, but it's practically impossible to argue someone out of they way that they feel. It goes back to the way those primitive central brain centers are giving things the thumbs up or thumbs down, dozens or hundreds of long milliseconds before the outer cortex gets a chance to work on them with some semblance of rationality.

So, it is one thing to try to inculcate children with a value, an internal emotional preference, for logic. I like the idea, even if I think it is a bit quixotic. I wonder what it can do in the face of all our other motivated reasoning skills, the ones that are desperately trying to keep us from ever having that cascade of negative emotions associated with realizing that we are wrong. Perhaps another socially useful value that we should be teaching is to value learning that we are wrong, and to value changing our minds to fit the available knowledge. It's something of a masochistic value, and it runs counter to our desire for internal consistency, so I have my doubts that teaching it will work very well. Still, some people seem to have it, so it must be possible.

I saw a related political cartoon (and if I could remember where, I'd link it) that compared "I'm not changing my mind" Bush with "Let's go where the facts lead us" Obama. The same cartoon has different messages to different people. If your preference is for consistency of values, you like Bush and you think Obama's a wishy-washy flip-flopper. If your preference is for consistency of reason, you like Obama and think Bush is willfully stupid. (I'm not making this claim more generally, it's just the cartoon.) And there is actually something useful in both stances. For example, you shouldn't change your mind based on just one new study. Yet you don't want to be impervious to the facts to the point of running off a cliff believing you're on the right track.
_________________
The reward for a good life is a good life.

[Vox Raucus]

[Dogen]

Indeed. The entire universe exists within the brain of every thinking thing. We don't simply experience it, we interactively create it through the lens of the mind as it passes through our sensory perception. My philosophy professors would be so proud...
_________________
"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

[nathan]

//the-standard-vodka-caveat

[Dogen]

[Sam]

[Dogen]

For me that moment was (and repeatedly still is) the fundamental attribution error. Even knowing it, being aware of its influence, I still catch myself assuming everyone that drives badly is an asshole or a moron and have to talk myself out of it.
_________________
"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

[Thy Brilliance]

[Dogen]

[Usagi Miyamoto]

Alternatively, some people have difficulty modeling others' internal state, so they may find other people's behavior or reactions surprising or unexpected. This could be due to interacting with someone from a different culture, or significantly different values, an autism spectrum indication, even a developmental issue with mirror neurons.

I suppose an automatic assumption that you must have done something wrong could be a kind of cognitive bias; it seems pretty common in human-computer interactions where something goes haywire (unless the human is a software developer, in which case the assumption is always the other way around).
_________________
The reward for a good life is a good life.

[Dogen]

[Sam the Eagle]