So, I was listening to a This American Life on the way into the office this morning, and there was a discussion about having a scientist convincing a global warming skeptic that global warming was real. And the interesting thing, to me, was that the scientist made an argument by citing facts, measurements, trends, and scientific consensus, and it had absolutely no impact on the skeptic.
Which was, I thought, patently obvious.
The problem was that the skeptic had already discussed how or why they were skeptical, and the underlying reasoning was simply that there are “two sides to every story,” and the skepticism came from the inability to accurately assess the merit of the arguments that were being made.
But so the interesting thing to me was that the scientist utterly failed to have an impact because they weren’t able to assess the argument that needed to be made. And holy cow, I’m guilty of this at times. But you can’t convince someone who doesn’t believe in facts with facts.
So what do you do? I’m not sure, honestly – because ultimately what you need to do is you need to teach someone how to think. If you ever get into an argument and someone says “there are two sides to every story,” you’ve already lost because saying that indicates that that person has no ability to give weight to an argument.
But I think the fundamental point is that you have to start with the fundamentals. You have to teach people how to judge how to tell good information from bad, and that anyone can have an opinion, but those opinions aren’t all worth the same. Which seems to be generally where Democratic politicians fail – you can’t argue policy or facts without teaching your opponents the fundamentals – and it’s a hell of a lot easier to teach someone to be willfully ignorant and believe whatever they want to believe. 😛
Yeah, that post went nowhere.
The problem is, some people’s brains are broken and they will never be able to think properly. This is essentially how I feel about religion. Despite a complete lack of evidence to the affirmative, and despite all of the mountains of evidence to the contrary, some people still think that immaculate conception and zombies are real. They have broken from reality. They are, by any reasonable definition, insane. And I’m pretty sure there’s a significant overlap between religious people and climate change deniers.
I listened to that last night as well. It was kind of painful, since it was clear that scientist was on the wrong track. This is one of the weaknesses of liberals – they assume that “the truth will set you free”, so they argue from facts (“that tax cut will only benefit rich people so it doesn’t make any sense for you to vote for it”).
I did like Ira asking the kid whether there was anything that she could be shown that would convince her. And she said “Well, I need to see both arguments side by side to evaluate them”, which was clearly not true, because that’s what the scientist was trying to do (knocking down her objections one by one). It was a face-saving answer, because the answer was clearly that nothing would convince her to change her mind but she couldn’t admit that. And I know it would be cruel to grill a 14-year-old girl on the radio, so Ira didn’t follow up. What’s really frustrating is that hypocrisy like that is not only accepted but welcome – consistency is only valued when convenient (e.g. right to life except when it comes to the death penalty).
Rant rant rant.
Sounds like many conversations I’ve had with my father. The frustrating part is that I’ve taken his methodology in many situations in my life out of default (because it’s honestly what I grew up with). My mom would say or do something, my dad would “correct” her, end of story. Who is to blame? There is error on both sides: 1) my dad with the idea that he always knows best and 2) my mom with the notion that she shouldn’t question him. I struggle with this in my own marriage because my wife hardly questions my own thoughts and ideas because I’ll default to a defensive state. It’s a vicious cycle that I’m trying to break; especially when I feel that there is something broken that I need to fix in the relationship.
I think the biggest thing is the realization that you can do something different, and consciously trying to do so. There are a lot of times when I find myself sort of “reflexively” doing what my parents did, and it often takes someone pointing out that I’m doing something unreasonable before I even question why I’m doing what I’m doing.
Honestly, I think some of it is behavioral, and some of it is genetic – I think people have a predisposition to fight, or flee in particular ways, and while culture and practice can overcome that, it is a conscious effort. So the realization that there’s something to do is the bulk of the process. Or in other words, knowing is half the battle.