Personal Experiences Bridge Moral and Political Divides Better Than Facts, Research Finds (livescience.com) 162
AmiMoJo shares a report from Live Science: In his inaugural address last week, President Joe Biden called for unity. But how can Americans come together, given what seems to be growing political contention and deep divides? New research suggests the answer can be found in stories, not statistics. People respect those they disagree with more when their position comes from a place of personal experience, not facts and figures, finds a new series of experiments published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is especially true when the personal stories are rooted in experiences of harm or vulnerability.
"In moral disagreements, experiences seem truer than facts," said Kurt Gray, a psychologist and director of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina. For the new research, Gray and his colleagues focused on how facts versus experiences affected people's perceptions of their opponent's rationality and their respect for that opponent. Over 15 separate experiments, they found that, although people think they respect opponents who present facts, they actually have more respect for opponents who share personal stories.
"In moral disagreements, experiences seem truer than facts," said Kurt Gray, a psychologist and director of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina. For the new research, Gray and his colleagues focused on how facts versus experiences affected people's perceptions of their opponent's rationality and their respect for that opponent. Over 15 separate experiments, they found that, although people think they respect opponents who present facts, they actually have more respect for opponents who share personal stories.
lack of understanding of statistics (Score:2, Redundant)
Most facts these days are presented in terms of statistics. Almost any scientific report is impossible to understand without knowledge of statistics (any report of X causes cancer or Y increases longevity can't be understood without that). Because of that, it is hard for people to judge which facts are true and which are false. Does coffee increase or decrease your risk of cancer? [hardwoodfloorsmag.com] You can find a study to support your opinion no matter which opinion you have.
But if I say that my mom died of coronavirus, the
Re: lack of understanding of statistics (Score:2, Insightful)
But if I say that my mom died of coronavirus, the message is clear. Wear a mask.
You hear that. I hear that I need to respect my immune system.
Re: lack of understanding of statistics (Score:3)
Eat healthy. Exercise. Don't take medicine or antibiotics for non-serious illness.
Btw, have you tried yoga? Even chanting and meditation is show results that improve immune response. Basically most any practice that reduces stress that doesn't involve taking another chemical. Inversely, many chemicals that we use to reduce stress often weaken the immune system, such as drinking alcohol.
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How does that work, for example, when you run into cholera? Does yoga and exercise help you recover from AIDS?
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You could literally google these or you could just be an ass on the internet because that's hip.
In the fist case cholera is rather easy to deal with. Boil the water. I think this falls under "eating healthy", just like eating uncooked poultry can be a bad decision -- who would of thunk.
The second one is legitimate question but again you could of easily find insight. Here is some though because I actually care that people become informed on the matter:
https://www.everydayhealth.com... [everydayhealth.com]
https://www.sciencedirec [sciencedirect.com]
Re: lack of understanding of statistics (Score:4, Funny)
I'm going to tell you something: yoga does not prevent AIDS. That is a fact.
It doesn't matter how much you exercise. If you get AIDS, take the chemicals. They will prolong your life.
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Kundalini isn't nonsense, it's a real thing. Chakras are real things.
But yoga doesn't cure cancer. If it did, I would have one job instead of two.
Re: lack of understanding of statistics (Score:2)
Again you miss the point. A condition like cancer is the outcome of a long series of events. I am not saying to skip chemotherapy, instead I am say as we understand the immune system better it's clear yoga can create an effective immune response which was the snarky question I replied to. As for preventive care and yoga, that requires longitude studies. We simply do not know how well cancer could be avoided by a yogic lifestyle..
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A condition like cancer is the outcome of a long series of events
Indeed, the most accepted model for cancer now is the multi-hit model. Chances are you already have small cancerous growths or cells throughout your body.
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Also, anyone who says "Chemicals are bad" doesn't know what they are talking about.
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You may be shocked to find this out, but yoga doesn't prevent AIDS, cholera, Covid, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, or anything else disease-related.
It. Just. Doesn't.
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Exercise. sleep, and a healthy diet certainly help *treat* AIDS. Of course it was the "pumping and thrusting" that generally helped you catch it. Except for South Africa, where most new AIDS victims are infants and children raped by AIDS victims to "cure" the disease.
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Re:lack of understanding of statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Statistics is central to how science works (Which is why I've always maintained that Thomas Bayes should really be the one considered the father of modern science). The problem is more how to evaluate that (particularly as often happens when different study designs lead to different conclusions). People tend to want hard and fast answers and scientific truth rarely works that way,
I mean I saw this the other day when some clown was posting a list of "the 8 people who died within 3 days of recieving the vaccine". I tried to explain that with 300million americans if 8 people died out of 20 million people , then that means , counterintuitively, that the vaccine prevented deaths from even non coronavirus things like car crashes etc. Which is not ACTUALLY what the vaccine does, but it does point to the difficulty in explaining the statistical thinking behind the science.
This "personal stories" thing can be a little infuriating to hear for those of us in the sciences but we have to live in the world we live in not the world we wished we lived in, and in THIS world, the facts on the ground are that humans are creatures of emotion, and so science communication needs to factor that in to be successful.
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The problem here is that a lot of critical facts about reality come from statistics. A lot of aspects of the whole have gotten far too complex to be modeled any other way.
Hence the only thing that could be done is to generate fake stories based on statistics for that majority that cannot deal with statistics. Or to pick isolated cases that are representing the statistics and let them tell their stories. But is this really something we want to do? I see a tremendous potential for abuse.
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The world is a confusing place for people who don't understand statistics.
Re:lack of understanding of statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Haven't you noticed that news outlets largely report on individual cases rather than just reporting the statistics? (Like interviewing somebody who lost their father to Covid19.) The difference between a quality news source and a garbage one is what basis they use for selecting the anecdotes they present - whether they are representative of actual larger trends, or just pushing some non-representative anecdote to further an agenda.
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When every fact media disagrees with is called a lie, what's left but emotional anecdotes? Poetic justice.
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Conversely, if they notice that the bulk of ordinary people like themselves either don't get it or don't suffer from it, they might notice the bullshit.
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If they haven't noticed anybody affected by Covid at this point then they are actively trying not to notice.
Everything from Covid exposures at work leading to coworkers dying and other coworkers getting sick to the grocery store clerk who had both her mother and brother die of it. Of course I'm nice to the check out clerks and talk with them, I wasn't expecting to get her full story but she felt it necessary to share it to help other people understand how serious it is.
This excuse worked in the beginning
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The problem here is that a lot of critical facts about reality come from statistics.
You mean like how 13% of the population commits 50% of the violent crime?
Like how 13% of the population is ARRESTED for committing 50% of the violent crime. There's a difference. Understanding the difference is part of understanding how to apply statistics to the real world.
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Observed experience beats facts. Because *facts are supposed to come from observations, repeatable observations*. If somebody's lived experience is different than your scientific explanation, you don't have a scientific fact, you have a flawed scientific explanation.
This is true for everything. EVERYTHING. If somebody's lived experience violates the law of gravity, then that is an exception to the law of gravity- and it means that you need to refine the law to fit the lived experience.
What part of this
Facts dont mean anything to the layman. (Score:2)
Re:Facts dont mean anything to the layman. (Score:5, Insightful)
Presenting facts to people who cant understand how they are considered facts, has no effect and the person either "believes" them or not.
True. This article suggest a way of manipulating people into believing random things. It does pretend the application of this technique would synchronize the manipulation with actual facts, but that is obviously completely optional.
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You thought "cygnusvis" was the same letters as "raymorris".
Ray starts with an R. Then there's an A.
cygnusvis starts with a C, and has no A anywhere.
In your mind "cygnusvis" is the same as "raymorris", and a $130,000 ultra luxury automobile is the same thing as a pile of leftover parts from a 1980s trailer house.
A top-end Maserati (or a PAIR of last year's Maseratis) is $130,000 worth of automobile. This is a cheap trailer house:
https://www.mobilehomepartsdep... [mobilehomepartsdepot.com]
Let me rephrase that (Score:2)
In the spirit of this story, let me rephrase that.
I'll share one of my experiences.
Many years ago, I bought a trailer house (aka mobile home) for $1,500. It was in pretty rough shape. It didn't have any interior walls anymore. It wasn't the WORST one in the trailer park, though - at least the wood trim between the wall panels was actual wood, not the foam with wood grain that dents any time you touch it. Some trailer houses even crappier than my $1,500 one had that shit in them.
Things are looking up now.
Anecdotal evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
What this is saying is that literally, people value anecdotal evidence over objective truths. I'm sure this is correct but it's also incredibly sad that so many people cannot process factual information and internalize the ramifications of it. It reminds me of a meme that reads, "nothing is real until it hurts me," (in place of "don't traed on me,") which makes sense in this context.
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Indeed. It also indicated that the complexity of the world has far outstripped the capabilities of most people to understand key facts.
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That's even more true on Twitter, where people herd themselves into groups of beliefs with hashtags. It then only needs enough to believe for something to become true. The number of Likes, Upvotes and Followers becomes the measure of truth and has replaced experience. The experience then is in the number of people who believe in the same.
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In a sense, Twitter is the very essence of a "Filter Bubble Management System".
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Well, that is the "Dunning-Kruger Effect" described in an alternate way. So yes, very true.
A key observation for me was the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers and corona-deniers here in Europe and specifically Germany (I grew up there). I had, so far, seen this as something specific to the US, because of not very good public schools, but I had to learn this is not an education problem and quite a few people are just dumb and prefer their personal opinion, no matter how unfounded, above what they actually would k
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I've experienced it (lol) first hand with otherwise seemingly intelligent people. You show them official, widely accepted statistics but they just can't get past that one experience they had.
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And conversely many people will only believe the official narrative when there are many facts that undermine that narrative, experience or otherwise.
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So if I showed you government-signed and approved statistics that show the length of your dick to be 1 meter, would you accept this as true and you'd think of yourself as intelligent.
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I wasn't asking. You lack experience and because of it do you have no doubts on facts. Those who have experience can have doubts on facts. It doesn't make them wrong or dumb, it makes them intelligent. It makes you dumb for not knowing and understanding the issue, because of your inexperience.
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No. What it says is that many lack the association of facts with experience. In other words, they lack education.
In education do we combine facts with experiments where kids learn to associate facts with the experience of the experiment. We not only say water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, but we show this with an experiment that we can split water into gasses, and create water from combining hydrogen with oxygen. We not only say a computer runs a program, but we let kids enter code and allow them to make
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It's not sad. Your own personal truth is all that matters to you.
Your life has no meaning outside of your personal truth.
Maybe you're an outlier whose life is actually given meaning from objective truth, but that's just not the case for 99.99% of people.
Even something really basic is about personal truth. There was a time in human history when it was just natural to rape and pillage and enslave people. There was nothing 'wrong' about it. Your personal truth in those times was probably some story about being
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This will sound corny, but thanks for sharing. I was raised "southern baptist" (Bible-thumping Christian sect) but found out that the world was different than I was taught to believe when I want to college and studied (among other things) classic and ancient civilizations, including multiple mythic traditions.
My perspective varies from yours in fine detail, but I that that the gist of what you are saying matches my own experience. I'm ok with large religious gatherings though, because I view them as a gr
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Doesn't sound corny at all and we basically agree.
While I think objective truth exists, we as individuals rarely know it.
I believe climate change to be real, but its really just because i trust that subset of scientists.
As to the large religious gatherings. I know in my head all that you say. I try and view it as such. Yet, my soul doesn't agree with it. Best i can give is an example of a religious person academically understanding homosexuality... But being weirded out by two guys making out of them.
To top
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ts not all religious things weird me out. I sit through religious ceremonies of other faiths fine. Its just too personal for me to sit through my own.
Until my mom passed away, I had to put up with her sighing over me whenever I came to visit. Sighing because I (and my siblings) were all going to go to hell while she went to heaven. I'm not sure how she balanced her concept of a "just and loving god" with what I would think would be her suffering the mental anguish of being in heaven for eternity knowing all the while her children were being tormented in hell for all eternity.
I figure if she could deal with that cognitive dissonance, I could deal with
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He isn't wrong though. How do you know global warming is true? You actually don't know. You only believe it to be true, because you hear experts say that it is. You simply trust the experts.
I myself believe it to be true, and I trust the experts, and I have made the experience that as children we had colder winters, white winters with lots of snow, and now we no longer see these happening as much as we did in the past. This does however not satisfy, because I also know that my experience is local and not gl
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He isn't wrong though. How do you know global warming is true? You actually don't know. You only believe it to be true, because you hear experts say that it is. You simply trust the experts.
It's not experts, it's scientists. Scientists from every country have been looking at the climate, recording results and modeling projections. Have I personally validated every report? No, I don't have time for that but there is peer-review that greatly increases the credibility of findings. Additionally, there are people who translate these studies into something understandable for the lay person. These translators work for news organizations which then disseminate information to lay people. On top o
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It's not experts, it's scientists.
No.Your scientists only happen to be experts. Scientists perform experiments, which makes them into experts, because the experiment is what gives them experience and the knowledge over the truthfulness of a fact. Scientists can also only repeat what other experts have said, making them just as much of a believer and trustee of facts as everybody else. They're still scientists, but they're not the actual expert, but only an expert in another field.
What you probably mean is that some people only call themselv
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I guess it's a bit more nuanced than that.
Facts and figures can be very misleading if missing proper context and / or details so you need a great deal of domain-specific knowledge to know how to interpret those figuers or you could come to totally bogus conclusions. Point in case: even batshit crazy conspiration theories tend to be based on actual facts and figures - it's just that these are either cherry-picked or totally misunderstood by the theorists.
This is something that I guess most people are aware o
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This isn't really news in that we've seen a lot of it in recent years; the amount of Trump supporters that believe the election was stolen is unfathomable, but it's a key example - people would rather believe a story told to them by a guy they look up to than understand the fact that someone down as much as 12% in the polls prior to the election could've lost it - even with polling errors the gulf was so large that losing it was always by far the most likely outcome going in, and it was the outcome that occurred, and yet 10s of millions of people just can't deal with it because they want to hear the story their deity is feeding them about election theft.
This kind of behavior isn't limited to one political subgroup. Both of the major parties in the US set up their followers prior to the election with the premise that "If the other side wins, they STOLE the election." In this case it happened to be the Dems who won, so the Repubs had to double-down on the pre-election messaging that the other side stole it.
For evidence of similar election doubt from the Dems, reference the post-2016 election rhetoric. Many cries of "he's not my President" and claims that
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Journalist Greg Palast claims to have evidence that officials of both political parties (but mostly Republicans) have in fact altered the outcomes of elections by controlling who's allowed to vote. Here's his book, How Trump Stole 2020 [gregpalast.com] . (It's a bit out of date now.)
I especially like the part where Brian Kemp, Secretary of State for Georgia and therefore in charge of running elections, simultaneously ran as a candidate for Governor. As Secretary of State, he purged the registrations of 500,000 voters, whi
Unity (Score:4, Insightful)
People from both sides call for the death of the people not like them. Everyone wants to accuse everyone else of being an "ist" of some kind, or default to thinking anyone else can't have possibly honestly formed a differing opinion. Punch someone today. Deplorables, DemonRats, my side good, your side bad, it's all absolutes... and in the process, we dehumanize everyone else.
It's all an existential fight because my way is the one true way and we have to force it on everyone else, even if they don't want it... especially if they don't want it, because the only reason to not want it is because they're evil. At best, I'll unfriend/stop associating with you for having a different opinion so I can blissfully continue to live in my echo chamber where all the good people agree with me.
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Indeed. This is how societies die: They fracture. If, say, 90% of democrats were in one region and 90% or Republicans in another, this would lead to a split of the country pretty much at this time already. As it is, there is not much choice besides an eventual civil war all over the area. Unless enough people remember what is really important, but that seems rather doubtful given the current situation and historic precedents.
Insisting your side has the truth and the other is worthless comes at a terrible pr
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The last time the country split in 1861, the dividing line was geographical. So the split led to war.
Things are different today. The split is somewhat urban/rural but not even that. Even deep red rural counties have about 30% Democrats. So how would a "split" work? It makes no sense to separate farms from cities.
In 1861, there were deep divisions about the direction of the country. Today, that is much less true. We aren't going to have a war over healthcare reform, trade with China, or renaming milit
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"The last time the country split in 1861, the dividing line was geographical. So the split led to war."
As if the actual reality were different today.
"Things are different today. The split is somewhat urban/rural but not even that. Even deep red rural counties have about 30% Democrats. So how would a "split" work? It makes no sense to separate farms from cities."
No. Sure, like then. Sure, like then, Just like then. Just like then.
The civil war was not a dispassionate proposed solution to a problem. It was a
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What is surprising about the issues that divide America the most is not that they are profound, but that they are mostly stupid manufactured issues and of no real consequence.
Indeed. This is about _beliefs_, many of them unfounded. That is the most dangerous kind of divide. If it were about actual issues, facts would help. But it is not.
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Tory: from Irish toruighe "plunderer," originally "pursuer, searcher," (1566)
Both from here [etymonline.com].
You mean people seeing others dying? (Score:2)
As in if they see others dying from a disease, they may actually start to believe the disease is real?
Does not work reliably either, unfortunately. Many people are so in love with their misconceptions that they will try to keep them alive no matter what.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics (Score:2)
"All Internet facts are fake. All Internet statistics are fake. All Internet stories are fake. All Internet quotes are fake"
- Abraham Lincoln
Weeeeelllllll Duuuuuuhhhhhhhhhh (Score:2)
I mean have you not looked around?
Will you love guns and hate abortions? (Score:2)
Just because of a chummy conservative president with great stories? Same the other way around. Eventually Biden will have to choose a legislative agenda. Will Republicans be any less angry about changes to immigration or taxes because he is a pleasant guy personally?
Barely qualifies as "news", TBH (Score:3)
Politicians and others who lie for a living have been manipulating people through exactly this mechanism for centuries. It's the template for a lot of infomercials too; and even on something as meaningless as "Food Network Star" etc the aspirants are taught to priorities "telling a story" over such trivialities as actually providing a recipe or explaining techniques.
Yes, it sucks that people are so susceptible to being suckered and manipulated this way, especially when the subject matter is potentially life-ruining rather than just cherry pie - but there's so much value to our "leaders" in being able to exploit these kinds of failings that the critical thinking skills needed to get past it are never going to show up in curriculae the way they need to for us as a society to get over this hurdle.
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Unity and Healing (Score:2)
I'm all for the unity and healing bit, but actions and words etc...
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Convicting him for his criminal acts as President is a warning to others. Banning him from federal service, which is one of the results of a successful impeachment, is invaluable.
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Convicting him for his criminal acts as President is a warning to others. Banning him from federal service, which is one of the results of a successful impeachment, is invaluable.
It's a waste of time and money. People who hate Mr. Trump don't need a warning. People who support him will simply be energized. The majority of the country (independents and moderates of all stripes) look one at the emotional partisanship, shake their heads, and go about their lives. Progressives and other liberals don't believe there will be a backlash. I think they're wrong.
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A formal impeachment is a warning to people tempted to copy his behavior.
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Convicting him for his criminal acts as President is a warning to others.
Since he is almost certain to be acquitted, it will actually send the opposite message.
So what is the point?
Banning him from federal service, which is one of the results of a successful impeachment, is invaluable.
He has already threatened to start his own "Patriot Party" which would be a dream-come-true for Democrats. It would be like 1912 all over again. Disqualifying him would end all of that.
"Never interfere with an enemy in the process of destroying themselves." -- Napoleon
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So what is the point?
To damage the Republicans.
They will have an internal war over this, between those who want to get rid of Trump and stop the re-election campaign he has already started, and those who don't want the stain of an impeached GOP president on them.
No matter which way it goes the divisions will remain. Either Trump becomes a talking point for everything wrong with the GOP, or GOPs get attacked for defending a cook who is likely to be hit with lawsuits and other criminal charges in the near future.
It's a no-lose si
Unscientific Crap Headline (Score:2)
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I've not read the study, however the headline of this story crashes hard in the objectivity smell test because: "Personal Experiences" = empirically encountered facts.
You are massively overestimating the ability of most humans to perceive reality correctly. Personal anecdotes are very rarely empirically encountered facts. They are nearly always an emotional tale about how someone felt about something which happened to them.
Teasing actual facts out of the mish-mash of human consciousness is quite difficult, and at the bottom of a great many such anecdotes, there is no fact whatsoever. It's all a Just So Story the person relating the anecdote has made up in their own he
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Of course (Score:3)
Appealing to emotions is more powerful than cold, hard facts and statistics. Too bad. Anyone can pull some anecdote out of their ass just to prove their point. And you are an insensitive clod if you claim that their experience is an outlier. And no basis for making public policy.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. In other words, we have to govern for the benefit of the greatest number. And if that means ignoring a few fringe cases, no matter how heart wrenching they may be, too bad.
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"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. In other words, we have to govern for the benefit of the greatest number."
That's a dangerous thought if it has no limits. If 60% decide they need to enslave the other 40%, do you do go ahead and pass the law? Or are there some things even a majority are simply not allowed to do? And what is the mechanism for stopping the majority from acting? And are the many even capable of understanding the needs of the few? As example, there are many many city-dweller
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That's a dangerous thought if it has no limits.
Yeah. But it's one of the principle tenents of socialism. So I gues we had better get ready to accept it. Are there limits? Yes. Something like a bill of rights. But even that may have to yield to the whims of the ruling class. Society may be obliged to provide a living for its subjects in the form of UBI. But when the government needs work crews to re-gravel some county roads, these people will be expected to pick up shovels and rakes.
many city-dwellers who want there to be more wolves in the forests, while the people who live in the forests have a very different opinion since said wolves keep eating the livestock.
We are going to be doing away with livestock. Everyone can eat bugs. And
Feelings are better than facts?! WTF (Score:2)
So Donald Trump feeling he needs to inject bleach trumps(ahem) the facts that say that won't work?!
Has the hard left totally lost the plot? The facts seem clear....
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Apparently not.
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So Donald Trump feeling he needs to inject bleach trumps(ahem) the facts that say that won't work?!
No, but for you it seems that hearing that falsehood trumps the fact he never said it.
True. In the literal quote, Trump used the word "disinfectant", not "bleach". A distinction without a difference. It's was a stupid thing to say. Not merely ignorant, but just stupid. That's the most offensive thing about Trump. He's fucking stupid and doesn't care and people glorify him anyway. Many glorify him because he's stupid. They identify with it.
It was Trump being Trump, as usual. The man blathers. He's an ignorant stream of consciousness that never stops spewing his random associations t
Yes, of course (Score:2)
"In moral disagreements, experiences seem truer than facts,"
Duh, because they are MORAL disagreements. We need research to understand this? We literally have evolved a vocabulary for this very reason.
Personal experiences ARE the ONLY facts! (Score:2)
Evrything else is literally just hearsay.
Yeah, got a nice wonderful peer-reviewed six sigma double-blind study?
Well, to everyone else it's just pixels entering his eyes, interpretable as somebody else telling them that, and then having to blindly believe the stated measurements based solely on the stated source (=argument from authority fallacy) and its sciency design. They would have to replicate it themselves for it to become any better than that.
So "facts" is an unscientific weasel word that has led to a
Yeah, that is a known problem. (Score:2)
Duh ... (Score:2)
Of course, people are more empathetic to things that are presented from the human experience! That is the purpose of empathy.
People aren't inherently evil and seeing how something actually affects someone else is moving emotionally.
However, the question is 'should' it sway your opinion, or how should it effect your actions.
The other problem is credibility. I may not trust the educated guess of someone who has gathered statistics, especially if I detect bias in their presentation.
It is hard to argue with h
Biden/Pelosi Cognitive Dissonance (Score:2)
Indeed (Score:2)
British fishers now understand the EU single market and customs union much, much better, now that they are experiencing being out of it.
Reading about non-EU countries' fresh-fish imports on a EU-server ain't just not the same.
PS.
Also, the Brits have been confiscating ham-sandwiches from 143 countries for decades at Heathrow airport, so I don't really get the 'surprise' there either.
what is a "fact" ? (Score:2)
A "fact" in this context is "a statement that some stranger said." How is it at all surprising that personal experience carries more weight?
Re:Anyone else notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about?
There's 3 stories today on slashdot about COVID. Just go to the front page, ctrl+f for covid. Click next, do it again. Most pages have multiple stories as hits. Occasionally there's a page without them, but look at the dates. There's a lot even if you drop the ones where COVID is just a passing mention and focus only on the ones where it's the subject of the story. If you go back 10 days there's one that recounts the number of infections and deaths (https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/01/17/1830244/7-of-americans-have-had-covid-19).
Whether an article is "divisive" is going to be subjective, whether there's "complete silence" on COVID since Biden has been elected is clearly way off.
Re: Anyone else notice? (Score:2)
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Yeah, I've seen more than one poster with the same "theme". Almost like somebody is guiding them, telling them what to say.
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Nice story, bro. But it contains facts. So what happens when anecdotes contain facts? Do some people's heads assplode?
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Re: WTF is wrong with people? (Score:2)
Anecdote is not data
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Anecdote is not data
Correct, it's datum.
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Anecdote is not data
Correct, it's datum.
More fun with mixing Latin and English:
An anecdote is a datum.
Several anecdotes are several datums; merely having several anecdotes does not necessarily constitute having data.
What were we talking about?
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I would say it is far easier to lie with personal stories, because they have a nice setting around and can be pre-constructed so as to be mostly true. We even already have professionals that specialize in doing this! Propaganda experts and marketing experts have known this approach to work well for a very, very long time.
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I would say it is far easier to lie with personal stories
Another benefit of stories is that when someone presents facts that contradict the point of your story, you can act personally offended that they disbelieve your story. It is a great way to shut down a debate when you are losing.
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You are perfectly right! I had not thought of that angle (too little experience with lying, I guess), but that will work nicely with many people.
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Re: See? (Score:2)
I'm free to speculate, and my theory is sound.
If you have counter-evidence, feel free to share. Otherwise, feel free to GFY
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*lol* I wish I could upvote you for being funny. +1