How Minds Change

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1. orduAug 2024
   > basically the author doesn't understand why altruism was difficult for evolutionary biologists and game theorists to explain

   The author doesn't say that altruism was easy to explain, what he says is that the very idea to start explaining altruism is not obvious for many.

   > The titular question is maybe only interesting if you've been steeping in post-modernism for too many semesters and are trying to blow some epistemic bubbles to see which way is up.

   Oh no, not only that. I'm very interested in the topic. In explanatory inverted topic and in not inverted: why people believe lies and why people believe truths. Or sometimes I replace "why" with "how" in these questions, because sometimes I'm really baffled at people's ability to ignore evidence, and sometimes I seek rational tools to deal with some problems.

   Moreover I totally agree with the premise that people believing bullshit is their default state. Frans de Waal wrote a lot about primates and from that follows the idea that "political thinking" (motivated reasoning, self-aggrandizement, status-seeking, tribalism, and social conformity) is what we got from evolution. Everything else, like rational reasoning, scientific method, calculus are artificial cultural things. You can reason rationally if you learned how to, but even then your rational thoughts will run on a substrate that is evolutionary tuned for self-aggrandizement, status-seeking, tribalism, and social conformity.

   But I also like the article because the very idea of the explanatory inversion is new for me and it makes sense. It is possible, that what is new for me is the term to refer to the already known phenomena, but I'm not sure. I need to think more about it.

   The author approach makes absolute sense if you want to persuade other people to believe "true" things. You need to stop thinking about why your beliefs are true, and start thinking about why people resist persuasion. BTW I can recommend a book about it: How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion.[1]

   > It's worth noticing that a rational mind can

   There are no rational minds in the Universe. Or at least we don't know any.

   [1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Minds-Change-Surprising-Persuasio...

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2. lapcatApr 2024
   Related: The book "How Minds Change" by David McRaney.

   With regard to the stability of beliefs, there's a strong element of social reinforcement at work. An incident discussed in the above mentioned book is how a group of prominent 9/11 truthers was invited to meet with various scientific experts who presented the case against the conpiracy, and as a result of the meeting, one (but only one) member of the group did change his mind about 9/11. However, this rejection of the conspiracy by a prominent conspiracist did not cause a crisis of belief among the rest. Rather, they rejected and shunned the mind-changer from the community, despite the fact that he used to be a leader of the community.

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3. djwayne35Jul 2023
   I thought you were going to talk about the book "How Minds Change" by David McRaney. Bummer. Great book.
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4. DigorySep 2022
   Kahneman hedges just a bit in his talk: " To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters."

   Trying to explain the small number of people who do change their minds, David McRaney has an interesting book out called How Minds Change.[0]

   And I imagine there are people who change minds, even outside his model. People who change their minds when it doesn't seem to help them strike me as important people to hear from.

   [0] https://www.econtalk.org/david-mcraney-on-how-minds-change/

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