"Tyranny of Facts"

[AlpsStranger]

https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-...g-right-is-not-enough-3bc4513d690a#.kdg4sjbjy

With respect, I absolutely disagree. When you're correct and the opposition is incorrect, shove the facts down their throat. Make them look stupid. Show the truth blatantly and mock them ruthlessly. If they're going to stick to their guns anyhow for emotional, religious, cultural, etc. reasons, then mock, mock, mock, mock, belittle, denigrate and brutalize them with raw, unfiltered fact.

If someone chooses to be on the wrong side of fact, then shove their face into fact. Fact is stronger than either participant in an argument, which is why it pays to stay on the right side of facts.

Being correct is nothing to be ashamed of, you just have to have the fortitude to always align with fact, even when it's not easy. And your hour will always come when a fact is something you'd rather not face.

 

[Lexicus]

An alternate take:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/degrasse-tyson-kriss-atheists

In the time of Kierkegaard and Marx and Parallax, there was still some resistance to the deadness of mere facts; now it’s all melted away. Kierkegaard’s villagers saw someone maniacally repeating that the world is round and correctly sent him back to the asylum. We watched Tyson doing exactly the same thing, and instead of hiding him away from society where nobody would have to hear such pointless nonsense, thousands cheer him on for fighting for truth and objectivity against the forces of backwardness. We do the same when Richard Dawkins valiantly fights for the theory of evolution against the last hopeless stragglers of the creationist movement, with their dinky fiberglass dinosaurs munching leaves in a museum-piece Garden of Eden. We do it when Sam Harris prises deep into the human brain and announces that there’s no little vacuole there containing a soul.

All these falsehoods are beautiful, tiny, glittering reminders that the world can be something other than simply what it is; we should nurture them and let them grow. Instead, they’re crushed, mercilessly, in the name of a blind, stupid, pointless truth. But who’s more wrong—the person who droningly insists, jerking like an automaton, that the world is round, has always been round, and will always be round? Or the one who knows that this earth is not a given, and that we can imagine a whole weary planet into new and different shapes?

 

[Kozmos]

Well that's a dubious position. It's not like a rationalist, physicalist, materialist, whateveralist position precludes change and improvement or even whimsical dreams. It's people arguing that things are fine as 'is' and should stay that way. Tyson is a typical tiresome I am very smart person, but in a country that can't even come to grips with evolution or that the Earth is older than 10000 years I can't see him as unnecessary. You could say however that he is preaching to the choir mostly.

 

[Bootstoots]

https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-...g-right-is-not-enough-3bc4513d690a#.kdg4sjbjy

With respect, I absolutely disagree. When you're correct and the opposition is incorrect, shove the facts down their throat. Make them look stupid. Show the truth blatantly and mock them ruthlessly. If they're going to stick to their guns anyhow for emotional, religious, cultural, etc. reasons, then mock, mock, mock, mock, belittle, denigrate and brutalize them with raw, unfiltered fact.

If someone chooses to be on the wrong side of fact, then shove their face into fact. Fact is stronger than either participant in an argument, which is why it pays to stay on the right side of facts.

Being correct is nothing to be ashamed of, you just have to have the fortitude to always align with fact, even when it's not easy. And your hour will always come when a fact is something you'd rather not face.

There are several problems.

The most obvious is that people are fundamentally irrational, and the fact-stuffing approaches tend to have negative persuasive effect, resulting in people who have worse arguments becoming set in their beliefs and even more wrong after a long debate than before it. This has been shown repeatedly in psychological experiments. Anecdotally, my generally less confrontational approach has had much more success at convincing opponents to at least take my views seriously, even if they still disagree in the end.

Other than that, it's rarely the case in disagreements that being correct is a simple matter of the facts. That's pretty much confined to arguments about relatively simple science, e.g. the basics of evolution and global warming. If you take the example of abortion, for instance, you get a whole lot of shouting over the drawing of an arbitrary moral line, the relative weighting of personal autonomy against the right to life, and so on, with the facts being peripheral to what people actually believe. Anything related to complex fields (especially social science) tends to have many possible arguments all of which are supported by different factual lines of evidence of greater or lesser strength, and you don't really understand the issue unless you've looked at multiple points of view.

But fundamentally, it has to do with the way you approach disagreements. Are you primarily trying to win, or are you trying to learn? The former is more common, but people don't develop their views and the debates get boring very quickly, because people just hash and rehash the same arguments combined with name-calling and whatnot. When you have the goal of learning more than winning, you still try to 'win' because you're testing your arguments, but the way to learn is by having your best efforts come up short and 'losing'. You can also learn what it's like to think all sorts of different ways even if those ways are irrational, by testing different lines of reasoning against other people and having them show you how they think, even if there is no chance of convincing them.

Relevant essay.

 

[Gori the Grey]

If facts feel tyrannous, there are always alternative facts, nowadays.

 

[AlpsStranger]

@Bootstoots

Sure, I did write the post with a large degree of anger and your points aren't without merit. However, sometimes we aren't trying to win over the other person, but the peanut gallery. When you're trying to win over the "third parties" it can be justifiable to simply make the person clinging to a stubborn fact look silly.

If we were having more sophisticated arguments in this country then, sure, "Tyson's approach" might be irrelevant. However, we're still retreading 6,000 year creationism and basic global warming denial.

 

[warpus]

https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-...g-right-is-not-enough-3bc4513d690a#.kdg4sjbjy

With respect, I absolutely disagree. When you're correct and the opposition is incorrect, shove the facts down their throat. Make them look stupid. Show the truth blatantly and mock them ruthlessly. If they're going to stick to their guns anyhow for emotional, religious, cultural, etc. reasons, then mock, mock, mock, mock, belittle, denigrate and brutalize them with raw, unfiltered fact.

If someone chooses to be on the wrong side of fact, then shove their face into fact. Fact is stronger than either participant in an argument, which is why it pays to stay on the right side of facts.

Being correct is nothing to be ashamed of, you just have to have the fortitude to always align with fact, even when it's not easy. And your hour will always come when a fact is something you'd rather not face.

This approach doesn't work at all though. How many creationists have been convinced after they've been mocked? How many flat earthers? How many climate change deniers?

If the people you're arguing with don't care about facts, you won't be able to use facts to win the argument. If you start throwing mockery into it, then that's not going to make things any better either.

 

[Mouthwash]

https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-...g-right-is-not-enough-3bc4513d690a#.kdg4sjbjy

With respect, I absolutely disagree. When you're correct and the opposition is incorrect, shove the facts down their throat. Make them look stupid. Show the truth blatantly and mock them ruthlessly. If they're going to stick to their guns anyhow for emotional, religious, cultural, etc. reasons, then mock, mock, mock, mock, belittle, denigrate and brutalize them with raw, unfiltered fact.

If someone chooses to be on the wrong side of fact, then shove their face into fact. Fact is stronger than either participant in an argument, which is why it pays to stay on the right side of facts.

Being correct is nothing to be ashamed of, you just have to have the fortitude to always align with fact, even when it's not easy. And your hour will always come when a fact is something you'd rather not face.

Has it occurred to you that the "facts" produced by internet intellectuals don't often have a lot to do with what ordinary people experience?

 

[AlpsStranger]

What does the "ordinary experience" have to do with the fact that climate change is largely caused by human activity AND is dangerous, or the fact that all life on earth shares a common ancestor? Or the likelyhood that, even if there is "something" to the idea of an intelligence behind the universe, it's extremely likely that all human religions are myths?

How does the experience of an "ordinary person," whatever such a loaded and clumsy term means, weigh on any of that?

 

[Lexicus]

There's more to the world than facts. Refusing to see that is submitting to a kind of tyranny.

 

[aelf]

If the people you're arguing with don't care about facts, you won't be able to use facts to win the argument.

That's the thing. Pretty much no amount of reasoning will change their minds.

I'm not saying we necessarily have to shove facts down their throats, but it's really pretty hopeless anyway.

 

[Bootstoots]

The vast majority of human experience, including most of what most people care about, is not fundamentally rational. I don't think the drive to ridicule wrong people is especially rational itself, and there's not any particular reason to think that uninformed third parties are more likely to side with a rational person who comes across as a dick than with their opponent, who has worse arguments rationally but believes what they do for religious or ideological reasons. Dickishness is generally frowned upon more strongly than being wrong.

People deny facts when the facts would undermine the way they make sense of the world around them. For many people, the drive to preserve a religion or an ideology is much stronger than the drive to make sure their opinions fit well with reality. That's how humans work - it's never going to not be that way. We're not on an onward and upward march to a world where humans believe only what can be established rationally.

 

[Hygro]

If the fact is that there's something higher upstream in someone's reasoning blocking out all the relevant facts, are you really any different not adjusting your own behavior to reflect that information?

 

[Lexicus]

The vast majority of human experience, including most of what most people care about, is not fundamentally rational. I don't think the drive to ridicule wrong people is especially rational itself, and there's not any particular reason to think that uninformed third parties are more likely to side with a rational person who comes across as a dick than with their opponent, who has worse arguments rationally but believes what they do for religious or ideological reasons. Dickishness is generally frowned upon more strongly than being wrong.

People deny facts when the facts would undermine the way they make sense of the world around them. For many people, the drive to preserve a religion or an ideology is much stronger than the drive to make sure their opinions fit well with reality. That's how humans work - it's never going to not be that way. We're not on an onward and upward march to a world where humans believe only what can be established rationally.

We are, i hope and believe anyway, on an onward and upward path to treating each other better. If so its not a straight path. The idea that i am wrong about this sends me into a black pit of despair though.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-...g-right-is-not-enough-3bc4513d690a#.kdg4sjbjy

With respect, I absolutely disagree. When you're correct and the opposition is incorrect, shove the facts down their throat. Make them look stupid. Show the truth blatantly and mock them ruthlessly. If they're going to stick to their guns anyhow for emotional, religious, cultural, etc. reasons, then mock, mock, mock, mock, belittle, denigrate and brutalize them with raw, unfiltered fact.

If someone chooses to be on the wrong side of fact, then shove their face into fact. Fact is stronger than either participant in an argument, which is why it pays to stay on the right side of facts.

Being correct is nothing to be ashamed of, you just have to have the fortitude to always align with fact, even when it's not easy. And your hour will always come when a fact is something you'd rather not face.

While I agree completely with you I do acknowledge that it never works.

 

[Mouthwash]

What does the "ordinary experience" have to do with the fact that climate change is largely caused by human activity AND is dangerous, or the fact that all life on earth shares a common ancestor? Or the likelyhood that, even if there is "something" to the idea of an intelligence behind the universe, it's extremely likely that all human religions are myths?

How does the experience of an "ordinary person," whatever such a loaded and clumsy term means, weigh on any of that?

I'm thinking more about politics. It's worth noting that outright ignorance on evolution or global warming is better than peer-reviewed tribalism where those who reject a particular dogma can't get published.

 

[aelf]

So, I guess, instead of shoving facts down their throats, we should just ignore and sideline people who are impervious to facts.

 

[Lexicus]

It's worth noting that outright ignorance on evolution or global warming is better than peer-reviewed tribalism where those who reject a particular dogma can't get published.

Please, give an example of such dogma

 

[Hygro]

Please, give an example of such dogma

Orthodox economics ;D

 

[Lexicus]

That is a good one. The real-world consequences are definitely much worse than people saying they don't believe in evolution or that the Earth is flat.