Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Brian Eno and making radical mind changes
Edge's publisher, John Brockman, asked the intellectual cream what they had changed their mind about and why. "Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?" said the brief.
A common theme in the responses is that what distinguishes science from other forms of knowledge and from faith is that new ideas can rapidly overturn old ones as new evidence emerges. So there's nothing to be ashamed about in admitting an intellectual switch.
One contributor is Brian Eno, a name unexpectedly familiar in LibDem circles since Nick Clegg won the leadership poll.
He explains how he started his political journey as a Maoist, why he changed his views and where he is now:
Interesting…. a rather Popperian approach... wonder how this plays out with younger people?Maoism, or my disappointment with it, also changed my feelings about how politics should be done. I went from revolutionary to evolutionary. I no longer wanted to see radical change dictated from the top — even if that top claimed to be the bottom, the 'voice of the people'. I lost faith in the idea that there were quick solutions, that everyone would simultaneously see the light and things would suddenly flip over into a wonderful new reality. I started to believe it was always going to be slow, messy, compromised, unglamorous, bureaucratic, endlessly negotiated — or else extremely dangerous, chaotic and capricious. In fact I've lost faith in the idea of ideological politics altogether: I want instead to see politics as the articulation and management of a changing society in a changing world, trying to do a half-decent job for as many people as possible, trying to set things up a little better for the future.
Perhaps this is why I've increasingly come to regard the determinedly non-ideological, ecumenical EU as the signal political experiment of our time…
Labels: beliefs, political argument, science
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Resistance is futile you will be assimilated
Well not according to recent studies which suggests that rebuttals can actually lead to a strengthening in belief of the inaccurate information. Take this example:
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.
Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.
The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy.The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.
Washington Post 4 September 2007
Making a denial repeats the ‘information’ that needs to be denied and this repetition makes it more easily remembered that the refutation.
There are sobering reflections for the political process because the human mind
…. is not good at remembering when and where a person first learned something. People are not good at keeping track of which information came from credible sources and which came from less trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some information came from the same untrustworthy source over and over again. Even if a person recognizes which sources are credible and which are not, repeated assertions and denials can have the effect of making the information more accessible in memory and thereby making it feel true…
Washington Post, ibid
An example is the Great Killer Banana Scare of 2007 which flooded the mailboxes of many people in the USA and still pops up sometimes.
Of course being a LibDem doesn’t make us immune to this distorting process..
Incidentally a discussion of this report on the Metafilter (Hat Tip) raised an interesting side discussion on the “Toxic ‘leader’ meme” which may be of interest in our present mutters about press coverage.
The studies refreed to in the WP article are (all .pdfs, note)
Schwartz et al (2007) : METACOGNITIVE EXPERIENCES AND THE INTRICACIES OF SETTING PEOPLE STRAIGHT: IMPLICATIONS FOR DEBIASING AND PUBLIC INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS
Weaver et al (2007) Inferring the Popularity of an Opinion From Its Familiarity: A Repetitive Voice Can Sound Like a Chorus
Mayo et al (2002) ‘‘I am not guilty’’ vs ‘‘I am innocent’’: Successful negation may depend on the schema used for its encoding
Labels: political argument, refuting errors, revisionist arguments, Urban Legends
