Thread by @ethanjweiss

There is so freaking much to love about this latest @Freakonomics podcast about changing one's mind (freakonomics.com/podcast/change…).

It obviously resonates with many things that I've been thinking/writing about lately. Just listen to the whole thing - but here are a few highlights:

1. The essence: "It doesn’t get much more meta than that: a bunch of scientists changing their minds, and trying to change others’ minds, about whether the brain changes when we change our minds."

2. Dubner interviewed Francis Fukuyama who was an early advocate for the Iraq war. He went to a dinner where Dick Cheney was the featured speaker
"...and everybody in the room was cheering like this was the biggest success for American foreign policy, that they could imagine...

...And I just looked around at the people at my table and I said, “Why are these people clapping?” Because clearly this thing is turning into a huge fiasco...

...And that’s the moment that I decided these people are really nuts. I mean, they’re so invested in seeing this as a success that they can’t see this reality that’s just growing right in front of their eyes."

And Fukuyama continues: "Like, this model where people just take facts and draw conclusions from them and then base their opinions on that is completely wrong. I mean that’s just not the way people think...

...They start out with an emotional commitment to a certain idea, and then they use their formidable cognitive powers to organize facts to support what they want to believe anyhow...

Need to repeat this one...

"...They start out with an emotional commitment to a certain idea, and then they use their formidable cognitive powers to organize facts to support what they want to believe anyhow..."

...So the partisan affiliation comes first and then the reasoning process by which you justify it comes second. We tend to see the world and cherry-pick facts that support our version of the world, and it takes a really big external shock that just clearly proves you wrong."

They go on to make the obvious connection to today's political climate but the above part is just so good...

3. Dubner then spoke to Steven Sloman who discussed how people believe they understand things that they actually don't know shit about. It's called "the illusion of explanatory depth"

SLOMAN: We think the source of the illusion is that people fail to distinguish what they know from what others know. We’re constantly depending on other people. In other words, someone knows how a toilet works: the plumber. And you know the plumber; or, you know how to find one.

4. Another Stanford economist, Matthew Jackson discussed how more or better information can't solve this. JACKSON: One thing I used to think was that people, if you gave them the same kinds of information, they would make decisions the same way...

...They might have different experiences in their past, different influences. But somehow the fundamental ways in which they think about things and process things is the same. That, however, is not what the data say

JACKSON: The more you look at data, and in particular, the more you look at experiments where people are faced with facts or information, you realize that some people are very single-minded

In one experiment, Jackson asked people about climate change. He had everyone read the same batch of abstracts from scientific articles...

JACKSON: We asked people their opinions before they went in to the study, and you could see that people looking at exactly the same article would interpret it very differently depending on what their initial position was.

"So again, information isn’t necessarily the solution. In fact, information can be weaponized."

JACKSON: There was a group of about a quarter to a third of the subjects who actually became more polarized, who interpreted the information heavily in the direction of their priors, and actually ended up with more extreme positions after the experiment than before.

JACKSON: One aspect of people seeing exactly the same information and coming away with different conclusions is how we interpret and store information in our brains. It’s very easy to sort of snippet things into small little pieces that we can remember...

And lastly- back to Sloman:

SLOMAN: Why do you think Obamacare is good or bad, whatever you think about it? Now, the fact is, most people have very little to say about that. Most people just have a couple of slogans. They have the Republican [or Democratic] slogan

...but they don’t actually know about Obamacare, because after all, it’s a 20,000-page document.
SLOMAN: I like to say even Obama doesn’t understand Obamacare.

So clearly I enjoyed this one and especially in light of the tribalism piece @Dr__Guess and I recently wrote together: statnews.com/2019/05/09/tri…