That makes sense, and I like your example. Here's the experience (from a while ago) that got me thinking about this:Marduk wrote:I find this to be somewhat true, but not entirely. What I've come to realize more is that since often the values we have are the results of years upon years of evidences, (note I'm using the term liberally; the term here meaning the information we have come into direct contact with, most people will put more stock in the anecdotal evidence of a good friend than mounds of empirical data) it takes years of counter-evidences to prove to them sufficiently to the contrary. For example, lets say someone is the victim of a violent crime by a Hispanic. Despite knowing many Hispanics who have not committed violent crimes to this individual, the one incident is weighted higher than the empirical evidence. Can this person be disabused of their fallacious belief? Absolutely. But not by showing them that their 'knowledge' is based on emotion rather than logic. This will only weigh a small amount in comparison to the traumatic experience. Rather, through years of associating with Hispanics who work hard to show said individual that they are good, kind people, it will eventually be corrected.Laser Jock wrote:On a semi-related tangent: it's been rather disheartening to me to realize that almost no one argues from a logical basis. In the vast majority of cases, people make a decision for emotional reasons and then use logic to try to support their decision. The result is that no matter how broken you prove their logic, they won't change their decision, because logic wasn't the real basis anyway. It makes debate, or even discussion and problem-solving, very frustrating. (I don't claim to be immune to this, but I do try to see and avoid it.)
I ride my bike a whole lot (as has probably been evident in some of my answers). I also have put some money into it and I'm somewhat protective of it. Thus, I don't like locking it up where it's subject to the random violence of more casual cyclists. (I've seen how people tend to jam and shove their bikes in any place where they even sort of fit, and that can easily bend a derailleur, which usually needs to be replaced as a result.) I also like to keep it out of the weather as much as possible.
So anyway, I'd started storing my bike inside the apartment, in my bedroom. Shortly thereafter I got a new roommate who objected. I suggested that I could just keep it on my side of the room and out of his way, but he said no, he didn't want it in the room even then. He offered the reasoning that bikes were dirty, but then provided what I'm quite positive was his real reason: bikes just didn't belong inside.
As it turned out, the cleanliness (or not) of my bike wasn't really an issue. (I was the only person in that apartment who ever swept, vacuumed, or mopped, so he clearly wasn't that concerned about dirty floors. Nor did he care that tires aren't any dirtier than shoes, though they can have a somewhat larger surface area.) The real issue was that in his opinion, bikes just don't belong inside. He needed no real logic, and nothing I could have suggested would have changed his mind. I imagine that he just grew up with the idea that bikes don't belong inside.
(I ended up locking my bike up outside in a stairwell, where it was reasonably protected from both careless people and the weather, which was a good compromise.)
This is clearly a much more trivial example than the one you gave, but I believe that as a result, it's also much less likely that my (now former) roommate will ever change his mind. It bothers me that he has no logical reason to dislike my bike being in the room. It's a reaction based purely on habit and upbringing. (I later realized that he really disliked any sort of debate, or even casual discussion about different points of view, which was immensely frustrating to me.)
Yeah, I agree, it's pretty easy to have arguments go nowhere in either of those cases.Tao wrote:Agreed. Sadly it seems there are primarily two factors behind prolonged arguments, first, as Laser Jock mentioned, people making a decision for emotional reasons and then using logic to try to support their decision and those who never even make the attempt to bring logic into the fray.
