You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you
May 2, 2017 2:37 PM   Subscribe

You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you. A short comic from The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman on belief, the brain, and the Backfire Effect, aka the response of confirmation bias.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul (96 comments total) 70 users marked this as a favorite
 


The problem is none of those facts really provokes an emotional response in non-believers. You need something that really going to fire people up, like: "Today, Microsoft released a new computer, and it is gorgeous."
posted by The Bellman at 2:52 PM on May 2, 2017 [23 favorites]


The problem is none of those facts really provokes an emotional response in non-believers.

I dunno, I can imagine sufficiently conservative amygdalas freaking out over "George Washington harvested the teeth of human beings that he owned so he could have spare dentures," or "Roe v. Wade was the product of Republicans." There's not really a corresponding level of WTF in there for lefties, though.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 3:00 PM on May 2, 2017 [16 favorites]


"designed to only run apps from the windows store" Beliefs restored, all is good.
posted by joelf at 3:01 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


"designed to only run apps from the windows store" Beliefs restored, all is good.

Keep reading, though. It ships with Win 10 S, which is limited to the app store, but you can upgrade to vanilla Win 10 Pro (for free this year, $50 after this year) at which point that limitation goes away. It's really only there so the machine can be locked down for the target market, which is education and anyone else who likes Chromebooks. Beliefs still shattered, at least for me. [/derail]
posted by The Bellman at 3:06 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Yeah, the closest he got to an angering claim for me was "Gay marriage should not be legalized" in the example of an idea that would upset someone on the left, but since that claim is not factual and therefore didn't have any cites backing it up, I didn't have an opportunity to attempt to experience the backfire effect myself.
posted by Scattercat at 3:26 PM on May 2, 2017 [8 favorites]


When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

Suggested illustration: Venn diagram of people who readily believe that this is probably true of themselves, and people for whom it actually is true. My guess is that relatively few are in the intersection of enlightenment.
posted by sfenders at 3:31 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is brilliant.

Probably the best illustration I saw of the Backfire Effect in, well, effect was last year here in Iceland. Last August, a far-right group called the Icelandic National Front went to protest a bunch of changes to the Law on Foreigners, as they believed these changes effectively opened the borders and gave refugees piles of pocket money. Absolutely none of this was true. So when they showed up, among the people to greet them was Pirate Party MP Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson.

Dude was there, with his laptop open and the law itself up on his screen, trying to literally show them that everything they thought about the law was false. As you can see, this had absolutely no effect on their unflinching belief that the Immigrant Horde was coming to take over the country. They didn't just not believe him; they refused to even look at the law itself. None of them had even read it.

And why should they have? It's not like they needed facts and evidence to back up their intense fear of foreigners. Facts were irrelevant to their convictions.

I've never seen this particular quirk of the brain encapsulated like this, so thanks for letting me give a name to this maddeningly phenomenon.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:34 PM on May 2, 2017 [38 favorites]


As a speed reader, my amygala is threatened by the so-called fact that Washington's false teeth shipped with Windows 10S.
posted by condour75 at 3:54 PM on May 2, 2017 [54 favorites]


"George Washington harvested the teeth of human beings that he owned so he could have spare dentures," ... There's not really a corresponding level of WTF in there for lefties, though.

I'm a pretty solid lefty, and when I learned that that the blood drained out of me; like, I felt myself go white; a similar thing happened just reading it - sheer horror emotionally. It was similar to when I realized/learned Sally Hemmings was most likely the half-sister of Thomas Jefferson's wife or that Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus to keep Maryland from succeeding. I have a very visceral attachment to a ton of the Founders which makes realizing how horrible they were to other people (even for good reasons in the last case) absolutely gutting to me. I didn't have a backfire effect because I've already tried to come to terms with the founders being human (I started with Lincoln, and that remains the least horrifying gut-punch), but I can track that visceral emotional reaction of "MUST PROTECT WHAT I LOVE".

Lefty's don't currently have a media complex centered around twigging our fears; the biggest ones are on the chem trails/vaccines/911 inside job end of the spectrum which have not (yet?) been normalized. This means there isn't the same unification and consolidation of our irrational or unsupported beliefs, and so those tend to be more diverse. I spend time trying to keep track of my trigger points, though (abortion, immigrants, physical inferiority of women) and manage what and how much "challenging" of those I can endure.

I've been wondering for a while if identifying and discussing our axioms/core beliefs might be a way through - but that might just be too abstract. I know my big ones are fairness, beauty/balance, and compassion (the last is practiced, not unconscious; I am a judgey fuck). It would be interesting to see if/how other people would boil down the motivations behind and pattern of their beliefs.
posted by Deoridhe at 4:06 PM on May 2, 2017 [18 favorites]


Oof.

One of my core beliefs is that mentalistic readings of psychology are a bunch of hooey.

I believe that hooking a CT scanner up to someone and finding "The part of the brain that activates when X happens is also the part of the brain that activates when Y happens" is terrible, useless, dangerous science.

I believe that cognitive biases are descriptive but not prescriptive.

So i disagreed with the very premise of this article! And it just made me feel more smug and confident in my beliefs! So there!
posted by rebent at 4:06 PM on May 2, 2017 [57 favorites]


I had a really weird thing happen with the Washington slave teeth fact - my brain almost immediately "decided" that it was just something the author made up to shock the reader. It wasn't until I kept reading that I realized it wasn't the case, and it took me a few moments to really fully realize what that meant. So my brain didn't get aggressive, but it did try to protect me from having this info sink in.
posted by lunasol at 4:27 PM on May 2, 2017 [16 favorites]



I had a really weird thing happen with the Washington slave teeth fact - my brain almost immediately "decided" that it was just something the author made up to shock the reader. It wasn't until I kept reading that I realized it wasn't the case, and it took me a few moments to really fully realize what that meant. So my brain didn't get aggressive, but it did try to protect me from having this info sink in.


I had a retrograde fear that the first correction was false (the one with the hippo teeth and weird tidbits of crap) and that I'd fallen for it and it was a demonstration of how easy it is to accept facts on the internet. It didn't occur to me that someone would have 2 sets of false teeth.
posted by RustyBrooks at 4:30 PM on May 2, 2017 [14 favorites]


lol you guys still believe there was a George Washington.
posted by ODiV at 4:37 PM on May 2, 2017 [42 favorites]


That was nice.

I definitely just experienced a moment of horror on learning the pledge of allegiance was written by a socialist.
posted by latkes at 4:39 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think that horror could happen equally to a socialist-hater, but it happened to me as a pledge-hater. So... everyone is beautiful in their own way.
posted by latkes at 4:39 PM on May 2, 2017 [23 favorites]


I had a retrograde fear that the first correction was false (the one with the hippo teeth and weird tidbits of crap) and that I'd fallen for it and it was a demonstration of how easy it is to accept facts on the internet. It didn't occur to me that someone would have 2 sets of false teeth.

That was my first thought when I read the slave teeth thing. Like, 'that's so horrible that the Oatmeal guy wouldn't just make it up, but I remember hearing the first one before so maybe it's also false.' Then I saw everything was sourced and was like, '... oh.'

I've been wondering for a while if identifying and discussing our axioms/core beliefs might be a way through - but that might just be too abstract.

One societal change I would like to see is the notion that mistakes are an opportunity, rather than this big stain on someone. I'm not sure how to arrange that, but it feels like that's where a lot of this springs from: when most people are wrong in public, they feel really intense shame, (and are encouraged to do so), which makes a lot of things that might be easy to debunk a lot harder.

Upon preview:
lol you guys still believe there was a George Washington.

Of course I do. He'll save the children, but not the British children.
posted by mordax at 4:40 PM on May 2, 2017 [19 favorites]


it's worth noting that it's not clear that old George had an entire set of human tooth dentures harvested from his slaves. The evidence for that claim are a) there are human teeth included in the hippo/ivory/misc. set and b) a ledger kept regarding Washington's finances has an entry in May 1784 saying “By Cash pd Negroes for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoire.” (Dr. Lemoire was his dentist.) If an all-human-tooth set ever existed there doesn't seem to be a record of it.

This doesn't change much, but it does indicate that not everything that says [source] [source] [source] after it is necessarily the whole truth.
posted by bracems at 4:48 PM on May 2, 2017 [22 favorites]


I'm not sure what you mean by mentalistic, rebent, but you did inspire me to go take a look at the actual literature. The original paper is from 2010 by Nyhan & Reifler, and they've self-replicated, however a replication attempt that was published last August found only one of 36 issues (WMD in Iraq) showed a backfire effect. I couldn't find any other replication attempts, though I only looked briefly.

Given the reproducibility crisis in psychology (previously on MF) and issues of publication bias more generally, I'm inclined to view the existence of the backfire effect as still very much in the 'interesting hypothesis, let's see what the data says' phase. I hope that given the recent interest in the concept there are some more replication attempts on the way.
posted by galaxy rise at 5:01 PM on May 2, 2017 [14 favorites]


So, modern psychology is the backfire effect locked in a mortal struggle to the death with the reproducibility crisis? Presumably with the Dunning-Kruger effect looking on from the sidelines insisting that he knows how to fix all the problems.
posted by um at 5:09 PM on May 2, 2017 [18 favorites]


Nothing inhuman that slaveowners (including our "Founding Fathers") did to their slaves could shock me. But the "dentures made of slave teeth" has some mitigating possibilities, most obviously, considering the likely death rate of slaves, the likelihood that teeth were harvested from dead slaves... not very much mitigating but a serious potential possibility for the culture of the time.

But considering the old saw "History is written by the Victors", I have come to assume that almost everything in American History has been revised, at the time or since, to make White Males look better, or at least less bad.

And the Roe vs. Wade example just fits my observations that the "Overton Window" has been constantly shifting rightward in my lifetime. The Republican Party is not the Party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower or the Roe v Wade jurists. It's the party of Jefferson Davis, Joe McCarthy, Don Corleone and Rodrigo Duterte. (Not even Ayn Rand because she's a WOMAN)
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:18 PM on May 2, 2017 [19 favorites]


I like to notice when my brain does silly things like the Backfire Effect, so as I saw what the comic was trying to do I was excited. But sadly it didn't work for me because I happened to already be aware of the specific shocking facts within. Has anybody got any other verifiable, upsetting corkers in the same vein?
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 5:24 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


It's sad that a lot of people believe the list of apocryphal trivia the (reliably irritating) Oatmeal piece debunks.
posted by My Dad at 5:33 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


The only good thing about being 58 is that there's not much historical stuff that can freak you out (humans have done some absolutely unspeakable things) and some humans are hell-bent on doing some other unspeakable things, but as a whole, things work out. I don't really react to isolated horrible things, but if there's a trend I do. I remind people that other people tried that shit before, and I'm not going to sit by and watch that happen again, and I'm going to encourage you not to, either. I can't change your mind, but maybe, just maybe I can open your eyes for a minute, then let you do the work.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 5:50 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


“Assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and though your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and tho’ you throw it with more than Herculean force and precision, you shall be no more able to pierce him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw.”
posted by Sebmojo at 5:51 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


-Groucho Marx
posted by Sebmojo at 5:51 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


It's sad that a lot of people believe the list of apocryphal trivia the (reliably irritating) Oatmeal piece debunks.

That really wasn't the point of the article.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:52 PM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]


Has anybody got any other verifiable, upsetting corkers in the same vein?

The earth's "north" magnetic pole is actually the south pole. source
It's not true that you can caramelize an onion in 10 minutes. source
Fortune cookies, often associated with Chinese food in America, were invented in Japan. source
Barack Obama is a reptilian. source
posted by sfenders at 5:54 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


lol you guys still believe there was a George Washington.

George Washington was real. Benjamin Franklin was invented for propaganda purposes.

Anyway, I'm aware of the backfire effect, and I know how to avert it. It's those other guys who believe bullshit and then get mad when they hear facts, and what can you do with people like that?
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:59 PM on May 2, 2017 [5 favorites]


happy i guess that other people liked this but god I found this annoying & patronizing to the extreme, and it made me remember that no matter how many times i click through, i really just do not care for the Oatmeal at all at all
posted by likeatoaster at 6:00 PM on May 2, 2017 [25 favorites]


I definitely just experienced a moment of horror on learning the pledge of allegiance was written by a socialist.

This is not in the least surprising, the Pledge is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect from that particular stripe of ideologue. Just like I could see another type of ideologue abolishing public schools entirely.

All of these had me checking the sources out of curiosity, not outrage, but it took me a while to stop giggling at the pinky toe part. :-)
posted by smidgen at 6:02 PM on May 2, 2017


So, modern psychology is the backfire effect locked in a mortal struggle to the death with the reproducibility crisis? Presumably with the Dunning-Kruger effect looking on from the sidelines insisting that he knows how to fix all the problems.

Overton window Myers Briggs Stockholm Oedipus Stanford prison experiment AM I DOING THIS RIGHT?
posted by Behemoth at 6:05 PM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


The pledge is cool now because we de-socialized it with that added bit of words at the end.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:11 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'm inclined to view the existence of the backfire effect as still very much in the 'interesting hypothesis, let's see what the data says' phase.

I'm a grumpy cynic, so none of the factoids produced any effect on me and my largest emotional response to the piece was sniggering to myself, imagining a version five years from now that just reads, "You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you - the Backfire Effect is not reproducible science!"
posted by Squeak Attack at 6:21 PM on May 2, 2017


The only thing that could induce a backfire effect on me is evidence that humans as a species are alright. I am 100% credulous about any story of human-on-human horror anyone tells me, which on the one hand has tripped me up a few times but on the other hand not nearly enough times to disprove my original hypothesis.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:29 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


I wasn't really fazed by any of his examples and I'd already heard about the teeth before and concur that we don't know exact circumstances there.

However, last week or so.... there's a person I've known (Person A) on a professional level for 10+ years. She really helped me once upon a time and she got me connected with someone else (Person B) I've been close to who has also helped me for 10+ years. Last week, Person B straight up told me that Person A is a bully professionally. Good at her job, but apparently was super pushy about getting herself into a job that she wanted, and she and Person B have not been pals for years. Mind. Blown. I find it so hard to believe because it's completely incongruous with the person that I've known for so long, but Person B would definitely not lie and would not say that without plenty of evidence. I believe B, but I'm so disappointed in A for turning out to be a closet asshole.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:33 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Better Living Through Cybernetic Implants: an implant that shoots steam out of your ears whenever it detects significant activity in the amygdala, not only intimidating for fight-or-flight responses but a wonderful negative reinforcement tool that keeps ruining your earbuds until you learn to open your mind.
posted by jason_steakums at 7:09 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


Dude, they dissed cilantro.
posted by 4ster at 7:09 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


I think that horror could happen equally to a socialist-hater, but it happened to me as a pledge-hater. So... everyone is beautiful in their own way.

Being already aware of Francis Bellamy, my thought on reading that part was that if you want real cognitive dissonance, show some photos of the original salute that went with the original pledge.
posted by asperity at 7:18 PM on May 2, 2017 [12 favorites]


...I am completely unmoved by this. I might be a nihilist?
posted by Doleful Creature at 7:31 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]


Has anybody got any other verifiable, upsetting corkers in the same vein?
I'm not sure about upsetting, exactly, but here are a few fact that I've known to discombobulate people:
  • Coal plants introduce more radiation into the environment than nuclear energy does. [Source]
  • Children are 5× more likely to be sexually assaulted by a family member than a stranger. [Source]
  • We're injecting CO2 into the atmosphere at the same rate the world experienced during the Permian Mass Extinction, during which 90% of all complex life was wiped out. [Source]
On a lighter note, my personal favourites involve shifts in time and perspective. (I haven't sourced these, since I am meant to be marking finals right now, but they're all quite Google-able).
  • Cleopatra was born closer to us in time than she was to the construction of the Great Pyramid.
  • Tyrannosaurus are closer to us than they were to the existence of Stegosaurus.
  • Tom Cruise is now older than Wilford Brimley was when he starred in "Cocoon".
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 7:35 PM on May 2, 2017 [46 favorites]


I loved the irony (or not) of all the fully linked sources.

I hope that on the back end, someone is collecting data on how many of them got clicked on, and that is the real point of this article.
posted by Dashy at 8:57 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


lunasol, I had the exact same reaction at first to the human teeth fact. I glanced at the "source" urls and thought surely they must be either fake or to a random snopes page that wasn't relevant. It wasn't until I got all the way to the end and he DIDN'T say "by the way, I made up that human teeth thing" that I decided maybe I better actually read the sources.
posted by yhbc at 9:07 PM on May 2, 2017


...I am completely unmoved by this. I might be a nihilist?

I'm not a nihilist, but those of my beliefs which I strongly hold to are not those which could ever be expected to be moved by facts, let alone factoids found on the web or in newspapers: I love my family, Vim is the best text editor, that sort of thing. Aside from completely subjective beliefs like that, everything seems open to question. General Relativity and Zen Buddhism seem good and I'd be reluctant to stop believing in them, but even they are very much open to question if something better comes along.

What George Washington's false teeth were made of, by comparison, is pretty much just trivia. Teeth collected from dead people seems plausible, and certainly no more shocking than the kind of organ recycling that's done today. If it turns out Saddam Hussein really did have a gigantic cache of horrific weapons that he was plotting to use in unleashing mass destruction upon the world, well... it may seem unlikely, but I'd have no trouble considering it as a possibility without shaking up any of my core beliefs much at all.

The factoid about coal plants releasing more radiation directly to the atmosphere than nuclear plants generate in waste is one that was surprising enough I remember first hearing of it, some years ago. It seemed unlikely but intriguing, worth spending a few minutes to confirm as true or false. Anyway it stands out as more difficult to accept than any of the others, but not for any emotional reasons.

Obviously I'm still subject to confirmation bias of more normal and subtle kinds, but this "backfire" seems a bit far-fetched. Or maybe just misinterpreted: Study participants "were presented with counterarguments to strongly held political beliefs". Counter-arguments do not necessarily count as new evidence, particularly if, as one imagines is probably the case given the usual process by which these beliefs come to be strongly held, they're mostly familiar ones that the subjects had heard and dealt with many times before, resulting in annoyance that obscured any actual fresh information that might've been coincidentally present.
posted by sfenders at 9:23 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


There's not really a corresponding level of WTF in there for lefties, though.

I've seen some pretty impressive defensive responses to, say, the fact Ghandi was a racist who liked the Nazis.

From the end of the last election, how did people here react to people who refused to vote for Clinton? Not vote for Trump, just decided to go Green or write in Mickey Mouse or what have you. Tell me that wasn't the result of an ad-campaign that told everyone that Trump was going to destroy America twenty times a day on every radio station I cared to tune in to.

The amount of knee-jerk profoundly negative reactions on this site to any degree of contradiction on any number of holy cows is staggering.

It is also exactly the sort of reaction described in The Oatmeal's comic.

The idea that you don't see an equivalent level of WTF on the left kind of scares me honestly.
posted by pan at 9:52 PM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


> Tell me that wasn't the result of an ad-campaign that told everyone that Trump was going to destroy America twenty times a day on every radio station I cared to tune in to.

But he's. I mean he's. like, isn't he?

sure twenty times a day is hyperbole, but really he's only got to destroy it once.

also I can't remember when I last turned on a radio.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:10 PM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


But he's. I mean he's. like, isn't he?

How much further would the Republicans be in screwing us all over if Cruz had won?

Edit: ...and I found myself without useable hands for most of the end of the election cycle. Radio and broadcast TV are remarkably useful in that situation.
posted by pan at 10:16 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]


OK, The Oatmeal just erased a few black marks in my personal ledger. That was quite good. (Re: The SEO/spammy bullshit from years ago.)

Tom Cruise is now older than Wilford Brimley was when he starred in "Cocoon".

I'm... going to need to lie down for a little while. Can we maybe get the planet to stop spinning for a few hours? It's making me dizzy.
posted by loquacious at 10:18 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


>...I am completely unmoved by this. I might be a nihilist?
> posted by Doleful Creature

My husband and I had an excellent conversation around this, because neither of us experienced the rage spike depicted. After a lengthy, extreme-jet-lag-and-wine-fueled rehashing of what we understand about each other, we've determined that we share a core belief, and that is "all beliefs can and must be challenged and explored."

Then we got into a friendly argument of "core belief" vs "core philosophy" and how they related to factual exploration and whatnot and ultimately it reminded us both of why we hooked up 15 years ago and then decided to get married a few years ago, which was pretty cool and stuff.

Basically this Oatmeal made me and my husband pat ourselves on the back and feel smug for like 14 minutes and then general existential dread set back in and now here we are back where we started.
posted by erst at 10:20 PM on May 2, 2017 [21 favorites]


I've seen some pretty impressive defensive responses to, say, the fact Ghandi was a racist who liked the Nazis.

This might be more relevant if you weren't replying to a comment about what was in the comic. Maybe read it again and try not knee-jerking in with a comment on how lefties are all oblivious to their own biases?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 10:21 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


Tom Cruise is now older than Wilford Brimley was when he starred in "Cocoon".

Of all things, why is this the fact that's breaking my brain?
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:27 PM on May 2, 2017 [16 favorites]


Surprising fact: Tesla wasn't as cool and mysterious and amazing as he is now popularly held to be due mostly to underdog status. Although he was super handsome.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:51 PM on May 2, 2017


This might be more relevant if you weren't replying to a comment about what was in the comic. Maybe read it again and try not knee-jerking in with a comment on how lefties are all oblivious to their own biases?

First of, totally a leftie. Second off, I spent a good twenty minutes considering whether or not it was worth replying and if it was relevant or not and came down on the side of typing.

The point of my last post was that I think people as a whole can be oblivious to their own biases, certainly not just the right. Holy Zarquon's reply to what was in a comic that was fundamentally about introspection definitely gets a response out of me. The fact the post was also implicitly dehumanizing half the US population didn't help.
posted by pan at 10:55 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


There's not really a corresponding level of WTF in there for lefties, though.

Yep, and it's the biggest weak point of the comic. As it stands, it probably has the intended emotional effect for some right-wing readers, but not left-wingers. Fell a bit flat for me for that reason.

Coming up with reasonably moderate conservative views that would not even be openly horrible or something-ist nor contain slurs (but would still reliably anger many liberal readers), things that pretty much immediately follow simply from having a different set of axioms on a few hot-button issues, is easy. I'm disappointed there's almost nothing there.

(I had a comment here with a few pretty mild, disclaimed examples that I encouraged people to imagine being in the comic to get the intended effect as lefties, but it got deleted. I don't begrudge the decision; I just felt that reading them written by someone else would have more of the intended emotional impact than I had after coming up with them myself.)
posted by jklaiho at 11:36 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]


The coal radiation one is actually a good choice for some lefties who are emotionally invested in nuclear power being unacceptable.

But I agree the original piece was not great at triggering backfire effect in leftish folks. I say this as a leftish person who was already aware of backfire effect and knows what it feels like. I saw where this was going almost immediately and was disappointed that none of the examples seemed to trigger that anxious feeling.

Tl;dr: I was promised a discomfiting feeling and didn't get it.
posted by R343L at 11:50 PM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]


And the Roe vs. Wade example just fits my observations that the "Overton Window" has been constantly shifting rightward in my lifetime. The Republican Party is not the Party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower or the Roe v Wade jurists. It's the party of Jefferson Davis, Joe McCarthy, Don Corleone and Rodrigo Duterte. (Not even Ayn Rand because she's a WOMAN)

I suspect that Ayn Rand will remain in favour for longer than Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and such. Her views (which come from the ressentiment of the Whites who lost their positions in Russia after the revolution) predate neoliberalism, and once the “liberal” side of it is rejected, can pivot onto a more atavistic, reactionary basis of the inherent rightness of power. Heck, the world could even regress before Edmund Burke's “modern” conservatism to the ancien régime and the Divine Right of Kings and Rand's ideology would adapt with it.
posted by acb at 3:20 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


- Cleopatra was born closer to us in time than she was to the construction of the Great Pyramid.
- Tyrannosaurus are closer to us than they were to the existence of Stegosaurus.
- Tom Cruise is now older than Wilford Brimley was when he starred in "Cocoon".


New Order's “Blue Monday” Prince's “When Doves Cry” is closer in time to Bill Haley and the Comets' “Rock Around The Clock” than to today.

(Periodically replace the song with a more recent one, for the full effect.)
posted by acb at 3:33 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


The coal radiation one is actually a good choice for some lefties who are emotionally invested in nuclear power being unacceptable.

The problem with nuclear power is not just the structural designs of the reactors but also the structural designs of the regulatory regimes operating and overseeing them.

Nothing like Chernobyl or Fukushima should ever be built again. Assuming that there are more modern reactor designs which can fail safe, and do so when faced with a cascade of failure conditions as Fukushima was, they're OK, with the proviso being how they're regulated. Self-regulating private industry is a problem, as then corners would be cut to maximise shareholder returns, and bets would be made on things not going wrong, in the knowledge that the risk will be borne by the public. An opaque government bureaucracy is also a problem (especially with secrecy, and extending “national security” laws to prevent uncomfortable scandals from emerging will be tempting); there's the idea of “CYA” and “close enough for government work”. If reactors are built, the mechanisms which oversee them, and the mechanisms which keep those from being captured by the interests that run the reactors and would profit from a slacker regulatory regime, would need as much thought as the designs of the facilities.
posted by acb at 3:43 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


The fact that has caused this "backfire effect" for me most recently (that I can think of) was the media stuff about David Bowie raping a teenage girl that was tossed around after his death.

I have real trouble consolidating horribly negative things with all the good things about a person I admire or love. Previously I would have called it misplace loyalty, but I think it fits best here. It's like thinking to myself, "X is a horrible human being because they did Y, but I'll still buy their music because it's so great!" for almost every musician ever.
posted by tracicle at 3:53 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]


If the accusation against Bowie was difficult to accept and left you with an unsettling realization that you don't know him as well as you'd assumed and a worry that it might be true, that is not a "backfire". You'd need to somehow end up thinking more highly of him instead, based only on the evidence against him.
posted by sfenders at 4:41 AM on May 3, 2017 [8 favorites]


The coal radiation one is actually a good choice for some lefties who are emotionally invested in nuclear power being unacceptable.

It's only true when things are operating as intended, and most anti-nuclear campaigners aren't proposing to replace it with coal plants, exactly. Yeah, nuclear and coal are both awful. Come back to me with a factoid about solar panels or wind turbines being terrible for the environment, and you've likely got a better example.
posted by Dysk at 4:50 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


122 shillings for 9 teeth. Hmm. What did the entire human being cost in those days?

the likelihood that teeth were harvested from dead slaves...
Hmm again. Hard to know which possibility is worse. Thinking through scenarios of extraction here, my takeaway is that people are really bad at imaginative extrapolation from what they accept as given facts.
posted by glasseyes at 4:59 AM on May 3, 2017


Pretty sure you and pan are misreading Zarquon's comment, which wasn't saying the left is immune, but that there weren't any examples in the article itself to provoke a backfire response from the left.
posted by nobody at 6:23 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


Yeah, nuclear and coal are both awful.

Ah, now that looks like a live example of the backfire effect in action. You not only reinforced this belief in the process of thinking about it, but you were moved to positively reaffirm it by information that you perceived as intended to threaten it. Nobody else had expressed an opinion as to whether nuclear power was somehow made "acceptable" by this interesting fact about it.
posted by sfenders at 6:30 AM on May 3, 2017 [6 favorites]


Mainstream lefties tend to be neophiles - we like new information that challenges our worldview. (Perhaps a bit too much - Jenny McCarthy kills children.) We may be resistant to new concepts, but we'll mull them around and accept them in the course of time, as more evidence emerges.

The Mainstream right is a different sort of beast these days, and the comic was intended for them.

But, yeah, the time differences kind of rock me. Love it.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:35 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


Prince's “When Doves Cry” is closer in time to Bill Haley and the Comets' “Rock Around The Clock” than to today.

Nirvana's Nevermind is closer to Abbey Road than to today.
posted by Rock Steady at 6:38 AM on May 3, 2017 [7 favorites]


Jessica Price posted an interesting Twitter thread rebutting this article. Among her points: emotion vs. logic is a false dichotomy and promotes gender bias.
posted by DrAstroZoom at 6:46 AM on May 3, 2017 [8 favorites]


The Oatmeal cartoon is a good conversation starter about what beliefs are. They may not be as vestigial as they seem. The cartoon mentioned a primitive fight response when beliefs are challenged, but those beliefs might actually be the weapons and defenses themselves. If, say, someone wanted to either conquer or defend a tribe or nation, one is most likely to use a cultural belief to either initiate the war, or defend the territory. Humans have long figured out that people with nothing to fight for will fight better for an imaginary kingdom than a real one.
posted by Brian B. at 7:01 AM on May 3, 2017


- Cleopatra was born closer to us in time than she was to the construction of the Great Pyramid.
- Tyrannosaurus are closer to us than they were to the existence of Stegosaurus.


So wait, you're saying Cleopatra was a Tyrannosaurus? I don't believe that for one second.
posted by The Bellman at 7:02 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]


Tl;dr: I was promised a discomfiting feeling and didn't get it.

Well, yes, he had to include only ideas disconcerting to one side of the political spectrum so that it would get traction on the other. I've seen this shared on Facebook from at least five friends of varying stripes of lefty. I suspect that if he had included some facts threatening to a left-leaning worldview and others threatening to a right-leaning worldview, it wouldn't have been shared by many on either side.

It would have been particularly brilliant if he had produced two versions of the comic, one with right-threatening facts and one with left-threatening facts, with no direct connection from one to the other, to see where the different versions got shared. Although I suppose someone would have noticed by now if he had.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:04 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


Has anybody got any other verifiable, upsetting corkers in the same vein?

I can't believe nobody has brought up the fact yet, that about half of all humans wipe their butts standing.
posted by KTamas at 7:05 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]


Coal plants introduce more radiation into the environment than nuclear energy does.

This, like the teeth statement, show how a reframe of the source material can introduce error rather than clarity.

Is it the fault of English that 'nuclear energy' could mean:
1) The Sun
2) Fission power plants
3) Civilian fission power plants

While the cite talks about "ash" - does Fukushima and Chernobyl count as an "ash" release.
posted by rough ashlar at 7:06 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't believe. I know or I don't know.
posted by judson at 7:34 AM on May 3, 2017


Tom Cruise is now older than Wilford Brimley was when he starred in "Cocoon".

Stallone was the same age in Creed that Burgess Meredith was in Rocky.
posted by Etrigan at 7:37 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]


When Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years. (h/t Tom Lehrer)
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:34 AM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yeah, nuclear and coal are both awful.

Ah, now that looks like a live example of the backfire effect in action.


Exactly. It a reasonable quantity both could be integrated in a well renewable ecology, say as an economical backup that is only triggered at essential thresholds.

One real problem with the reproducibility of the backfire effect has got to be how tricky to identify exactly what the ensconced ideas are in differing populations. A problem in scientific communities and a problem in other communities like this one, liberal as in open to all ideas (as long as not too disturbing to a certain constituency)
posted by sammyo at 8:35 AM on May 3, 2017


George Washington was real. Benjamin Franklin was invented for propaganda purposes.

Faint of Butt, I suspect this was meant to be a joke, but it actually more-or-less true. Benjamin Franklin was invented for propaganda purposes by Benjamin Franklin.

This Radiolab episode, featuring On the Media's Brooke Gladstone, discusses how Ben Franklin basically lied his way through his autobiography, and single-handedly invented the myth of the "self-made man."
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:42 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


ODiV: "lol you guys still believe there was a George Washington."

fnord Adam Weishaupt, you mean? fnord
posted by namewithoutwords at 8:53 AM on May 3, 2017 [4 favorites]


As a leftie, the closest I have come to this feeling was when an epidemiologist who I personally respect told me that we (we being the medical community) really don't know all that much about the effects of vaccines or the causes of autism, and therefore it's entirely plausible that vaccines cause autism. Even though he knows a ton more about medical science than I do, I just can't bring myself to believe him (except in the sense that *anything* is possible).
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:02 AM on May 3, 2017


Tom Cruise is now older than Wilford Brimley was when he starred in "Cocoon".
Stallone was the same age in Creed that Burgess Meredith was in Rocky.


These are nothing. Nothing. Here's the real one:

Ralph Macchio is older now that Pat Morita was in The Karate Kid.

Game over, man.
posted by The Bellman at 9:03 AM on May 3, 2017 [18 favorites]


Exactly. It a reasonable quantity both could be integrated in a well renewable ecology ...

What? Leaping to the defense of nuclear power here is just as inappropriate a response as reflexively denouncing it. The new (hypothetically new, at least) fact we have about it is a point in its favour and should on balance make those who manage to properly assimilate it at least marginally less opposed to the idea, but it's nothing resembling an overall argument for or against nuclear power stations having a place in the world.
posted by sfenders at 9:37 AM on May 3, 2017


From the end of the last election, how did people here react to people who refused to vote for Clinton? Not vote for Trump, just decided to go Green or write in Mickey Mouse or what have you.

You're acting like Trump's election wasn't a big deal. We're just getting started with it. Me, I just called my congressperson yet again to preserve the ACA. If you didn't vote for Clinton, I hope you're at least calling your congresspeople frequently.
posted by JHarris at 9:51 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]


The idea that you don't see an equivalent level of WTF on the left kind of scares me honestly.

I don't see an equivalent level of WTF for lefties in this comic.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:20 AM on May 3, 2017 [2 favorites]


It was a fun read.

BTW, it seems that selling one's teeth was a thing in those days. Also, the sources didn't specify whether GW's teeth were taken off cadavers or handed over for a few coins by some guy who no longer wanted to eat corn on the cob.
posted by mule98J at 11:57 AM on May 3, 2017


an epidemiologist who I personally respect told me that we (we being the medical community) really don't know all that much about the effects of vaccines or the causes of autism, and therefore it's entirely plausible that vaccines cause autism.

He's wrong.
posted by Lexica at 1:01 PM on May 3, 2017 [7 favorites]


Someone needs to come up with a catchy name for how tenuous theories with catchy names can become established as truths when the scientific data doesn't back them up. Here's an interview with Ethan Porter and Thomas Wood, two scientists who went to great lengths in an attempt to reproduce the "backfire effect" with very limited success. Here's a quote:
But we have definitely not found any consistent evidence of factual backfire despite months of work on thousands of subjects. By and large, folks across the political spectrum were happy to move, at least some of the way, consistently with a factual intervention.
posted by Kattullus at 1:57 PM on May 3, 2017 [12 favorites]


Exactly. It a reasonable quantity both could be integrated in a well renewable ecology, say as an economical backup that is only triggered at essential thresholds.

Well yeah, except the way we tend to use both of them in practice is for baseload. Is it a defence of nuclear to say it's better than coal? Or is it damning of coal? What belief is it supposedly challenging? The idea that coal is radiation-free, or the idea that a nuclear power plant releases radiation into the environment when operating properly? It doesn't actually address whether either is a good idea, just compares a fairly irrelevant metric between the two.
posted by Dysk at 4:08 PM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]


Here's an interview with Ethan Porter and Thomas Wood, two scientists who went to great lengths in an attempt to reproduce the "backfire effect" with very limited success.

Well, now I'm even more convinced that the backfire effect exists.
posted by Etrigan at 5:13 PM on May 3, 2017 [6 favorites]


You mean what if the Backfire Effect is the proof of the Backfire Effect?
posted by fullerine at 12:20 AM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


...and I found myself without useable hands for most of the end of the election cycle.

Pretty much everyone's hands ended up broken after this election. Some from too much shaking with rage, others from excessive wanking.
posted by rokusan at 2:42 AM on May 4, 2017


While the cite talks about "ash" - does Fukushima and Chernobyl count as an "ash" release.

Even more significantly would be my guess, do depleted uranium weapons count? I watched a documentary I'm now annoyingly unable to find in a cursory search, which I'd have sworn was from the Deutsche Welle Documentaries section on Youtube, which claimed that not only is the uranium dispersed by fragmentation of the weapon upon impact but that the form of uranium most commonly used is flammable and can be ignited upon impact as well.
posted by XMLicious at 9:26 AM on May 5, 2017


I dunno, Republicans being the source of Roe v. Wade does break my brain a bit, given how things have shaped up since then.

How about somewhere between 140,000 and 328,000 birds die each year from collisions with wind turbines.
posted by fragmede at 5:02 PM on May 5, 2017


Solar concentration power plants fry birds straight out of the air as well. There's definitely a non-zero impact on bird life. I would like to know how that compares to the number of birds that die each year from collisions with windows and static buildings, though - I honestly have no idea if the above numbers actually represent anything significant. Much better example to my mind, still.
posted by Dysk at 5:08 AM on May 6, 2017


The lack of these examples triggering a backfire effect doesn't mean leftist people don't experience them.

Now, if this comic focused on facts about Hillary Clinton . . . well. The tone of this thread would be different indeed.
posted by Anonymous at 8:58 PM on May 6, 2017


Solar concentration power plants fry birds straight out of the air as well. There's definitely a non-zero impact on bird life.

Yes, but there aren't a lot of those types of plants (yet). Wind turbines are being designed and sited in locations where they pose much less risk to birds.

By far the biggest threat to birds in North America is the domestic cat. Way more birds are killed by cats than by flying into buildings or being hit by cars, or hitting tower guy wires or anything like that. Cats.
posted by suelac at 10:47 PM on May 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


For the record, wind turbines are impacting bat populations, perhaps far more than birds.
posted by Brian B. at 7:28 AM on May 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


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