I have looked into some of these studies and realized that it’s near impossible to change people’s minds.
Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches their already held opinions.
There's a fantastic book[0] about positioning in a marketing sense, that explains, among many other things and IIRC, that the mind is fundamentally a WORM machine; you almost never can overwrite existing information (or, with extreme effort and time; you can add new information but for it to be accessible, it needs a different key/name/index.
So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it.
The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf.
I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more.
Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels.
I don't think this is particularly strange when one thinks about the effect of ideology. It has a way of filtering any common reality different people have. I'm not sure how to move towards a common understanding without a larger sense of shared experience, but even then the same experience can have different interpretations.
That being said, having shared experience can help, at least anecdotally, in being able to come to terms with wildly differing views. One example I have is with my brother. With the same event we had come away with a drastically different understanding. The facts between us all checked out, and we confirmed it many times. Yet the shared vocabulary gave us a way of acknowledging the others disagreement in the shared experience.
Zoom in on the tree leaves, it's very visible on those. They appear as green rings, slightly lighter on the edge, giving it the appearance of a ring. You can also see it very clearly in the spots of sky between the leaves, they appear grey with an almost white outline.
Specular light sources always like ornamental balls in out of focus areas. What's wrong with it here is they are much brighter along the outside than the middle, and they have a funny shield like shape.
That said, I can't see this with the image open filling my 27" monitor, I can only see it zooming in. Perhaps if you are printing a wall sized photo, use a real camera.
We should not be wary of loud truths either. Unless we push the envelope we cannot trace back to the essence. Like, as an outsider in this discussion, I am now inclined not only to assess the finding, but also the definition of an organ. The title did good work. Its refutation too. Fencing every statement in unquestionable truth does not make the pursuit of truth stronger.
But there’s rarely one correct answer. Conveying the same approximate message to multiple types of readers is extremely difficult in a handful of words. People with subject matter knowledge are annoyed by headlines written for laypeople that don’t know the jargon or have a mental model of the important concepts that jargon represents. They always seem to miss important distinctions, make poor analogies, or the like. Headline-length blurbs that successfully convey those things to the knowledgeable are often utterly opaque to laypeople causing them to ignore articles about topics they’d find interesting. The only option is trying to estimate the subject matter expertise of the audience, and despite many people in the tech world assuming their software knowledge gives them technical expertise in many non-software fields, the layperson headline is absolutely the best approach here.
This is not true. There is a complex relationship between truth and good communication. The relationship is non linear and convoluted and it depends often on the subject of what is being communicated.
There are many many cases where lies are easier to communicate than the truth.
Take tobacco for instance. For the longest time we did not know it was bad for you. It took decades of epidemiological research and statistical techniques to ascertain that it was bad.
The truth was buried in numbers and human knowledge about applied mathematics and statistics. Without centuries of human endeavor to create the concept of science unionized with the rigor of statistics the truth would have remained forever invisible.
The sheer complexity of the truth in this case makes is extremely hard to communicate. We mostly trust that smoking is bad based off of the reputation of the researchers who established that fact. But the truth was never really directly communicated to most of us as it involves diving deep into the data.
> There is a complex relationship between truth and *good* communication. [...] There are many many cases where lies are *easier to communicate* than the truth.
You're literally conflating good communication with easy communication.
The truth about tobacco was known for years but ignored because 1) industry lobbying and 2) the Nazis were the ones who figured it out, and pushed anti-smoking hard, so smoking became something "our side" did, 3) tobacco was still a huge US export.
It was easy to communicate, but we were motivated to not listen.
No the deaths were buried deep in the statistical data. It’s not apparent and we did not know either way.
Yes there were people who said it’s bad but their word was as good as bullshit because until we had the statistics there is literally no way to truly know.
No, the Germans had good statistical data linking smoking (as well as asbestos and other carcinogens) to cancer by the 1930s; this was known and ignored (or actively derided) by the allies. It's one of the classic and well known examples of ad hominem.
Self awareness means would be taking a step back and knowing if you're caught in a vicious cycle, trap, loop, pursuing something mindlessly.
Discipline would be turning this into principles you practice constantly, it's more of a lifestyle rather than a skill you "obtain".
For example, starting from the position of "I am taking on an idea where I may have knowledge gaps in" you first prompt for research and validation rather than execution. Even if the end result is you were right on your original design. (Sort of a challenge, adversarial, by default)
It will slow you down, but may lead to more sticky results.
Then you should adhere to yet another unwritten rule while we're at it: Don't use smileys. Especially not to change the meaning of your statements. You can just drop them and say what you mean, that makes communication easier and clearer. This is not facebook where people talk via emojis.
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