How do you debunk people that does not believe in experimental facts?

[technix]

Consider religious texts as 100% true and interpreted literally

We have countries filled with those people and (true to their religious texts' requirement) try to shove their religion down everyone in the world's throats. And they have bombs.

 

[RoGeorge]

[Electro Detective]

Consider religious texts as 100% true and interpreted literally

We have countries filled with those people and (true to their religious texts' requirement) try to shove their religion down everyone in the world's throats. And they have bombs.

 

Those are straight up psychopath 'leaders', and that includes the good guys as well as the bad (and ugly) on both sides of the game.

Note please the 'bombs' usually drop far away from all the psychopath leader inhabited cities

It doesn't work like The Terminator, On The Beach, Planet Of The Apes movies, where everyone everywhere gets nuked equally   

Thatsa no gooda for business 

[HighVoltage]

Q: How do you debunk people that does not believe in experimental facts?

A: You can't.

+1
And you stay away from them or the subject matter of discussion.

[Electro Detective]

Q: How do you debunk people that does not believe in experimental facts?

A: You can't.

+1
And you stay away from them or the subject matter of discussion.

LOL, agreed    

nothing funnier than a fiery debate about who is at what level of brainwashing and conformity        

and this is before the beer starts flowing     

[Jeroen3]

You can actually. It's really complicated though, they have to be the experiment subject.
When they experience something that does not meet the expectations of their biased minds, they will be very confused. The somewhat intelligent ones will accept it, the others turn violent.

[tszaboo]

Consider religious texts as 100% true and interpreted literally

We have countries filled with those people and (true to their religious texts' requirement) try to shove their religion down everyone in the world's throats. And they have bombs.

Yes. Very religious countries, like USA, middle east, africa. They have to put up with soo much bullshit in their daily life, I think their bullshit-o-meter just stops working. I mean if you live your life with thinking about the man in the sky (or whatever), believing things like Bigfoot is much easier, than empirical evidence. I think the concept of causality or critical thinking is just not working for these people, they have probably some kind of brain deformation. Believe it or not, half the population has less than 100 IQ, by definition.

[TerraHertz]

Here's a nice presentation of the Backfire Effect. Related to beliefs, and rejection of information contrary to one's existing views.
  http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Then there's
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

[Vtile]

I once read a study that pointed out that most stubborn people are among the most intelligent and educated ones. They were the most efficient ones to argument their false believes to truth to themselfs. Humans are funny animals.

[Cerebus]

yet continues to honestly believe that the world is a few thousand years old

He doesn't honestly believe it.

Oh, I've known him for a long time (nearly 40 years) there's no doubt that (1) he believes this (2) he is honest and sincere in that belief. This isn't some televangelist out to line his pockets, it's a decent honest bloke. I used to share a flat with him, he gave me my first lesson on a motorbike, we used to go climbing and drink beer together.

What has happened is his brain is divided into different compartments, the scientific compartment and the religious compartment. When he argues for a young earth he is voicing the agenda of the religious compartment and suppressing the agenda of the scientific compartment. It has to be understood that most people, most of the time, have an agenda, and what they say is driven by their personal agenda. There is nearly nobody who speaks impartially, based on a purely rational assessment of the situation.

Look him up on You Tube (Marc Surtees), you'll find all manner of talks he has given. There's no doubt that he's simultaneously engaging the religion and science parts of his brain. That's the bit I can't comprehend, he is not compartmentalizing his thoughts on the matter. This isn't classic cognitive dissonance where the disparate facts are carefully kept away from each other in the brain, this is actively pursuing his religious agenda with science and where, to you or me the two would clash and force us to one conclusion, in Marc they don't and take him to a different conclusion. Yet, he is capable of forming correct conclusions the rest of the time. Its not a question of agendas, it's a question of "Why hasn't he talked himself out of this belief system by now?" and my inability to comprehend how that has not happened.

[TimFox]

WRT engineers, one of my co-workers was a "wing-nut" who, of course, did not believe in global warming, biological evolution, or quantum mechanics.  On the latter point, I remarked that he would have to stop using solid-state electronic devices, which require quantum physics to understand and predict their operation, and go back to vacuum tubes, which are (almost completely) described by classical physics.

[coppice]

The American military did not believe that they would need to compensate for relativity when they commissioned the GPS constallation. They (reluctantly) encorperated a method of compensation with the assumption that they wouldn't have to turn it on. After finding that the position was wandering by about 10km a day it was turned on and the problem went away.

This is an widely spread myth. GPS was one of the things which finally proved that GR explains reality very well. Without solid experimental evidence to base their design on, and with making relativistic compensation so cheap and easy to switch in and out, it made perfect sense to make it selectable. Of course, now that evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates the veracity of GR, nobody sane would build a navigation system which doesn't bring it into the calculations.

[grumpydoc]

Q: How do you debunk people that does not believe in experimental facts?

A: You can't.

+1

>"who believes that the pharmaceutical industry cover up all sorts of alternative medicines because they can't make money from them"

I could give you a lot of examples of treatments that exist for common health issues which aren't at all well known because they work and are cheap.

Example, resveratrol for joints/disc/back pain and arthritis

It actually helps repair joints. 

With respect, you know about it, Google knows about it, it's dirt cheap and available over the net without a prescription, it's even been talked about on Oprah, it's not exactly the cover up of the century is it...

Anyway, I can see this subject won't go anywhere but downhill so I'm bowing out gracefully.

The "big pharma cover up" is something of a myth - although for-profit drug development does warp things a bit.

Basically if resveratrol worked, "big pharma" would have no problem taking the molecule, tweaking it to be better, or less toxic, or whatever - but most importantly patentable, then selling it at artificially high rates to make a good profit. It's "what they do" after all and, by and large, they are good at it.

Heck if there was just solid evidence behind it they would probably have no problems making it and selling it for modest profit. Again, pharmaceutical companies are very good at making high purity organic molecules cheaply (it's that "what they do" thing again) and most off-patent drugs will have several companies making them and making profit from them.

But, and here's the thing. Resveratrol, while "interesting" has no clinical evidence behind it - a few in vitro studies is about it (and some concern about increased breast cancer risk). So it is no more interesting than the 100,000's of molecules that the typical pharma company screens for drug activity; continuously looking for the magic bullet that is going to make them, or rather their shareholders rich.

There was a company set up to try to exploit it so it got further than some of these things but it was not a success.

[technix]

The American military did not believe that they would need to compensate for relativity when they commissioned the GPS constallation. They (reluctantly) encorperated a method of compensation with the assumption that they wouldn't have to turn it on. After finding that the position was wandering by about 10km a day it was turned on and the problem went away.

This is an widely spread myth. GPS was one of the things which finally proved that GR explains reality very well. Without solid experimental evidence to base their design on, and with making relativistic compensation so cheap and easy to switch in and out, it made perfect sense to make it selectable. Of course, now that evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates the veracity of GR, nobody sane would build a navigation system which doesn't bring it into the calculations.

Now we have two even better experiments up there. The Russians misfired their rockets and sent two of ESA's Galileo satellites on some awkward highly elliptic orbit instead of the usual circular one. Since the solar panels, control surfaces and the atomic clocks on those satellites still work, ESA repurposed those misfired satellites into experiments of GR time dilation effects. We will start to see papers coming in in the upcoming years.

[f5r5e5d]

I understand that the latest clocks can be used to demonstrate GR in the lab, bench top scissor jack height range delta

[xrunner]

I've debated the religious-minded folks for many, many years on other types of forums. I kindof got burned out on it, but I still do it from time to time. The really interesting endeavor is not so much trying to convince them of certain objective facts, which to them seem outrageous, which they seem to ignore or twist into pretzels. Rather ask them what methodology they use to determine what is true or false in the world, or how they determine that the things they believe in can be classified as knowledge¹ in their own minds.

If you delve into that, you will understand what you are dealing with, which is to say again that actually trying to do the convincing in a logical and rational manner is a waste of your time.




1. The classical definition, described but not ultimately endorsed by Plato, specifies that a statement must meet three criteria in order to be considered knowledge: it must be justified, true, and believed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge

[CatalinaWOW]

Part of this is admitting that there are few if any "facts".  Just good explanations.  And all of our explanations have holes and hand waving in them.  Currently the biggest and most obvious include dark matter and dark energy.

Many things that people pound on desks about as science are not as robust as we would like.  Climate science is a perfect example.  Climate is being predicted decades and centuries into the future.  While most of those creating and studying these models do not do this, many others regard these predictions as delivered fact.

How many of you would trust an unverified Spice model of a circuit?  Spice is far more mature, and the circuits you can model with Spice are far simpler and better understood than the climate.

None of this may help in convincing someone who doesn't listen to facts, but accepting that truth is hard to obtain and that you may not have perfection on your side can help in discussions with those of different views.

[james_s]

There are indeed giant holes in our knowledge. Your point about SPICE is a good one, I would not fully trust it, although if my simulation says that a small signal transistor is going to be dissipating 150W I'm going to trust the simulation effectively telling me that my circuit is not going to work. I don't know how accurate the long term climate predictions are, but there's enough data to tell me that something is not going to end well on the current trajectory.

[mtdoc]

I've said it before on this forum but it's worth repeating:  Just because science is uncertain about many things,  does not mean it is uncertain about everything.  Some people use the relative uncertainty in some areas as justification for discounting all science that disagrees with their religious or political views - or threatens their lifestyle.  I deal with this issue everyday in my work.

Trying to convince someone who discounts the science in any particular area due to their religious, political, etc beliefs is rarely going to be successful.  But letting their views go unchallenged in a public space is also unwise IMO, since it gives the uninformed the erroneous impression that their ideas are based on facts.

[Cerebus]

I've said it before on this forum but it's worth repeating:  Just because science is uncertain about many things,  does not mean it is uncertain about everything. 

Indeed. We're knowledgable enough about Newtonian mechanics and optics that we can create entire CGI films that are good enough that they would fool people, say 40 years ago, that they were looking at objective reality, i.e. an actual photographed film of real actors (and aliens and dinosaurs). There's much we can be as certain about as it is possible to be certain.

[schmitt trigger]

[ Sadly, he will generally return to his default state once you stop.

I call them non-retriggerable monostable minds. 

[Vtile]

Part of this is admitting that there are few if any "facts".  Just good explanations.  And all of our explanations have holes and hand waving in them.  Currently the biggest and most obvious include dark matter and dark energy.

Many things that people pound on desks about as science are not as robust as we would like.  Climate science is a perfect example.  Climate is being predicted decades and centuries into the future.  While most of those creating and studying these models do not do this, many others regard these predictions as delivered fact.

How many of you would trust an unverified Spice model of a circuit?  Spice is far more mature, and the circuits you can model with Spice are far simpler and better understood than the climate.

None of this may help in convincing someone who doesn't listen to facts, but accepting that truth is hard to obtain and that you may not have perfection on your side can help in discussions with those of different views.

Good post, heh. It is hilarious to read or listen how the chemistry were taken as a science not long ago, but in view of todays scientifical consensus it were total BS, with all sorts of burning and nonburning airs and what nots. My own believe in science is that is the best approximate working explanation we atm. can get. If all goes well and I retire in old age I wouldn't be suprised that something that is written to the stone today will be then judged to be BS. One example that goes close to every EE is the complex circuit analysis with common concentrated circuit models, it is just an approximation (even with ideal components in ideal cases), not actually 100% precise. It starts to fall apart in long cables or high frequencies (the relative speed of light and wave state in components). Also something like operational calculus have not been here too long, actually my grandparents were born before it were scientifically accepted if I have understood correctly. While this is not a science either but a normal polar representation of complex number as |r| L angle weren't mainstream not until like ww2.  ..Or tin whiskers something that is not fully understood by science, but certain engineers face it daily basis.

Still science is usually right.

[Cerebus]

Also something like operational calculus have not been here too long, actually my grandparents were born before it were scientifically accepted if I have understood correctly. While this is not a science either but a normal polar representation of complex number as |r| L angle weren't mainstream not until like ww2. Science is usually right.

Errm, Calculus was devised independently by Gottfried Leibniz (b 1646, d 1716) and Issac Newton (b 1642, d 1726) so you must have very, very old grandparents! Complex analysis has been around since at least 1545.

[Vtile]

Also something like operational calculus have not been here too long, actually my grandparents were born before it were scientifically accepted if I have understood correctly. While this is not a science either but a normal polar representation of complex number as |r| L angle weren't mainstream not until like ww2. Science is usually right.

Errm, Calculus was devised independently by Gottfried Leibniz (b 1646, d 1716) and Issac Newton (b 1642, d 1726) so you must have very, very old grandparents! Complex analysis has been around since at least 1545.

Not operational calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_calculus and not polar representation with |r| L angle notation of complex number (|r|e^i*angle before it) weren't widely adapted not until of somewhere ww2 time period (atleast on electrical sciences. side note in book of Prof. D.sc. Martti Paavola, Sähköjohtojen laskeminen (calculation of transmission lines), 1947) if you have sources of its history I'm more that interested to read those.

And complex circuit analysis with ideal components and consentrated network models is just aproximation, that is why there is transmission line theory and analysis (my translation, hopefully correct).

[Cerebus]

Also something like operational calculus have not been here too long, actually my grandparents were born before it were scientifically accepted if I have understood correctly. While this is not a science either but a normal polar representation of complex number as |r| L angle weren't mainstream not until like ww2. Science is usually right.

Errm, Calculus was devised independently by Gottfried Leibniz (b 1646, d 1716) and Issac Newton (b 1642, d 1726) so you must have very, very old grandparents! Complex analysis has been around since at least 1545.

Not operational calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_calculus and not polar representation with |r| L angle notation of complex number (|r|e^i*angle before it) weren't widely adapted not until of somewhere ww2 time period (atleast on electrical sciences).

Sorry, in the rather fragmentary English I took the 'operational' as a mis-chosen adjective, not as meaning 'Operational' (The capital letter makes a difference). Polar representation is as old as the hills, Leonhard Euler certainly used it. Perhaps you're right in that it didn't catch on in electronics until late, but I doubt it.

An aside: The first proper description of all the operations of Complex Algebra is down to Rafael Bombelli, which I kind of knew. What amazes me is that I can download a PDF of a full scan of his second edition of L'Algebra from 1572 with a single click. Thirty years ago if I'd wanted to see a copy of this I'd probably have had to travel to Bologna to read it in the university library there. (It's in 16th century Italian, I haven't a hope in hell of actually being able to read it in detail, but it's fascinating to get a glimpse into the state of the art in 1572.)