I
Put it on your sticky note on your bathroom mirror:
Facts don't change minds.
Facts don't change minds.
Facts don't change minds.
Facts don't change minds.
Facts don't change minds.
We can't sit a bunch of kids in front of Einstein, have him spout facts, and expect little Einstein equivalents to come out of it. Why not?
Learning is context dependant.
If we want the kids to become expert physicists, there is a series of steps they have to go through. First, they need to understand vectors and mathematics. Then they need to understand the concept of waves and particles. Then they need to understand the nature of time, space, and energy and the way they are intertwined.
There are a thousand smaller checkpoints along the way that I don't know because I'm not a physicist, but the point is that becoming a world-class physicist requires at least some sort of order in their learning progression.1
The best first step in becoming a world-renowned physicist isn't talking to Einstein for a day, it's (probably) having a good high school physics teacher who 1) realizes which educational gap the student is at and 2) has the expertise and experience helping people cross that gap. The measure of a good teacher/mentor isn't how much more they know than you. It's how well they can see your personal limitations in the subject at hand and provide the tools for your next step forward.
II
An example…
Joe is curious about whether meditation can help with his anxiety. So he asks his scientist friend who studies meditation what book he should read. joe’s friend recommends Book A. Book A is a scientific examination of the various forms of meditation. It discusses medical imaging findings, randomized controlled efficacy trials, and theorized neuroscientific mechanisms. Joe reads it. Finds it dry and confusing. And is still confused about what meditation is and why you’d want to deliberately spend time doing nothing. On his own accord, he stumbles across Book B. Book B offers a more poetic description of meditation. It discusses how one can subtly alter the way they see the world in each moment (rather than merely accept what we think, hope, or fear it is) so that daily experiences are more felt, compassionate, and in tune with reality2. Joe loves book B and goes down the meditation rabbit hole.
Why wasn’t Joe’s friend's book helpful? 3
Every time we give people information (like a book suggestion), we are not giving them raw information. We are giving them puzzle pieces that must fit into their preexisting understanding of the world. We can’t just give the puzzle piece that helped us. There are inferential gaps, i.e. missing steps in reasoning, every time we try to explain something to someone else. To Joe’s friend, Book A was the red puzzle piece in the image below. It snuggly fit into his mental model of the world and helped make everything crystal clear.
But Joe doesn’t have all the light blue puzzle pieces in his mental model. When the scientist gave Joe that red puzzle piece, it couldn’t connect to anything. It didn’t make sense, so was discarded it.
III
Why does this matter?
We underestimate how many inferential gaps there are between us and our ‘opponents’. I see this on social media all the time. Two people shouting facts back and forth and both utterly dumbfounded by the ignorance of the other party. The current flavor of this phenomenon is the ‘COVID vaccine’, but the flavor is irrelevant. In a year, there will be a new flavor, with the same underlying principle. That is, an underestimation of the inferential gap. The shiny red puzzle piece you try to explain to the other party simply has nothing to stick to.
Remember - facts don’t change minds! There are countless things that need to be addressed before getting to the shiny red puzzle piece they seem incapable to grasp. Like, what counts as evidence? Why some kinds of evidence are more valuable than others? How much trust can we put on large institutions? Who qualifies as an expert? What does expertise offer the argument? What counts as safe? What is the value of personal liberties? The list goes on. These are much deeper topics that require much longer conversations. I’d venture that people have unchallenged assumptions nestled in these more fundamental questions that they have not thought much about. If you want to change someone’s mind, this is where you begin.
The default approach to changing someone’s mind is to take the pieces that seem important in your mental model of the world and regurgitate them. ‘Look, here’s these facts that persuaded me. Why aren’t you persuaded?’. I call this the here-to-there approach. You’re taking puzzle pieces from here (your model of the world) and trying to stick it into there (someone else’s model of the world). This is backwards. If you want to get someone on the same page as you, you have to start with their mental model of things and direct it towards yours. I.e. a there-to-here approach. Figure out where they are on the subject matter and what inferential gaps there are. Then slowly add the blue puzzle pieces such that you are building a bridge over to your shiny red puzzle piece.
The there-to-here approach is a much more effective algorithm to follow in persuasion, and it involves a lot less frustration than the here-to-there approach. It involves asking questions to clarify what the other person’s understanding of the topic is, how much they know about it, how emotionally invested they are, etc. Of course, this takes time and energy though. And unfortunately, the asynchronous, anonymous world of social media doesn’t give much space for these things.
Even with straightforward things like physics, you can skip around the order of things. It’s not like things must be learned in a specific order. You don't need an understanding of every nuance of Newtonian physics to begin to grapple with the weird quirky findings of quantum mechanics - like what a wave-particle duality is. It may even get in the way! Nonetheless, the order in which you learn the various parts of physics influences the way you interpret the subsequent parts. There is probably an ideal order to this progression (which current teaching pedagogy may or may not have)
I’m generally a fan of meditation but often find it overstated as a guaranteed way to ‘solve all your problems and make you happy, and if it does not do this then you’re not doing it right’. Meditation can certainly help foster compassion, mitigate psychological suffering, and the like. But just because you ‘meditate’ doesn’t mean you’re enlightened with wisdom now. It doesn’t mean your financial situation has magically changed. etc.
A strawman explanation is that Joe did a bad job asking his scientist friend exactly what he was looking for. Poorly designed questions yield misguided answers. Joe asked if meditation was effective for helping with his anxiety. Had Joe asked for a poetic hippy description of mediation, maybe our scientist friend would have offered Book B. While there’s some merit to this, it misses the more fundamental point. Even if Joe asked for a poetic description of meditation, Joe’s friend may have offered Book C, which is a poetic description of meditation that resonated with Joe’s friend, but still didn’t resonate with Joe.