Why It’s So Difficult To Change People’s Minds

One of the most important strengths of drawing a belief network as a graph is that it allows us to trace the path of justification when a believer backs up a belief. For example, if I argue against an ideologue, who has a very strong coherence in their beliefs, we may notice that when they hear an argument A, argument B, argument C, etc. for opposing their ideology, all their rebuttals follow a pattern(s) around the belief network graph that gives us a better idea of where to start dismantling their belief network.

A person’s understanding of other people’s belief networks is also a part of their belief network. If someone has strawman beliefs about someone else’s belief network, then that is a barrier to their understanding the other person’s beliefs, which in turn shapes their own beliefs.

The main drawback to drawing complete belief maps is that it is very difficult and time-consuming to show all of a person’s ideological beliefs, especially if they have dozens or even hundreds of beliefs with hundreds of connections between them. Since a person may have thousands or millions of beliefs, belief maps are most useful when they only show the ones that are relevant for understanding the psychology of an ideologue.

When people outline their arguments and premises, propositions, and conclusion format, what they are doing is that they are taking different notes from their belief network, and saying them in an explicit format instead of an implicit one. However, these textual belief networks have the limitation that they don’t always list all of the assumed implicit premises and selective attention biases that the believer used to reach their conclusion(s).

Often times, when people construct their own Internet Wikis or Encyclopedias (e.g. Wikipedia, Conservapedia, RatWiki, Metapedia, etc), the encyclopedia writers are just constructing articles that show the maps and details linking all of their beliefs together. Another example would be how this entire website and all its links illustrate what Zero Contradictions’ belief network looks like, aside from any out-of-date content or external links that mention beliefs that he disagrees with (but are otherwise mostly good).

When people criticize opposing ideologies, they will often have one argument that they think is a silver bullet that they can utter that will automatically win the debate in their favor. Sometimes this actually does happen, and it’s easier to happen the more ridiculous the opposing person’s claim is. When the supposed silver bullet doesn’t convince the other person that they’re wrong (and there is no censorship to shut the debate down), what usually ensues is a lengthy debate where the opposing ideologist recites other beliefs connected to the belief node that is under attack. This makes it challenging to refute even a single belief, because the debaters aren’t just attacking a single belief, they’re attacking the entire network of beliefs that all back up and support that one belief node.

When people convert to new ideologies, it can be gradual process if they’re slowly discarding beliefs from their former worldview (they’re removing the spokes within their belief network), or a really rapid process where a multitude of values and/or beliefs are discarded all at once when a particular value or belief is proven wrong or contradictory or when they choose to adopt a new theory of value (one of the central hubs of the belief network). Perhaps even a new ideology is introduced, although this part will often be a lengthy process since it usually takes time to adapt and get used to a new ideology.

For faster results, it is more efficient to attack the hubs of an ideological belief system rather than the spokes, when the persuader is reasonably certain that the core values and beliefs in a believer’s belief network can be disproven in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, this is usually harder to do because the hubs have many, many connections. You’ll almost never move someone to change their opinion by claiming and explaining their entire worldview is wrong. Most people will push back when pushed, so it’s usually a more successful strategy to introduce attack the “spoke” beliefs and spur them to discover the rest themselves.

We can think of the relative worth of dismantling other people’s beliefs in terms of a cost benefit analysis. If you manage to dismantle one of the beliefs that are relatively more well-connected than other ideas, then there is a greater reward for doing so, but at the same time, it can also be more difficult because the greater number of connections to that central belief make it very difficult to let go of. Conversely, attacking more minor beliefs could be easier since they have your connections to the other beliefs, but there is also a smaller payoff for disproving them due to their fewer connections.

Generally speaking, there is never a “right” way to dismantle someone else’s belief system because every person’s beliefs are different. It’s usually better to start with the spoke beliefs, or one can start with the hub beliefs if they’re really confident and they know the other person’s belief network well. They both have different payoffs that tend to correlate proportionally to the number of collections that they have, so the best beliefs to refute are the ones that you think you will have the best shot at.

It seems that people with fewer critical thinking skills tend to rely almost exclusively on pointing out contradictions in ideas that they don’t like, when they choose to criticize ideas. Higher-level thought would involve giving more comprehensive arguments why other people’s ideas are wrong. People who seek to convert other people’s belief networks generally aren’t interested in changing their own views because: 1. they already have strong confidence / coherence in their beliefs if they think that they can convert other people, and 2. people want to be in the front of social movements.

Dogmatic people won’t change their minds if they realize that one of their arguments is refuted. Instead, they will switch arguments. That’s a good indicator of a bad faith debate that they have a fixed conclusion. A rational person would put forth what they think is their most persuasive argument first. If they lost an argument and they’re good faith, they’ll say: “okay, you beat my best argument(s). I have to rethink what I believe.” If that one(s) is defeated, they won’t just switch to a weaker one, unless they’re genuinely curious about how the opponent would respond to it.

Doxastic Logic is a type of logic concerned with reasoning about beliefs. Some time, I should investigate it further to see what kinds of discoveries (if any) could be made if doxastic logic was used to reason about belief networks. Until then, I can only describe belief networks in terms of propositional logic, which I already know.

When drawing the directed edges between all the different nodes in someone’s belief network, we can label each of these edges with boolean operations, because the combination of these beliefs and the format of these boolean operations is equivalent to when people give formal arguments and explicitly list out the propositions that they used to reach their conclusions. If the directed edges do not have any boolean operations on them, then that indicates that one belief implies the belief in front of the arrow.

If there is a directed edge from belief₁ to belief₂ and a directed edge from belief₂ to belief₁, then that probably indicates that the relationship between those two beliefs (or two propositions, if we think of them as propositions instead) is a biconditional.

For example, if (A ^ B ^ C) -> D, then (~A v ~B v ~C) could make D undecided, but we would need software that can convey a 3-to-1 edge connection from A, B, and C to D.

Wikipedia: Confirmation Bias

A lot of people are aware of what confirmation bias is, but almost no one understands why it occurs, (since most people are ignorant of epistemology). Since coherence is necessary in order to form strong belief systems, this causes ideologues to make up bad ideas that aren’t grounded in reality in order to increase the coherence of what they believe and prevent them from recognizing how their ideologies contradict reality.

Since most people are unaware that belief systems are structured to coherentism, every time they see or hear something that they perceive to reaffirm their belief system, they only interpret what they have seen as more evidence for believing that they are right. They aren’t aware that Ideologies cause people to look for patterns that conform with their beliefs, instead of patterns that contradict their beliefs. Every person has an ideological filter that causes them to interpret events according to their ideology, instead of what the events are actual signs of.

Example: The 2022 Buffalo Shooting

• Conservatives pointed out how: 1. the shooter’s manifesto stated that he was always authoritarian left-leaning, 2. that he did the attack to provoke lawmakers to past more gun control laws that would supposedly encourage white people to fight for their rights, 3. they interpreted his race realism facts and study citations as racist pseudoscience (mainly because most people never got to see the manifesto since it was censored), etc.
• Leftists used the manifesto as evidence that white supremacy is a serious issue, despite how remarkably rare incidents like these are. And many leftists lied by saying that the shooter was a conservative (even though the manifesto says that he was left-leaning), etc.

Wikipedia: Apophenia

Ideologies cause people to look for patterns that conform with their beliefs, instead of patterns that contradict their beliefs. Every person has an ideological filter that causes them to interpret events according to their ideology, instead of what the events are actual signs of.

In order for memes and ideologies to reproduce themselves, they need to have strong links that reinforce the other ideas inside the believers’ belief systems, and crazy, ridiculous ideas can do just that. Some examples:

• Thomas Aquinas came up with his five arguments in favor of God because it was a way to increase the coherence of the Christian belief system, which is why the arguments gained a lot of popularity.
• How many Democrats believe that Republicans want Voter ID laws because they want to prevent minorities from voting, even though the real reason is that Republicans are concerned with voter fraud.
• How leftists will insist that conservatives are anti-immigration only because they are racist, when they’re actually concerned with crimes committed by illegal immigrants, and they believe that the country’s resources and welfare should be preserved only for the country’s citizens.
• How many far-leftists believe that right-wingers want people to have more children only to “create more wage slaves and feed Capitalism’s need for endless growth”.
• Many hard-core Communists claim that all the information about North Korea being a dictatorship instead of a democracy was fabricated by western and mainstream media outlets. Example. This belief is effective for reinforcing the belief in Communism because it gives the believers a reason to easily discredit the vast majority of information out there.
• How Libertarians came up with Cornucopianism to compensate with their belief that population control and other governmental measures are not necessary to regulate the population, even though it makes no historical or biology sense and greatly overestimates the potential of technology.
• This Ancap who came up with the conspiracy theory that the world’s governments want to depopulate the Earth as an explanation for why bad events are happening (from his POV).
• Many people instinctively reject race realism because they don’t know any better, and due to how memetics tends to work.
• Being taught all sorts of great things about individualism and independence is a factor that leads people (particularly Libertarians) to naïvely reject race realism because in theory everybody should be equal in an ideal individualist world.
• Some leftists think that that conservatives want to ban abortion because they “want to control women’s bodies”, when the real reason is that conservatives believe that unborn infants have a right to life.
• Creationists who insist that dinosaur bones were constructed and planted in the ground to provide evidence for evolution.
• These Efilists who assumed that Blithering Genius was a religious person and “pretends everyone else doesn’t have feelings” since it’s easier for them to believe that, since actually confronting his arguments against Efilism would weaken the coherence of their belief systems.

Interestingly, many of the craziest, most delusional lies tend to be brainstormed when political ideologues and utopian ideologists are trying to brainstorm propositions that they believe to be true (even if there’s little to no evidence regarding the actual truth) in order to maintain the coherency of whatever crazy, ridiculous nonsense that they believe.

Pro-life people frequently repeat that there are many contraceptives available, so there should be no excuse if a woman got pregnant from consensual sex. They repeat this frequently, because this justification is a major node within their belief network for opposing the legality of abortions.

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This image shows the following belief map for why Georgists believe that Land Value Tax would strongly benefit the economy:

Georgists also have a second belief map of beliefs and arguments for why they believe Land Value Tax is justified, which has many connected nodes to the belief map show above.

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Read More: Geolibertarian Arguments

Objectivism Belief Network Map: This image shows the standard belief map for Randian Objectivists. Source. Note that although this image / pdf was created to present what Objectivists claim to believe, it doesn’t accurately model their beliefs the same way a proper belief map should. Objectivists aren’t aware that knowledge is coherentist, not foundationalist. Contrary to what they claim, they’re wrong that all of their knowledge can be derived from just three axioms. A true belief network wouldn’t derive all of its beliefs from a limited set of beliefs, because that’s not how human minds work. Hence, a proper discrete graph representation of their beliefs as a coherentist belief map would feature cells with statements that would describe the implicit things that they believe and misunderstand due to their blindspots.

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Selective attention and ignorance make it harder for people to realize holes in their belief networks. Ignorance of implicit assumptions and contradictions is just as important to belief networks as the belief nodes themselves, but this is harder to realize because belief maps often don’t tend to have explicit nodes for their selective ignorance of contradictions.

If the awareness of implicit assumptions or the ignorance of some contradictions had never occurred, then many of the core belief network hubs and nodes never would’ve appeared in the first place. When belief maps are created, it is important to keep separate notes or a separate diagram, explicitly detailing how the believers’ stream of sensory input, selective attention, implicit assumptions, and thought process played out. If we are unaware of the believer’s implicit assumptions and how their selective attention is directed, then we won’t be able to figure out how all the beliefs in the belief map formed in the first place. Blindspots affect how beliefs are formed.

For example, many Anarcho-Communists have a node in their belief network that if people don’t work under Capitalism, then they will die. But if they were to draw belief maps representing their own beliefs, they wouldn’t think to add a node or note to the diagram that they’re ignoring that literally every economic ideology requires people to work, lest they die. People are guaranteed to die on a deserted island if they don’t work to find food, water, and shelter.

As another example, Alloidal Libertarians joke about who will build the roads, but they’re implicitly assuming that car-centric urban planning is the best when they say this, even though it definitely isn’t. Alloidal Libertarians are focused on the wrong solutions to achieving the best public transportation, and their ignorance of good urban planning practices is a major reason why they fail to understand Georgism. Alloidal Libertarians are clueless about urban planning because they don’t recognize the grave economic, political, and environmental importance of it, and it’s not a topic that is usually discussed in Libertarians circles to any significant extent, except for when they’re complaining about government changes that made urban planning worse.

The main reason why exposure to other people with different ideologies/beliefs is important is mainly because it enables us to focus our attention on beliefs that may have been ignored by our selective ignorance / attention. To a somewhat lesser extent, it can also expose us to different logic/reasoning that can improve the correspondence of our belief networks with reality.

Individuals that have less selective attention and fewer gaps in their attention are more likely to have higher intelligence. Selective attention is one of the key reasons why people with above average IQ can potentially have ideas that really brilliant people never thought of, especially if they had more time to think about some of the things that lead to their more original ideas.

• Humans evolved from the Great Apes.
• Humans adapted to use tools and primitive technologies to enhance their survivals. This implies the use of knowledge to some extent.
• Humans had thousands and thousands of primitive religions, many of them were polytheistic.
• Civilizations arose. A portion of humanity’s modern knowledge erupted.
• A lot of nonsensical philosophies also developed (e.g. Classical Elements of Greece, China, etc., Eastern philosophies, the world’s modern most populous religions).
• Knowledge and new technologies continue to develop, but Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and other religions continue to be humanity’s most dominant forms of philosophical thought.
• The Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, and Industrial Revolution pioneered the way for reason to become more ingrained into Western culture, and people formed more rational ideas about the world.
• Today in the present, religions, inaccurate philosophies, ill-thought-out politics, and especially Humanism are unfortunately still very influential in the world.