You Can't Tell Me What Not To Think (II)

Last time I looked at the backfire and Streisand effects : when attempts to refute or suppress an idea go badly wrong, convincing people it's actually true and/or attracting unwanted attention. We saw that neither of these are guaranteed to happen during any argument, and that the backfire effect in particular is likely mostly due to bad rhetoric. The Streisand effect depends on curiosity and the extent of the information which leaks out, and that no-platforming policies may actually be successful if the audience already knows what the speaker would have said.

We also saw that the effects of arguments are not limited to strength of belief. They can also cause us to like and trust a source more or less, depending on our predisposition towards their argument. Feedback loops even between a couple of individuals can then become extremely complicated, with the persuasive effect of an argument causing one side to like the other more, which in turn causes them to like their argument more, and so on. Add to that that people can hold many different ideas and rarely see eye to eye on everything, and it's clear that at best, all we can suggest here are broad guidelines. There's no programming manual for people.

Which is not to say that these guidelines aren't useful or important. In this second part, I want to summarise what's known about how persuasion works on a one-to-one basis : how and why specific techniques work at the level of a single issue. Specifically I'll concentrate on the different factors at work when people form conclusions, which, partly due to psychology and partly due to the fundamental nature of meaning*, they simply cannot do based on the evidence alone. The one major aspect I'm going to deliberately gloss over, which I've already hinted at, is information flow rate. That ties in with the spread of ideas in groups, which I'll largely limit to the the third, concluding part of the trilogy.

* I wrote that bit while drinking whisky and feeling extra pretentious.


How do people form conclusions ?

... and what is a conclusion, anyway ?

The question, "what is knowledge ?" has plagued philosophers for millennia, with the best answer generally reckoned to be something along the lines of, "mumble mumble mumble justified true belief mumble mumble things that you clearly and distinctly perceive mumble mumble mumble".

I've decided to skip one of the biggest topics in human existence. Fortunately it's incidental here anyway. All we need is to look at what it is that convinces people something is true, to which psychology has provided some more definitive answers.

Of course, even deciding what we mean by "what people accept is true" is not straightforward either. There are differences between knowledge, belief, and behaviour. For example on a roller-coaster you may know, intellectually, that you're perfectly safe, but you may still scream like a little girl as though you're in serious peril : you don't necessarily have any choice about what you believe. Virtual reality simulators can make us jump and duck when things appear to be about to hit us, even though we intellectually know we're perfectly safe. Even self-knowledge isn't perfect, with well-documented examples of people being deeply mistaken about their own ostensibly very important, powerful emotions, as well as their own self-knowledge of morality and their own sexuality. Habitual behaviour provides another case of doing things we may not think are really necessary. And the less said about goals, the better : suffice to say that merely knowing something doesn't mean we care about it. Finally there's the enormous topic of intelligence : that knowing a fact doesn't mean we understand or accept it (which I shall largely gloss over here). The point is that the relationship between knowledge and behaviour is horrendously complicated.

However some behaviour remains inexplicable.

Even when restricted to conscious thought we run into difficulties. When we learn new information, our brains don't automatically say, "right, let's check if that fits with absolutely everything I already know or if I'm gonna have to chuck out some conclusions so I don't get a terrible migraine". This makes it possible for conflicting ideas to live alongside one another. So, if someone believes one thing, that does not mean they can't believe something which is in apparent contradiction. Maybe they shouldn't, but they do anyway.

In some ways this is reassuring, since implicit bias studies have found that people tend to favour white males over other demographics, even if they're not a member of that group. You might conclude that means they're all secretly deluded, self-hating bigots. Thankfully the brain's ability to graciously host completely contradictory ideas means that that's not necessarily the case, even though people can very well act as though they indeed are self-hating bigots. Behaviour, then, doesn't necessarily tell you what people really think. It's far more complicated than that.

Doctor Who may have taken it a tad literally, but humans really are paradox machines.

Attempting to determine if there are multiple levels of beliefs and knowledge and how these relate to behaviour is definitely a matter for professional psychologists and philosophers. Still, I think something useful can be useful said about the common sense understanding of the phrase "something people sincerely believe is true".

Some researchers have proposed five different criteria by which we assess proposed conclusions (which in turn leads to a wide variety of different methods of evaluating information) : our trust in the source, how many other trusted people we know that believe it, whether we think the evidence supports that interpretation, whether we think the argument is coherent, and how it fits in with our existing knowledge and beliefs. That puts some interesting flesh on the bones of the statement last time that people disbelieve information if it contradicts too much of what they already know, which we'll explore more fully in part three. The point here is that while reality is objective, our interpretation of it is often anything but; that at the most fundamental level we are unable to reason without trust and emotional influence. Don't underestimate the difficulty even of ascertaining how someone reached a conclusion, much less if their conclusion is correct or not.

For now, although you can find umpteen articles about this all over the web, here's my own take on the matter.


Comparisons to what we already know

We all of us have access to internal and external memory. We are capable, under the right conditions, of comparing our observations with this vast database of our own and other people's findings. But though our long-term memory does come into play, this is a demanding task, and our default comparisons are much simpler : they are relative, recent, and local.

This simple statement has remarkable explanatory power. For example, by rights we ought to be constantly thrilled by our access to clean water, electricity and other modern conveniences our ancestors lacked. But we aren't, because although such things are seen as wondrous for a little while, they quickly become normal and accepted, so we only appreciate them when they're taken away.

At least according to Terry Pratchett's Hogfather anyway.

We're also tremendously bad at estimating our own happiness and the state of those around us, and what the long-term effects of major events will be on our own state. More subtly, when we're aware of a problem, we start to actively seek it out. When it diminishes, previously minor issues become as important as the major ones used to be. Things that were not previously threatening can then become so. This also explains why why people in privileged positions become jerks : for them, a minor difficulty is genuinely perceived as being much worse than for someone used to it. And it helps explain why we sometimes excuse our bad behaviour by our recent good actions, and, somewhat more unexpectedly, why we put shitty things in time capsules*.

* Some even have it that this can explain the lurch to the right the Western world is currently experiencing. I disagree that this is primarily due to rapid technological development, though I'm more sympathetic to the idea that some other perceived rapid change - social, political - has at least an indirect but significant contribution.

Problems are bit like fractals : once you zoom in, details that were once small and insignificant become just as important as larger features. And our bias to the recent means we don't appreciate improvements - even massive ones - as much as we should.

This means that if we debate with someone, they'll primarily evaluate our statements relative to their own recent* experiences. We learn mainly (some argue entirely) by induction, and only with effort and/or training do we sit down and actively attempt a more objective, impartial analysis. Part of the reason why arguing with people on the internet is so hard is that we rarely know much about their relative, recent, local experiences. Exotic and normal are both relative states, and arguments that may be fabulously successful in persuading some can massively backfire with others.

* Whether "recent" should be taken literally or not is unclear. It could be rather that we compare current events to the last few similar experiences, regardless of when they occurred - a soft of "numerical recency", if you like.

That's our default behaviour., but again, sometimes we do take the time to analyse things more carefully and impartially. There doesn't seem to be much research as to the conditions under which this happens or what makes us most rational - rather the standard approach seems to be to assume we behave logically by default and see what goes wrong. But equally, it's worth bearing in mind that we do need evidence to form a conclusion. Even though the broader context - ideology, existing beliefs, trust in the source, etc. - matters a great deal, context still has to operate on evidence. It doesn't always mean the observation is particularly astute or the reasoning very good, but reality usually has some role to play - even if only a perverse one. And that's well worth remembering. Most of the time our brain does a job which is "good enough". If it didn't, we'd all be dead.

Natural selection isn't foolproof, mind you.

Ideology and emotion : winning hearts and changing minds

Ideology may be loosely defined as the way we think the world should work. One notion I rather like is that there are different moral elements which we all value to different degrees. Such "moral sliders" might be independent of (though not necessarily uncorrelated with) intelligence, giving different basic ideological systems. According to this, liberals most value care and fairness, whereas conservatives prefer loyalty, respect, and purity (though most people will value all five of these to some degree). We may be hard-wired with initial settings for these, or they may be set down early in life, and it's unclear how far (or how easily) these values can be adjusted later on.

However we arrive at them, moral values provide a very fast way in which we can evaluate a statement, and changing someone's ideology is difficult at best. If we want someone to believe something, it's better to try and frame it to be compatible with their ideology instead - personal examples can be found here*. Unless you've been living under a stone on Mars your whole life, I bet you've witnessed arguments rapidly degenerating because someone insists that the other side shouldn't merely stop liking something but actually hate it instead : they try and shame people for their beliefs. Which makes their moral sliders fight back hard, causing a spectacular backfire (it seems the brain registers attacks on core ideas using the same it has for dealing with physical threats). Hate and anger and shame are all very powerful forces, useful for rallying the troops and inspiring action, but you can't just demand people hate whatever target you choose. If you actually want to get people on your side (and of course sometimes people just vent because ranting feels good) and get them to hate what you hate, you've got to go about it with much more subtlety. As we saw last time, changing stance and changing strength of belief are different. More on that later.

* Couple of shorter recent examples : I thought this video on the obesity crisis was interesting, as was this article on sugar, despite contradicting my existing opinions.

And I suppose "bass boost" is equivalent to how loudly
someone shouts while "virtualiser" is how many news
channels they appear on...

Sometimes, as on a roller-coaster, the difference between knowledge and belief can be extremely enjoyable. The contradiction between reality and expectation can often be extremely interesting, or, if we have no (perceived, conscious, ideological) expectation, we can accept new findings without much dispute. On the other hand perceived ideological conflicts with reality seem to be almost always unpleasant, usually provoking us to rationalise away new information rather than re-evaluate our core beliefs. The leading theory seem to be that this is because we have an emotional investment in these ideas, such that they've become part of our identity. And as we noted last time, social praise can increase our belief in an idea.

Emotional manipulation can have sinister uses : if you keep people permanently angry, afraid or otherwise highly emotional, it becomes impossible for them to think straight. That strips away their rationality leaving only their emotion-driven ideology to deal with. And of course you can manipulate emotions physically as well as through information : you try being rational if you're exhausted or massively aroused, for example. Or indeed suffering from lead exposure. Nutrition has also been suggested as a key aspect of human cognitive development.

If you can't convince them, confuse them. Or terrify them. Better yet, do both.

What I particularly like about this basic concept of moral beliefs is that although they may be linked with intelligence (or not, doesn't really matter) they act completely independently of it. So in an argument, you're effectively fighting different, sometimes opposing forces : getting someone to accept something intellectually is a different matter from gaining their ideological approval - and they don't even have any choice about the latter. Perhaps that's part of the difference between knowledge and belief. If I tell you, "don't worry about the sharks, I can easily save you !" and you can clearly see I'll easily be able to rescue you long before the sharks arrive... well, that knowledge is clearly going to do you little good against the belief in the approaching dorsal fins and their associated big nasty teeth.


Trust

In an ideal world we might evaluate statements based purely on their content. In reality this would be Bloody Stupid, because liars would quickly overwhelm the (literally) terminally honest (I strongly recommend playing with the interactive simulations in that link). More on the group dynamics of this next time, but here the relevant message is that we evaluate statements based on who's saying it and in what context. For all its limitations, this gives us a much faster, easier way to assess truth than carefully working through the details of an argument ourselves. It's especially important when dealing with conclusions from highly specialised areas of expertise.

Additionally, people don't always say exactly what they mean, so context really does matter : a drunk bloke in a pub doesn't carry the same weight as a book by an Oxford professor, even when the bloke is the author of the book. And trust is a function not just of who says something and how they say it, but also what they say : I trust my dentist's knowledge of teeth but not necessarily of archaeology. Even the physical nature of the communication medium may be important, possibly due to cultural conditioning (i.e. "books on dentistry are reliable, drunkards rambling about Mesoamerican architecture are not") but maybe even due to the very nature of sensory perception.

The point is that who makes the argument may matter as much, or perhaps more, than what they say. And the arguments they make can change our perception of them in a complex feedback loop. For instance, we know that people we view as competent are seen as more likeable when they make a mistake, but if we already view them as incompetent, mistakes cause us to like them less (there is presumably a limit to this, beyond which we start to re-evaluate our more fundamental perception of them).

Establishing trust is tricky. You've got to establish your intellectual credentials, and often this can be remarkably easy (e.g. be an article on a major website, don't be a commentator on said website). In such cases trust tends to be the default option - sheer social prominence seems to engender an extraordinary amount of credibility; witness celebrity actors or even just attractive people who gain legions of followers because boobs, apparently. Less prominent individuals have to work harder. More important than credentials and cleverness may be to demonstrate goodwill, that you're trying to do right by everyone. Expertise can be limited, but goodwill is seen as an inherent property that you'll always have.


Expectation

The impact of culture is hardly fully understood. But what seems clear is that the data doesn't speak for itself, and some things have to be taught. Evidence is crucial, and some interpretations seem to be natural and universal... but others don't. That's another enormous topic I can safely skip. For our purposes it simply means that people evaluate things based on their own memory using the methods they have been taught, which will differ at an individual level as well as between whole societies. Even merely saying, "focus on this", can have profound effects. The gorilla test is probably the most well-known example, but it's also worth remembering that without being prompted almost everyone passes easily.




Behaviour

While we might usually try and change behaviour by changing opinions, changing behaviour can change thinking. People in positions of authority can, for example, create rules for behaviour that lead to people rationalising (consciously or otherwise) why they do it. We might even start to impose rules on others without understanding their purpose. What I find really interesting is the idea that more intelligent people can be better at this self-justification, whereas it's more critical people who actually stop to question things. Analytical intelligence is, I suggest, the ability to process information to form a conclusion, whereas criticality is the ability to overcome bias. They might very well be linked, but they aren't the same thing.

Obviously this method of dictating the rules to change belief isn't available to everyone, but then, neither are any of the others. Our default - and I'm as guilty of this as anyone else - is to assume that in any argument we'll be able to change other people's minds straight away with good evidence. But for strangers on the internet, to take a simple example, we have no idea who the other guy is or what their agenda might be. We assume that our own conclusions are completely rational and evidenced-based (or equivalently that our own ideology is just obviously the right one) but, somewhat paradoxically, we think of the other person as equally logical but not necessarily trustworthy and perhaps very stupid. Brains are weird.


Cognitive ease

The final aspect of how we form conclusions I want to mention is cognitive ease, probably the biggest key to persuasion of all. If something fits with our existing beliefs and ideologies, is framed in such a way that it fits with our world view, methodologies, is expressed in a simple way, and comes from a trusted source, then it's easier for us to believe because it's easier for us to process. We're also less likely to examine things we agree with as carefully as those we don't (confirmation bias). Conversely things which go against some or all of these conditions force the brain to work harder. That can make things harder to accept, but it can also make you better at rational analysis. There really is something in this old comic after all :

Though it should be remembered that this is a guide to how people think, not what's true. Sometimes things are simple and right or complex but wrong. And what can seem simple and even unavoidable to one person can seem complex and abhorrent to others, and vice-versa. The reason we make comparisons based on relative recent experiences is because this is much easier for our brain than if it had to sift through our entire memory, carefully making pro/con tables and summing everything up quantitatively. It may be a fast way to reach a conclusion, but it's not exactly the most careful or exact method.

We've already looked implicitly at some ways an idea will have cognitive ease, but there are some which are less obvious. Sensory input seems to matter, e.g. whether a font is easily readable, whether someone's name is easy to pronounce. So does mood - being happy makes things easier to accept. To a point, anyway.

Rhetoricians have been exploiting this for millennia, using statements designed to appeal to vanity and ego, making their audience feel special and individual. A skilled orator has an abundance of parameters to exploit that simply aren't available in plain text : pace, tone and pitch of voice, physical gestures. Their emotions are (or at least so we like to tell ourselves) easier for us to sense, so we think we get a better indication of whether they're being truthful. Of course this also gives a skilled liar more tools to work with. Here's an example of something that's obviously word salad in text form that (apparently, though God knows how) wasn't so clear to the audience when spoken :

How the holy flying crap that persuaded anyone I'll never know. A much more common approach is to tell a story. This engages us personally as well as being incremental*, so that each new piece of information is small and builds on the first in a consistent development : each successive advance is cognitively easy. Perhaps one of the most skilled approaches of all is to get people to think they're working things out for themselves - they can hardly believe themselves to be inconsistent (even if they actually are), and they will tend to frame things within their own ideologies anyway - whilst actually manipulating them. Socrates was famously bad at this. Others are more successful.

* I'm not sure if the Google Plus link will be preserved, but the story is nice : "Apparently a few years back Ebay changed their page background from white to yellow. Everyone hated it, huge outcry, so they changed it back to white (don't do this). Then a clever engineer had an idea. They made it so that gradually, over the course of several months, the page background changed from white to yellow. Did the users notice? Of course they didn't!"

The tricky thing about cognitive ease is that if you want to get people to think, you have to get them to deal with uncertainty, whereas if you want to persuade them, you shouldn't leave a narrative gap. The problem is that people often prefer an incorrect to an incomplete explanation. Yet it's usually easier to argue towards a state of uncertainty than going straight for the jugular. Sometimes you can say, "well, actually there were several different factors at work as to why your daffodils exploded". This doesn't leave a gap but does allow some uncertainty about which reason was most important (was it the gunpowder or was it the... oh, fine, bad example). After all, there are gaps and then there are G  A  P  S. Surely the worst case would be to say, "we have no idea what it is, but we're certain your explanation is wrong".

One technique I particularly like is to ask someone to think of something that could undermine their belief by themselves. It's a very direct attempt to promote critical thinking rather than trying to simply win people over.

More difficult are the cases where someone's interpretation is just plain wrong, e.g. the exact opposite of what the data indicates. It's not possible to make everything equally simple, but I suggest that if someone's interpretative methodology is flawed, explain to them why using unrelated examples that they don't care so much about. For preference, don't do it there and then. Bring it up some other time, otherwise they might twig as to what you're doing and you might only make them think that your method must be wrong.

Time itself is a big factor too : things which are cognitively challenging take more time to analyse by definition. Changing stance seems to be almost inherently cognitively challenging, so give people time to mull things over. Don't expect to win them over on a difficult topic there and then - much more on this in part three.

And be sure to mention the original interpretation as little as possible : studies show that if you go about explicitly debunking something, people can remember the the explanation you wanted to disprove more than the correction. If you have to mention it, start and end with the correct explanation, mentioning the erroneous interpretation only briefly in the middle. Rebuttal articles (the kind that only say, "this isn't true" rather than trying to find out what's actually going on) can be useful, but only if people are neutral or already dislike whatever's being refuted : they enhance existing belief, but are not necessarily persuasive. As we saw with ideology, you can't just tell people to be angry about something : you have to strip away their approval of an issue before they can start to attack it for themselves.

Finally, one important aspect of cognitive ease is simple repetition. We may have a bias towards information we learn first, since it should be easier to implant a brand new idea than change an existing one. After that though, if you repeat a lie often enough, they say, it becomes accepted as truth and you may even start to believe it yourself. But it isn't just lies. A more accurate (though less appealing) statement would be that the brain has an easier time processing familiar information and is therefore more likely to accept it as true. Extra emphasis on more likely. It's not guaranteed. If it wasn't already obvious, it really should be now : all of these remarks are only guidelines. The brain isn't a programmable computer, but it's not as mad as a million monkeys on a million typewriters either. With notable exceptions, of course.

Repetition is complicated. While it's not necessarily a good idea for individual people to argue their case based on many different reasons (people become suspicious and wise up to the fact you're trying to persuade them), I'm not aware of what happens if you get different reasons for the same conclusion coming from different people. My suspicion is that this would be very persuasive indeed, but we'll look at the effects of group dynamics next time.



Summary

Last time we looked at some extreme hypothetical cases. But most of the time it's not these extremes we're after. Yes, we might go on a rant about Edward Gibbon's crappy writing occasionally. And yes, sometimes we might want (even need) to do the verbal equivalent of hurling stones at an angry cat.

Usually though, we do actually intend to change someone's mind in a significant way, not by the trivial case of basically agreeing with what they already think or getting them to believe something even more passionately, but by fundamentally altering their stance on an issue. That means that at some point they will have to become uncertain in order to change their opinion. According to all the links cited here, the way to increase the chance of success is to minimise the difficulty and maximise the pleasure that this presents. It's essential to remember that all of these techniques will only ever increase the probability of success, and they've got to be adapted to the audience :

• Try not to argue with people who don't like you. Accept that you won't be able to make any headway and might make things worse. Don't fight battles you can't win, work with what you've got. This doesn't mean giving up, but it does mean accepting limitations to what you can do. Think of it this way : if you try and argue with some people, you'll only make things worse. So don't do it !
• Frame the argument to agree as much as possible with existing beliefs and especially ideology. Make it seem not so different from what they already support, ideally an incremental change. People are perfectly capable of believing contradictory ideas at least as long as they don't notice the conflict, and even then they won't instantly choose one position over another. Try and work with their morality - don't try and change their ideology directly ! And if they are after hard evidence... give it to them.
• Don't present the argument as an argument, try to avoid starting a debate. Don't make them argue the position because they'll feel defensive even if you don't say anything personal. That doesn't mean you may as well hurl abusive insults at them though ! And recognise that their personal experiences will be different from yours and may have biased them in different ways.
• Present your case in as simple terms as possible. Repeat your main point (but not incessantly) and stay focused. Try to use a single main argument rather than lots of lessor reasons. If the point is complex, then engage the senses, use pictures, tell a story, and employ other tools of extended cognition. Let the brain do as little work as possible. It'll have to do some, just try to minimise it. In contrast, don't confuse people by using these more complex methods to describe something where a simple factual statement would do.
• Be as informed as possible on the subject concerned - ideally, an expert with a recognised qualification. You don't have to shove this in their face instantly, but you can slip it in more gently : "Well, actually, I wrote a paper on....".
• Recognise that you might be wrong, but don't admit to definitely being wrong. Acknowledge your own uncertainty (even if you don't have any, although to be honest if that's the case then you've probably already lost). Especially as a non-expert this will then put you on a more level playing field and you won't be seen as unjustly trying to claim superior knowledge of something that, for both of you, may be really just a hobby.
• Understand the alternatives before discussing them : cultivate meta-knowledge. This allows you to have a stab at understanding the appeal of the alternatives. And if you don't know about the alternatives beforehand, your own position may be a lot more down to bias than you you'd like to think.
• Try to minimise the damage that your argument would entail. It's much easier to believe oneself to be misinformed or acting out of a positive intention than to say, "actually, I was being a bit of dick". That conclusion is possible but the result of a longer process. Give people legitimate reasons to excuse their belief, i.e. they were misinformed and/or well-intentioned. Don't present them as the villain.
• Minimise the amount of gaps. If at all possible, present an apparently complete (though perhaps somewhat uncertain) alternative. Rather than saying, "we have no idea", say instead, "it could be this or that, but we're not sure which". Try to mention the thing you're trying to refute as little as possible.
• Give people time to come around. If you're changing their stance on a complex issue, they're going to need time to think things through, possibly re-evaluating a lot of supporting arguments as well. Yours are not the only arguments they're experiencing.

As these are only guidelines, it's also worth mentioning that sometimes using extraordinary methods can have truly extraordinary results. I've kept this list and the discussion focused on more everyday situations, as most of us don't have the capabilities to induce the intense levels of emotional manipulation (or medical treatments) such methods require. Just keep in mind that it doesn't always have to be softly-softly : sometimes, a hammer blow of emotion delivered at just the right moment can have astonishing results. It's just damn hard to do this by writing someone a short text message over the internet.

But the main message has been hitherto implicit : the brain doesn't have a built-in, objective truth analysis package. Such a thing may even be fundamentally, philosophically impossible. The closest it gets to direct, true objectivity is through direct observation, and even that's not perfect. Most of the time it seems to judge based on consistency. If all available factors agree - ideology, assessment of self-consistency, prior knowledge, direct observation, other trusted people - then belief is very strong. It cannot rely exclusively on evidence because evidence without trust is not evidence at all. It has to use those other factors. We should be less surprised that people come up with stupid ideas and far more surprised that they're able to come up with any ideas in the first place. Or, as a wise man once said :

Or at least he said something very similar. Doesn't really matter who said it anyway.

Which means that if you think someone has come to conclusion based on less than rational methods of analysis, don't even bother trying to torture them with logic. Work with those other factors instead. It sounds ridiculous, but maybe the thing to do is think of some completely irrational arguments and try those instead. After all, if stupid people can't understand their own stupidity, then the same should follow for irrational people as well.

People and ideas are bloody complex. Even the most self-aware people don't stop and consider their own biases when they decide what brand of toothpaste to buy, and even the stupidest can sometimes realise when they're being particularly dim. There can be a complex interplay between what someone says and how you perceive them : if you already hate them for other reasons, you may start to hate what they say, and if you already hate an idea, you may instantly dislike someone new if you learn they agree with it. At the extreme, you may come to view someone's support of an idea as evidence of their bias and never be affected by what they have to say at all. This isn't intrinsically a bad thing, it's just how people seem to work. And people who are highly intelligent are not necessarily very critical : if they're in the full grip of an idea, they may simply be better at rationalising it rather than really examining it.

Although of course "believe" and "think" can also be used interchangeably. I'm gonna let you have some cognitive challenges by not telling which sense of the word I'm using.

So the backfire effect is at best only partially related to the actual facts. Yes, people may be predisposed towards disliking certain facts because of their existing beliefs. But this doesn't mean that stating those facts is definitely guaranteed to cause them to cling more strongly to their ideals. Rather this seems to depend far less on what the issues are than on how they're framed and who is stating them. Avoiding the backfire effect and using persuasive rhetoric are almost interchangeable terms, saving that the neutral option of having no effect whatsoever is also possible. Rather than the issues themselves being the problem, it's articles that use pure rhetoric, pure chest-thumping "us against them" invective diatribe that cause the worst backfire.

Remember how last time I was saying that one study found no evidence of a backfire at all ? Well, there's a nice comparison with an earlier study which did. For example the earlier study described a statement which was designed, but failed, to correct false beliefs about WMDs in Iraq (I'd prefer to keep this apolitical, but this is a an actual psychological study so blame them) :

Immediately before the U.S. invasion, Iraq had an active weapons of mass destruction program, the ability to produce these weapons, and large stockpiles of WMD, but Saddam Hussein was able to hide or destroy these weapons right before U.S. forces arrived.

And here's a version which didn't produce a backfire effect :

Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces did not find weapons of mass destruction.

Look how different they are ! The first might not exactly be War & Peace, but it's a pretty darn complex narrative to cram into such a small space. It doesn't exactly mention the original idea, but it comes close : it keeps talking about the existence of the weapons. It's incomplete and potentially uncertain, "hide or destroy", giving multiple possible explanations when, as we know, people prefer to have only one. These aren't necessarily at odds if you stop to think about it, but on a quick reading it suggests that it isn't known what really happened. And doesn't it smell awfully convenient that they were destroyed "right before" the invasion ? That alone sounds rather unlikely, phrased such as it is. Event though it doesn't insult anyone, the statement is wide open to misinterpretation.

In contrast, the second statement is a blunt fact. It's not that it denies there may be uncertainty. It's that it doesn't even open the mental doorways to uncertainties in the first place. There's no complexity about what happened : either the Americans did or did not find weapons, that's what we're discussing, not even why they weren't found but simply the fact that they weren't found at all. It is absolutely focused. There's no complexity. No uncertainty. No scope for argument of any kind. It's just too simple to be misunderstood.

Finally, we've seen that belief seems to follow a threshold-like behaviour. If someone does something stupid, your perception of them alters depending on whether you already view them as competent or not. If you trust someone, you view their behaviour and weight their ideas very differently than if you don't. If you already accept an idea, emotive rhetoric may strengthen your belief, whereas if you don't, it might backfire - stance and strength of belief are different. Likewise the techniques used have to be done at the right level - you can't just keep repetitively and tautologously repeating and repeating the same thing endlessly again and again, over and over, day in day out, or write everything in blue boldface comic sans to make it easier to understand. And as we saw last time, people like to be challenged, but not so much it makes them feel that the effort is just not worth it. The old golden rule of presentations is absolutely correct : know your audience. What works on one person is not in the least bit guaranteed to work with others.

If you want a more detailed guide to persuasion, I highly recommend the video below.

Personally I find Lindy's style of rhetoric very compelling for educational

videos, though I can't for the life of me see this working for political statesmen.

And while I agree there should be more lessons on rhetoric in schools, I

can't agree that there isn't any at all.

You might come away from this thinking, "Great ! I now know all I need to become a master of rhetoric. I shall bend the world to my will and remake it for the better". Well, hopefully not because you should now bloody well be aware that knowledge and behaviour aren't the same, if you weren't before. And in fact very little (if anything at all) of this is new. Still, if we've known all this for so long, why do people seem so damn stubborn about clinging on to obviously wrong ideas, yet so susceptible to change for the worse ? Why hasn't some wise, charismatic, persuasive person managed to put a stop to this nonsense ? Well, what this discussion is lacking is other people, a factor so large it can - sometimes - render all the others useless, thus making this post a complete waste of time.

So in the third, concluding part of this mini-series, I'll examine how information flows affect belief in a group context. Can we really stop bad ideas from spreading, and if so, how ? Should we try and restrict speech or will this inevitably backfire ?

You Can't Tell Me What Not To Think (I)

Marine Le Pen, right-wing French nutter, was recently "uninvited" to a technology conference. Nicola Sturgeon, leftist leader of Scotland, is boycotting an event featuring badly-groomed nutcase Steve Bannon. Predictably enough, these choices triggered concerns that they might provoke a sort-of variant of the notorious backfire effect, in which an attempt at persuasion causes someone to hold more strongly to their original opinion. The hope is that by banning a speaker, they have less of a platform from which to attract supporters and less legitimacy; the fear was that the ban would attract more attention than if they were allowed to attend. Similar claims and concerns beset every incident of "no platforming".

The backfire and Streisand effects are distinctly different : the backfire effect is when an argument causes or strengthens the opposite belief it was intended to, while the Streisand effect is when restricting speech attracts unwanted attention. Both share the common feature of being an effect opposite to the intention, and while not the same they are not mutually exclusive either. Both relate to the moral principles and effectiveness of attempts to control the flow of information.

This is the first of three posts in which I'll concentrate on the effectiveness. In particular, under what circumstances do bans successfully prevent the flow of information and when do they have the opposite effect ? When they backfire, do they cause a wider spread of information or does it only strengthen existing belief, or both ? Or neither ? When does exposing a viewpoint only harm its supporters, and under what conditions does it help normalise the idea and help it spread further ?

In this first introductory post, I'll concentrate on persuading individuals and the effects that arguments can have on them in isolation. In particular I'll give some extreme examples to illustrate the main point : that it's not the ideas themselves which matter, it's their conditions which govern whether they will attract unwanted attention or simply fall on deaf ears. In the second I'll summarise the more general, typical causes of successful and unsuccessful persuasion. Finally in the third I'll examine the flow of information in groups and why this isn't as simple as the persuasive techniques used between individuals. Although there are plenty of links to my own musings, for the most part I've tried to make this one into more of a compendium of findings from actual psychological studies.

So, let's begin.



When the backfire effect doesn't happen

The backfire effect is so popular on the internet that sometimes one gets the impression it's an inviolable law of nature that can never be avoided. Let's start by knocking that one on the head and start with some simple hypothetical examples that may lead us to more general trends.

Do you always decide to believe the opposite of what anyone says under any circumstances ? Or is your sense of morbid curiosity always inflamed whenever someone tells you not to do something ? Of course not. If your dear old mum tells you it's raining outside, you don't insist that it must be sunny. And you definitely won't insist on continuing to believe that it's sunny if she was proven correct on checking. That level of irrationality is very rare indeed. Even if you already thought that it was sunny - say you'd looked outside yourself a few minutes ago - what this new information will generally cause is not, I'd say, active disbelief, but simple, momentary confusion. You probably won't even feel inclined to check at all : you'll accept it without question, on trust. In fact you won't even care.

Or suppose some lunatic claimed to have discovered a goose that laid golden eggs bitcoins, and no news outlets bothered to report it. Why would they ? Lunatics say crazy things all the time by definition. There's no news there. What would happen ? Simple : no-one apart from those within shouting range of the lunatic would have any idea of what they're saying. The idea might still spread by word of mouth, but because it's such an uninteresting story it would spread very, very slowly - even on social media. It would probably not reach many people*, and hardly anyone at all would be believe in the magical goose**. It'd be discussed but only because it was silly, and only other lunatics would actually believe it. If anything, it'd be the lunatic causing people to disbelieve them by shouting obvious nonsense, not the media who weren't reporting it. Not even if people discovered the media weren't reporting it.

* It's an under-appreciated fact that most things people say on the internet do not go viral. The overwhelmingly vast majority of discussions remain extremely limited and don't propagate in the slightest. Or maybe it's just me being reeeeally boring... ?
** Not to be confused with the Magical Moose, of course.

So in this example the backfire effect would occur, but it would obviously be the lunatic who was distrusted, not the media. Why ? Because anyone with an ounce of rational judgement can instantly say that the madman's claim is far more probable to be nonsense, and thus they would lower their trust level of the lunatic and possibly even increase their trust in the media (if they had reported it, they'd have been criticised as being gutter press - "give us some real news !"). Only other lunatics would behave in the opposite way. There would be no Streisand effect at all, and no backfire effect on the media.

Or to put it another way, people have access to multiple sources of information. Shouting about a bitcoin-laying goose is in such absolute contradiction to all of those other sources - science, direct observation, etc. - that it couldn't be believed by anyone rational.

Now imagine that the media decided to actively report on the fact that they weren't reporting a story. "Nope, there's definitely nothing interesting about ol' farmer Bob, he's just a crazy old coot." Well, if there's nothing interesting, why in the world are they even reporting it ? Suddenly I really wanna know who farmer Bob is and why they're not reporting on him ! An active, promoted ban is like having evidence of absence (there must have been something to search for, something that can be absent), which is very different from a complete lack of reporting, which is more like having absence of evidence.

Yet while this will certainly draw attention to the issue that it wouldn't have otherwise had, and it might sow distrust in the media, it still definitely won't cause more people to become more receptive to the possibility of magical geese who weren't receptive anyway. Oh, it'll cause more people to believe in magical geese, yes, but only by reaching a greater a number of plonkers than the case of pure non-reporting. It won't make anyone the slightest bit more susceptible to believing nonsense. There's a big difference between spreading information and causing belief, and an even bigger difference between making people hold rational conclusions and them actually being capable of rational judgement.

And the thing about actively-reported bans is that these effects are largely temporary anyway, because few of them stay actively reported for very long. Stories about people being unwelcome in certain venues tend to last about a day or two in the media but rarely longer than that because they quickly become uninteresting non-stories. Only very rarely does this ever seem to cause a viral story with mass attention it wouldn't have otherwise received. Novelty would seem to be an important factor - usually when a speaker is barred, we already know the gist of what they would have said, whereas with information - books, music, academic papers - curiosity is inflamed. The Streisand effect seems to be more related to what they wanted to say than who was trying to say it.


All this presumes both that most people are basically rational and that the media are trusted. The situation is completely different if there's a chronic culture of media untrustworthiness : if the media are not trusted, then nothing they say can be believed. And how can you have people behaving rationally and believing rational things if they have no coherent, reliable information to assess ? You can't. Isolated examples of nonsense simply cause the inherently irrational to more fully develop their own irrationality; in contrast an endemic culture of reporting gibberish inevitably has the entirely different effect of actually making people irrational. You cannot have a rational society without trusted information.

Which is why, given the chronically irrational state of British politics, there's a non-negligible chance I'll be voting for these guys at the next election.

So we know for certain that at the very least, information doesn't equate to an automatic backfire effect. Politicians don't try and win approval by always saying the exact opposite of what they really think. Advertisers don't tell you their product is utter shite. We don't lie to each other the entire time. We're often more rational, or at least more honest, than we give ourselves credit for : I'd say that our irrational, incoherent behaviour is only unleashed when we have to deal with situations our evolutionary history hasn't prepared us for. Basic social interactions are therefore fine, but understanding statistical methods and interpreting complex data - that's where we fall down.

We also know that there are entirely ethical persuasive techniques that give measurable, significant increases in appropriate responses that don't use or cause the backfire effect at all. And there are methods of argument that are specifically designed to avoid the backfire effect. More on these in part two.

At least one study has gone to the extreme and claimed that the backfire effect actually never happens. #Irony, because that surely encourages believers in the backfire effect to believe in it more strongly... it's most likely an overstatement, but the study was quite careful so we shouldn't dismiss it out of hand. It suggests, I think, further evidence that it's not inevitable, and may depend much more strongly on how the counter-arguments are framed than we might have guessed. The broader social context - e.g. current global affairs - and raw factual content may play only minor influential roles. Stating the blunt facts is not enough in itself to cause a backfire, even if they have obvious, emotional consequences. Rather it's about how those statements are presented and in what context : who says them, how they make the other side feel, and what alternatives are available.



When the backfire effect does happen

The backfire effect may not be ubiquitous, but it's hardly a rarity. Think of the last time you heard a politician speak, and I bet there's a fair chance you ended up believing the opposite of what they intended - unless you already agreed with them. Or better yet, not an actual politician but a political activist : someone trying to promote belief in broad ideologies, not necessarily specific policies.

The backfire effect happens largely when you already dislike something : either that specific piece of information, or, perhaps more interestingly, you have other reasons to be predisposed to disliking a new idea. There's also a very important distinction between disliking the source and disliking what it says. For example, I loathe Gizmodo's sanctimonious reviews of apolitical products, e.g. movies, but they tend to make me hate Gizmodo itself more than they ever make me hate whatever it is they're reviewing.

It doesn't always react like this to all new concepts, of course.

Even more subtle, you might hate an argument but that doesn't necessarily mean you don't accept it. The acceptance level and emotional approval of an idea are surely correlated, but they're not the same thing. I mean, Doctor Who is wonderful and all, but it's not a documentary. I might accept its moral teachings but reject its wibbly-wobbly, pseudo-weudoy "science". Or I might reject that it has any applicability to the real world at all, including its moral commentary, but still find it entertaining. Political satire provides another case of enjoyable lies that attempt to reveal deeper truths.

Perhaps the simplest case might be when you've already formed a firm conclusion about something and then you encounter a counter-argument. Depending on the amount of effort it's taken for you to reach your conclusion, and especially if you're emotionally invested in it, the opposing view may not go down well. But even here there are subtleties - again, it might just cause you to dislike the source, not believe any more strongly in your view. And even that might be temporary : when you just casually read something you think is stupid on the internet, you can simply say, "that's stupid", move on, and that mildly unpleasant incident might not even persist in your long-term memory at all. Things you dislike can thus have no impact whatsoever.

There are a couple of possibilities which might cause a genuine strengthening of your belief. The argument itself may do this, depending on how it's framed : saying, "all Doctor Who fans are stupid" isn't going to stop anyone from watching Doctor Who, and might even make them enjoy it more : it induces a group identity, they will now make their Doctor Who fandom a - slightly - more important part of their identity. Or it may simply press the wrong buttons, using emotional rhetoric ("Daleks are shite !") for people who want hard data ("Daleks only exterminate 24.2% of people they interact with !"), or vice-versa, only using hard data for people who need an emotional component. Or it may use ideas and evidence the opponent is already convinced aren't true, automatically giving them reasons to be suspicious. Or perhaps the supporting reasoning is fine but only the final conclusion isn't compatible with their existing beliefs, or at least isn't presented as such. There are indeed very many ways in which a persuasive technique can go wrong, with large variations between individuals*. Unfortunately, one man's compelling argument is another's pointless and deluded ranting.

* Witness the success of targeted advertising, with the significant caveat that advertising isn't terribly effective so improvements aren't necessarily that difficult.

A more interesting failure may occur with rebuttals. One important lesson from school debates (and indeed the above links), where we often had to argue positions opposite to what we initially thought, was that this emotional attachment does cause a true shift in stance. Getting people to argue for something gives them a sense of ownership; it becomes part of their identity (not necessarily a very important one, but it doesn't have to be). Counter-arguments are then registered by the brain in the same way as attacks, even if the argument wasn't personal at all. While it surely helps to avoid saying that the other guy is a stinky goat-fondling loser whose mother was a cactus, that's not always enough. Mere argument with the issue itself is subconsciously perceived as an attack whether we intend it as such or not (though in a carefully managed situation explicitly framed as a debate, this is not necessarily the case).

And we're not always on our own either - we may be part of a group. Feedback plays an important role. If people praise us for what we say, we're more likely to believe it. So if we're receiving praise from "our side", and criticism from those smelly losers, then even the carefully-stated, well-reasoned statements of the other side may struggle in vain and cause us to dig our heels in deeper. This is perhaps why certain philosophers preferred to debate people one-on-one or in small groups, never en masse.

Note the key difference between changing a strength of belief (making you hate Doctor Who even more than you already do) and changing the stance (making who hate Doctor Who when you previously liked it). Techniques to cause both effects are not necessarily the same : insulting members of different groups isn't going to cause them to like you, but it may strengthen the bonds within your own group. Most political memes, on that basis, seem to make a massive error by trying to rally support, seeking to motivate the existing troops rather than gain new recruits. More on that in the other posts.


Who do you trust ?

So while hating the source doesn't automatically lead to disbelieving an argument, it can eventually have an even stronger effect. One possibility is, as mentioned, that we don't trust anything at all, becoming pretty much entirely irrational about everything. Another is that we fall victim to extreme tribalism, entering what some people call an echo chamber, an epistemic bubble, or what I like to call a bias spiral.

When you despise a source strongly enough, you may be capable of hearing their arguments but not really listening to them. Every vile word that comes out of their whore mouth is processed not as legitimate information, but wholly as evidence of their partisan bias. If they give you evidence - even really good, objective evidence - that counters your belief, you may see it only as a further indication of their own ideological ensnarement. This is both a manifestation of and route to absolutist thinking, where you already know the facts so any contradictory statements are simply evidence that the other side is lying, stupid, or themselves trapped in their own cult-like filter bubble. You have in effect become inoculated against opposing ideas, and can listen to them freely but with little chance of them ever making any difference. Everything the opposition says can have a backfire effect. Which isn't good.

Not listening is bad enough, but perverting evidence is much worse.

And that's where I think people tend to get confused about the effect restricting information has. It doesn't necessarily mean the Streisand effect will cause the idea to propagate further. It won't necessarily mean the idea gains a single new devotee. But what it can very well mean is that in certain circumstances existing believers become even more convinced, if not of the idea itself then certainly of the bias of the other side. The effect on non-believers can be more subtle, but more on this in part three.

That's a really extreme case, of course. A more common, lesser manifestation is activist thinking : at some point, we all want to convince others of something because we genuinely believe we're right. Someone who is on an active campaign of persuasion isn't themselves very receptive to persuasion. They've made it their mission to change everyone else's mind, so psychologically it will be extremely difficult for them to admit they're wrong. Techniques here have to be slow and subtle, gradually undermining the reasons for their conclusion but never letting them suspect this threatens the conclusion itself; gradually getting them to find ways to undermine their own idea rather than telling them they're a nutcase (even if they are).

Which of course raises the issue of how to judge if someone is crazy, and the even more complex issue of how to decide what's true (which for obvious reasons I'm largely avoiding). One fascinating idea is that you should examine their metaknowledge : ask them how many people agree or disagree with them. The most informed people who have investigated ideas in the most depth don't just know about one option, but have broad knowledge of the alternatives as well. And this means they have the most accurate knowledge of how many people believe which idea, which is something that can be reliably and directly measured.

So if you're looking for someone to trust, look for someone with accurate metaknowledge; if you want to judge which idea is correct, look not just at the broad expert consensus but the consensus of the experts with the best metaknowledge. For example most Flat Earthers are probably aware they're a minority, but most of them will assess this far less accurately than genuine astrophysicists.

This won't be perfect. Science isn't a done deal, because that is simply not how it works. All you can do is judge which theory is most likely to be correct given the present state of knowledge. Understanding of group knowledge is a good guide to this - but of course, it has its own flaws.

Persuasion also requires time. Of course when we do enter into activist mode, as we occasionally must, we all hope that we'll argue with people and convince them in short order, landing some "killer argument" that they can't possibly disagree with. This is a laudable hope, but it may not be a reasonable expectation. Instead, presume that the best result you'll achieve is to plant the seed of doubt. Arguing for uncertainty first gives that seed a chance to germinate later. We'll look at some of the reasons for this in parts two and three.



Summary

People are weird and complicated. They don't have buttons you can press to get whatever result you want. But there do seem to be some plausible, useful guidelines. In general you can't just say, "go over there !", but you might be able to steer them in the direction you want them to do. For instance, consider the extremes :

• If you tell someone who trusts and respects you some information that doesn't conflict with their ideologies, is consistent with their existing ideas and expectations, only adds incrementally to what they already know, makes them happy, is trivial to verify, and you say it in a nice, respectful way, then there's very little chance of it backfiring. The worst you can expect is that they might go and check it for themselves, if it's something that excites their curiosity. They won't even do this if they don't care about it. 
• If someone despises you and thinks you're an idiot, and you come along with some idea that's completely at variance with their established beliefs, requires a huge conceptual shift in their understanding, makes them angry, makes them start arguing but really requires expert analysis to check properly, and you garnish it with insults, then this is almost certain to backfire. At the very least, it's ridiculously unlikely to persuade them of anything, and might just cause them to hate you even more. If they didn't care about it before, they may start to do so now. And if it's something they already care about, curiosity will be of no help : they might start to further rationalise their position rather than examine it.

So our default assumption that if we get into an argument with a stranger on the internet that they'll definitely, definitely be swayed by the sheer force of our evidence looks pretty ridiculous when you stop to think about it. Even leaving aside the emotional, irrational side of human nature, if we were to trust everyone who said anything to us in any circumstances, we wouldn't live in a Utopia of rational thinking. We'd be a bunch of feckin' idiots. The idea of an intelligent thinker being completely unbiased may even be fundamentally impossible. In short, rather than assuming that the other guy is the emotionless, ever-logical Spock, start by assuming that they're the prickly, sensitive Dr McCoy. You may not like their irascible nature, but you damn well have to account for it.

Of course, if it turns out they're actually more like Spock, then you'll have to change tactics.

And we've also seen that there's an important distinction between your opinion of the source and your opinion of the idea. The two are interrelated, but in a complex way. Arguments you dislike cause you to distrust a source, and vice-versa. It really should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that if you get people to listen to opposing political opinions, i.e. people they don't like saying things they don't like, they become more polarised, not less. It's nothing to do with people just not listening to the other side, that's not it at all. Although people do sometimes attack straw men, in my experience this claim is massively over-used. More typically, it's precisely because they've already listened to the other side that they decided they don't like them, so further contact isn't going to be of any help.

Yet in other circumstances the opposite happens. The conditions in which people trust the evidence presented are not entirely straightforward : more on that in part two.

While I'll look at how information flows in groups in part three, we've already seen how attracting attention to an idea is largely a matter of curiosity. I've claimed that this means the Streisand effect occurs during a botched attempt to hide information. No-platforming efforts seldom cause prolonged mass interest, except perhaps to those who weren't familiar with the speaker anyway, whereas banning, say, a new music track has often caused sales to spike. Reporting the ban inflames curiosity even further, whereas just not mentioning it all can be much more successful. Banning is more likely to cause believers to harden their position than it is to create new believers.

Superinjunctions, a law forbidding the reporting of (say) a crime, the alleged criminals, and the superinjunction itself, are perhaps the worst case : even a tiny failure, a minuscule leak, will send curiosity levels soaring because so much information is hidden. It's not really the people involved that excites curiosity, it's what they said and did.

I'll end with a personal example. Back in 2016 there were rumours that a British celebrity was involved in a sex scandal. Nothing unusual about that, except that the British media were forbidden from reporting any details at all. Had they just told us it was Elton John, I wouldn't have cared an iota. But they didn't, so I specifically trawled the internet just for the point of finding out who it was. I still didn't care about either the issue itself, or even who it was, really (at most I was mildly curious), I just wanted to see if I could overcome the "ban". It wasn't, I have to say, entirely easy, but it wasn't impossible either. At first the difficulty became a motivation to continue, though after a while it began to seem like a motivation to stop. However, had I been a bit less motivated (or just busier), or had the search been just a little harder, the super-injunction could have succeeded.

More of that in part three. Next time I'll look in more detail at how techniques of persuasion work, and how while people can sometimes be extremely easy to convince, at other times they are impossibly stubborn. Knowing persuasive techniques can help, but sometimes it's better to step back and not enter the discussion at all.

Now Entering A Seminar-Free Zone

It never rains but it pours ? I seem to have a year's worth of talks compressed into a three-week period, which makes my head hurt.

Last time I went briefly gallivanting around the mean streets of Strasbourg. Exactly one week later I had to repeat the seminar in Ondřejov, because the theoretical physics institute have an annual field trip there. Ondřejov is a small village about half an hour's drive outside of Prague and is home to a pizzeria and the bigger half of the Astronomical Institute but nothing much else. This, as you might guess, is due to the same reason astronomers have a backwards way of measuring brightness and a spectral classification scheme that goes OBAFGKMRN : history.

Ondřejov  (last year) in winter is a bleak place.

A hundred years ago, if you were a Czech looking to set up an observatory, Ondřejov looked like a decent spot. Prague was still small and distant enough to limit light pollution, but close enough to have access to the infrastructure of a large city. You didn't need the kind of massive facilities of today to do valuable science, much less have to set up your telescope at the top of a Chilean mountain to minimise atmospheric effects. So if you were a rich Czech noble (who'd made a fortune making optical instruments to measure the alcoholic content of beer) with a penchant for astronomy, it wasn't a bad place at all. And as it happened that's exactly what Jan Frič was, so he built a small observatory there.

This turned out to be an astute move and the institute grew over the years, eventually transitioning from the old mode of gentleman science into administration by the Czech Academy of Sciences. And since the political forces of history are just as inviolable as the laws of physics, in 1967 the observatory gained a 2m telescope - at the time, the 7th largest optical telescope in the world.

A 2m telescope is not terribly impressive by today's standards, but it's not to be sniffed at either. You can still do perfectly good research with such an instrument. Still, nobody in their right mind would put such an expensive piece of kit somewhere that only gets 60 clear nights a clear. Astronomy, let's face it, is generally something you put money in and astronomy comes out, but 60 nights a year means your money isn't going to get you much scientific bang for your Czech buck*. But history has declared that's what we've got, and arguing against history is largely hopeless. Fortunately, the telescope is facing renewed efforts to maximise the possible scientific returns thanks to the still-youthful field of exoplanets.

* The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is one of the most important surveys of modern times, and that only has a 2m telescope as well, but it's in a much better location with more modern equipment.

Anyway, Ondřejov is a nice place and I figured it would be worth repeating the Strasbourg seminar to a brand new audience and get double the use out of the not-inconsiderable preparation time. Adapting it was more work than I thought : it had to be five minutes shorter, but then I realised there would be undergraduates present as well as academics, so I had to make it simpler too. Which meant a lot more of me giving preliminary practise seminars to empty rooms to get the timing right.

Before the afternoon seminars kicked off, we had a tour of the historic part of the observatory - from the director, no less. Which was very nice, especially because a) I'd never been in any of the old buildings before and b) practically nothing is in English. I still don't know what everything is, but mechanical computers and other instruments from a bygone era are always fun to look at. Here's a bunch of pictures with close-ups of the description panels for enthusiasts.

An early Occulus Rift, which wasn't even in colour.

I want one. Dunno what I'd do with it, but who cares ? I'd look cool doing it.

We should revert to this style because it was the best one, dammit.

Again I've got no clue what this is but it looks nice.

This one I do know : it's a Frič polarimeter, used for measuring the alcohol content of beer. The Czechs still express alcohol content as a polarisation rather than a percentage.

Then there was a seminar by someone else, which was very good, and then there was mine, about which I make no claims. It's always fun to get a large audience to wear 3D glasses and the physical data cube is always a hit. Which is good, because seminar preparation is pretty draining for me. Two in a week would have been a healthy limit really.

By this point I was pretty tired, but prepared to sit through another talk or two. I'd aimed mine specifically at people who might not be observational astronomers by training, as had the first guy, but the others... hadn't. First there was one on relativity, which was very clearly targeted at a highly specialised audience. Which to be fair constituted most of the group but I understood practically none of it. It didn't help that the speaker seemed to be monumentally unenthusiastic, a widespread phenomena that I simply don't understand.

Then there was a break, followed by more talks. I don't even remember what the next one was about at all. Then another talk started, something about molecular physics which looked much more interesting but I was already bored half to death. Mercifully I managed to escape with some other people who were being evacuated back to Prague.

On the train, the relativity dude turned out to be a normal person who just seemed completely exhausted. Fair enough. Our other companion, however, was one of those people you meet in science - someone who's clearly a space alien. In this case he mostly sat in brooding silence, but would occasionally and without any provocation or context start blurting out his hobbies for no reason whatsoever. First we got to hear about rollerblading, which you can at least make some pathetic small talk about, "I suppose it's good exercise"; "not much fun in winter"; that kind of abysmally boring "conversation" that does nothing except expend time and further the progress of the Heat Death of the Universe.

His second unprovoked meanderings were about his efforts to write a novel. Something about a physics lecturer who meets a piano teacher who teaches him the true meaning of Christmas, or to see beyond the equations and how to become socially acceptable. Some pointless nonsense like that. I forget exactly, because it was such a "the hell am I listening to ?" moment that my brain was fighting to decide if that was really what he was saying, whether I might be missing something essential, or if it was just too dang tired and would prefer to just shut down down now if that's not too much trouble.


A fair chunk of the weekend was spent preparing the third talk, a much shorter one at the IT4I supercomputing centre in Ostrava. This one had to be prepared largely from scratch, since it was aimed at an almost entirely non-astronomy audience. It consisted largely of infographics from my last science post, which I think was a good idea. This mini-conference was a one-day event aimed at bringing together users of the powerful computing facilities at Ostrava. This mostly seems to be researchers of the very small : quantum physics and genetics, that sort of thing. So keeping things ultra-basic and simplified is the only realistic way to explain what we did with the ~400,000 core hours in 12 minutes or less.

(The other talks were a mixed bag. Some were good, some were awful, one was clearly intended to be 45 minutes long but the session chair said nope. There was a lot of terminology I didn't understand and some I suspect to be typos : antiferromagnetic, radio zebras, health breast phantoms. Regular physics is weird.)

Preparing the presentation didn't take all that much time, and the nice thing about 12 minute talks is they don't take long to practise. But because the conference was one full day, and Ostrava is 3 hours away from Prague by train, we went there the evening beforehand and left the following morning. The hotel was none too glamorous either.

As for the interior, it looked nothing so much like a badly-converted hospital or dormitory.

The shower refused to point anywhere except at the wall and there were too many noisy students outside to keep the windows open. But it was functional, clean, and I survived.

All this tiring travel and repeated presentation preparation came with a perk : a tour of the supercomputing facilities. These are a very far cry from the mechanical museum pieces at Ondřejov with their punch cards : it still ranks respectably high in terms of modern global performance capabilities and is well-maintained and continuously upgraded. The tour (again by the director !) was excellent. We started with a look at the machines from inside a showroom :

It looks very science-fictiony : kept in darkness behind glass, with enough LEDs to cover a street's worth of Christmas trees.

We spent quite a while looking at it like this, with the director turning on spotlights to highlight specific parts of the machines. Eventually he admitted that these are only for show and turned the lights on properly.

The computer produces so much waste heat that they don't need a dedicated heating facility to keep the staff warm : they just use the water-cooling system that stops the processors from melting. When there's downtime - and as far as I can tell the director was being sincere - they genuinely get cold. The last time they tried to use the more usual radiators they ended up with a minor flooding problem.

The computers also consume a crazy amount of power. To prevent damage or data loss by power interruptions, they have two backup diesel generators. But these take about 30 seconds to start. The gap is filled by a 9 tonne flywheel rotating at 2000 rpm, which, if you've ever seen Robot Wars, you'll know is downright terrifying.

We didn't get to see the generators, but we need see the cooling systems. Unlike astronomical facilities, these are a testament to neatness and good order. Think Half Life 2 if everyone was insanely tidy.

The computer itself is behind glass for a very good reason - the air is hypoxic, with an oxygen content of just 15% compared to the normal 21%. This, apparently, is the sweet spot that makes it difficult for fire to spread but is still enough to work normally. At 13%, on the other hand, you'd pass out. It's roughly equivalent to being at the top of a 2,700m mountain : you notice it, but it's not awful.

You can't help but admire the neatness of the whole thing.

And so then we went back to Prague, leaving the hospotel at a bracing 6:30am.

Could I relax ? Nope, because I had more preparations and only two days to do them in : a public talk at our institute's open day and an escape room. The public talk I simply recycled from a previous one because there simply wasn't time to do anything other than minor modifications and figure out what the hell I was supposed to say. Only the title slide contained any text since that would require additional translation, so I had to re-invent the speech based on the images and movies. It seemed to work though, and 3D movies and props almost always help.

The escape room was a completely new idea that a few of us came up with some months back. Since we're probably going to re-use it, I don't think I should give away too much. It's slightly different from the usual escape room concept where you've got an hour or so to figure out how to escape a locked room (typically themed, with various puzzles to undo locks in a particular sequence). We'd tried one where you have to escape a plane, which was quite fun but the puzzles didn't seem to have much relation to aircraft or the story. We wanted to fix that and make it at least related to astronomy (if not genuinely educational, which would be asking a bit much).

What we eventually came up with was a story of a scientist who's made some major breakthrough but been abducted. The players have the role of his students who come to wait in his office. Instruction by telephone from another scientist tell you that someone's just come to his house and are now heading towards the university. Players get 45 minutes to discover his secret research and email the results (an alien signal) to the outside world before the evil corporation come along to suppress it. The puzzles are astronomy based, including the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram, exoplanet radial velocities and cross-matching galaxy catalogues. And there are also simpler puzzles involving astronomy-themed chocolate. Since this was in Czech, my role was limited to making some of the documents the player's need, including a Pioneer-style plaque identifying where the aliens are from.

I decided the aliens should be like the aliens in Commander Keen but happier.

Which was a lot of fun even to test. The puzzles were more difficult than we anticipated (one test group found an important prop but insisted on putting it back where they found it before using it properly...) but eventually, with enough hints, we got it down to being solvable. The fastest group did it in 30 minutes.

And then I went home and collapsed.


(Normal blog services of extended rants will be resumed shortly)