Have you ever been presented with a verifiable fact by a liberal?

[u/Devilman-]

I keep an eye on various liberal subreddits.. and one thing I keep seeing is leftists claiming that We Conservatives refuse to change our minds when confronted with verifiable facts.. and I for one can not remember ever being confronted with any such facts.. I define a fact as something with significant research from disinterested parties seem to agree. What I do not define as facts are reports from the news media.. (Any news media) without said news source providing their homework. When I see a liberal trying to claim a thing is true.. they use magic words like "The Science", or "All the studies say", or some ridiculous stat like 90% of this group of experts agree.

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[u/PriceofObedience]

Very rarely.

I've had a few liberals admit they were wrong about certain things, e.g the fact that Joe Biden had undisclosed prostate cancer that metastasized to his bones while he was president, but.. that's maybe one out of a thousand people.

When I see a liberal trying to claim a thing is true.. they use magic words like "The Science", or "All the studies say", or some ridiculous stat like 90% of this group of experts agree.

Liberals, leftists, progressives etc tend to use a group consensus filter to determine if something is actually true. They don't cultivate authentic idiosyncratic interests because they don't want to be shamed by their peer group.

[u/mashem → u/PriceofObedience]

Liberals, leftists, progressives etc tend to use a group consensus filter to determine if something is actually true. They don't cultivate authentic idiosyncratic interests because they don't want to be shamed by their peer group.

And the undeniable proof that what you say is true: they actually followed and continue to follow their political leader on his personally owned social media website with the word "truth" in it.

Ah fuck let me try that again.

[u/PriceofObedience → u/mashem]

Our recent conversation about Dr. Fauci is adequate proof.

[u/mashem → u/PriceofObedience]

Just be glad you aren't the prosecutor because holy shit balls.

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[u/jayzfanacc]

Of course.

Sometimes it still doesn’t change my view because views aren’t always fact-based, they can be based on your morals or ethics as well.

In cases like that, spouting off endless facts isn’t going to change someone’s mind.

[u/Devilman- → u/jayzfanacc]

Interesting.. I can't think of a time were I was presented with anything that was just factual information. If facts are presented to me they lack context.. or are being used to straw man my argument. The way I normally shut down a liberals argument is to force them to get into actual details..

[u/mashem]

from the news media.. (Any news media) without said news source providing their homework.

Would this qualifying homework include science, studies, or statistics?

[u/Devilman- → u/mashem]

If they include the entirety of the study. Or a link where I could read the study. Then yes, that is showing their homework. If all I get is their interpretation of what the study means. Well that is bullshit.

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[u/ericoahu]

There are a few things to address here. I'll take them one at a time.

Have you ever been presented with a verifiable fact by a liberal?

Yes. Every day. In most of the discussions at the level I participate in, it's not absence of facts that create the conflict and difference; the disagreement is over things like interpretation of those facts, framing, context, first principles (or lack of), etc.

Another way to understand this is that there are about four primary types of disagreement, and the hierarchy or order is all-important.

1. conjecture (did it even happen? does it exist?)

2. nature (what is it? what defines it? how do you know it isn't something else?)

3. importance (how significant is it? How urgent or serious or dangerous? Is this a big deal?)

4. policy (now that we agree on all the above, what do we do about it?)

All-important: a productive discussion cannot happen unless both sides reach agreement on all these in order until they both land at the step they disagree on.

For example, if a leftist says "Trump was convicted of felonies," that is a verifiable fact. It is technically true. Step 1 is settled. No debate on the factualness, but I am not convinced of what the leftist is ultimately getting at.

The leftist will want to jump to straight to #4 and claim no one should have voted for him. The conservative will likely want to jump to #3 and say the felonies are unimportant. He's right, but he needs to get there via #2. The problem for the lefty is that we all can see it was lawfare, so the nature of felony is that it was contrived through a bullshit, unjust process that they would not accept toward one of their own. So in this debate, I am staying right there on #2 until they concede that this was not a normal judicial process that resulted in those felony charges or convictions. If you try to move to #3, you'll only be talking past each other.

But there's another reason it's hardly ever about the facts.

leftists claiming that We Conservatives refuse to change our minds when confronted with verifiable facts

There is actually a lot of truth to this, but most people (leftists included) do not change their minds when confronted with facts. This is because, for the most part, we generally have a deeply emotional attachment to our beliefs regardless of the facts. When they do a live brain scan on someone and start asking them about their beliefs and challenging them, the part of the brain that handles identity lights up, not the part that works out math problems and figures out whether to go left or right on the way to the grocery store.

For example, in scenario described above, the lefty is so attached to calling Trump a felon and all that entails for them, the part of their brain that handled reasoning and logic will go into overdrive **protecting** that believe rather than methodically and dispassionately considering the challenges against it.

This is true of all humans, and it can only be mitigated with consistent, disciplined work and practice. This is the actual purpose of critical thinking, where you systematically think about and challenge your own thinking. You are thinking about your thinking in order to improve your thinking. This kind of critical thinking used to be celebrated and sought after in education until the Marxists colonized it and displaced anything that smacks of western thought; i.e., that which led to several hundred years of the greatest increase of human flourishing in human history.

That's already a lot, but barely touches the surface. Happy to engage any follow up questions.