不要轻易去纠正别人

你好呀，我是良哥。

又一篇好文来啦，请阁下细细品尝。

世界如此复杂，充斥着多种不同的解释，以至于我们无法直接理解。因此，用先入为主的观念（世界应该是什么样的预期）和实际经历来解释这个世界，成了人们最快速最有效认识世界的方式，成了无处不在的基本范式。

而想让人们改变这种认识世界的方式，并非一件容易的事情，因此，除非利益相关，否则不要轻易与任何人发生争执，即使别人说了一些蠢话，也千万不要纠正，更不要试图说服。

无处不在的范式

Every good conspiracy theorist needs their own Grand Unified Chart; I’m a particular fan of this one. So far, my own Grand Unified Chart looks like this:

每一个厉害的阴谋论者都有自己的一张全面的理论图谱，就像一张复杂的大图表，把所有事情都串联起来；我特别偏爱这张图谱（文末附件）。到目前为止，我自己也有一张这样的全面的图表：

All of these are examples of interpreting the world through a combination of pre-existing ideas what the world should be like (first column), plus actually experiencing the world (last column). In all of them, the world is too confusing and permits too many different interpretations to understand directly.

图表中的例子展示了人类如何用既有的观念（第一列）结合对现实的体验（最后一列）来解释这个世界。但世界太复杂了，充斥着各种各样不同的解释，以至于我们难以直接理解。你甚至不知道从哪里开始学习更多知识。

You wouldn’t even know where to start gathering more knowledge. So you take all of your pre-existing ideas (which you’ve gotten from somewhere) and interpret everything as behaving the way your pre-existing ideas tell you they will. Then as you gradually gather discrepancies between what you expected and what you get (middle column), you gradually become more and more confused until your existing categories buckle under the strain and you generate a new and self-consistent set of pre-existing ideas to see the world through, and then the process begins again.

于是，你采用所有既有的预设观念（这些观念来自某处），并根据这些预设观念告诉你的方式去解释世界。但随着时间的推移，当你发现预期与现实之间的差异（中间列），你会越来越感到困惑。直到有一天，你现有的认知框架在这种压力下崩塌，你不得不创造出一套新的、自洽的预设观念来重新审视这个世界，然后这个循环过程又将重新开始。

All of these domains share an idea that the interaction between facts and theories is bidirectional. Your facts may eventually determine what theory you have. But your theory also determines what facts you see and notice. Nor do contradictory facts immediately change a theory.

所有这些学科领域都认同一个观点：事实和理论之间是相互影响的。你了解到的事实最终可能会决定你相信哪种理论。但反过来，你相信的理论也会影响你看到和注意到哪些事实。而且，即使出现了和理论相矛盾的事实，也不会立即改变你相信的理论。

The process of theory change is complicated, fiercely resisted by hard-to-describe factors, and based on some sort of idea of global tension that can’t be directly reduced to any specific contradiction.

信念的改变不是一个容易的过程，会受到一些难以言说的因素强烈抵抗，信念的改变基于一种全局性的冲突，这种冲突不能简单地归结为某个具体的矛盾，而是一个涉及到多方面因素的复杂过程。

(I linked the Discourse and Society levels of the chart to this post where I jokingly sum up the process of convincing someone as “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they’re neutral, then they grudgingly say you might have a point even though you’re annoying, then they say on balance you’re mostly right although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you win.” My point is that ideological change – most dramatically religious conversion, but also Republicans becoming Democrats and vice versa – doesn’t look like you “debunking” one of their facts and them admitting you are right. It is less like Popperian falsification and more like a Kuhnian paradigm shift or a Yudkowskian crisis of faith.)

我写过一篇幽默的文章描述了说服人的过程，从最初的被忽视，到被嘲笑，再到被抵抗，然后是半推半就的抵抗，接着是中立态度，然后是勉强承认你的观点，尽管你让人烦恼，然后他们承认你基本上是对的，尽管你忽略了问题中一些最重要的层面，最后你取得了胜利。我想表达的是，意识形态的转变—无论是宗教信仰的彻底改变，还是政治立场的转换—并不是通过简单地驳斥一个事实就能让他们承认你的观点。这种转变更像是库恩所描述的范式转变，或者尤德科夫斯基所说的信仰危机，而不仅仅是波普尔的证伪过程。

Why do all of these areas share this same structure? I think because it’s built into basic algorithms that the brain uses for almost everything (see the Psychology and Neuroscience links above). And that in turn is because it’s just factually the most effective way to do epistemology, a little like asking “why does so much cryptography use prime numbers”.

为什么所有领域都遵循相同范式？我认为这是因为我们的大脑在处理所有信息上都使用一些基本的算法（可以参考前文提到的心理学和神经科学的内容）。这种范式之所以有效，是因为这种范式实际上就是认识世界最有效的方式，这有点像问为什么密码学中广泛使用质数一样。

附件：

译：良哥

By Scott Alexander