First, I will add some caveats:

a) Please forgive my annoying point-by-point communication style. My belief is that it adds clarity and precision, but I realize it's also annoying.

b) Everything I should should be read in the spirit of "in my opinion"...I see this as an exploratory conversation about unqualified armchair theories, not a statement of facts.

> I started responding to your GP comment, but I moved it here (and lightly edited/expanded it) to let you know that I see you

Sincere thanks.

> (though your pivot from "suspicion" and "bias" to "psychology" and "identity" makes me leery).

Suspicion, bias, identity, and a whole schwack of other things, all fall under the domain of psychology. But I don't ask that you accept anything I say at face value, I will address any questions you have, and consider all criticism.

> Without specific cited examples I'm not sure if you're talking primarily about

It's like 90% armchair psychology, based on non-acedemic education, and a fairly long period of close observation of human interactions. I claim no authority on the subject, I only ask that people think, and be honest (or at least try). That said, the possibility remains that I may not be entirely incorrect, even out of sheer chance.

> Our primary tool for communicating, human language, didn't develop to meet complex communication needs (be they scientific, technical, philosophical, etc). Some concepts are hard or impossible or tedious to communicate in language. Worse, these can get folded into nuanced domain-specific terminology or unstated shared context among practitioners.

Exactly. And this isn't news to anyone, but what I think might be somewhat of a novel/underinvestigated idea, is how these things manifest in day to day interactions, and in turn affect subsequent behavior, such as the influencing of peers, voting patterns, etc. Has there been any academic study into this? Should there be (are the stakes high enough that out of the box thinking might be warranted, or are staus quo ideas getting the job done to an acceptable degree)?

> I won't impute, but if you see this in climate science and not everywhere--do investigate why.

It appears on any culture war topic, which is why culture war topics are often banned from being discussed in multiple communities. But again, what I find interesting, is the unwillingness for people to discuss the specifics of why they are banned.

> Not that I would know where the Overton window is, here--but I get the impression from how you frame this that you think you are further outside of it than I think you are.

This is an ever-present risk, and it's undoubtedly a motivating factor in my choice of when to wade into discussions, but I think(!) I've managed to become fairly disciplined in actually discussing things in an honest, mostly emotionally detached manner.

My framing of it is certainly not a comprehensive overview of the subject, and I have tried to go to great lengths to acknowledge that. My intent is to not discredit or derail the climate change initiative, but rather to introduce the idea, for consideration, that perhaps our perceptions of the nature of "resistance" or "disagreement" may not be accurate, and in turn our solutions/response to that may be suboptimal. Maybe I've done a less than perfect job of communicating this idea, but I see little evidence that others are making any effort to understand. Rather, it seems that my lack of complete agreement is immediately considered to be disagreement, and therefore dealt with accordingly. Any pushback seems to invoke an authoritarian, tribal response.

> I wonder if you're seeing (something like?) Dunning-Kruger here--many (but not all) of the people left arguing on the internet about facts and gigatons and global cooling and ivory tower conspiracies may just be identifying at each other.

Of course. But again, this isn't so much what I am pointing out, which is the amazingly widespread inability and unwillingness among intelligent people to step out of this mode of thinking, or acknowledge clear signs of it.

> In any case, I'm unsure what practical application this realization has (beyond the obvious--lobbing fact-grenades into the other trench doesn't accomplish much). Do you see applicable lessons, here?

At this point, I think there is some potential value in investigating how true some of these theories are. Is the fact that climate change is (has become) a culture war topic interfering with people's ability to discuss or think clearly about the matter, or does group identity trump everything (System-1 overpowers System-2, ~without exception, even among the intelligent). I believe some clear patterns can be observed. If so, what to do with this knowledge?

> One lesson can be that the message should come from someone with a lot of identity overlap.

Yes indeed! If the requirement is mass persuasion (and it very much is), and the topic is identity-related (causing the human brain to malfunction, resorting to tribal, System-1 thinking), then adopting an approach where the message is delivered via influential figures in various sub-communities seems like a very logical approach.

Which raises the question: do we see any of this happening?

> I think it's useful, but it takes a while to scale well (for example, you need people willing to risk ostracism and exclusion from groups that are core parts of their identity; people most knowledgable about the science don't have a lot of identity overlap).

Agreed. Assuming this theory is sound, scaling is a big problem. Perhaps some people who are smarter than me in the HN community have some related expertise in the field, or just some good old-fashioned smart ideas to consider. But how one might persuade them to think about the problem from this perspective seems like a difficult nut to crack. I will continue doing my best (as you can see I am not deterred by ostracism and exclusion, and @dang seems content to let me go about my business), but if you have any good ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Even if we could get everyone's sentiments pointed in the right direction, there are a lot of other seemingly unrelated issues that may need to be taken into consideration, but if a higher frame of enlightenment (willingness to cooperate, MAYBE) could be established, perhaps we could fix several problems at once. Dare to dream, eh?

> Katharine Hayhoe is a decent case study, here. She stays busy, but I don't have a good sense of how readily she can move the needle with skeptics. Either way, her identity doesn't seem to defuse the regular conspiratorial comments on posts/videos about her.

To me, sending a climate scientist to deal with skeptics is like bringing a knife to a gun fight, or trying to put out a grease fire with a bucket of water. You need a lunatic to deal with lunatics, because you need to understand how they think. Authorities and rationalists have high-resolution perceptions of how deniers and conspiracy theorists think, but they are only perceptions, almost completely manufactured by their minds. No wonder no one can make any progress with them.

> I find the discussion of memes in The Selfish Gene useful here. It's worth a read if you haven't. Considering the "fitness" of individual memes, fellow travellers, and memeplexes as a whole (i.e., their virality, whether they fit in well with or oppose other common memes, how resistant they are to displacement, etc.) is a good place to start with evaluating how climate change denial slots into people's broader belief systems.

150% agree, the propagation of "knowledge" via memes is fundamental to this problem, but it is key to realize that it is not only "deniers" who are thinking in memes (as opposed to reasoned logic) - this is how everyone is thinking, if to varying degrees. This is well known in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, and few here would dispute it within a thread on that specific topic. But try raising the notion in an unrelated topic, particularly a culture war topic, and watch people's logic exit the room instantaneously (yourself being an obvious exception).

Many thanks for the conversation, any criticism of anything I've said is appreciated.