>my friends who rely on emotion-based arguments

Isn’t every argument based in emotion? Do unpalatable facts have a strong track record of success in arguments?

Depends on the setting. Among educated professionals - it's how science gets done. So even though the process is flawed, it's still more consistently fact-based than emotion-based.

But some people's arguments are based exclusively on emotion.

And they tend to be very bad at estimating risk, because they literally can't tell the difference between one specific tragedy which triggers their emotions because it's reported in great deal, and millions of tragedies which don't trigger their emotions because they're reported as dry statistics.

If we were being less polite, we'd call this a form of cognitive handicap.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/ttu-pra04092...

Is your claim that people whose “arguments are based exclusively on emotion” are “very bad at estimating risk?”

Do you use the term “argument” as meaning a decision making process or an advocacy method?

Is there a significant population of people who base a decision making process “exclusively” on emotion or is that a straw person? (And how do you know that?)

If there were a significant population of people whose decision making process was based on emotion, how would one falsify the premise that they are “bad at estimating risk?”

Given the causality claim that emotion based decision making poorly estimates risk due to availability cognitive bias, could the same causality claim be made that “educated professionals” are often bad at estimating wholistic risk because tunnel vision is also a product of their specialization?

No. A lot of modern physics for example still seems objectively wrong when hearing about it as a student. Physical experiments and math has converted a lot of skeptics into believing some very “strange” things about how our universe works.

Are you saying that over a time period longer than a conversation or argument people who committed to learning a topic in depth were able to alter prior beliefs that were based in their lived experiences?

An argument isn’t some specific length of time. A 20 year bet on some outcome is a single argument that takes decades.

>Going this deep into statistics would just lose them

The comment’s text quoted above leads me to believe “argument” in this context refers to a shorter length of time rather than a longer one spent in deliberate study of the argument’s topic. Do you have a different interpretation of the comment to which this particular thread is devoted?

Acceptance of some of those strange observations relied on the older generation - with strong emotional attachment to the old way of looking at things - dying off.

That’s extremely overstated.

Einstein for example complained about spooky action at a distance, but didn’t disagree with the results. “Quantum mechanics is very worthy of respect. But an inner voice tells me this is not the genuine article after all. The theory delivers much but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secret. In any event, I am convinced that He is not playing dice.”

So, he was completely on board with the results of the single photon double slit experiment and other observable results which are very odd. But, he may have favored non local hidden variable theories which are indispensable from QM and all it’s observable oddities.

It's a dynamic not entirely confined to quantum physics in the 1930s, and there's a range of graciousness involved. It's a side effect of the paradigm shifts described by Kuhn: What happens to the old guard? Some will adapt to the new paradigm, some will enjoy tenure and let their students carry the new torch, and some will join the church in denouncing these heretics who deny the primacy of the earth. (And will happily say as much in their grant reviews!)

Also keep in mind that the stakes are higher when it's the academic's core area of contribution which is under attack. Einstein's contributions to large scale physics were secure. If instead good we're playing dice at the scale of solar systems, threatening to obviate his primary contributions and consign his name to the dustbin of history, the reaction may have been a bit different.

Not to completely disagree, but Einstein won the 1921 Nobel prize for photoelectric effect which demonstrates the quantum nature of light. I was using him as one of those pioneers which where faced with the universe acting strangely rather than anything to do with relativity.

So, yes some people will object long term, but it’s important to keep their objections in context. Plate tectonics is a slightly more recent revolutionary idea that actually converted most skeptics, but the early objections where reasonable and the actual conversion was quick once the idea approached it’s modern form.

"I was using him as one of those pioneers which where faced with the universe acting strangely rather than anything to do with relativity."

Yeah, all I'm saying is that his total collection of contributions wasn't at stake here, so it was probably a bit easier to back down.

FWIW, my 'motivating anecdote' in this discussion is an old prof describing the earlier years of algebraic topology, which he had been very active in. There were apparently a number of older topologists who were pretty resistant to algebraization of the field. Which possibly had a lot to do with Poincare's attitudes about logic and proof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9#Character

If your friends accuse you of being an ivory tower jerk for adding nuance to a conversation, you should probably get better friends.

Not sure why you were downvoted because what you are talking about is the reality on the ground for a lot of people. I'm dealing with this with some family members now. "I heard everyone in Europe is getting blood clots from their vaccine." is a common statement even though it's factually untrue. It's not coming from a place of logic, but emotion and has to be handled appropriately, otherwise you lose them.