You describe a tiny fraction of cases. In my opinion most of us are most of the time mostly in tribal mode, therefore "Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL" is indeed 'reductive'... to most cases.

Moreover such a 'tribal mode' mode often impedes the ability to perceive/understand, therefore 'facts' aren't even perceived/understood. You are right: overwhelmingly obviously true facts are very rare, and even less are decisively convincing (only one possible conclusion, without any counter-argument), therefore most facts aren't convincing.

This 'tribal mode' seems natural to me because we learn thanks to analogies, and therefore are prone to imitate the most-enforced beliefs/behaviors: our tribe's.

Regarding "most facts aren't convincing" - I think that the most productive thing to do, if two or more people strongly disagree about facts, is to drill down into the underlying definitions that provide context for the facts.

An analogy is, in effect, a definition. And a definition is not a fact, but which definitions people accept determine which facts they accept.

> ...if two or more people strongly disagree about facts, is to drill down into the underlying definitions that provide context for the facts.

Except that surely you don't have the time to do that most of the time? What about cases where the other person is being dishonest and shifting the burden of proof about a claim, or trying to offer more and more arguments which detract from making the original point?

While drilling down is possibly indeed what you should do, it's also easy for it to derail any average discussion, if done wrongly and either of the participants don't have honest intentions of having a discussion and finding out the truth.

Indeed. Many philosophers are pretty clear about it (French ones: B. Pascal, A. Lalande...), however it implies cold (dispassionate) heads and (as pointed out here by KronisLV) plenty of time. Most of us, sadly, lack time and only invest it in whatever we feel some passion for.

I have heard that philosophers today have a culture of high toleration for very heated discussions that would be considered beyond appropriate in other contexts.

> we have to choose who to believe based on a complex web of tribalism, perceived history, social cues, emotional intelligence, and priors that have served us well

«Tribalism» vs «priors».

That family became rich when the curse placed on the husband had him always lose money at gambling: the wife bet double on the complementary option.

You do not have close friends you ask for advice in order to help decision - towards the opposite? Some people are more consistently right, some random, some wrong. This includes friends.

> facts are rarely indisputable

Almost all major facts that people disagree on are, essentially, indisputable. It is indisputable that:

- The Earth is round

- The Earth is at least millions of years old

- Evolution occurs

- Vaccines generally work

- Politicians are not secretly lizard people

- Humans walked on the moon

These things are all extremely clear and obvious to anyone with a healthy mental model of how the world works. They are all interconnected with tons of evidence from a huge range of disciplines; any one of them being wrong requires a mind-bogglingly huge amount of commonplace and easily verifiable evidence to be flat-out wrong.

It's actually very hard (if not impossible) to be self-consistent without being true. How many made-up stories have plot holes? Essentially all of them. Statements that are backed up with thousands or millions of data points and shown (through simple, followable, verifiable logic) to be consistent with the rest of our understanding of how the universe works can essentially be called "facts". Again, this is the vast majority of things people disagree on.

> The vast majority of facts we have to build our worldview on are not directly confirmable without huge amounts of personal effort

Only if you're persnickety about what exactly "directly confirmable" means. For some definition, literally nothing is "directly confirmable". It's actually extremely easy to confirm most facts that people actually dispute in a political debate.

> we have to choose who to believe based on a complex web of tribalism, perceived history, social cues, emotional intelligence, and priors that have served us well

Do you have a list of individual humans you have chosen to believe, and you ignore everything else? I don't think you do. I think you have a complex mental model of how the universe works and you constantly try to fit new ideas and concepts into it and see how well they fit. If you're good at it, you keep that new idea quarantined for a long time while you search your mental model in-depth for anything that might dispute that new fact, and then you arrange a contest of ideas where you seek out other information to clarify the situation. Based on the outcome of that contest, you update your mental model appropriately, making an effort to flag pieces of information that may not fit for further review in the future.

People who don't do this have chosen not to. They've decided that they don't care about their relationship with truth. And any time we talk about these people, someone comes along with their false equivalency and claims everyone is that way. No. Some of us have decided to care about truth.

With the exception of evolution (which is a very religiously loaded question) and humans not walking on the moon (which is quite an outlier among conspiracy theories) the others are really minority positions - even antivaxx craziness is a minority, though one that causes much real harm.

What evolution and the moon landing have in common is that they (a) are facts about history, which is much easier to rationalize being different, and (b) they have little to no impact in people's lives whichever way they believe.

The vast majority of relevant facts are ones that affect everyday life, where there is either broad agreement (basic physics, social cues etc) or complex disagreement (actual political matters, such as the root causes of poverty, politicians' track records on various issues etc).

And especially looking at day to day political facts, it's very very hard to tell who is lying and who isn't, who is massaging the truth etc. An exception here were Trump's election bold-faced lies, but most political facts are complex and multi-faceted.

Let's take a look at "Russia-gate". We know for sure that there was an FBI investigation, and it found some collusion. But, the FBI is a secret service, notoriously hard to trust, with a history of lying to the public. Also, the amount of Russian interference they found was actually small - direct money investments were small, and "troll farms" are very hard to quantify. But, there still was something, and some Trump associates were actually indicted, which doesn't tend to happen for pure propaganda reasons in general.

So, what should you believe? How close were Trump's toes with Russia? If you vote for Trump next election, will you expect him to collaborate with Russia or actually fan the flames of war?

This is much closer to the vast majority of facts I see in my day to day (note, I am not American, but if I gave examples with Romanian politicians are unlikely to be well known to others).