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This weekly thread will focus on the sometimes painful art of being wrong.
I don’t mean not having an opinion and then forming one, I mean having an opinion, and then having that opinion changed with new or more accurate information.
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- When was the last time you were wrong? What about something somewhat major?
- What was it regarding?
- How did it make you feel?
- What do you feel is the best way to correct someone with an ingrained opinion?
- Is it easier online or in person?
- When do you give up on talking to someone?
- Would you be open to a new thread type here where we create a Steelman post as a group? (eg. We start from questions and end up at THE post / article for finding information on a touchy subject)
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Most recently, about Kamala Harris’ viability as a candidate at this stage of the campaign.
I didn’t think there would be time to rally any but the die hard, identity politics driven democrats firmly behind her. Boy howdy, I called that one wrong lol. She’s got almost the entire party behind her, and sizable chunks of independent voters too.
Still don’t know if it’s enough to win, though it’s looking probable.
Took some serious heat over that take lol.
As far as my end of things, I’ve been wrong so many times in my life, it’s old hat. And I’m used to changing my thinking as my understanding of something grows. It’s gotten to the point that if something isn’t essentially so well proven as to be truth, I stay open to change, even if only in my head. The type of things that can reach that degree of certainty are almost exclusively in maths and physical sciences. Mind you, I don’t necessarily reject the possibility of change even there, nor extend it to anywhere outside my head.
As I said in other threads, I can’t even partially understand how people don’t want to have a more cohesive / logically sound opinion, so this is close to the heart for me.
I had a major opinion shift on drugs when I was in my mid 20s; I was straight-edge without knowing what straight-edge was until then. No drinking, and no drugs of any kind. My experiences with drugs were of the potheads-that-drop-out-of-school and abusive family kind. Seeing people I cared about become burnouts way too young and do themselves permanent damage really drove home how much harm they could do. As such, I used to think that there was no good reason to do so.
I had a conversation in a forum that changed things when another user spoke about something I hadn’t factored in.
Art.
I had no quarrel with the majority of art that came from drugs (and to a much lesser extent, drinking) and actively loved a lot of it. Turns out it wasn’t drugs or drinking I had a hate-on for, it was addiction in general.
And to answer my own question, I really want to do that Steelman group thingie if we get a few people in on it.
I dodged that bullet myself. I’ve always been of the opinion “your body, your choice” even as I took the choice to not use any drug harder than alcohol (and even there I hate drunkenness).
But I could very easily have gone down the road you did.
Normalize changing your opinion when new facts come to light! Fight past the lizard brain urge to dig your heels into the sand when challenged!
I was absolutely, 100% wrong about transgender issues. I was hard-hearted and mean. I probably hurt a lot of people with my stance.
Then I read the actual science.
The eye-opening I got made me deeply ashamed of my past behaviour.
This was actually the topic I wanted to bring out as the inaugural Steelman! I’m conflicted for a few reasons.
I’d like to know more on the subject, but there’s some conflicting science on the issue. I’ve seen papers that discuss brain differences saying both that there are no differences between male and female brains, but in other papers that there are. Similarly, I’ve read papers that talked about no differences in trans brains vs. their biological sex, and also ones that state there are. It’s kinda wild and I don’t know enough about brains to confidently decode the research properly.
In a similar vein, I also know studies are not being funded (and at least two that were actively shuttered) due to not researching the subject in a manor that was explicitly pro-trans, which I have a problem with. Not that I’m anti-trans by any means, but I don’t like “activist” research. Put another way, if neutral science and review doesn’t support an issue, maybe it’s not the science that’s wrong.
What changed your mind?
I’ve also noted that “yes it is, no it isn’t” research papers and have even gone down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out who funded the papers and if there was a pattern on each side. (Protip: I haven’t found one. It’s really weird.)
I think the problem is that we genuinely don’t know shit about the human brain except in isolated pieces and unfortunately there are things which exist which cannot be understood in a reductionist way: you understand the whole or you understand nothing. The brain is such a weird organ (which may even have quantum components!) that interacts in so many unexpected ways within itself that I think it will be a long time before we can say anything definitive about it.
As to what changed my mind:
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The books Brainsex and How Brains Think together started waking me up to just how complicated and weird the brain is. The former also very specifically showed a model of how homosexuality develops and when combined with a few research papers also explained to me gender dysphoria.
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I also came to realize that it doesn’t fucking impact me in the slightest if someone who is “male” feels uncomfortable in that designation and wants to be treated as female. A lot of my growing up over time boiled down to that: “True. False. It doesn’t fucking matter in any meaningful way to my life.”
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