People get mocked when they profess a strong moral/ideological position and assert it is the only valid belief, and then change their minds. Especially if the change seems opportunistic, and even more so if they now claim their new belief is the only possible valid belief.
Someone who’s open about all beliefs being provisional, respectful of opposing viewpoints, and transparent about being willing to change with no evidence is not going to be mocked.
Outside of politics and other performatively dishonest arenas, of course. In those areas mockery is a weapon and it doesn’t matter how fair the criticism is.
Yes. PG is using a straw man as he often does. People are derided when they change their mind constantly, because it's (justly) considered hypocritical.
But it's rare to mock someone for having a true intellectual journey: starting in one place, working hard, gathering more evidence, and arriving in another.
He's also doing this thing we need a name for, something like "fallacious pithiness".
I've noticed that when people reduce some random thesis to a level of brevity beyond the minimum to actually express it coherently -- but do so succinctly and perhaps a bit archly -- the audience enjoys the illusion of effective communication, and fills in the intellectual voids on their own, affirmatively.
As if they've gotten a bargain, or been saved some time.
I mainly noticed this when so many people stopped writing awesome long-form blog posts, and supplanted it with tweeting. I seldom found value in the tweets, even from people whose blogs I prized. But many people did! And the tweeters were encouraged.
I see the same thing here. I mainly know the OP from his essays, which are overall quite good (IMHO). I subscribed to the RSS feed of them. I think I've read them all, even.
But it's hard to imagine a version of this tweet as a full essay (even a short one) that didn't end up repudiating the core idea entirely.
Because once you had to add even a bit more detail -- such as examples of it happening in the wild -- you'd end up realizing that people don't generally get mocked for changing their minds. That changing your mind is actually encouraged and praised by various books, corporate 'leadership principles', philosophers, etc... and in most cases, derision and animosity aimed at opinion-changers tends to be aimed at the ones who are obviously self-serving hypocrites, not those who've genuinely reconsidered things and come to a better conclusion.
So even though you still could, no dooubt, come up with some examples, through the process of writing the essay (or blog post), you'd... realize it was bullshit.
> I mainly noticed this when so many people stopped writing awesome long-form blog posts, and supplanted it with tweeting
I could not agree more. Tweeting and similar have been pretty bad for real intelligent and honest discourse.
You also hit on another terrible side-effect of extremely short-form discussion: the process of writing is also the process of analysis, at least when done right. To accomplish a good piece of essay-writing, you need to really think things through, do a bit of research in order to support for your thesis, etc.
The form itself requires a process that is more likely to force you to really think your thesis through, anticipate objections, etc. A short sentence requires none of that, and so doesn't encourage critical thought.
> ...when people reduce some random thesis to a level of brevity beyond the minimum to actually express it coherently...
This has often struck me as one of the worst things about Twitter (i.e., that everyone tries to have conversations about serious stuff on a platform that's not conducive to long/detailed/nuanced posts), but it looks like PG's paying for Twitter's little paid subscription service, which, iirc, does let you write lontform tweets to your heart's content. So that's a bit ironic, maybe.
Minor nit: many high profile accounts (supposedly all accounts with more than 1m followers) have had Twitter Blue imposed on them. It's impossible to say whether he paid, or whether it was given to him because of his fame.
Though either way, he would have access to the features of it, so your main point stands.
I don't see this as just a twitter problem. It's in "memes" (people love an image with one or two lines that seemingly obliterates an opposing view), facebook posts, and bleeds into meatspace (facebook/twitter/reddit > family gathering)
It's a disregard for context and nuance that I don't find specific to twitter.
I think that the special thing about Twitter (and other short-form services) is that it's actually impossible to include context and nuance even if you want to.
A friend of mine recently observed how the NYT and other big papers, in their straight reporting, will rush directly to cover the "controversy" of any given issue while barely covering the details of the actual facts at hand.
So brevity is part of it, but I think a lot of people just prefer to engage in abstract philosophizing. It's more fun I guess, harder to argue with.
In that case, it's more that they want to spread an opinion that they don't want to associate with the paper, because they'd have to defend or prove it. On the other hand, instead of publishing negative news about things they support, they'll publish indignant reactions to the spread of the negative news story. Doing this pushes the actual specifics of the story to the tenth paragraph of the first article they've covered it in.
People absolutely are mocked for changing their minds. Public debate is a on spectrum from (rare) good faith discussion with good intentions to (more common) playground posturing where changing your mind is seen as a form of weakness.
And weakness must always be punished.
I have no idea where PG puts himself on that spectrum. But SV culture is notorious for being convinced of its own awesomeness. So it's possible that if someone is being mocked it's not because of a change of mind, but for other reasons.
Well, thank you for writing this comment in a length that allows sufficient precision to express your thought and provide examples.
The only part I would disagree with is this:
>So even though you still could, no doubt, come up with some examples, through the process of writing the essay (or blog post), you'd... realize it was bullshit.
>And then, you wouldn't publish the essay.
Alas, I feel you have some very optimistic assumptions about the level of self-awareness of someone who would otherwise indulge in "fallacious pithiness", the essence of which is condensing a narrative down to a quirky soundbite.
The pithiness doesn't come for free; the process of reduction is even more laborious than the one of expanding on a thought.
That road goes both ways: the same false narrative can be beefed up with numerous examples and arguments that support it, all while leaving the author immensely satisfied with the result.
----
Side note: as an autistic person, I used to make the same mistake, namely, thinking that fallacious argument of the sort we see here are the undesired result of carelessness that could be avoided if only the processes were improved.
Alas, such results, more often than not, are the outcome of a lack of the desire to find and express something that one feels confident is true. Such desire, however, is an autistic trait[1].
Most people find it not only acceptable, but desirable and enjoyable to construct narratives that look good, regardless of their veracity in the actual world we live in.
The laws of physics allow for a society in which PG's narrative would be true; and our society allows for enough outlier examples to cherry-pick for it. (I have experienced criticism for changing my opinion in a long discussion, the change stemming from being convinced that the other side has a good point - but that was an isolated incident). Without an urge to fact-check oneself (is what I say really true?), entertaining these thought experiments and turning them into words for others to read is a pleasant pastime.
It's the prose equivalent of vapid poetry, with pithiness being the constraint instead of rhyme. And it hits just the same.
I don’t think that’s really what being hypocritical is.
Changing your mind doesn’t make you a hypocrite. Hypocrites are people that claim to have certain morals, but act differently. That’s not people that change opinions.
Example of a hypocrite:
“The Bible says homosexuality is wrong and everything in the Bible is right, sorry I have to be against gay rights”
* proceeds to have affairs, use the lord’s name in vain, and does many other things the Bible considers wrong*
This person isn’t a hypocrite if they change their minds about gay rights, or even went back and forth.
They are a hypocrite because they claim their actions are guided by the Bible, yet clearly they aren’t because they conveniently choose what to follow.
Few Americans follow the bible just because (fundamentalism).
Most do it for cultural reasons, and those cultural norms also dictate picking-and-choosing what to follow, while claiming the religious authority of the bible.
It's not the individual that is hypocritical, it's the culture.
The reason I mention this is that hypocriticism requires some kind of logic to track consistency (or lack of) and yet faith is blindly illogical (believe this just because). No one is analysing why someone has (or chooses to have) a faith in something in the first place.
I also think there is a definition of hypocrite that goes something like: being a proponent of some universal moral rule, while excepting oneself from it.
I know it's only tangential to the topic being discussed, but it's quite important, so I'll elaborate.
I used to be anti-gay. So, in PG's words, ~P (why did he choose "~" instead of "!"? ~ is bitwise not in c++, while ! is boolean not. It's going to remain one of the mysteries of life). Now I'm not only pro-gay, pro-trans, etc, but thankful that I live in a country that is free, and gay and trans people, and all people, can decide for themselves what life they want to live, and to consider that they don't need approval from the rest of the society, or actually, that the rest of the society owes them an approval for their life choices.
But why was I anti-gay? Because that is what I learned as a kid. Kids learn from adults. Especially during teenage years, they are rebellious, but in reality, they still take their value clues from adults. And once you are an adult, and hold some values, it's difficult to think that they values you've held all your life were wrong. So you come up with excuses. Like the Bible thing. I grew in an atheist society, so that was not my excuse. My excuse was simply that I was raised thinking that it's wrong to be gay. That was it. In time I changed my argument into "Gay people want to get marriage benefits from the government", but someone pointed to me that gay people pay taxes too. So, after a while I realized that whatever arguments I had were hallow. But most people don't go through what PG call the journey from ~P to P. Their brain doesn't allow them too.
I don’t think it’s uncommon to believe the person who started with the right answer is smarter, or wiser than the person who had to work to get there. However, many people land in the right answer right away by chance. If we valued finding the truth over being right, people would more often admit they had the right answer by simply guessing or because they followed their tribe.
Yes. What makes people smarter or wiser is precisely that they work to get to the positions they hold (even if those positions are mistaken), and never stop questioning themselves or evaluating information that could change their position.
People seriously overvalue "being right". Discovering you're wrong is far more valuable and is worthy of celebration. It means you learned something, and are just a little less ignorant as a result.
I think that regardless of whether or not someone's belief is correct, causing harm to unconsenting others should always cause some amount of guilt or embarrassment.
But if I hold a belief that is leading me to cause harm to people, and then I discover that I'm wrong, is that not a reason for even greater celebration? It means that I have become a less harmful person.
Of course! Only a fool is 100% convinced that their positions are right or wrong in some absolute sense. Enlightenment is an ongoing process, not a destination.
One example is merely being born into the right answer, like a morally superior practice. You might never do the work to arrive at that moral position yourself so you might not actually hold the belief as strongly or as internally consistently as someone who reasoned themself into the position.
In my view, wise people don't declare they have the answer until they are sure, so it follows that wise people appear to start with the right answer.
That said, sometimes one needs to declare a position without be absolutely sure and it is wise in that scenario to declare the fact that you are unsure.
Maybe this triggered it, but Yesterday people were trashing this woman for being against horse racing now even though they could dig up a tweet of hers from 11 years ago where she was excited about an ascot race: https://twitter.com/imlucywatson/status/1673050143027781632
> But it's rare to mock someone for having a true intellectual journey: starting in one place, working hard, gathering more evidence, and arriving in another.
In fact, those people generally get more attention and praise than the people who have had the beliefs all along. Movements seem to generally be lead by born-agains. Every other media liberal has their conversion from a sheltered conservatism story, and conservatives constantly talk about how they were dumb liberals until they saw the world.
A lot of people are aggressively impervious to all reasoning or evidence until the opinions of people who they rely on for friendship or money change, then they suddenly change opinion without any new argument or evidence being introduced. That type of flocking behavior is what is seen as hypocrisy.
I don't think PG is using a straw man. Rather, he's talking about "politics and other performatively dishonest arenas", which GP excluded, as outside of those areas, mockery is kind of... stupid.
He doesn't qualify who he is talking about and in which situations. This conveniently leaves room for charitable interpretations. Which is really close to a form of sophistry, in my opinion.
> He doesn't qualify who he is talking about and in which situations.
Yeah this sort of grand, vague postering is the kind of thing that tech personalities do and it's because they get the kind of blind positive reinforcement from followers who have their own agenda.
Someone in his position can write something like "Not everything is knowing" and get a bunch of adulatory responses and just think they're providing some deep philosophical fodder.
While true, people also get mocked when they are perceived as being uncertain. Words like "maybe", "possibly", "likely", "hypothetically" tend to subtly piss off the 68th percentile because we all like certainty. People want answers, plain and simple. Anything in-between requires more thought, and thoughts make your head hurt. Similarly, while it's said that it's okay to admit that you don't know something, my experience is that most people don't react well to this, though they will try to tolerate it in a corporate environment. Unless you're speaking with someone who appreciates intellectual honesty, at best you'll be faced with a subtle disgust reaction, and at worst you'll be called out for not knowing something.
So to the credit of those who profess strong positions, I think society is... unsophisticated enough that such strong positions are implicitly encouraged.
What you describe is such a strong element of human psychology that friends who have been in the military have told me their leadership training explicitly included something to the effect of handling decision-making this way in the field:
* Immediately go with your gut instinct.
* Appear 100% confident in your decision.
* Avoid flip-flopping unless there would be catastrophic consequences.
I'm sure it works very well for keeping a group of people alive in deadly situations.
Because it's so persuasive, it can often be an effective way to get others to follow instructions in less grave circumstances, but when there's no time pressure, in the bigger picture it's a bad idea IMO.
> While true, people also get mocked when they are perceived as being uncertain.
I’ve only seen this be a common thing when people use (implicitly or explicitly) a weakly held premise as the basis for a strongly held conclusion, or one with a very high cost born by other people.
This is a bit uncharitable. People only have so much capacity and interests.
Constantly analyzing the parts of life you don’t care about is exhausting.
For example: Most people would be absolutely crushed if they had to manage my disability the way I do. For me, it’s second nature. That doesn’t make neurotypical people less.
We’re the weird ones who enjoy being curious about a broad set of topics rather than just one or two. The curiosity that is so much a part of us is not necessary for much of life. We just can’t imagine living any other way.
But this is the case on everything though, literally almost everyone used to be anti or neutral about LGBT 20 years ago and now is supportive, mostly, because over the years they've had experiences with LGBT people in their life and changed their minds.
Shaming people who have "strong moral/ideological positions" is basically just denying human nature... if anything, it is comendable to at the very least be able to change your position if enough (real) evidence is provided.
Obviously, someone who is "Open to all viewpoints" is ideal, but in many cases those people (Myself included in many cases) also do not feel too strongly about any topic to act on it (it is mostly just our nature), if everyone was like that we wouldn't have activists for example.
> literally almost everyone used to be anti or neutral about LGBT 20 years ago
I can't remember any mocking for changes on LGBT issues from "anti" to "support". In fact, that movement was particularly careful throughout the naughts and 10s to be welcoming to changed minds. I don't remember any mocking for changes in the other direction either, but tbh that direction of change was probably pretty rare until fairly recently. So maybe it did happen and I never saw it because the precondition was rare.
Nit: Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, which was 20 years ago. Several other states quickly followed. Major changes to civil institutions don't happen when "almost everyone" is quixotic. I think you could say "a majority" were anti or neutral, but certainly not "literally almost everyone". Perhaps "literally almost everyone running for President", but now we're talking about dozens or perhaps hundreds of people most of whom genuinely deserve to be mocked for having no real convictions outside of personal ambition. Or at the very least mocked a bit for the obvious dearth of courage to defend or even admit to any convictions they do hold which happen to be inconvenient to electoral college math...
I can think of one example where somebody was publicly mocked for their change of heart: Rob Portman, who changed his mind about gay marriage after his son came out.
The vast majority of the coverage was positive, for exactly the reason you said. But I heard a number of voices who saw it as part of a pattern: they were uninterested in any issue that did not affect them personally. It's not a lack of conviction, but rather a lack of empathy. Every issue is pursued with equal self-interest, holding back rights from everybody else until it serves them.
Off-hand the only situation where I remember people being mocked for switching positions toward favoring gay marriage is politicians, such as in a Matthew Bors comic [0]. But politicians are widely perceived to change their public stances for insincere reasons, so this example suggests that it’s insincerity, not changing positions, that people tend to mock.
That's why I said both anti and neutral, yes it is true that most were "neutral" but there were also a lot of lowkey insults aimed at the LGBT community, such as casual use of the f word, let's not pretend that wasn't the case
> because over the years they've had experiences with LGBT people in their life and changed their minds.
Two things can be true at once. People who identify as LGBT can be very pleasant people. Additionally, I can still believe that identifying as LGBT is wrong according to my religious views. In fact, according to my religious views, everybody is a sinner and doing stuff that's wrong, but that doesn't mean they're horrible people. But it also doesn't justify the wrong behavior.
And of course, my religious views don't mean I can go and harass people who disagree with me or anything. But it also doesn't mean I have to go praising them for doing something I don't agree with.
I think it's harmful to society and people's lived well-being (as opposed to adherence to values espoused by millenia-old orthodoxies) to judge people as being sinful for being attracted to and caring for loved ones of the same gender, as opposed to being attracted to and caring for loved ones of a different gender.
Cool, and people that are religious believe it's harmful to society and people's well-being to engage in several behaviors that are otherwise considered acceptable in the eyes of the law and different social circles (sex outside of marriage, swearing, indecent joking, etc). I don't see how this has any bearing on the point I was making.
OP makes it seem like if you disagree with LGBT lifestyle, then it's because you must hate the people. All I'm pointing out is that you can disagree with the lifestyle and the movement while still loving the people. That's a core tenet of Christianity: God hates the sin while loving the sinner.
Once again, the OP's ultimate point was:
> if anything, it is comendable to at the very least be able to change your position if enough (real) evidence is provided.
And the claim was that LGBT people are actually quite pleasant, hence you should change your mind. And my counterclaim is that according to Christianity, people can be pleasant while sinning (after all everyone is a sinner[0]), and sin can still be wrong. They are not mutually exclusive. So realizing that someone is pleasant while also not following the tenets of my religion is not counter-evidence that would make me change my mind.
This is a harmful (to discourse) reduction of the situation.
Modern religious authorities/communities, despite some of their uneducated followers all too often not understanding the nuance either and generally being homophobic turds, are against extramarital sexual intercourse not because “God hates the gays” but actually because they believe [religious] marriage is covenant of procreation. Marriage is not needed to have sex, and having sex outside of a situation where you’re willing and able to accept children is not the society these people want to build.
There’s nothing inherently homophobic about that at all. Nobody (the bible included) says you can’t love someone of the same sex or even have two people of the same sex cohabitate and raise children. It’s actually quite the opposite if you look at history and the broader context. They’re just not “married” in the eyes of their church because they’re not popping out babies. Believe it or not, in the Catholic Church, even a heterosexual couple married but on birth control is looked down upon and considered to be in a state of sin.
Now you can still have a problem with a group of people considering extramarital sex sinful, I have no apropos argument there, but it’s not born of some grand scheme to discriminate against the gays or whatever. And it’s really uncharitable and harmful to thoughtful religious people to reduce their moral doctrine to charged falsehoods.
The definition of marriage in the Church has little to do with the legal definition of marriage - except for the fact that the Church is trying to impose its views on the law where it suits them.
Also, different christian denominations have different beliefs about the purpose of marriage. Sex outside of marriage is definitely sinful in all of the mainstream christian churches, though they differ on how sinful sex is in the context of a marriage.
I'd also note that, while wedding ceremonies commonly talk of kids, there is no obligation to have kids as part of a marriage. For example, the church is perfectly happy to marry an old woman with a man, even though it is absolutely certain she can't have kids anymore.
Overall, the orthodox/fundamentalist christian position seems to be: sex should only be done for the purpose of making children, only married couples should have sex, and anyone capable of having children should strive to have more children. LGBTQ+ people are not exempted - at least if they are physically capable of having children, they shouldn't let their personal preferences get in the way of their duty to God - so they should also seek to enter a heterosexual marriage to have children. The only exception to all of this is choosing to become a monk or priest (depending on denomination) - in which case you owe a duty of faith to God and thus shouldn't love other men or women anyway.
The legal definition of marriage is a topic I didn't want to get into for the scope of my comment, but you're right. I think the bestTM thing for society would be to just separate the language entirely and call all legal arrangements "unions" and handle the economic subsidies in a gender agnostic and results oriented way (e.g. you get a cohabitation tax break and/or filing status, unions of people can enter contracts and own property like a multi-member llc would and division of said property and contractual obligations is handled by the courts if unions are dissolved, and you get tax breaks for number of dependents you have, etc.). Let religions say what they want about religious marriage, but don't let that impact any legal and free (as in "freedom of/from religion") handling of civil economic affairs. I 100% agree that religious bodies have no grounds to impose their beliefs legally on society. In the US religion has no place in law.
> Overall, the orthodox/fundamentalist christian position seems to be: sex should only be done for the purpose of making children, only married couples should have sex, and anyone capable of having children should strive to have more children.
It doesn’t really map to either “fundamentalist” or “orthodox” in the usual theological senses (though its more associated with the former), particularly the “anyone capable of having children should strive to have more children” part, which is a modern social movement overlapping with some streams of Christianity, but not really a part of traditional doctrine.
> The only exception to all of this is choosing to become a monk or priest (depending on denomination) - in which case you owe a duty of faith to God and thus shouldn’t love other men or women anyway.
The branches of Christianity that have celibate religious brothers and/or clerical celibacy are also the most accepting of the concept of a vocation of committed single Christian life outside of clerical life and religious orders; there is basically no Christian community I am aware of where monastic/priestly celibacy is a norm but it is the only acceptable non-married life.
Statements of the form "nobody is doing X" are almost universally incorrect. There are 8 billion people on this planet, you can almost certainly find an entire organization dedicated to whatever X you please.
Statements of the form “nobody is doing X” are almost always talking about a very small percentage, and not intended to be a claim about exactly zero people. My statement wasn’t a claim about whether someone exists who wants praise, it was a summary of the purpose of the LGBT issue to counter the parent’s straw-man that summarized LGBT as being a binary harassment vs praise issue. Sure my statement above can technically be interpreted as incorrect if you take the words of my broad generalization extremely literally, but if you want to be that pedantic, why didn’t you call out the parent comment for being much much more wrong? Do you think relative magnitude doesn’t matter?
> you can almost certainly find an entire organization dedicated to whatever X you please.
This is fairly meaningless when you strip it of all magnitude and comparison. Sure you can find some weirdos in numbers that are statistically insignificant. You can’t even make your point without also acknowledging that an organization of ten people is 0.000000125% of the population, which is, statistically speaking, for all intents and purposes, nobody.
> it was a summary of the purpose of the LGBT issue to counter the parent’s straw-man that summarized LGBT as being a binary harassment vs praise issue.
?
You may want to reread what I wrote because the last thing I was trying to do was argue a "strawman that summarized LGBT as being harassment vs praise". In fact, I was arguing exactly the same thing you seem to be arguing here: that this is a false dichotomy being preached by the loud minority, and that taking a balanced middle ground is a fine idea.
However, I do find it funny that you're offended about someone being pedantic with your argument when it seems like that's the exact same thing you did with my original comment.
Not the OP, but the concept "sin" is nowhere nearly as physical as the shape of the Earth.
I would even argue that for non-religious people, the concept is entirely irrelevant, with some exceptions, and religious people shouldn't try to legislate anti-sin policies into law.
[Exceptions:] If you live in a heavily Jewish neighbourhood and sell sandwiches, it is a good idea to have kosher ones as well, even though you personally don't care about mixing of cheese and ham.
> But this is the case on everything though, literally almost everyone used to be anti or neutral about LGBT 20 years ago, and now is supportive
If by “literally almost everyone” you mean “a majority, but not a particularly overwhelmingly large majority”, sure. Both opposed 20 years ago and supportive now:
2001-2019 support for gay marriage in Pew polling went from 57-35 against to 61-31 in favor. Did everyone change their mind? No, about 1 in 4 did.
Possibly far fewer, since it's not the same population, and those aging into polling were much more accepting (on average) than those, um, "aging out."
While GP has a point but, in general, there is a lot bigger penalty for changing mind than for being stubborn. We would be better off as a society if we balance penalties for changing your position vs being stubborn.
And I rather have leaders who are hypocritical/opportunistic/etc but at least using new data to change their views than those who reject the new data and stick to their original viewpoint.
I think voters often WANT to hear strong ideological opinions that they think will never change on things they care about too, sometimes when it isn’t there.
Single issue voters can be weird like that.
The local pot enthusiast crowd that I know we’re furious year after year when it wasn’t legalized. They would note that some politicians said they supported it, but it wasn’t passed. They we’re upset ignoring the fact that legalization would never pass due to the balance of power in another branch of government.
They often feel like they’ve been betrayed or lied to if the outcome they want doesn’t happen.
If you extend this idea past political and policy issues I still have the general impression that people are looked down upon for changing their mind.
I think we can widen the definition to include any surprising new ideas a person holds that seems to contradict their previously professed ideas / identity.
Look at when a public culture figure changes their ideas about something in a way that breaks our image of their identity- Jim Carey starting to make paintings or Lewis Hamilton designing clothes. If someone is well known for something then it seems like there’s a general aversion to that person expressing their thoughts and opinions in a different domain.
I think this might have to do with the fact that our ideas of someone’s identity is just never that accurate- it’s difficult to understand the nuances of why someone would believe something, so it’s surprising when they express an idea that might seem contradictory to something they expressed before.
This still can hold true for a personal acquaintance too- “my uncle is learning to speak German??”.
If we’re talking about politicians then our system is also not setup for them to express a lot of nuanced opinions. If they change their mind I feel like a lot of the time the nuanced justifications for that change of kind get washed away in the mainstream media.
> Look at when a public culture figure changes their ideas about something in a way that breaks our image of their identity- Jim Carey starting to make paintings or Lewis Hamilton designing clothes. If someone is well known for something then it seems like there’s a general aversion to that person expressing their thoughts and opinions in a different domain.
Usually the issue is not about them doing something that breaks their identity but about using their position of influence to get an advantage with having far less skill and talent than the competitors that didn't start out famous.
Specific pg case in point. In the early stages of the Twitter acquisition, pg mocked others for saying that Musk didn't know what he was doing wrt Twitter. Then, a couple weeks or months later, pg sent out a tweet complaining about something in Twitter that had broken, pg expressing the sentiment that he was baffled by the level of incompetence.
Now, I don't necessarily think this represents a complete change of mind, but pg was roasted pretty significantly online for his new sentiment. But it wasn't because pg "changed his mind", it's because he was so condescending to others who viewed Musk's management skills negatively to begin with. Furthermore, he only tweeted out his negative opinion when something specifically affected him directly.
It's like when conservatives suddenly have a change of opinion with respect to gay rights when their child comes out. I'm not going to throw you some party celebrating your ability to change your mind when all you've done is show that you only care about shit when it affects you directly.
I don't think the problem is the assertion - even if the change of heart seems opportunistic - as much as the absence of acknowledgement of their own fallibility and their prior errors in world views.
Granted, such an acknowledgement involves some degree of humility, but I think this is preferable to not having opinions at all, especially about issues that matter.
People get mocked when they change small beliefs to keep heavy beliefs intact. Say changing their belief about a policy when they find out it's based on politics they oppose.
If you view all beliefs as provisional then you’ll probably accomplish nothing. You have to go all in sometimes even just to figure out if you’re wrong.
Interestingly, when people profess a strong opinion and change their mind, this is exactly when we shouldn't be mocking them. Everything we say is due to mental/rational processes applied over data we gather, so... oftentimes it's just an opinion.
Sometimes we'll strongly believe something totally bogus (I used to believe in communism when I was a teenager). And the fact we change our mind when holding very strong beliefs is actually a sign of intellectual honesty.
Unfortunately, I see people being mocked even when transparent and respectful. But I mostly agree with you that being respectful helps receiving respect when you're wrong.
Are think you are working with a small subset of humanity: highly educated people.
For everyone else in the world, dogma rules. It is not that people get mocked when they profess a strong moral position and change it - it is that the vast majority live by strong moral positions and apply this level of certainty to everything. Just look at the increase in discussions around "how to change people's minds" since Trump entered the political scene: we suddenly needed to deal with folks who will not change their mind under any circumstances.
Mocking people for changing their mind is how the "in group" of the tribe maintains its dominance. We, the shamans, live by different rules, and occasionally get nailed to trees by the mob.
(Wow, I find the sheer volume of wannabe influencer rando blue-ticks whose replies are prioritised under that tweet quite off-putting)
It's not that weird if you look at the circumstances of the people who first believed ~P and then moved to P.
As an example -- about 15 years back I knew someone who would pretty much eat any meat under the sun and then some, while mocking and demeaning people on vegetarian diets (me included, at the time). Now I see for the last couple of years or so that they've turned quite strongly vegan, and their Instagram feed/stories is full of anti-animal cruelty stuff -- while mocking, demeaning and shaming people who eat meat.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: if I mocked this person for being a hypocrite, it's really more so because they're being an asshole. And that -- unlike Paul G's second tweet -- says more about them than it does about me, IMHO.
I've no problems with people who change their mind in a thoughtful, nuanced way, while explaining what led them there; and preferably also held their original ~P position in a non-dickish manner.
Pro-tip (though could be outdated): if your reply gets a yellow-tick reply then your post gets ranked higher than the blue ones. To make this happen, @-mention an automated customer service bot.
This is the sort of vague comment that sounds observant and smart but absent of any kind of context is absolutely meaningless.
I’ve been sort of lumping this stuff into the category of “self-help glurge” or “productivity glurge” lately. I’m sure there’s a better term. Pithy little vapid one-liners spit out by those who see themselves as thought leaders, designed to give their followers an empty little social/emotional boost. So much of Twitter and especially LinkedIn is full of this stuff lately.
That’s not what he wrote — you’re filling in his empty vessel of a comment with context you’ve created. And we can certainly debate how people talk about politics online, but that’s way way more complicated and nuanced of a topic than “it’s weird when people get mocked for changing their mind.”
Weird how? What does that even mean? What does “mocked” mean? Someone says something nasty on Twitter? Your kids make fun of you at dinner? What topic are you changing your mind about? A zoning issue in the town in which you live? Or have you suddenly realized that LGBTQ+ folks deserve rights after decades of people trying to convince you? Or did you listen to Joe Rogan and now you think vaccines contain tracking chips that let George Soros know when you use the bathroom?
In politics, at least, it is harder to distinguish between someone genuinely changing their mind, and someone merely switching to a now-popular position.
The first is someone who is thoughtful. The latter is someone who lacks conviction and unreliable- you can't really know what you get when you vote for them.
So much of Politics is theatre aimed at engaging a base large enough to get you elected.
The constant threats to society that engage many, such as Gay Marriage (remember all the rushed state bans?), Sharia Law (remember that being outlawed?), Critical Race Theory (remember that?), or now Youth Transexual Treatment, are designed to engage a demographic to vote for a politician, they are not true societal threats, and they are also discarded soon as they stop working well and another potential engagement strategy arises.
Also on many other non-hot topics a lot of politicians have opinions that align with their major donors. So again, they are slow to change their opinions if the money continues to flow.
So politics are not good studies of how people change their minds.
"Moral panics". All sorts of things fall under that topic. The fear runs ahead of the evidence. There may or may not be any real underlying problems, but the proposed solutions either don't engage with them or are massive over-responses.
Moral panics. We still haven't found all those satanists. We haven't found the clowns. The Prius started working again once Toyota paid $1 billion and bolted the mat to the floor. Popcorn lung has apparently subsided. And the murder hornets were just visiting.
Still going strong is anything can be "grooming". And your child can be taken from you if you look away from them even once.
I really like the last one -- images of professional gangs having difficulty snatching that child because the mom is going to stop a professional gang.
Believing the opposite extreme, that there is zero harm associated with moral panics, is necessarily true based on heuristics is arguably not optimal thinking either.
Thinking better than dummies is not hard, but thinking without error is a lot harder than it seems. I think if more people started thinking in terms of both relative and absolute comparisons the world might improve. If you only think in relative terms, you are living in a dream world of sorts.
The problem with the moral panics is that people jump onto the bandwagon with zero evidence. Some are just paranoid and distrustful, others want to feed the panic.
I'm not asking that everyone think better, just that they think. Especially in a day where everyone has a camera and there are child snatching clowns all over the place -- just a little bit of skepticism goes a long way.
Questioning a wild claim out of nowhere isn't the same as thinking something isn't dangerous. It's thinking a claim has no basis.
Take the cinnamon challenge. Literally millions of people doing this. Then the claim comes up it is killing people. Yet these claims don't have any names or actual news articles that aren't in a circular reference. It may or may not injure you, but with millions or 10's of millions doing it, if people are dying there would be evidence of that.
All those Prius's with sudden acceleration -- and when everyone calmed down, the fix was floor mats and not cosmic rays. The real answer is that it was bad driving because all the brakes still worked perfectly well and if you press both the car stops. It was bizarre watching this play out after watching the same stupidity from the Audi 5000 in the 80's.
> The problem with the moral panics is that people jump onto the bandwagon with zero evidence. Some are just paranoid and distrustful, others want to feed the panic.
Another problem: people thinking this is what's happening, when it is actually not.
> I'm not asking that everyone think better, just that they think. Especially in a day where everyone has a camera and there are child snatching clowns all over the place -- just a little bit of skepticism goes a long way.
Using specific, maximally absurd examples to prove one's broad beliefs may not be optimal thinking.
> Questioning a wild claim out of nowhere isn't the same as thinking something isn't dangerous. It's thinking a claim has no basis.
Where "thinking" = heuristics.
> Take the cinnamon challenge...
There is not shortage of instances of people thinking genuinely poorly, but there is also no shortage of instances of people using such instances to predict broader instances, and predictions about reality tend to be considered to be reality itself (as a consequence of evolution, culture, etc).
It'd be easier to take moral panics even a little bit seriously if one actually turned out to be true.
Has there ever been a moral panic that turned out to be true? The closest I can think of is maybe the teetotaler/prohibition movement. Alcohol truly does cause a great deal of harm to society.
Not having been alive in the late 1800s and early 1900s I can't speak to if it was really viewed as a moral panic similar to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s that I got to experience.
People don't call them moral panics if they turn out to be true...it's almost by definition. E.g. say the catholic priests turned out to not have been molesting children, it would have been called a moral panic, but it's true, so it wasn't a moral panic.
I do not think that the sexual assault by Catholic Priests ever was a moral panic in the spirit of the other ones I mentioned. It was long-term persistent and it never played a role in elections.
It was a long simmering issue that was very hard to elevate such that action was taken. I would argue it was very much akin to the multi-decade struggle for LGB rights. Long slog with slow progress, but eventually reaching success.
Well whatever example, opium or crack epidemic, hiv, etc, point being it's always retrospectively that moral panics are defined, after it turned out that people were concerned over nothing.
As in, if you had found out the satanists were real, well it wouldn't have been a moral panic anymore.
In in the cases I list, many of the politicians knowingly are using these moral panics for engaging their demographics to vote for them, not because they actually care about the threats.
What do we expect from politicians? Is it better to have politicians that are thoughtful and have conviction even though it goes against what the populace demands or is it better to have politicians that understand the populace and are aligned with them in general?
We elect representatives because we can’t expect the populace to be in the room at every moment. The expectation is that those representatives will have some consistency, the hope is that that will mean they’ll make calls similar to the ones we’d make if we were in the room and had all the info.
Consistency could also be a guard against pure power politics. Usually people get elected by appealing to some constituency, but it is uncomfortable to just say “I’m here to appeal to X demographic!” So, they try to express the interests of those demographics in terms of principles. Holding them to those principles when they don’t work in the interest of their chosen demographic can result in some pretty strong rhetoric at least.
I argue that a politician going against what the people (aka voters) demands will not get elected in the first place. So the real work must be done before election - a matter of influence in a direction or another.
I understand your point, but it's also true that "the people" don't exactly have a unified opinion of much. Any politician will be going with what some of the people want, and against what a different group of the people want, all at the same time.
I feel this is an extremism vs moderate thing. Extremists are offended when their extremist politicians were "faking it" by only taking on popular positions to win elections, but moderates are the opposite: They are proud when a politician tells them they listen to the constituents and faithfully represent them even if the politicians personal feelings would be different than the peoples.
Though even cynically doing an about face to a now-popular position due to the polls has some merit in that at least one can say that this politician has respect for and is listening to the population.
They are capitulating their position and acknowledging that the population they seek to represent does not agree with them.
They may still personally believe differently (who knows) but they are putting the opinions of the population in front of their own.
What is unfortunate is that in politics we rarely see a politician talk about situations where they were wrong or made mistakes and they much prefer to turn the page and stick with their talking points of their new idea.
I think there's well developed political science and strategic reasons for this. I sometimes say to myself that I'd take another look at some politician I previously disagreed with if they actually offered real apology and regret, but maybe that's not really true.
Usually you know exactly what you’re getting - someone who will lockstep support the popular positions of the day/country/party, whatever that may become.
The first is a bit more dangerous as you’re trusting them to make the best decision in the circumstances: which is better but easily second guessed.
If their job is to be representative of the people in their community and those people have a popular opinion, that doesn’t seem to strike me as wrong necessarily.
"unpopular populism" is definitely a thing; policies presented as populist that are only supported by a minority. Usually because that minority is "swing" voters.
I think zdragnar's position is that there can multiple reasons for someone to change their position; two being "genuinely changing their mind" (making them "thoughtful"), and "someone merely switching to a now-popular position" (making them "someone who lacks conviction and unreliable").
Your view seems to be the inner state doesn't matter - they still represent the will of the people they represent.
morkalork's position seems to be that if someone lacks conviction and is unreliable then a problem may be they get elected then switch to represent the interests of a donor more than the electors.
When someone shifts their positions to whatever happens to be popular it comes off more like someone who's motivated by gaining power rather than trying to improve the lives of their constituents
Not all popular opinion is created equally. People want leadership, & coming off like one's thoughts on policy is "what does polling say will make people like me?" isn't strong leadership
1. Representation is representation of interests, not of people - what is in your best interest may not be the same thing you think you want
2. Representation doesn't mean you need to hold the same opinions, representation is symbolic by definition.
If it were as simple as "well they're not giving the people what they want, get them out of office!" we wouldn't need a politician as the middle man we could just simply vote on legislation directly
Conviction is important because you’re electing people with a mandate. If that someone runs with View X, gets elected, then switches to View Y, they have (potentially) invalidated the mandate that got them elected in the first place.
Electing someone, at least in a democratic system, with a mandate would be quite foolhardy.
1. It signals that the candidate has a lack of interest in doing the actual job. In fairness, you may share the same lack of interest. It is certainly the easy way out, but nobody ever said that democracy is easy. If you really don't want democracy there are better options than trying to pretend.
2. Even if you buy into the mandate presented during an election campaign, it is going to be woefully out of date before it can be executed on. The state of the world is constantly changing. Which means you still have to put in the work to oversee the employee you hired, buying you little if you thought #1 would be a shortcut.
(1) is what elections are. It authorizes the mandate proposed by the candidate during the election cycle. Democracies aren't really about giving individuals authority to exercise their will, they're about authorizing individuals to execute the will of the people who elected the individual.
I.e. it would be more proper for a candidate to pursue a platform they were elected on but which they no longer personally believe in than it would be for them to get elected on platform X then pursue platform Y. One obvious reason is that you actually can't know whether they changed their mind X -> Y or whether they knew X had a higher chance of election than Y. In either scenario, their mandate is for X, not Y, and they ought to be somewhat beholden to that. Of course not beholden against all new information, compromises, or circumstances. All of this wiggle room and the individual's propensity for wishy-washiness is considered during the election and is, in fact, part of the mandate. Some people prefer a candidate who has shown willingness to compromise, others do not. Again, in either case, candidates are expected to behave similarly to how the electorate expected them to behave.
Point (2) is a valid one. The modern world changes very, very quickly and this is indeed a problem for democracies, but it's a problem only because all of this^ is true. We could simply elect tyrants (not in the pejorative sense) and they can react reflexively to the changing world, but that's not really how democracies work. This dynamic is exactly why crises (a fast-changing world) push democracies toward tyranny.
> Democracies aren't really about giving individuals authority to exercise their will, they're about authorizing individuals to execute the will of the people who elected the individual.
Yes, but the election is merely the hiring process. Democracy takes place when you visit your hired representative on the regular, to keep them informed of where you are at with the changing state of the world. That does not mean the employee has only one boss, but it also doesn't mean you can just disappear and never speak to your employee again. I mean, you can, but don't expect favourable results. They are certainly not mind readers.
If you don't want to put in the hard work of staying on top of your employee, that's fine, but if you are not going to engage in democracy why keep up the facade? Certainly, if you are going to sit back and not participate, interests will go towards those who do (e.g. lobbyists).
>If you don't want to put in the hard work of staying on top of your employee, that's fine, but if you are not going to engage in democracy why keep up the facade?
I don't participate in democracy because I believe the whole thing to be a facade itself, an illusion. Sure, it exercises the will of the people more than exactly zero, and has served us reasonably well historically (at least on a relative basis, according to the flawed methodologies by which we measure / hallucinate such things), but on an absolute scale how good is it really?
I think it would be interesting if some way could be found to enable people to be curious about such things. Perhaps a good start on that would be to first investigate why people are currently not able to be curious about this, because it seems very counterintuitive and it is plausibly quite harmful.
>Certainly, if you are going to sit back and not participate, interests will go towards those who do (e.g. lobbyists).
For now, but it would be a shame if a movement of some sort materialized with the goal of putting an end to this little party.
That's why the elected mandate is important: the election cycle is the closest we have to population-scale mind reading.
The dynamic you're describing (people with more time or money being "heard more") is an antidemocratic bug, not a feature. And yes, I'm aware that this is the reality, "if you want X you have to go fight for it" etc. etc; that's not what we're talking about here.
It is not about fighting. The job of your representative is to literally listen to what you have to say and take in that information to bring to the central meeting place. This is what you are hiring for. Indeed, they have to collate it with the information given from everyone else – it is not just about you – but it does include you. If someone comes telling you that they aren't going to listen and only shove through what they want, you know you've got the wrong person for the job. You want to hire someone who you can trust, not someone who is determined.
If there is a bug, it is people being too lazy to show up to speak to their employee. No doubt it is easier to show up when you have more resources. Most things in life are easier when you have more resources. But that brings us back to questioning: Why keep up the facade if you don't want to participate in democracy? There are other systems. Democracy is not the be all and end all. It can work well when the people are ready to put in the hard work, but if all you can muster is casting a ballot (if you can even manage that), why bother?
The answer is self-evident and I’m pretty confused by your confusion: because casting ballots are the best way we have to take account of the electorate’s opinions, and they specifically mitigate the exact dynamic you’re talking about.
A person who can camp out every single day in the lobby of a leader shouldn’t have greater say in the direction of society than a person who is working 12 hours per day in a factory.
To the extent that they do, it’s exactly a bug!
At this point I’m not even sure what you’re arguing. Seemed to go from “democracies aren’t about mandates” to “people with more free time have more influence” to “in any world where people with free time have more influence (all of them), democracy isn’t the right system?”
Sounds to me like just a convoluted argument for “I don’t like democracy.” Which, fine by me!
> casting ballots are the best way we have to take account of the electorate’s opinions, and they specifically mitigate the exact dynamic you’re talking about.
The electorate's opinion is not static. In fact, the matters the electorate will be interested in largely won't even be apparent during the election cycle. There is simply no way for a representative to know what the electorate is thinking without speaking to them. Which is why their job is exactly that.
> To the extent that they do, it’s exactly a bug!
They don't have greater say, but they do have a say by being willing to show up. The factory worker who doesn't find the time to speak to his representative certainly will not have a say. There really isn't much way around this. The hired employee is certainly not a mind reader.
> At this point I’m not even sure what you’re arguing.
What leads you to b believe that I am arguing? What is the value proposition in arguing? Sounds boring.
> Sounds to me like just a convoluted argument for “I don’t like democracy.” Which, fine by me!
Strange that you would attribute feelings to the words on the page. What in this suggests like or dislike towards democracy – or anything for that matter?
> [Lobbyists] don't have greater say... but they do have a say... The factory worker who doesn't find the time to speak to his representative certainly will not have a say.
Party A has a say, Party B does not, yet Party A does not have more of a say than Party B?
Will leave it at that logical incoherence. Have a good rest of your week!
Lobbyists are just people. They don't have greater say than other people who provide their say.
Those who haven't said two words to their representative certainly don't have a say. How could they? Quite literally, you have to say something to have a say.
Lobbyists can certainly say a lot more than most people, on account of that being their job. That's the point. A factory worker may or may not be able to say anything to their representative, but they certainly can not say as much as the lobbyist. Now, what the lobbyist says may be counted equally or even less than what the factory worker says (though cynically I would say they could well be counted more: if they represent a donor, for example), but that doesn't make up for sheer volume.
In a democracy, it is the duty of everyone to make it their job if they stand by the democracy. You don't get to go work at the factory above talking to your representative if you have something that needs to be said.
Lobbyists are just another layer of representatives for those who have chosen to pay to have someone show up instead of showing up themselves. The factory worker can equally assign a representative to talk to the lower-tier representative on their behalf if they find going to the factory is more important.
Of course, you can opt out of the democracy and let others dictate your life. I did question why one would want that, though.
Ah, so the issues in the system which make those without much resources much less well represented in deciding policy and those with lots of resources massively overrepresented are the fault of those who have less say, because they have moral failings which put things like eating and having shelter over participating in the system?
Alas, it’s too easy judge conviction incorrectly — by mannerisms, posture, swagger, tone of voice, etc. and are misled by well-coached imposters. Worse, many seem to prefer candidates with loads of apparent conviction in terrible things. Adolf didn’t exactly lack conviction, recall, and people were drawn to it.
It’s also obviously easy to see the difference. The former is able to clearly explain why they change their mind. The latter is unable other than by falling into sound bites.
The hardest people to compete against are those who see what works and what doesn't and change their strategies accordingly on a regular basis -- a self correcting missile to a target.
You need to orient your ego away from just being about your ideas or specific strategy to instead being a master executor whose goal is to win.
It is even worse to compete against people who also study your strategy with an open mind and then incorporate the best elements of your strategy into theirs.
Then it becomes a game of resources, connections, marketing and focus, rather than just a competition of ideas.
Some people seem to demand ideological purity and dogmatism regardless of what the facts say. In fact, some people seem to oppose facts just on principle. It's not a great time for truth and critical thinking.
I don't think it's a problem if people stick to their beliefs in the absense of evidence to the contrary, as long as you do recognise evidence when it's there.
I generally appreciate it when people change their mind, as long as they change it for the better, or at least base it on evidence or rational arguments. I've got tons of respect for Linus Thorvalds because he realised his attitude was a problem, and he changed it, to name just one example.
I also try to change my own mind when necessary. Maybe I'm slower than I should be. For example, I've always opposed nuclear energy. It was dangerous, Chernobyl and all that, nuclear waste, nuclear proliferation. I completely agrees with the environmentalist movement that nuclear energy was a bad idea. And now I think that resistance was a mistake. It caused us to stick with fossil energy for far too long. It's weird to say that the environmentalists underestimated global warming, but they did. We did.
Yeah, people don't get mocked for evaluating new evidence and reaching a new conclusion based upon it. What they get mocked for is:
a) Professing to believe in something so strongly that they are unwilling to listen to good evidence to the contrary, then later changing their mind.
b) Making promises that they later break. This is the really common one we see from politicians — in the UK, at least. Promise something to get into power, then do a complete about-turn when it suits them, not because of new insight gained but because of perceived personal benefits from changing 'opinion'.
Straw man argument at best. This is anecdotal, but ridicule for reevaluating a position is not at all common in my experience.
When people tie their identities to a specific idea, it becomes hard to change that idea as they or the idea evolve.
Personally, I always try to dissociate the idea from the person; I really like the motto of “always happy to adopt a better idea”. Helps reduce the ego burden of switching.
As someone who has changed his mind fairly often when shown sufficient evidence, I’ve rarely been mocked for it.
If you’re sincere and can explain why, it’s not really problems. It takes humility and a certain amount of confidence to say you were wrong.
It also helps not to be a dick about your beliefs. I prefer to explain why I believe what I believe. When people know why you stand for something, your surface beliefs make more sense.
I’ve made being correct more important than being right. It’s really hard to make a meaningful argument when I’ve just said I agree with you.
My theory is that there are three ways to "know" something:
1) Socially
2) Intuitively
3) Structurally
Each with their own pros and cons. Structurally is more or less having a mathematical proof of the knowledge. Intuitively is having enough experience with a domain that your gut decisions have a very good probability of being very good. And socially is listening to peer pressure.
In defense of peer pressure. Imagine a forest that is absolutely littered with abandoned ancient wells. A person walking through the forest is at constant threat of falling into a hidden well and then dying, never to be seen again.
Structurally, we cannot prove or disprove the existence of ancient wells in a forest that were dug out and then forgotten long before our civilization came along.
Intuitively it doesn't really matter how much experience you have with the woods. Either you enter the woods and you live or you die. Your first mistake will result in your immediate death, so you can't build up a good intuition through trial and error.
But socially, we can tell our kids that the demon bear lives in the woods and it'll eat your brain if you go in there and nobody will ever see you again, so stay out.
If you are going to rely not on your intuition OR you ability to reason something out, but you are going to store your knowledge "in the cloud" of society. Then you're going to tend to want reliability.
If I google how to spell "peace" because I can't be bothered to remember how to spell it myself, then I'm probably going to start mocking it if it starts returning "pease".
People get mocked because the mocker doesn't like that their cognitive cloud storage is acting faulty. Mocking which you'll find stops once many queried "nodes" starts to return the new result instead of just a single one.
I can fully understand mocking people who changed their mind after being totally sure, utterly convinced, proselytizing and annoying. If they were so sure, how could they change their minds, except by being dishonest about their surety or by being easily mislead? All good reasons for mocking them.
People who weren't so sure and were honest about it are of course different. Those deserve respect for their objectivity and honesty. But those are unfortunately rare specimens.
I think there's a big difference in really believing in an issue, pushing it whenever it comes up, and then changing your mind and saying "forget I said anything", versus really believing in that issue, and then changing your mind and explaining why you changed your mind, putting effort in correcting your earlier mistake, and now putting at least as much effort in the better side of the issue.
The latter is a convincing change of mind. The former looks more like abandoning a feebly held belief.
~25 years ago I had teacher after teacher tell me (and my parents) that the time I spent learning and on computers was a total waste of time.
~1.5 years ago it was totally racist and xenophobic to think a lab escape in Wuhan could be a viable source of the pandemic.
~15 years ago being queer was something you should be quiet about.
~10 years ago a language supporting simple asynchronous paradigms, static and cross compilation was a "waste of time".
~30 years ago OOP was the only acceptable and superior paradigm.
~45 years ago psychology was equivalent to voodoo.
These attitudes do not exist in a vacuum where the people that hold them hold them all. Had I ejected and mocked people from my life for them, I'd have very few friends today, and maybe a good percentage of those friends would've never changed their minds. In net, less people changing their minds yields less progress over time. It also results in an Orwellian sense of right without reason and decreased dialogue between opposing views to determine rightness; some people call this a "chilling effect". The point of life is not to be right, but to continually try to understand better. The cynicism and mockery of today's society combined with exacting tools like weaponizing shame and guilt are abhorrent and anti-progress.
1.5 years ago? I heartily pooh-pooh the idea that the so-called MSM speaks with a single voice about anything. But in any case, the WHO was already calling for the lab leak theory to be investigated in 2021, and this was certainly being reported by mainstream media outlets without the suggestion that any of the people involved were racists. E.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/13/covid-lab-leak-t...
There are discussions that have merit that point to other theories, and I believe in a couple theories, not just one. However, none of those other theories or objections were put into a paper that was signed and circulated with the entire intent to stifle discussion about the topic. It's also particularly disgusting that xenophobia and racism were used to ward off talking about a theory that had just as many legs as other theories.
> ~1.5 years ago it was totally racist and xenophobic to think a lab escape in Wuhan could be a viable source of the pandemic.
To the extent that it was true then (taking saalweachter's comment in mind), it's still true now.
> ~15 years ago being queer was something you should be quiet about.
"Queer" is a very broad term, which also includes trans- men and women, drag queens, and so-called "Don't Say Gay" bills which make it more difficult to bring up many queer issues now than it was 5 years ago.
Members of ACT UP in the 1980s certainly did not believe that being queer was something you should be quiet about.
> ~10 years ago a language supporting simple asynchronous paradigms, static and cross compilation was a "waste of time".
I remember people being enthusiastic about Go, which came out more than 10 years ago and fits that description.
> ~30 years ago OOP was the only acceptable and superior paradigm.
Not true. In 1994 Stroustroup wrote:
] One reason often given for learning Smalltalk is that it is ‘‘pure’’ and thus forces people to think and program ‘‘object-oriented.’’ I will not go into the discussion of ‘‘purity’’ beyond mentioning that I think that a general-purpose programming language ought to and can support more than one programming style (paradigm). - https://archive.org/details/designevolutiono0000stro/page/17...
and
] The fundamental reason for the size of C++ is that it supports more than one way of writing programs, more than one programming paradigm. From one point of view, C++ is really three languages in one: - A C-like language (supporting low-level programming); - An Ada-like language (supporting abstract data type techniques); - A Simula-like language (supporting object-oriented programming) - https://archive.org/details/designevolutiono0000stro/page/19...
> ~45 years ago psychology was equivalent to voodoo.
What? I don't remember it that way either.
I really don't think viewers of "The Bob Newhart Show" (1972-1978) were expected to view Robert "Bob" Hartley, Chicago psychologist, as a voodoo practitioner.
> "Queer" is a very broad term, which also includes trans- men and women, drag queens, and so-called "Don't Say Gay" bills which make it more difficult to bring up many queer issues now than it was 5 years ago.
Let's not mistake this for regression!
15 years ago it would have been literally unthinkable to e.g. do a drag queen story time with kids or have teachers talk about their sexual orientations. Now it's an active cultural battlefield, on which the pro-queer side has evidently made significant progress.
While you make a good point, I hold there is both progression and regression.
> or have teachers talk about their sexual orientations.
When I was a kid, I well remember teachers talking about their sexual orientations, like how one teacher took time off when his wife gave birth to their kids.
> To the extent that it was true then (taking saalweachter's comment in mind), it's still true now.
It is entirely possible to be skeptical and critical of the labs handling of the virus and want investigation into it without assuaging anything about the Chinese people or some grandiose theory involving their military. Most people are interested in the former, not the latter, but people who don't want this discussed rule all discussion about the latter.
As for the rest of what you wrote, you can definitely object that there are exceptions today and that there exceptions years ago but I'm talking about prevailing attitudes, not that there weren't zero people who did or didn't believe something.
Case in point, the 1990s is when the idea about OOP being dominant began to die. This was culturally marked in the show Halt and Catch Fire.
I disagree. You are presenting strawman attitudes, representing an extreme interpretation of the past. Exactly what you accuse me of. Except I cited counter-examples.
Even your example of "possible to be skeptical and critical of the labs handling of the virus" has strong issues because when the general scientific consensus is along the lines "Although there is insufficient evidence to define upstream events, and exact circumstances remain obscure, our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred through the live wildlife trade in China and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. .... Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from activities associated with the live wildlife trade there." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715 .
The general response to the lab leak hypothesis is "where's the evidence"? Not "you're racist".
> This was culturally marked in the show Halt and Catch Fire.
A show made, what, 25 years after the era it describes?
Why do you think Halt and Catch Fire accurately describes things, rather than being subject to its own sense of drift?
While my own pop culture example comes from the era you describe.
Here's another 1991 quote, from Lippman's C++ Primer:
"""Object-oriented programming is an evolutionary advance in the design and management of large software systems. It is not, however, the deus ex machina come forth to resolve the many ills of the software industry.""" - https://archive.org/details/cprimer0000lipp/page/530/mode/2u...
That's in the section titled "Living in a Multi-Paradigm Universe".
> You are presenting strawman attitudes, representing an extreme interpretation of the past. Exactly what you accuse me of. Except I cited counter-examples.
lmao, this is so over the top ridiculous. I didn't "accuse" you of anything. I validated your examples and said that there's exceptions but I was describing prevailing attitudes. Take your frustration and hostility somewhere else.
The only thing I flatly disagree with is that all or most people that agree with lab leak are somehow racists and xenophobes and I find it distasteful that this was pushed by "scientists" who turned out to be heavily involved in the whole thing. Lab leak has just about as much evidence as "zoological origins" so folks like you step off your sad little soap boxes.
If you look up articles and conversation that reference that first citation you'll see most of them derided the theory as racist and xenophobic which had a chilling effect on further investigation for over a year, so much so that it required secretative investigation.
You accused me of cherry picking exceptions and interpreting them as prevailing attitudes.
Show me the evidence that your points are indeed prevailing attitudes.
Where is your evidence that "~30 years ago OOP was the only acceptable and superior paradigm." I've given several counter-examples. You haven't shown anything.
Where is your evidence that "~45 years ago psychology was equivalent to voodoo"? For that all I have a is a pop-culture reference, but your view doesn't explain why a psychologist character in the 1970s is seen as a member of the professional class similar to a dentist or airline flight crew.
Where is your evidence that "~10 years ago a language supporting simple asynchronous paradigms, static and cross compilation was a "waste of time".? I gave Go as a counter-example.
If you can't provide evidence for those things, why should I believe your viewpoints are other things are any better?
> If you look up articles and conversation that reference that first citation
As a reminder, you said "~1.5 years ago", not 3 years ago. And I said things haven't changed in the last 18 months or so.
Midway down the page there's a graph that reflects the early 2000s, OOP languages dominated that graph and that was not a new trend. Another source that claims it directly: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-post-oop-parad... this isn't some niche opinion of mine, it's widely accepted fact that you could've googled on your own.
My evidence for what was being said about Go is that I was there, in those conversations.
You sitting around demanding evidence for stuff that you can easily Google that's non-controversial is exhausting BS. I'm on a cross country road trip my guy, I'm not going to type into the googler for you anymore. You are a completely insufferable human being.
> OOP languages dominated that graph and that was not a new trend
That's fine.
But your claim was that the prevailing attitude was that "OOP was the only acceptable and superior paradigm".
That is not true.
> Another source that claims it directly
It says "software development has been dominated by a methodology". That is not what you argued.
Also - wow, an AOP hype paper from 2003! I hadn't read praise for AspectJ for a long time.
In any case, there were a lot of multi-paradigm languages by 2003 - and yes, with OO being a commmon one. People in general were not rejecting procedural, functional, or logic programming on the basis of being a worse paradigm!
> My evidence for what was being said about Go is that I was there, in those conversations.
And I was there too, and know people who jumped right on it. Meaning that we can't tell what the common perception was.
> The social relevance and crisis of psychology is discussed here:
That link is about "social psychology" (quoting it, "By 1960, social psychology was primarily a subdiscipline of general psychology; that is, it was practiced primarily by psychologists, in psychology departments, following the principles and methods of general psychology "), not psychologists in general, like a private psychologist one would go to for mental health reasons.
And the issue wasn't one of voodoo. The most damning criticism is:
] Thomas went on to argue that social psychology had not only failed to assuage racism; it had in fact sustained and contributed to it, and in the process, alienated minority groups: ‘‘It is not entirely by accident that ghettoized people are saying, more and more, words to the effect, ‘Psychologists, take your psychology and go home’’’ (Thomas, 1970, p. 259). It became increasingly clear to social psychologists and to academics more generally (Metzger, 1970), that they were being accused not just of failing to account for the diverse experiences of oppressed groups, but also of purposefully maintaining the structures responsible for that oppression.
It also highlights how that crisis was part of what Schlesinger termed a '‘‘crisis of confidence’’ in American culture' and "undoubtedly part and parcel of what one scholar saw as a larger crisis of academic authority (Metzger, 1970), characterized by student revolt and persistent questioning of the power structures and professed neutrality of the ivory tower."
Of course it does. If it occurred in the wild and then was transmitted to humans by eating or interaction the way we defend against a future pandemic will be fundamentally different from if there were certain things done or not done in a lab that could've prevented it.
You can be wrong about your level of confidence just as you can be wrong about the rest of the world. Either is just a prediction made by your neural network.
Sure, but who gets mocked for changing their minds? Maybe politicians? And who is doing the mocking? Other politicians? I don't think I have ever seen it happen in person.
On the pretend internet? The Reddit-types act like they are all hot and bothered if something said isn't set in stone.
With the blackout and other such things happening, and HN taking on more of that traffic, pg must be noticing that behaviour and confusing it with something real.
It's weird that this comment is so popular. Are these Twitter people? IRL if you're trying to convince someone of something, aren't you happy when they change their mind?
There should be another term in addition to cargo cult thinking - something like {college,education,expert} cult. This is only an issue when it becomes an article of belief that "what we are told is true". In other words when you decide that your own experience, senses and thoughts are not valid.
As humans we cannot re-invent the wheel everyday. So we rely on google maps, even when that map tells us drive 200 miles north to Gray, Maine, do u-turn, come back and then drive to Montreal. We need to be able to trust information.
I am somewhat convinced that we do not change our minds because of two problems. The first is cascading loss of trust. If I can't trust google maps in that case, can I ever trust it? Or any other map software? Or any software? Or the internet? This is too hard.
The other problem is who to trust. If you don't trust that the US government is representing your interest and is a democracy, then who do you trust? Well we have the answer.
Our ability to change our mind is our ability to adapt. I have recently been pondering whether html-css is a completely outdated way to build a web UI. What about threejs, react-three, etc. I can think about it without problem in the abstract. But what happens to all the work I have done and am doing if I change my mind? And perhaps most influential is "What will people think of me?"
A person's ability to trust their own thinking as opposed to the current cult thinking is, to me, the best indicator of their intellectual value - completely orthogonal to their degree/education.
Edit: Oh and I can almost hear people thinking I am wrong. That is not the issue. The question is what if I am right? There is a YC video some place where a YC person talks about Silicon Valley as a place where when people hear an idea they don't go to "wrong/right" they go to what if it is true? Or partly true, or ...
I think this comes down to people commenting out of their area of expertise. I remember hearing some expert (during the COVID outbreak) state that while they'd like to comment on some issue, they didn't have any particular expertise in the subject. It was refreshing not to have someone bullshitting.
Humans love facts, knowledge, and particularly answers to their questions and concerns, even when there are no good answers. Yet there's always someone willing to provide an answer, even when it's fundamentally wrong.
He's right. As some point in my life I ceased to believe that you are supposed to find your beliefs and defend them to the death, even in the face of new evidence. Of course I didn't articulate it that way in those days. I think some people become enlightened with acceptance of the fact that theyre probably wrong, they probably don't know what about, you have to live life believing you're right (otherwise you wouldn't believe anything) and always be ready to accept when you're wrong about something. Once this realization comes, your beliefs become detached from your ego.
I make a point to reserve the right to change my mind about anything at any point in time. I can't grow as a person otherwise. I don't owe anyone an apology for that, or for being wrong about something. And I am willing to consider any viewpoint, any at all, even some that are unpallatable to me or someone else. I haven't internalized or acknowledged the correctness of many of those extreme viewpoints because my faculty of reason has led me to disbelieve many of them, but I do detach myself when discussing or considering them. I'm after the truth. I want to be right, not feel right, and that means learning, which means being OK with being wrong and changing your mind when appropriate.
Controversial answer (maybe): Not changing you mind may be appropriate* (I'll explain [1]) though it also reminds me of a famous and apt observation [2].
[1] New facts do not always permit a change of mind because they they may support. indisputable but incompatible explanations/opinions/points of view.More facts are needed to reconcile things.
For this reason a person should strive to cultivate the skill of believing positions at the some time opinions, wholly incompatible. This is difficult. It takes effort and practice to partition your mind in a way that separates belief in one viewpoint from the belief in the other.
It is often uncomfortable [3], and for me I can only truly achieve it for brief moments. Nonetheless it's an extremely useful skill to navigate encountering new information & consider another person's viewpoint when it contradicts my own.
Ideally new information eventually comes along that explains how both can be true at the time.
[2] Quote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines" --Ralph Waldo Emerson
[3] To reveal some very personal details, I was helped in honing this skill by having to deal with mental health issues that force completely irrational thoughts on me at the same time that I attempt, with varying degrees of success, to bring down a hammer of rational reasoning and logic against those thoughts. The former makes for a tortuous experience in itself, while the later imposes an very strange but helpful contradictory belief with both held in my head simultaneously.
The late Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys was once challenged by an interviewer about the change in his lyrics (basically, trying to catch him out for being a hypocrite given the simple party-hard themes of early work and the more mature takes on things later, including and especially about women), and he said something to the effect of "I'd rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever."
This can largely be reduced to one of several motivations:
1. They mocker never liked the mockee anyway. This is just more fuel for the fire (eg [1]);
2. The mockee changed their position to one the mocker didn't like. In certain areas maybe that makes the mockee a grifter. That certainly does happen. More often than not, this simply comes down the mockee no longer being aligned with the mocker; or
3. If someone takes a genuinely principled position, many times they'll get mocked because (in the eyes of the mocker) they need to be dragged down back to their level because any form of principled action threatens to expose the mocker.
It's worth noting that people are particularly tribal or brand or team oriented. There's no critical thinking involved.
I'm not sure what specifically motivated pg to speak out here. I'd be curious to know. Chances are there's a specific motivation.
Winston Churchill on his return to the Tory Party after having spent 20 years as a Liberal: "Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat."
Don't know if it's weird or not. Maybe weird that people end up that way, being the sort to mock people? Maybe my reasoning on that kinda person is flawed so I'll write it out to share. Ain't weird because that sorta person seems to do it because it wasn't about being true or not it was about feeling smug and wanting to tell everyone else "I told you so" even if they never did.
I don't know if there's words for this other than "being a jerk" or somethin. Some people want good reasons, others seem to want circling the wagons and it ain't about the reasons just about that other person being the family across the hill you been feudin with. Anyone got a better way to put it? Seems like how feudin people treat one another. "You're wrong even when you're right" sorta thing
Doesn't anyone have beliefs that are not modeled best by booleans? I intuitively like to use trivalent logic "true/false/not known" but the Bayesian reals from 0 to 1 is also pretty useful. Does one not continually adjust the weights assigned to all manner of propositions? For that matter, doesn't one adjust the meaning assigned to vague propositions as the specifics of the case become clearer? ("I thought DRY meant have your code look like gzip'ed output, but now I see it means after spotting a pattern, take a moment to think about it and see if there's not some nice coherent abstraction you are brushing against and could profitably use?")
> I intuitively like to use trivalent logic "true/false/not known" but the Bayesian reals from 0 to 1 is also pretty useful.
In my experience less than 10% of people think in non-binary, non-heuristic-based forms on these and similar topics, and even Rationalists fare not much better.
I think it is a more productive tweak to thinking to understand beliefs as not being fully true or fully false than to believe that one can be purely rational in one’s actions or beliefs.
I mostly agree, although the meme-based beliefs about the simplistic notion that it is ~impossible to be "purely rational in one’s actions or beliefs" is highly inaccurate imho. I don't disagree that people can't currently do it, but then consider how much we've improved when it comes to things like racism. Maybe if we actually tried to be rational (rather than patting ourselves on the back as is a popular practice here and in Rationalist and Scientific communities) we could make similar progress.
The nature of the “change their mind” in question is critical. If it pertains to business leadership or entrepreneurship, a change of mind is perfectly acceptable and even desirable.
The issue arises when people “change their mind” regarding some moral or ideological stances solely for their benefit, especially when such changes impact others. Because maintaining the old stance would adversely affect them - that is when mockery should start.
Also labeling this as merely "changing their minds" is a misleading oversimplification, a tactic used to rationalize unsavory behaviors. However, it's important to remember that the world isn't that simple; it's a complex tapestry of nuances and gray areas.
A recently deceased French journalist/philosopher, Jean-François Revel, used to say "Politicians are often praised for the mere fact of holding onto their opinions; I'm more interested in knowing what those opinions are."
I believe this is one of the reasons why it seems so particularly hard to get a measure reverted here. Why go back on anything if you're guaranteed to get extra flak? Might as well just weather the storm of whatever bad idea you came up with originally.
It's not weird at all, it's basically normal human group psychology, as near as I can tell, looking through history. Your in group has a set of beliefs, the out group has other beliefs, it's what makes them others and worth competing against/destroying if needed. The major societal improvement that is science gives one a decent algorithm for changing ones mind. I believe being able to point at the algorithm is a very overlooked part of why we began to be able to change our minds more effectively and less violently as a society.
I think in a VC pitch you need to have a point of view so they know what they are financing - otherwise you have nothing -- but once you get the money, you should be free to do pivots, within reason, to ensure success. You should always have a thesis (or more than one) and test it and adjust your business accordingly.
Yeah, you shouldn't change your mind immediately after the first resistance to your conviction. But you shouldn't merely brush it off either. Take it seriously, think about it, consider different angles, and then change your mind if that really seems more accurate.
It is weird, but our society really won't tolerate you changing you mind over something you were previously sure of, so it's better to just stick to what you believe.
We live in a world where you can have your career ruined over Tweets from a decade or more ago even if you long since changed your mind. Given that you might as well hold firm and be unapologetic, because no one cares if you grew and changed as a person.
There is actually some rational ground for being suspicious of public figures who change their minds in their area of putative expertise. Nominally, the job of Secretary of the X is to be an expert in X. They should have done the work to come to the correct opinions, and be able to defend them. While in theory I wouldn't want them to hold that opinion at all costs, it should be a rare event that causes them to radically change their opinions. It should take some very substantial stuff to do it. They shouldn't be someone who can be blown by the wind and a couple of stray facts, because they should be sitting on a lot more facts that support their position.
Now, in reality this is all sorts of naive and the Secretary of the X was absolutely certainly not put there simply because they're the best at X. We're lucky if that was even a consideration and if they can even follow the most basic issues in field X. Nevertheless, despite the fact a number of people know that the nominal level of politics is far from the only one, it remains an important one. The nominal level of politics becomes more important the larger the group of people, and national scale is just about the largest relevant scale. Even so, even in small environments I find the nominal level of politics remains important even when every single participant knows everyone else is putting on a political show for everyone else. It's weird to me, but while analyzing that surface level is nowhere near sufficient to understand what is going on, it never ceases being relevant.
So it remains relevant for people in positions of authority to have relatively stable positions. Otherwise they're penetrating that nominal level of politics, and that's a very dangerous thing for them to do. Despite the fact we visibly have a lot of people in charge of X who know basically nothing about X and are clearly there for purely political reasons, if they actually publicly admitted they know nothing about X and they're just there because of their political skill, they'd be out of a job within the week.
This argument just applies to authority figures. But then, in my experience, in real life changing your mind is less of a deal; sure, that one guy or whatever might call you out on it but it is not intrinsically a huge deal. (The resulting rearrangement of relationships may be a big deal, but I wouldn't call that being mocked for changing your mind, that's a consquence of changing circumstances.)
Public posting of positions, say on Twitter or Facebook, makes it less likely they would even attempt to change their mind. They will rationalize very hard to keep their previous position.
I call this “Twitterification” of beliefs.
This is amplified by how logical, or generally intellectually superior one feels compared to others. An extra bonus if they acted very sure, mocked, or dismissed some opposing beliefs.
> It's weird that people get mocked for changing their minds.
Do they? It could be that I live in a bubble due to the profession I am in and the environment and culture I have grown up in. But in the circle I live in, people are appreciated when they change their minds. It is seen as a sign of growth.
Is it really that common for people to get mocked for changing their minds?
It's that it's annoying to have to consider changing your mind because they changed theirs. And, it challenges your sense of their authority. Were they wrong in the first place? Should I not trust them? Who should I trust instead? Influential people are valuable for their "insight" and for their "stability" -- both.
I mostly base my sense of someone's authority on their commitment to logic and readiness to embrace evolving knowledge. By your standard, if someone could live for thousands of years, they might persist in holding the outdated belief that matter is composed of fire, air, water, and earth. Too much stability is dangerous.
It isn't weird at all. People form status hierarchies based upon whom they can trust. At a primal level, constancy gives people feelings of security.
This may be irrational, and it may not be the way we want people to be, but that is beside the point. It's a very human thing and a core part of politics, religion and interpersonal relations.
It's sad that people are mocked for it but changing you mind is not free, it's a burden for your family, friends, colleagues and readers. Like changing an API the burden might be worth it or not and like Postel's law:
Be liberal changing your mind, but be conservative speaking your mind.
One should stay anonymous on THE INTERNET if they feel offended. When you put our bladder in front of wolves , you should not argue about wolves are wrong.
If you out your personal stuff on internet, be it just your name you invited people to disect it!
It’s just another manifestation of tribalism. Having lost ideological concord, people have to minimize that betrayal’s impact, in their own minds if in none other’s, suffering a fight or flight sensation instead of introspection.
It's not weird to mock people "changing their minds" if you believe that their change of minds is just them faking it to get on with the prevailing political/social wind or to jump on a bandwaggon for profit.
It's weird that people are expected to have made up their mind. "I've been looking into this for awhile, here's what I've found so far" is much closer to the truth.
To make this fun: What's a strong belief that you used to have, that you don't have anymore? Especially ones that go counter to mainstream narrative.
Two for me (might start some fights, but it's all in good fun):
- I generally believed that Python was great for building big systems, but having worked on some very large Python codebases, I've become a real zealot for a good type system, especially when refactoring and maintenance becomes a major issue.
- Having worked with and maintained a couple of event sourced systems, I've become much less of a purist, given how hard they are to maintain and build on. So I went from "event sourcing is awesome" to "YAGNI".
Such people are mocked if the mockers believe there is still something flawed about their reasoning and that they're likely to make the same mistake in the future.
The tweet should be “It is weird that people who are not self-serving hypocrites get mocked for changing their minds”. But in that case the tweet will not be true…
You may be pleased to know that “essay” literally means “attempt”. The idea being that you aren’t sure exactly what you believe, so you’re going to attempt to write it down and see if that helps to clarify it for yourself and others.
“the team has analyzed new, additional data which has yielded updated insights, so we are adjusting our designs and approaches accordingly”
Only to be savaged by project managers (and all kinds of other management types). It’s demoralizing for the team and plain stupid, and has me rethinking my life and career choices.
I’m so done with technology work, and life in general.
this is kind a bad take. like other comments say, genuine intellectual journey is great on most every topic. yet I'm not going to give points, much less MORE points, to someone who use to be a bigot, conspiracy theorist, or any other similar flavor of belief
The mocking is usually because they don't like the person, and would attack whatever they do. Not because they don't like the idea or the fact that they changed their mind.
Unfortunately a lot of public debate today is built around this.
Not when you believe that the absolute standard for truth was written thousands of years ago and never has and never will change. Forget historical truth, we already know that's absurd, but plenty of people think that way.
It's weird to me that people even seek to have opinions in the first place. That always seemed like the wrong way to view the world from the perspective of an observer with incomplete data.
I mean take a topic like global warming... It might be true or false in reality, but from our perspectives as subjective observers with incomplete data we can only ever say things about global warming with degrees of confidence. Therefore I tend to think of myself as an ~80% believer in global warming and a ~20% disbeliever – evidence seems to strongly weight on the side of global warming being a real phenomena, but it's certainly not inconceivable to me that our data may be incomplete.
Obviously where binary decisions need to be made I will act as if I believe global warming is real, but the point is I genuinely don't know and to say I believe in global warming as if it's rational to have a binary opinion on such things would be utterly absurd.
Another upside of thinking like this is that I genuinely don't seek to have opinions on anything. I like to think of my "opinions" more as superpositions of opinions which only manifest as binaries temporarily in situations where I need to act on my beliefs as if they're binaries.
I also like to remind myself that my own beliefs are simply the net of all opinions held by others with my own weightings – like a softmax output or something. Therefore I hold all political positions and all ideologies to some degree. For example, I consider myself as being both someone who supports Brexit and someone who doesn't and I think this makes me more open and understanding when it comes to controversial opinions. At least I seem to find it very easy to incorporate new positions or data without the typical mental blockers because something is labeled a "x" or "y" talking point. If someone makes a good point which I hadn't considered before I'll just be like, "oh that's interesting" and then it's part of my beliefs automatically. That wouldn't necessarily mean that the ideology that motivated that point would manifest when I'm forced to make binary decisions, and in this way I can easily view the majority of Brexit talking points as truthy without actually voting Brexit.
On the negatives people have said I'm schizophrenic with my beliefs because I'm fine with manifesting different binary opinions from week to week. But I think I'd argue it's probably more rational to do that when operating with a low level of certainty. I mean what's the alternative? Having a binary opinion the pros and cons of something as nuanced as freedom vs security? That would be equally absurd. If you force me to take to have a binary opinion it will be inconsistent.
I think if you believed something really really stupid, or if you dishonestly said you believed something because it was in your interest, say for example crypto, then pretend to change your mind, you deserve to be ridiculed.
Why is this on HN though? "People change their minds" is this deep or interesting to anyone here? This is really thin.
Someone who’s open about all beliefs being provisional, respectful of opposing viewpoints, and transparent about being willing to change with no evidence is not going to be mocked.
Outside of politics and other performatively dishonest arenas, of course. In those areas mockery is a weapon and it doesn’t matter how fair the criticism is.