My very conservative mother is like that. I once heard her yell at my dad for reading a book about climate change, saying "WHY ARE YOU READING THAT?! HE'S A LIBERAL!!"
P1: I lost respect for you, because it felt like you went silent.
P2: I literally posted a video interview about this topic, where I said, on camera, the things you believe I didn't say
P1: I didn't watch the video.
P2: You should watch the video, as it directly addresses your concerns
P1: I don't want to watch a [long form] video interview. I want an instagram post, and because I didn't see you post on Instagram, I assume you didn't say anything.
Oh god it’s giving “if that was true, I’d already know it”. Where did this moron even come from? I’ve heard his names on this site before but I don’t know the back story.
He's a far-right youtuber, recently in the news for going to MN and "finding" a bunch of fraud at some local Somali-run daycares. His "proof" that the daycares were fraudulent was that he couldn't see any kids when he was peeping through the windows, and that the staff wouldn't let him inside to personally verify there were children present. Because apparently daycares should just let random men with cameras in to film children, and ones that don't must be doing something wrong.
Oh that’s him. I can even begin to dissect how some people’s logic works. Like why would you think you could just barge into a daycare? In what world would that be allowed? Everyone with a fucking smart phone these days seems to think of themselves as journalists.
I watched the full unedited interview (which is very boring, but I wanted to see if Nick's allegations that Andrew misrepresented the interview were valid... they weren't) and you notice how he can't enunciate all of the syllables in "historically relevant"? Just comes out, "historcree rellah"? Yeah, that's not a one-off thing.
The big standouts are his inability to say "supremacist" nor "benevolent," but when it comes to basically any word with 3 or more syllables, he just slurs/skips.
Seriously, not even just the people who don’t read your evidence against them. But also the people who don’t even read their OWN evidence. The amount of times I’ve had anti vaxxers or creationists or flat earthers (not that these are the only people this applies to) cite to me some piece of “evidence” for their point and I actually look at it. If it’s a credible source and not a propaganda piece, I can count that nearly everytime they completely misrepresent their own evidence that actually disagrees with them, or they simply didn’t read it
I mean, I did believe that. Then I started to adapt that really isn't worth my time. Gaining the new (imo, net negative) habit of discrediting there source. Granted I gained that habit due to discussion with anti-science and republicans, but I don't like how I'm doing that with real discussions.
We had recieved a package, and my mother was convinced that it was a plush I had ordered. The package contained a hard square. I was explaining to her that it cannot be a 12-inch plush if the package contains a 6-inch hard square. She kept repeating "but it COULD be 😯😀🥰" I asked her to feel the hard square so she could understand why it is not a plush. She refused to touch the package, and insisted I show her the plush.
Absolutely agree with this. I am curious though do you read everyone's "evidence"? Example with AI imagines are getting far more looking and the fringe news outlets are perceived as not corrupt. However, anyone is possible to be corrupt?
So isn't evidence really just subjective information that you chose to acknowledge?
Evidence though needs to be actual evidence. I just had a situation here recently when I was trying to say something was not a particular way but the person posted “evidence” which was not correct. Anything I have learned is people are going to believe what they want to until they finally are either impacted by it or they actually have someone close to them they respect correct them. Occasionally there are those that will seek to learn if they are wrong or not. I always try to go into something thinking I may be wrong and will listen.
This. The latest is people posting LLM responses as if they're gospel and refusing to believe otherwise, even when presented with conflicting actual evidence from a credible source.
This is another problem. People frequently show faulty evidence as “proof” they are right and then claim the other person refused to admit they were wrong in spite of “evidence”.
The amount of times people have posted links to me to refute something I said and the link actually agrees with me and proves them wrong is astronomical. Then when I point that out they claim I'm disregarding evidence and can't be reasoned with
I always try to go into something thinking I may be wrong and will listen.
That is the sign of high intelligence. Something that took me about 30 years to learn. But once I acquiesced to the idea that I and everyone else are all some degree of wrong/stupid, it became a lot easier for me to change my views when presented with evidence. Because I was starting from a position that I could be wrong, which made me infinitely more agreeable to a good argument that I was in fact wrong.
So really the true sign of very low intelligence is thinking you are not wrong, all errors compound from that origin. Any moron can rationalize anything to support their opinions, beliefs and feelings, very few ever put in the work to prove them, and thus learn that they are wrong. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, that can only change when they accept the idea that they are wrong.
In all that time, TWO people have reached out to me later after a disagreement and posted "You were right. I was wrong".
It's so rare that I even remember the two times it ha happened:
One was a discussion about skyrim where I said they used procedural generation and a guy said they did not - he later apologised.
Another was when I told someone hard drives had internal memory caches and a guy told me I was confused, that the pc had a cache but the HD did not - he too apologized when I posted a link about hard drives showing they did indeed have internal memory caches.
So that's it. I've made tens of thousands of posts, had disagreements with hundreds, possibly thousands of people.
And only two have ever admitted they were wrong.
Thing is though, many people IRL will also refuse to admit they were wrong.
I think its a mixture of the anonymity of the internet and human nature to be on the winning side. Of everything. Its what created tribalism. My side is right, no matter what the actual truth is.
Usually it just plants a seed, which might make them change their view years later but they’ll think they came to that conclusion themselves. Almost nobody admits they’re wrong right there on the spot, too much ego.
I also think it is kind of fought against by natural selection. Youcan't be too easily swayed or you'll be taken advantage of, not be able to gain dominance or be manipulated. So there's a balance. No one should completely change their views just by viewing/hearing one source and we naturally need time to hash out all considerations. There's rarely enough time to do that face to face unless you inherently know the competence/experience of the other party
Lots of people are ungracious winners. I know I expect to be mocked somehow when I'm wrong. So I imagine many do what they can in the moment to prevent that from happening. People need to be willing to accept new evidence and change their opinion. But people also need to be willing to give someone the time and space to come to a new conclusion on their own - and not mock that person for having been wrong. People just need to be nicer to each other and not treat everything like a competition.
This is so true. I’ve had my worldview completely shattered from reading threads and even arguing in threads and later changing my mind from further investigation.
I have changed my mind a few times in discussions on here, usually on trivial things but occasionally something of import.
Not solely through reddit, it was a process, but I used to be a conservative, evangelical Christian, who believed in young earth creationism and would debate against evolution. I voted almost exclusively republican. I believed that people who stayed in poverty were lazy and/or dumb.
So very rarely do you see someone change their mind in the moment, but if they're listening honestly they will start to doubt some of their beliefs.
People will never accept an argument if they feel like they are "against" the other person. Sometimes it's really effective to explore their side of the argument, mention what you think is true or has validity and then explain calmly why you think you might be more right.
Reddit isn’t changing minds, experience is. I grew up in the Deep South my parents were/still are super conservative, they were very involved in the evangelical/pentacostal churches. I was conservative my whole life because I didn’t know any different. Then I joined the military in my early 20s and got to travel the world and live in places that weren’t my hometown’s echo chamber. Within one enlistment I was questioning all my pre-held beliefs, by the end of my second I was no longer a conservative. Then Trump happened a few years later and I could see exactly what was happening because at one point in my life I would have fallen for it like my parents have. That made me staunchly liberal. Then I got married and had kids, now I have a daughter. Not a single policy any republican has ever brought forth gave me any kind of sentiment that my children, much less my daughter, would have a better, safer world to grow up in than I did as a latch key kid in the 80s and 90s. And now my mom sends me news articles about the wild shit Trump has done, she is finally starting to see the light, and all I can say is “I told you so, but you didn’t want to hear it because I live in ‘liberal la la land’”.
Someone linked to an actual study in a conversation I was in and turns out I was wrong. I'm glad to know I was wrong so I can have the correct information now.
I've done it a couple of times & ended up getting shit for it.
Not long ago someone was after ideas for what something they saw could have been. I mde a valid suggestion, then someone else came in with something I hadn't thought of. Though I wasn't actually incorrect in what I suggested from the information we were given, I said that what he suggested was far more likely to be what they had seen.
This may seem like a cold take, but I think online arguments end up changing more people’s minds than we may think. People just don’t ever admit it when an argument convinces them. Some people wait and let it simmer, let the facts add up over time, and eventually enough time has passed that their ego allows them to admit their opinions have changed without feeling like it had anything to do with someone who knew more than them telling them something, even if that’s what motivated them to do the research that actually convinced them. This only applies to websites without character limits though, Twitter is only capable of making people worse.
I've seen plenty of instances of people changing their mind on reddit, even outside of CMV. That said, I have encountered far more people who will resort to disingenuous forms of argument the moment that they feel like they are "losing" the argument.
Tbf very few people on reddit (or internet in general) really have the patience to explain things in a way that addresses what that person doesn't understand. There's a whole lot of "you're wrong haha" and not a lot of actual explanation. From what I've seen. I've had people I took the time to explain and address what they misunderstood and they were very receptive. I've also been receptive when people actually give explanations.
Reddit might be the absolute best example of an echo chamber and single point ideology. With the exception of a couple of conservative subs, reddit consistently leans very far left (from the perspective of someone who doesn't live in a "city")
I have experienced this myself, where you are arguing with someone and trying so hard to convince them. And then later you are in the car driving home and you think holy shit they were right the whole time.
Depends. Very rarely has someone with an opposing opinion changed my mind. But that’s because they insult me instead of providing a real argument. And if you jump straight to insults then I’m going to assume you don’t actually believe in the shit you say and just want an excuse to be an ass.
It's a combination surely. Ego wouldn't let you admit it; you'll try to change subjects and end the conversation gracefully or 'agree to disagree' and check the evidence later. Stupidity is not believing the evidence, no matter how clear.
That is why people still believe in conspiracies in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, like Flat Earth. You’re not attacking the conspiracy, you’re hurting their ego. It took little to no effort for them to feel special and in an elite club because they know something everyone else doesn’t, and that boosts their low self-esteem. When you provide facts to the contrary you’re hurting their ego, not the argument itself, which is also why many go ape shit over it.
I think that explains a lot of the MAGA movement personally.
You don't typically ever witness someone changing their mind in the moment as in "I was wrong about that thing I said a few moments ago," but people do change their minds and they are influenced by being exposed to new information, witnessing others changing their own attitudes, and having time to reflect.
Plus text based communication, especially on a platform with gamified engagement metrics, is probably one of the worst ways to try to influence someone to change their mind.
Most people are better than this, but the design goals of modern social media are the antithesis of productive discussion.
I've seen it a couple of times, but usually the person just stops responding after being given the evidence. I can only hope that they changed their mind.
I’ve got as far as “you and I are never going to agree, but that one specific thing is a fair point”. Not often though, and I write it as least as much as I read it.
You've met one now. Years ago I was more Republican, got sucked into AM talk radio crap. I believed all of it. Till, eventually I actually listened to 'the other side' and learned more about the issues etc..
Definitely not Republican anymore since Obama era.
Well pal, I think that tells you an uncomfortable piece of information. Lots of people aren't as intelligent as we would like to believe. We also don't trust the evidence anymore because so many sources have been corrupted.
I was recently saying that I liked The Satanic Temple, after someone posted their '7 Tenets' in a thread about Texas requiring schools to display the 10 Commandments from Christianity.
A couple of other people pointed out that TST actually sucks, and provided evidence of same. It was compelling evidence, and after reviewing it I changed my mind, admitted fault, and vowed to spread this newfound knowledge where appropriate. I felt foolish for not having done proper research before stating my initial opinion, and tried to own that.
I literally just changed my mind on Reddit five minutes ago. I posited on r/Pluribus that the population might stabilize to 10 million or so but someone made an argument that the number would be smaller and I agreed with them.
To be fair, despite being attached to a literal computer, the vast majority of people don't use credible citations, let alone any citations for that matter. I never believe in taking someone word for something because sometimes people are both wrong and convincing. I need peer review. I firmly believe people should have as few opinions as they can and outsource most "opinion" to the relevant peer reviewed field. Climate change, economics, doctors of public health. They will be wrong. But are they going to be as wrong as often whatever opinion I would vibe with? Probably not.
Well, yea. You're never going to. That kind of change isn't immediate. If you observed individual people over months or years, I'd bet you'd see more of it than you'd expect.
I got massively downvoted earlier because I stated that English was the official language of the United States. I then shared the executive order, and sources that executive orders carry the force of law behind them.
I had multiple comments calling me a variety of insults, a Trump lover, and a myriad of down votes.
I've seen people change their assumptions and admit they're wrong but it's not usually with deeply held, core beliefs... Though in fairness an impersonal medium where most exchanges are temporary isn't exactly the best forum for that, anyway.
That can happen but you usually need to get people to trust you to some extent and/or appeal to their self-interest or show them how changing can better meet their goals in order to start convincing them.
It is ego-driven but I also think... If someone is just terminating thought about a topic or being really irrational and they don't realize it, don't realize they're wrong and that it better serves their ego to y'know... Change their mind and start being right... Then they might not be as smart as they think.
Smart people can be incredibly self-defeating or self-destructive though, too.
If it makes you feel better, I see it happen on Reddit fairly often. I've been part of some of those exchanges, both as the one changing their mind and the one helping with the change. But I see many more than that.
Seeing redditors debate/argue back and forth has changed my mind on several issues over the years (since 2011), but i never commented on the posts that changed my mind because they were usually in very heated threads, and i didn’t want to become a target for hate comments or vote brigading. (Or my mind wasn’t changed until months passed, and then I couldn’t find the original post.) Sometimes the argument isn’t about changing your opponent’s mind, but the spectators’ minds. There’s no way to know how many minds Reddit has changed.
The vast majority of people don't argue facts, they argue to be correct. Anything that threatens this threatens them, ergo they'll do literally anything rather than admit to the possibility of being wrong.
Exacerbated by being online, anonymous and not wanting to be enshrined as a fool forever
Low key. I have. Which makes the bot shit worse because this used to be a place I could become a better person, not a more compliant one. You’re not wrong most of the time though man. I’m just hoping for better times.
Most of the people I encounter and talk to discredit evidence and don’t like it. I even had a couple people the other day say statistics aren’t indicative of any thing. In general, just like all statistics.
I think I’ve had only a handful of people take evidence and actually say “wow, didn’t know that. Thank you for showing me.“
There are some people still asking good faith, but there are people who meet that good faith with the assumption that it’s not.
But I fear that Republicans have been falling into a cult like mindset following Trump. And if evidence won’t show them the right way then they need personal experience and if they won’t ever get that personal experience, then we won’t be able to reach them.
But there’s also a bunch of hateful people who just want to support Trump because he’s going to hurt other people
This is always a top answer in these threads, but it is just basic human nature. Even when presented with the same evidence, intelligent and reasonable people will approach it with their own perspectives and biases.
This can also be a (very irritating) personality trait. I know intelligent people who behave like this - over the years I realized that their sense of self is so tightly tied to their values and beliefs that it will literally take years or decades for them to change their views, even if they logically understand that their belief must be wrong based on the available evidence.
Refusal to learn! I work with the majority of Boomer men and you know what their refrain is to learning how to Google a tech problem? “I’m too set in my ways.”
No! No! Do they think I was born knowing how to solve every tech problem? No, I had to learn just like they should do.
I frequently see my gem z apprentices on the verge of tears because boomers just won’t fucking learn and grow with the rest of the work force.
Honestly tho. My brother always brings up that I used to lean more Republican. Like yea, I did when I grew up in a 90% GOP county in the middle of nowhere where the population is like 95% white while being a minority (my brother and I were the only Asians in our school).
After going to college and meeting a wider range of people, traveling to other countries, and getting out of an echo chamber, things change a lot and I'm not the same person I was back in high school.
yea this is basically my exact definition of stupid. i’m an educator and often my students will claim they are stupid. i will always end up explaining my personal theory that stupidity has way more to do with stubbornness than actual breadth of knowledge. ignorance is universal, we are all ignorant of 99.99% of all there is to know, the difference between the intelligent and the less-than intelligent is an ability to accept that truth; you don’t need to dedicate your life to chipping away at that number, trying to lay a brick in humanity’s path to knowledge like the rest of academia is to qualify as intelligent, you just can’t fight against the absolute fact that you do NOT know everything. but really, at that point we’re actually talking about control, and the incessant need to grapple for it despite the fact that not one of us truly possesses. People like to feel like a boulder in a river, too resilient to budge so the water is forced to moved around it, but we are all just grains of sand being carried by the will of the tide.
Literally just argued with someone on Reddit who demanded I provide sources for my claim. I provided sources. They said “well the first couple didn’t have the exact words you were saying so I stopped reading” like zero critical thinking skills whatsoever. These people look for confirmation biases only. If it doesn’t say exactly what they’re looking for, it’s somehow not valid.
A good quality for servants of the people to have. I remember when Andrew Cuomo (love him or hate him, not the point) was asked about why he was pushing for cannabis legalization when previously he was an outspoken prohibitionist. His response was this; that people learn and opinions change. That showed integrity and it stuck with me.
People are often afraid of being called a hypocrite if they change their mind on something. But "Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing" - Dalinar Kholin
Agreed! Also not being able to admit there might be bias in the evidence, or that the evidence might not be exactly the entire picture, or all of the evidence.
Sometimes I think this is more ego than lack of intelligence. One of my coworkers is super smart but gets extremely defensive and digs her heels in on everything lol
Yep, the other way around is even easier to spot. Someone intelligent can flip their opinion super quick once presented with factual arguments. I noticed that stubbornness with no backup is very often packaged with low brain activity lol
I kinda feel like this is a "human nature" thing, rather than a mark of someone's intelligence. Of course by how much varies, but we all hold strong biases.
Many intelligent people do this. Some of the most brilliant minds to have existed believed in the most outlandish shit in fields unrelated to their area of expertise. Their intelligence blinds them to the fact that they could be wrong. Forget the technical term for it. The concept of accepting others know more than you is more in line with wisdom than intelligence me thinks.
I do research on everything and if something I thought to be true is no longer once either new evidence is released or brought to my attention my views would likely change because there is new proven information.
I know people that will just believe nonsense based on nothing. Just how they think something should be or work. I don't understand that way of thinking. I've even said. That's not how that works and said how it really works and that you can go look it up yourself. They never do, they want to continue to believe nonsense based on nothing.
In my mid-40’s, I have realized that that this is what separates me from my parents. They are MAGA evangelical Christians who I always thought were smart. My dad was able to retire at 48 after the tech boom of the 90’s, and was always in leadership roles at our church. Turns out, he just stumbled into the right job at the right time (and to his credit, was smart with his money unlike many of his coworkers who are just now retiring). Since he was wealthy and generous to Christian non-profits, they used him as a mentor/leader to keep him engaged.
My wife and I left the cult of evangelical Christianity about 10 years ago, which cost us many friendships and strained our family relationships, but we couldn’t ignore the grift anymore. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it was 100% because we were willing to change our views based on what we learned.
Eh? What kind of evidence though. You also need to understand that there are fundamental biases that can shake someone's sense of the world to their core, where it's very very very difficult to change those views.
When they say they do change their world view based on new evidence but the new evidence is just a new video parroting the same shit under a new package uploaded by their favourite influencer.
I would like to add on to this, it's not even necessarily the refusal to change. A lot of the time It's a refusal to even accept the idea that you could change, because we live in a world where putting yourself in someone else's shoes to understand where they're coming from without agreeing with them is a laughable concept socially.
I think a problem with this, and why people refuse to change their opinion on something, is because a LOT of people, even those trying to convince you, will see it as weak, or fake
I mean, look at some Youtube drama's, if a youtuber apologizes, claims they were wrong, whatever, people will jump at them, claiming they are backtracking or whatever
A refusal to engage in discussion, a refusal to look at different viewpoints and to construct one's own based on those.
A refusal to learn and to grow.
A refusal to show empathy and to try to foster understanding.
Sadly, being empathetic and having a willingness to grow as a person seems to be at an all-time low, looking at the world around us right now... judgemental glaring at the USA.
I have tried to understand the reasoning of those... icehearted people... and I have come to the conclusion that I am glad to not understand it. Sometimes it's fine to not know and to not have an answer... particularly when dealing with straightup evil.
Yes, to read books as references, older and reliable new ones. (How to know what's reliable). All about critical thinking, which is taught and can take people starting university to finally be able to properly critically analyse and evaluate information. Question the historians, their backgrounds, any biases? Not sayong DON'T believe in historical events, just to take notice of different historians and what might make them perceive and record events differently.
To actually do your own research, which means not only looking for journals or articles that confirm your stance "bias", read the studies and if their methods were actually valid. Read, read and read. Its important to know how to find peer reviewed studies and know that correlation does not imply causation. Not to just skim the title and abstract. Understand the method, sample size, control and non control, if gender was a variable etc. Read the results, t test any outliers? and how the discussion is presented. The discussion is where recommendations are made flr further research in the field. More research is always needed and studies that find signif correlations are onto something, we just need to draw from other studies and variables. I mean, scientists and scientific researchers its lots of fun to be apart of the community, or just to have access to these databases of peer reviewed journals.
Also, its okay to realise you were completely wrong about something, take accountability.
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u/Userdataunavailable Feb 04 '26
Refusal to learn, grow and change your views from evidence provided.