Does anyone ever change their mind?

MorkandMindy

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No. Well, it's pretty rare.

Scientists are expected to change their minds not before but definitely after conclusive evidence has been given. The case of Barry Marshall & Robin Warren comes to mind.

Ulcers were at the time killing large numbers of patients and Robin Warren had found their stomachs over run by Helicobacter pylori bacteria. That was by 1981.

Rather than rush into the discovery many doctors held to the belief that ulcers were due to stress.

Two years later after infecting himself with that bacteria and developing massive inflammation (gastritis) Barry Marshall took an antibiotic and recovered. The evidence was in but the reluctance of others remained.

Marshall was quoted as saying in 1998 that "everyone was against me, but I knew I was right'.


What I remember from that was a wry comment that people were coming around to his idea, but only as quickly as people died and were replaced.
 

MorkandMindy

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It is my proposition that politics is the same.

People make up their minds, tell all their relatives and friends and then will not change their minds in light of new evidence, but find increasingly complicated ways to explain how they are still right and were right all along.
 
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Chris V++

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It is my proposition that politics is the same.

People make up their minds, tell all their relatives and friends and then will not change their minds in light of new evidence, but find increasingly complicated ways to explain how they are still right and were right all along

People allow themselves to be programmed, which is why you always hear the same talking points almost verbatim. Most, probably all, are guilty of shameless plagiarism. Uncertainty should be our default position. ( I stole that from the Coen Bros. )
 
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rambot

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YES! Yes I do. I DO change my mind. When STRONG evidence and the opinions of experts shift, I change my mind with them.

Unfortunately, people on the internet ALWAYS think that they provide "strong evidence" and that they themselves are experts (or that the tiny handful of experts that they agree are more important that the multiple thousands of experts who disagree with them).

Being called "sheeple" doesn't help. When folks use labels and make BROAD catagorizations of people that doesn't help to convince anyone of anything.


I've seen people online get duped by really really terrible evidence. Or, and tihs is far more dangerous and nowadays more common evidence that, on the surface looks VERY convincing but in fact, is disingenuous, misleading, or at times false.

My nephew is a graduate student and a friend of mine on facebook posted the scientific studies that call mask usage into question. While the studies on the surface were not supportive of mask use, there was a lot more going on that made the study less convincing. I needed someone DEEP into scientific research and published report writing to be able to analyze what was being said.

And the last problem is that everything thinks they are as smart as a nuclear physicist, atmospheric scientist, FBI agent, or Constitutional Scholar. Nobody is willing to say "teach me something and help me learn". And the bigliest problem is that when those people just HAPPEN upon a forum such as this and we are lucky enough to have someone with that level of knowledge, nobody bothers to engage in learning and just try (pathetically) to try to "gotcha" them.
 
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jacks

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When folks use labels and make BROAD catagorizations of people that doesn't help to convince anyone of anything.

Agreed, that's because to many people there are only two categories; US (The smart, good guys) and THEM (the dumb, bad guys).
 
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rambot

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Agreed, that's because to many people there are only two categories; US (The smart, good guys) and THEM (the dumb, bad guys).
Yes! And I would LOVE to be able to say that my side of the spectrum doesn't participate in it, but we do.

Heck, on my more frustrated days, I probably do too.

Sometimes I don't understand them. But sometimes it goes past that.
 
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MorkandMindy

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Politics is full of deception and a lot of that involves equating things that are very different and really mixing things up.

I'm conservative in that I don't like change and I have well-defined ethics and morals, pretty stable on every thing and I like stability.

Here's the interesting thing, back in the post WW2 era the US had nearly full employment, for white males to be sure, and a lot less disparity of incomes than now, so shouldn't conservative be keeping the more equal levels of pay of the past?
 
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chevyontheriver

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It is my proposition that politics is the same.

People make up their minds, tell all their relatives and friends and then will not change their minds in light of new evidence, but find increasingly complicated ways to explain how they are still right and were right all along.
I've changed parties twice now but I don't think I have changed my fundamental outlook from being an old-fashioned Humphrey Democrat.
 
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public hermit

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I have changed my mind, but it usually takes some time. I'm stubborn, and not very smart. Every time it has happened, I only really noticed it after the fact. It's kind of like a fog lifting. But, It has happened enough that I try not to be too dogmatic. I have been wrong before, so surely it will happen again. That experience is probably part of why I'm politically moderate.
 
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MorkandMindy

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Maybe Right Wing Economics?

The foundations of the Right Wing beliefs, Reaganomics / Friedman economics, are variously grossly exaggerated, meaningless or just plain false.

G H Bush referred to Reaganomics as 'Voodoo Economics' and he was right.

Somehow a lot of people decided Reagan's way was correct and took his side from then on.

What was behind it was greed, and some schadenfreude as well.

Here's a quote someone else on CF has as a signature:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith
 
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MorkandMindy

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There's a fair amount of human nature in the arrival of the far right thought that came in 1981 to both the US and the UK.

Here Reagan it seemed to me got away with talking garbage as a result of his age and failing mental faculties, to criticize his nonsense would be disrespect to elders. The UK had it's first ever female Prime Minister and it was felt that arguing with her was rude,

so as a result of something analogous to cowardice, but it came over as politeness, their nonsense was accepted as true.
 
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MorkandMindy

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1. Make the rich richer and the poor will get richer too: aka the rising tide, the trickle-down effect.

If everyone gets richer they will buy more cars and the car workers will get richer too. No, the ones in Detroit lost their jobs and the ones in Mexico where the jobs went aren't richer either. When the workers of two countries have to compete it is a race to the bottom and usually both lose.

That applies across all manufacturing jobs, in fact car workers is not a good example but it just came to mind, the availability fallacy.
 
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d taylor

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I have changed my mind from what i thought was true. To being shown first in the Bible that what i thought was true was not. That i began to let the Bible guide my seeking of truth, by first believing the Bible is true and every idea or man made assertions must fist be found true Biblically.
 
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