Humans are rationalizing creatures, much more than rational ones. Our first gut reaction is trying to make sense of why we think what we think and why we behave how we behave, rather than trying to figure out if it does actually make sense. If this natural tendency could be changed, the world would be far less of a shithole.
This is why, rather than slapping people in the face with a mountain of research, I try to ask them questions that lead them to the conclusion I want them to reach. Oh we discuss along the way, but you get a lot less of the black and white thinking bold statements that someone entrenched in their beliefs tends to make
The research backs up your statement. Especially if you yourself are genuinely interested in the conversation, and also willing to update your own thinking, along with helping get everyone in the conversation to start understanding the real answers.
In case you haven’t listened to it, the You Are Not So Smart podcast covers the topic of how to get people to change on a pretty regular basis. It’s a great podcast that talks a lot about conspiracies, misinformation, and how to combat them.
https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/
My favorite part of this podcast is that if you listen to it from the start (nearly 300 episodes at this point), you can hear him slowly become very jaded and pessimistic, but then as the podcast goes on, he starts turning around his opinion and gets exited and optimistic about all the progress that is made. It’s a really great podcast and makes me excited for the future.
This is just the Socratic method. It’s like…the oldest formal rhetorical strategy.
I don’t think so? The Socratic method wasn’t necessarily a strategy intended to carefully persuade someone by bypassing psychological blockers. If anything, Socrates’ counterparts were often antagonized and angered by his questions because he exposed contradictions.
I think the ethos behind it was that Socrates presumed he knew nothing, other people seemed like they knew things, so he asked them what they knew, since others were so bold as to make knowledge claims.
We’re also to some extent innately combative creatures. People will say “Oh, I showed people the facts and they still didn’t change their mind. They’re just idiots stuck in their ways.” Okay, cool. When you tried to present these facts, did you do it in such a way as to treat them courteously or as an equal, or did you do it in such a way that you got to feel like you were dunking on them rhetorically? Because it’s not as simple as presenting someone with facts. It’s doing so in a way that doesn’t make it feel like you’re trying to establish some kind of superiority over them. Because then they’re not presenting facts to you, they’re just attacking you and your position. And these are very different things, conceptually and emotionally.
That is - IMO - what critical thinking is meant to be … thinking about alternative explanations and evaluating their viability or probability.
Unfortunately a lot of people use the term “critical thinking” as just another way to rationalize why they are against something, without actually weighing the options.
100 percent this. Another way of putting it is to say that in general, we arrive at opinions and then use our intellectual faculties to reason ourselves into justifying them.
It’s exactly the opposite of how we intuitively think about how we arrive at our positions.
Everyone does it. I do it, you do it, we all do it. What’s important is that some of us are more aware of it than others.
It’s also true that the scientific method is a self-correcting system that accounts for this.
I try real hard to not only change my mind but vocally (typographically) acknowledge when I was wrong because it’s so goddamnit rare and infuriating.
Same here. I work in tech and you’d be amazed how many people are so much less on guard around me because of this.
It’s a movie but CPT Jack was right, you cant trust an honest person, but people do anyways.
This is like a 21st century Monty Python skit.
These comments are quite devoid of meme energy
Fucking everything is political. If you think something is too political its because your not political enough.
Your weekend is political, the 8 hour work day is political, the fucking air you breath and the pollution it is fucking political. EVERYTHING IS FUCKING POLITICAL!
A shit post about Chad farquad saying “E” after being asked what’s the second vowel is political?
there’s no escape, bitch
politics is reality and you just want fantasy… but if you keep reading fantasy, you’ll eventually notice something horrible about it. Spoiler alert: its politics
If there’s one I’ve learned after being on the internet for 17 years, it’s this; you can throw an entire mountain of evidence at a conspiracy theorist and they STILL won’t believe you.
On the internet your identity is a collection of the opinions that you wrote under that name. So if you changing your opinion on anything you’re changing your identity.
All the more difficult if you use your own name as your identity and you have acquired followers because of the opinions you’ve expressed.
Meanwhile back in reality…
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Fluoride in drinking water isn’t safe
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Iraq doesn’t have WMDs and we destroyed their country killing millions for some other reason
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The government is spying on everything you do
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JFK assassination must be shady since they keep refusing to release the final documents on it
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New world order (globalism) is real and now they openly hold meetings and promote the idea
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The vaccines were not “safe and effective” and many people were maimed and injured for a non-sterilizing vaccine that could never have stopped COVID
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UFOs apparently do exist and Congress is admitting it
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The government is brain washing people (MKUltra)
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The internet is all bots and shills (Dead internet)
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Many powerful people are pedophiles
Just a handful of “crazy conspiracy theories” that are all seemingly accepted as true now.
My god the amount of delusion in this comment is insane.
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Yes it is. It is undeniably true that fluoride improves tooth health, and improves your health overall as a result.
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I don’t believe it was ever a conspiracy theory that there weren’t WMDs. At least nothing beyond some random ass people in some corner of the internet. If we are including them though, literally everything is a conspiracy theory.
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This isn’t true. The fact that they need to pay companies for information they can’t legally get elsewhere is proof of this. If they were spying on everything, they’d already know everything and there would be no crime. Unless you’re denying that assasination attempts happen on top government officials?
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This isn’t even something that’s been proven beyond “well they haven’t said nothing happened so that means something happened!”
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New world order is just bullshit. There’s never any actual proof of this theory beyond “omg government officials talk to each other! Conspiracy confirmed!”
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Take your anti vaccine bullshit elsewhere. There is a mountain of evidence to support the “safe and effective” claims, and the people who try to debunk it literally don’t even understand what they are talking about. If you cross reference their data or what they claim something means, the holes are obvious. It’s the dunning center effect mixed with “I did my own research.”
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UFOs existing was never “admitted to” by Congress. No more than “Jewish space lasers” starting forest fires. Three people said something in front of Congress, presented no evidence, and some of it wasn’t even first hand knowledge. How is that a confirmation exactly?
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MKUltra was not what people claimed was happening when it comes to brain washing. The claim is almost always about sleeper agents who don’t know they are brainwashed carrying out activities only when they are “activated.” While I don’t doubt this has been attempted, it’s literally impossible with our understanding of the human brain at present.
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Are you admitting you’re a bot? Or a shill?
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This is just a given. Many powerful people are also: Sadistic, masochistic, like being pissed on, like pissing on people, are gay, are trans, are intersex, are murderers, sleep more than 10 hours a day. This is just how things work. If you get a large enough group of people, you’ll be able to find a subset that match any criteria you set.
Fluoride might be sufficiently safe in the drinking water and it’s slightly effective but you know what would actually help? Dental hygiene. Fluoride in a form that actually stays with the teeth for more than a split second and has a chance to soak in instead of being drunk, i.e. toothpaste. Fluor in tap water is an absolute stop-gap measure introduced by a country which can’t be arsed to have universal healthcare, they apparently can’t even be arsed to have a campaign to get people to brush their fucking teeth.
Stop-gap measure like the Teletubbies. No, wait, hear me out: The whole thing is a very scientific, and successful, way to teach basic language skills to toddlers parked in front of the TV. It does the maximum possible in the situation but the results are still worse than plain old interactions with actual people.
You’re the only who had a negative take but actually responded. That’s encouraging that you aren’t a bot. I’ll just focus on this one though.
This isn’t true. The fact that they need to pay companies for information they can’t legally get elsewhere is proof of this.
You might want to read what Snowden revealed. You’re trying to argue none of those things are true but like I said, they’re undeniably true. You’re just uninformed as to the truth of it. If you’d like to know more then you should admit this one is undeniably true and I’d be happy to source the others. There were many things revealed but you can start with “Prism.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data
It was already shown the US government is decrypting all internet traffic, storing all internet traffic in their data center in Utah, that they monitor all video, audio, and text communications. That they wire tap all phone communications and store it. All of this is done without a warrant and in violation of the constitution. They claim it is legal because they don’t look at the data until they have a legal justification. So, they say they’re not spying because even though they’re spying on you, they only look at wire tap data if they have some way to legally justify it. They say it’s legal because if you communicate in any way that a foreign person might receive it then they’re actually spying on the foreign person’s communication even though your data is the one being stored as well. They say it’s legal because they only search records “related to a target.” So if they find one bad guy they can find anyone with a link to them out to a factor of 100. Have you heard of 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon? Imagine 100 degrees and that you have a relationship if you post something on Lemmy for example with EVERYONE who views it. So if some bad guy overseas views your Lemmy post you’re now connected to them and can be spied on using only the justification that they need to spy on that bad guy and anyone they “communicate with.”
Your answer might refer to specific branches of the government. Obviously someone working in government grant reviews for agriculture isn’t spying on everyone. But yes, the government as a whole is spying on everything you do. What’s the point of sourcing anything else if no one can even accept this simple one that even the main stream media covered extensively over the last decade? I mean, they even just reauthorized the program a few weeks ago.
Of course, the average person pays no attention but it doesn’t make it untrue. It’s sad when people are so uninformed and propagandized that they can’t even accept the truths the government has admitted to, defended in court, and continues to authorize even as recently as a few weeks ago. Section 702. Another thread you can look into. There were a lot of threads and it goes far beyond what most people are even able to admit to themselves is technically possible such as the TLS (https, you know the lock on your browser) being easily back doored by the government. After all the entire basis of web encryption relies on “trust” of the certificate authorities who only need to be given a National Security Letter (another thread you can look into) such as when the Reddit canary was removed (another thread you can look into) in order for the government to abuse their position of “trust.”
You would need to review all of these programs, understand the technology being discussed, and then you might be able to accept that, yes, the government is spying on you without a warrant and basically any electronic record you create is stored in an NSA database at a minimum. Then you’d also have to get people to begin to understand just how many records exist about their activity. That’s a whole other discussion.
This is just one item. Notice all the responses are “thats crazy, you’re a crazy person” but no one wants to actually engage in a discussion or refute the points. You’re the only one who made an effort. Look at how much I had to type up and source for just that one point and you might still try to argue and say it’s not true. I don’t have time to type a book in response to things people can look up themselves if they care to know the truth because if they don’t care to look it up they won’t care to read or understand me anyway.
um… no? no these aren’t all accepted as true now. a couple of those things are, and a couple more are kinda halfway to reality but the rest… dude you need to examine your media diet, someone’s feeding you bullshit
Many powerful people are pedophiles
Undeniably true
The internet is all bots and shills (Dead internet)
Undeniably true and getting worse every day now
The government is brain washing people (MKUltra)
Undeniably true
UFOs apparently do exist and Congress is admitting it
Undeniably true, were just halfway to the reality of what they are but weird UFOs apparently do exist
The vaccines were not “safe and effective” and many people were maimed and injured for a non-sterilizing vaccine that could never have stopped COVID
Undeniably true. They were saying “safe and effective” before they even knew it had heightened myocarditis risk. The risk to young men in particular is very high and much higher than any risk they faced from COVID.
New world order (globalism) is real and now they openly hold meetings and promote the idea
Undeniably true. WEF just had their meeting. Countries are signing away rights to WHO. Politicians openly used the words “new world order” several times during COVID.
JFK assassination must be shady since they keep refusing to release the final documents on it
Halfway to reality.
The government is spying on everything you do
Undeniably true. There’s a guy in Russia and another in prison in the UK who proved that one already.
Iraq doesn’t have WMDs and we destroyed their country killing millions for some other reason
Undeniably true.
Fluoride in drinking water isn’t safe
Halfway to reality, it’s already admitted now previous studies to prove safety were deeply flawed, and new studies are showing risk of neurological damage.
