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.
Thanks for the recommendation!
This is just the Socratic method. It’s like…the oldest formal rhetorical strategy.
Shhhh don’t burst his bubble.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
-Descartes or some shit
A stitch in time saves nine.
-Pliny the elder
(Psst it’s not actually the socratic method)
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.
Ahh, after all this time, the Socratic Method still reigns
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.
No , we’re not.
Yes, we are.
Just putting this here for giggles, I don’t disagree with you lol
Oh I’m sorry, is this a five minute argument, or the full half hour?
Oh, just the five minute one.
Just the five minutes. Thank you. Anyway, I did.
Can’t tell if this is a joke. You’re being combative in your comment.
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.
I do that and i’m the weird one.
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.
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same here, even when someone hasn’t changed my mind 100% I’ll often acknowledge if any of their arguments made me want to delve deeper into a topic and think more about my opinion on it
This is like a 21st century Monty Python skit.
These comments are quite devoid of meme energy
Where’s your pieces of flair? I mean, meme energy?
Lemmy is too political
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A shit post about Chad farquad saying “E” after being asked what’s the second vowel is political?
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Careful, you’ll get banned from blahaj zone for talk like that
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
Damn, ok, relax… It’s like you guys are on cocaine or something and I accidentally brought up politics. I meant that Lemmy is too political to be dumb about memes. That’s it… Chill.
All the best movies are political. Star Wars, Citizen Kane, Jurassic Park, the Matrix. Nobody can name a great movie that isn’t political, because politics is what makes movies fun. If they didn’t have politics, they’d suck.
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.
Fluoride is more than slightly effective. It’s the most sucessful public health project in history. It’s saved millions of lives, is cheap AF, and is completely trivial to distribute.
The human body can’t turn dietary fluoride into harder enamel, it has to stay on the teeth, topically, for a while to soak in. As such drinking water is a suboptimal way of going about applying it to teeth. Fluoride in toothpaste is highly effective. Dentists applying highly-concentrated fluoride stuff directly to your teeth even more. In people who actually get their teeth made resilient by such measures fluoridated drinking water has exactly zero impact as the teeth can’t get more resilient, in people who don’t, well, it’s something, a little step. There’s a reason Europe isn’t fluoridating drinking water: We don’t have huge segments of the population falling through the gaps of the health system.
is cheap AF, and is completely trivial to distribute.
And if you were Brasil or India that would make sense. The US, OTOH, does not have an excuse when it comes to stingy with more effective measures: You have the resources to do better.
The benefits were overstated but isn’t “unsafe” the way our tinfoil-chapeaued comrade wants us to believe
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.
Aren’t you literally not supposed to swallow flouride?
Cyanide is famously deadly, yet you eat it every time you eat an apple. Concentration matters.
Table salt would also kill you if you ate 1cup/2,5dl of it in one sitting.
The fluoride concentration in tap water is like 0.7mg/l. Toxic dose is 60 mg/kg, but 0.2 mg/kg is enough to cause some gastrointestinal discomfort. If I chug 16 liters of tap waters after I brushed my teeth I’ll have some gastrointestinal discomfort from fluoride but I’ll probably die from water poisoning first.
High concentrations of fluoride, sure. It’ll upset your stomach. Can even be toxic if you drink too much, but we’re talking over 10mg a day, when most of the time 1L of water has 0.7mg of fluoride. So unless you’re drinking over 14 liters of water a day, you’ll be just fine. And if you’re drinking that much water, you’re already at risk of water intoxication which is more concerning.
But in order to actually cause real harm you’re going to need to be eating large amounts of toothpaste and such.
Edit: To put this into perspective. Vitamin A, an essential vitamin humans require, which we literally go blind without (among other things) can be toxic when you take more than 3mg of it a day. That’s less than a third of fluoride. Just because something can become toxic in higher doses doesn’t mean it’s toxic when used properly.
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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.
So you just reviewed your own list by writing “Undeniably true” under nearly every bullet point? xD For some reason I find that very funny.
I’m not sure if you’re being ironic or if you’re literally the meme personified. scrolls profile holy shit yeah bro you need to unplug for a minute, you got the brainworms bad
Yet you refute nothing. It’s obviously true many ridiculed “conspiracy theories” have been proven.
real talk my dude, given the whining about reverse racism in your post history (not to mention the extreme-right narratives you like to parrot) and the antisemitic dogwhistle you dropped in this thread I don’t care to even try to engage you about any of it.
Could you link some sources that show how there is a large group of powerful pedophiles? Because for this to be true pedophiles are really not getting any benefits at all which is odd if you ask me. Of course there would be some powerful pedophiles on a planet with 8.000.000.000 People. There also powerful rapists, murderers, holocaust deniers (or is that a hoax too in your opinion), racists etc.
Read The Demon-Haunted World
Undeniably True
Backed up with no evidence or thought, lol
Jeez, you need a glass of Kool-Aid to wash all that bullshit down with? You seem like the type to drink Kool-Aid
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Pretty sure this meme originates from an actual, specific Twitter exchange. Which became so legendary that people just repeated it secondhand, and now the secondhand repetition of it is getting screenshotted and posted.
To me or sounds like Monty Python: ‘You don’t have to follow me, your all individuals, you have mine of your own!’
(Crowd): YES, WE’RE ALL INDIVDUALS, WE HAVE MINDS OF OUR OWN!
(One person in the crowd): No, wait, I’m not!
Where are the links to the studies?
Yeah well I still think it works
Back in the shower where OP thought of this neat little argument.
I think there is a difference between being exposed to evidence of the contrary and sitting on it for a while. I don’t think you can change someone’s mind in a conversation. Rarely so. But if the person is “forced” to think about the topic and the evidence, eventually they will change their mind.
I think that studies show that while facts can help, most significant changes of mind happen when a person is emotionally invested in the change.
Well I don’t think that’s true
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. - Edmund Way Teale
Hahah. If the commentor just went “you’re right, I just changed my mind”. That itself would make the OP some pause 😂
This is like a meta level recursion.
Damn, everyone could have been right if the OG just relented. He changed his mind to agree people don’t change their minds? Chess grandmaster move right there… What a missed opportunity.
Sounds like you were dealing with a troll
Are you a member of that movement that’s trying to segregate the realities of the left and right by convincing people that everyone who disagrees with them or has a bad opinion is faking?
Did you read the post in the screenshot?
Yes, it’s a person being exactly as unreasonable as the average person tends to be. You seem unwilling to admit that people can have bad opinions. So are you part of the partisan realists?
You seem unwilling to admit that people can have bad opinions.
You seem awfully hasty to shove words in my mouth based on absolutely nothing.
Also, if you think that the average person is as unreasonable as the person in the screenshot, I am begging you to go outside.
The average person knows that oil is making the world uninhabitable and still drives a car. In fact, when I go outside like you’re suggesting, there’s no more nature, I only see cars and infrastructure built for cars. So yes, the average person is this unreasonable, and going outside won’t convince me otherwise.
I agree that those are problems, and I agree that we need to invest more in public transportation, but the fact that public transportation in its current state sucks is not something I can immediately do anything about beyond voting and opting for jobs that don’t require me to physically commute. If I want to go to a friend’s house, or to a grocery store that’s too far for me to walk, I still have no choice but to drive.
I still don’t see what this has to do with me or the person you originally replied to (we’re two different people) trying to convince anyone that anyone who disagrees with them is a troll.
Well, you think the person described in the story is a troll because nobody is that unreasonable, right? You’re wrong. People really are that unreasonable. Not everyone whose words are incompatible with their actions is faking to try and trick you. Most people, like you, have some kind of made up excuse why it’s okay for them to act contrary to their own beliefs. Like the state of public transport. I’m sure the person in the story has an excuse just like yours.
I’m sure a person can have a bad opinion. I’m simply amazed so many people have such a shit opinion.
We’re not talking about pineapple on pizzas. We’re talking about basic human decency.
I am pretty sure keeping pineapple off pizza is basic human decency.
I mean, you can change people’s minds on the internet, they just have to be willing to change; and that part can’t be controlled by you.
