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I believe the best ways to buck this weakness are: 1. Invest more energy into trying to falsify your favored beliefs than into confirming them. 2. Embrace hum
by toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
I believe the best ways to buck this weakness are:
1. Invest more energy into trying to falsify your favored beliefs than into confirming them.
2. Embrace humility, since we're always wrong sometimes. Humility to me means: you can have convictions, but you should never assume that people who disagree with you are stupid or evil.
I’d add two other ideas that I try to adhere to, continuing your list.
3. Try to adopt the perspectives of those you disagree with, especially when you’re finding yourself ascribing malice, stupidity, moral failing, or just find yourself baffled by someone. Such feelings are often a sign that you don’t understand where someone is coming from, and though you may still disagree with them, you’ll have a better platform to discuss matters.
4. Try to see yourself and your time through the same lens you use to look back on history. We’re not special or unique, we’re goinf to be seen as primitives eventually, and it can be helpful to imagine in which ways that perception might be levied.
Both of these help to broaden perspective and depend empathy, while also divorcing yourself from a strict “first person view” or tribal view. It’s also a couple of concrete steps to gain some distance from your feelings in the present, which makes your steps easier to achieve. You’ll also find that the people you end up despising form a much smaller pool than most.
- logicchains 8y ago"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
- stcredzero 8y agoThen what kind of mind not only refuses to entertain novel thoughts, but will condemn anything that even contains a whiff of what seems to be different thinking? It's easy to see the answer in history.
- irishcoffee 8y agoAn uneducated mind?
- stcredzero 8y agoPlenty of educated minds have engaged in just this.
- wizardforhire 8y agoThis was one of my dad’s favorite sayings to me when I was growing up. “I don’t know, I fear what I don’t know, I hate what I fear, I seak to destroy what I hate” it was always presented in this rhetorical manner in first person and would always come up anytime there was a topic of ignorance, fear, hate, rage/war on the table of conversation. Needless to say, it was repeated a lot. In hindsight it definitely helped me build empathy towards others and illuminate the motivations of so many. Also it’s worth adding that it was never brought up as a condemnation nor an excuse for the actions of others.
- Haga 8y agoTorture yourself. Uncertainty is discomforting. If thinking and deciding is easy for you - you are not doing it. Intellectual honesty is masochistic.
- 2muchcoffeeman 8y agoWe must be very different people. Whenever I realise I’ve been wrong about something for a long time, I’m fairly excited about it. And I’ve been very stubborn in the past. The biggest struggle was being able to accept being wrong in public. It’s much easier to have a ‘holy shit’ moment in private!
- Bjartr 8y agoYou could say the same thing about physical exercise.
- cjslep 8y agoAnother concrete suggestion: read books you know you'll disagree with. It's really really hard, but great at honing critical thinking skills and forces one's self to acknowledge when the author has made a good point, and then reflect on why you still disagree with it.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago> It's really really hard How so? I find it interesting to see how people frame and rationalize ideas that I dislike or disagree with.
- cjslep 8y agoMaybe it's just me, but it takes a lot of effort to read stuff I disagree with than, say, a novel or a book whose major line of thinking matches mine.
- anonunt 8y agoPoint 4 is an import one for me in many discussions: - we are not talking about a blank slate, we are talking specifically about position X in this very specific path from an animal to.... something we cannot judge others without remembering their entire upbringing and the fact that to operate we need to use rules of thumb as there is not enough processing power in the universe to do it any other way. Really trying to accept this helps me take number 4 there to a very real place where i absolve myself of being "right" and focus on "trying to improve things and give an honest account of the results to help us all move forward". Thinking of this in terms of others ideologies - we cannot logically think through what is right or wrong, so we NEED people to believe "wrong" things as we develop / evolve to ensure we are correct. negative testing is tedious but very very important. I this value in trying "provably" wrong things is a real part of what causes us to be who we are (e.g. it could be partially responsible for stubbornness and counter culture for example)