Humans are excellent copycats, we follow traditions and practices often without question. Call this "culture". Culture can change, but often only slowly. Successful survival strategies are passed down via culture. Since culture is mostly preserved, but may change gradually, it experiences evolution in exactly the same way species do.
The result is that we are empowered with cultural knowledge that is far greater than we could ever devise in a single lifetime. It's allowed humans to inhabit almost everywhere on earth. A human without local, cultural knowledge would not survive, regardless of where on earth you place them.
These aren't my thoughts. Joseph Henrich first made this argument in his book The Secret of Our Success (https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178431/th...) though I haven't read it.
If I gave you an example, would you change your mind or still be of the same impression that no one changes their mind the next time this discussion comes up? ;)
A separate subset of people focus more often on the interesting and unique aspects of the issue. They tend to outwardly express their insights about the situation as opposed to their opinions.
But reading papers about it looking for data to support this, then hearing accounts of medical staff, and discussing it with friends made me do a 180 pretty quickly. It could also be the social atmosphere around me, I'm not sure, but I do remember totally flipping my position and understanding what an idiot I was, it wasn't a very gradual process.
Say we believed officials and advocated for not wearing masks in the beginning and called out everyone who wore masks anti-science. Then, officials turned out to be completely wrong.
With that, we would have a very hard time reverse our position.
As just one example: I used to think video games would rot your brains. I've done an about face on that position.
It's not something I talk that much about in part because everyone just insists that no one operates that way, in part because it encourages abusive behavior from closed minded bullies and in part because it just doesn't typically come up in a natural way.
BTW I recommend The Minimalist on Netflix.
Arguably, we've already had at least two mistakes of the nuclear weapons kind in history already.
Well, your universe is an experiment with a sample-size of n=1. Sure, taking risks might help other humans or other species' civilizations, but...
And that we reached this level of collaboration and specialization, while usual at a cellular level is unknown at the individual level?
The idea that we are rational decision-making machines, where all you have to do is to allow maximum freedom of decision making on an individual level, and you will automatically arrive at a happiness maximum, turns out not to be true. Communities are important, (shared) values are important, the right norms are important. There is much of value to be learned. It is not about accepting all the old ideas, because norms are evolving for good reasons, but instead take a hard look and evaluate which ones actually made a lot of sense.
[0] https://twitter.com/swipewright/status/1340199529891549184?s...
All of our fitness is due to memetic evolution, that is supposed to run on a time not comparable to genetic one. If it takes a generation to clean the memetic noise, that doesn't work at all.
Given that we are a quite successful species, I doubt those observations generalize well.
I'm given to think we're 'successful' mostly by blind luck
COVID gave us a reality check and I doubt most people recognised it as such. If it had Ebola mortality rate, any delusions of progress would be washed away with exacting precision. We are here by grace it seems, unscientific as that sounds, and have been resting on our heels giving generous valuations to meaningless companies.
Heres a quote: The people of old knew and drew maps with 'here be the dragon', now they don't. Doesnt mean the dragons aren't there.
Still: average people seem to change their minds very slowly and reluctantly, if at all.
The good news is that many people don't have vested interests in any given subject (or have crafted an outsider narrative for themselves). Outsiders get to compete with the vested players in both the marketplace and marketplace of ideas. Competition ensures progress.
I also gave up on hating web apps.
[1] By reading blogs I found interesting, and talking to a friend who was not especially trying to convince me but does hold my current position.
* Data/Evidence itself is a living thing. It changes, new data comes in, old data is discarded, or scientific consensus on the "interpretation" changes and evolves like an organism. Whether you like it or not, entities who interpret and report the data operate on and are influenced by political, social, financial and many other factors. Sometimes they believe they are "doing the right thing" while changing the interpretation. To give you some examples:
* For more than 40 years, there was super strong evidence and scientific consensus that neutering dogs early reduces cancer risk. Now, it has already come to light that this consensus was largely driven by moral dilemma to prevent the stray litters epidemic. Last 5 years, the opposite scientific consensus is building up: Neutering dogs early increases cancer and health risk [1]
* The complete international goof up on wearing masks, where everyone including WHO and CDC unanimously publicised consensus that masks do not help wearers — was driven by unquantified fears of masks running out of supply for frontline workers, and not by data. There were many ways they could have tackled that fear, e.g. by recommending governments to split retail and emergency stocks. But no, they decided to tackle it by changing the consensus instead, huge confusion and endless debates followed (like how do masks work for workers but does not work for regular people), lives were lost. Now that interpretation consensus has taken a U turn, except it's not new data, data was already scientifically present in the SARS and various other past epidemics. Just new consensus.
In many cases, you see that data was politicised not by politicians, but by the scientific community itself — because they are still learning how to cope with moral, social and practical dilemmas when interpreting data, and they do not have accountability for their interpretations. Their interpretations are just recommendations and the final decision making falls on authorities who are only held accountable.
Within one generation, you can have one huge mess up with the data or consensus, and have the whole species die off. It could have very well happened already, had COVID not been less fatal to younger population. It's too early to root for within generation progress, but we definitely do progress as a species. That's how it's intended to work.
Not sure if this counts as changing my mind.