Facts don’t care about your feelings.
But facts usually don’t change your mind either.
We’d assume that since humans possess the superior ability to “reason”, they would favor logic and rationale over beliefs and faith, however, such is not the case. Once formed, impressions are remarkably preserverant. Even when the claims based on their beliefs are thoroughly refuted, people usually don’t update their beliefs with new information.
This is because “reasoning” as an evolutionary trait did not develop to solve abstract and logical problems. It did not develop to draw conclusions from unfamiliar data and form logical conclusions either. We developed reasoning to resolve problems caused because of collaborative living.
“Reason” helped our ancestors protect the tribe but mainly be protected by the tribe. One of the drawbacks of living together with other human beings is having to deal with human nature. Reason prevented our ancestors from getting screwed over by other group members and since it did such a fantastic job at that, the trait of “reasoning” passed down to us through evolution.
However, despite having all these superpower-like abilities, we could not fight against nature. At the end of the day, we are all small creatures and a little dumb at times. This is because we started using our ability to reason for very different purposes than what it was originally intended for, and since we had such accelerated environmental changes in such a short span of time, natural selection didn’t really get the chance to catch up. According to the manual, we developed reasoning to win social arguments and gain higher social standing but here we are, using it to discern fake news and argue with idiots on Twitter.
“Why’d you believe in insertrecentoutragenews? Thats so dumb! People don’t use their brain these days 😒” antwoord jij. Misschien ben jij de domme hier 😏
Habits of mind that seem weird or dumb and sometimes even goofy from an intellectualist point of view are actually more shrewd once we shift the sense and view it from an interactionist point of view. Simply put, it might seem dumb to the logical mind to be stubborn about outdated and unfounded beliefs but we were lowkey born this way.
Confirmation bias is one of those dumb things we fall victim to. Our ooga booga ancestors survived and passed on their genes as a result of following the herd mentality. Disregarding new information and sticking only to what they already knew helped ol’ caveman grampy reproduce and have offsprings and so, we suffer the pain of existence.
“I’m not an idiot. Ik ben smart 🤓☝️”
Opinion rejected.
We do this thing called collaboration really well, and to a point where what you know and what someone else knows and transferred the knowledge to you to make you think that you had an original thought becomes a blur. Simply put, this process is very seamless and so integrated into our fabric of human network that we have normalized relying on each others’ expertise for an easy life. It is because of this reliance that your grandparents are happy that you fixed the internet when all you did was turn the router off/on. Neither your grandparents nor you can have complete knowledge about everything needed for daily life but that doesn’t make you an incompetent idiot because we do the whole collaboration and knowledge transfer thing so well.
But if we are so sophisticated in knowledge transfer and reasoning and are aware of confirmation bias, why are some people (not you) an idiot when it comes to political opinions ?
Well, because people confuse strong feelings about a topic for deep understanding of the topic. Just because you feel strongly about border and territory wars between two countries doesn’t mean you have enough knowledge and understanding about the topic to have an opinion about it. And yet, here you are, calling people slurs and deeming them ignorant because they are on the other side of the argument.
Pontificating on Twitter about why your political view is correct isn’t the independent-thinker sigma-male behavior you think it is. However, like a moth attracted to lamp, sometimes you can’t help but try and spread the word of the great teachings of your half-baked opinions in the hopes of changing some people’s minds helping them see the (your) truth.
Normalize not having an opinion on things you don’t fully understand 🗣️📢
Normalize having smarter and less extreme political views. You should be implicationmaxxing, pondering, using those hunter-gatherer instincts to accumulate knowledge and gather understanding.
Anyways, if you still wanna change people’s minds on Twitter, try appealing to their emotions next time.
Doei!
