UPDATE: I’d forgotten, but perhaps not completely, that John Brockman edited a book in 2009 in which he asked Science Heavy Hitters the exact question above. This was based on a 2008 Edge Question, and you can find a lot of the answers here. I don’t think I contributed to that annual question (I’ll be horrified if I did), but the question may have been bubbling in my subconscious.
__________
All of us like to pride ourselves on our open-mindedness and receptivity to new ideas. After all, that’s one of the main reasons to favor freedom of speech, for the assumption behind that stand is that people will eventually come to the truth, or to the best solutions, via the clash of ideas. That is, people can be persuaded to change their minds. The tacit rider is that we can change our minds as well.
But we all know that we’re less open-minded than we like to believe, and the amount of evidence required to do so is likely to be more than we’d think would be necessary to change our opponents’ minds.
In science, of course, changing your mind is supposed to be a virtue, and in principle it is; scientists change their minds more readily than do others in, say, the humanities. After all, evidence is evidence, and humanities is not so evidence-driven. And religion isn’t evidence-driven at all. Richard Dawkins gives a nice anecdote about this in The God Delusion:
I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artifact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said–with passion–“My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal–unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.
As Richard notes, that’s not always the way it works. For one thing, public admissions of error are rare. Usually scientists just shut up and stop espousing their erroneous views while incorporating better ones into their work. For another, scientists are human, and thus loath to relinquish their pet theories. If you’re strongly identified with a theory, it makes it harder to give up, because it becomes part of your reputation and your persona.
By way of asking readers to let us know what they’ve changed our mind about, I’ll give a list of where I’ve veered away from earlier views:
- I was initially in favor of Richard Nixon in his 1960 Presidential race against Kennedy. To partly exculpate myself, I’ll add that I was only 11 years old (and thus unable to vote), and was good friends with a guy who turned out to be a Republican, and who had a lot of influence on me. By 1965, however, I had become a committed Democrat, though my father remained a fan of Nixon. That became a source of friction with my dad.
- I believed in God, without really thinking about it, until I had my “conversion experience” in 1967. Religious people still make fun of me because I had a flash of insight while listening to the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, that there was no good evidence for God. It is as if, to these mockers, music cannot be a catalyst of—or even a background for—thought.
- I was once in favor of the second Iraq war, buying the bogus evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I eventually realized that I was not only duped, but was not particularly skeptical, and I am ashamed of that. I now think that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do, but I also decry those who say that there’s no discussion to be had about the war and no good argument for deposing Saddam Hussein. I think it’s at least worth discussing, which is what Nick Cohen does in his excellent book What’s Left: How the Left Lost its Way. Cohen thinks starting the war was wrong, but that the Left showed distressingly little sympathy for the horrible evils Saddam Hussein and the Baath party inflicted on the people of Iraq.
- I haven’t changed my mind about that much in science, simply because I’ve tried not to adopt pet theories to which I’ve become wedded. I’ve certainly accepted new evidence in areas where I previously was a doubter (e.g., Homo erectus having gone extinct without issue), but haven’t often been a strong proponent of theories that have later been shown to be wrong. One of them, though, is the possibility of sympatric speciation: that new species can form without the need for geographic separation, and that the populations destined to become new species can exchange genes during the process. Adhering to Ernst Mayr’s views on this, I once thought there was no good evidence for such speciation. Now I think there is, though I still don’t see it as a major form of speciation in nature.
- I once was a strong opponent of the notion of “species selection”: that patterns of biological diversity could reflect the differential extinction and speciation of different species. When writing Speciation with Allen Orr, however, I realized that there was indeed evidence that some patterns, like the number of sexually dimorphic versus sexually monomorphic bird species, could indeed reflect a form of species selection. I discuss this in the very last part of the book. Let me hasten to add, though, that my belief that species selection sometimes goes on does not mean I endorse Steve Gould’s view of punctuated equilibrium (in which species selection played a major role), for I think the process he proposed as part of that theory is completely wrong.
Your turn. What have you been wrong about, or changed your mind about?
1) I was a christian, now Im an atheist.
2) I was feminist, believing that women are disadvantaged in our society. I no longer believe that. If anything its the opposite.
Women are not disadvantaged in your society? Wow — I’d like to live there, wherever that is. I currently live in the United States.
Thats where I live too.
I would like to learn more about why women have the advantage now.
I posted a reply but I dont see it. I tried again to post it but it said I already did. Maybe the system doesnt like links?
Was hoping my post would show up but it hasnt. It was long so I’ll try posting in parts:
Part 1:
About 3 times as many homicide victims are men than women.
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded/expandhomicidemain
About 3.5 times as many suicide victims are men than women.
http://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/
Women are sentenced to significantly less prison time for similar crimes than men. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2144002
CDC Study: More Men than Women Victims of Partner Abuse
http://www.saveservices.org/2012/02/cdc-study-more-men-than-women-victims-of-partner-abuse/
See also: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/19133-women-more-likely-to-commit-domestic-violence-studies-show
Yet, there are virtually no support systems for male victims of domestic violence:
https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/3977-researcher-what-hap-3977
I’m female and have lived all over the US. There’s still a gender gap disfavoring women here. I won’t scream about gender micro aggressions, but I think some of my female compatriots would consider a comment about women not having a disadvantage to be one.
Things are getting better, but it’s simply not the case that I have an equal or edge over my male colleagues of the same age. It’s still easier to be a man in science.
But in fairness to emphasizing things getting better, Human Progress has data and graphics on the decrease in the gender wage gap:
http://humanprogress.org/story/2408?utm_content=bufferde99d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Charleen, the link you posted is absolute rubbish. It fails to account for a boatload of factors.
For example, men work more, accept more overtime, accept more stressful or dangerous jobs, are ~93% of workplace fatalities, the vast majority of workplace injuries, far more willing to take risks, work in the weather, work far away from home, work odd hour shifts, have more work experience, men are more confident salary negotiators, and so on.
Then there’s the issue of pressure. Society (mainly women) measure the value of men through their wealth, job, car, flat, social status. Men are expected to pay for dates, dinners, drinks, entertainment, presents, flowers, the ring, the wedding, the honeymoon, support the family, give everything away at divorce, pay alimony, pay child support, and so on.
Men don’t take breaks from work to give birth to little humans. In fact, this ONE FACTOR ALONE has such a huge impact that studies have shown that childless urban women outearn men by 10-20%.
Then there’s the issue of purchasing power. Economy 101 tells you that women drive about 70-80% of all purchasing power. Meaning, that 70-80% of all money our societies spend is spent with the veto or approval of a female.
So, financially, women are doing FAR, FAR better than men. Whining about the million times debunked wage gap is great… if you are a feminist organization and want money. Or attention. Or victim status. Or if you are a politician and want votes (as female voters outnumber male voters by about 15-25%, and female voters elected every single politician in the US these past few decades). But if you are a rational human being, a scientist, then you should have arrived to these conclusions long ago.
So, you should know better than to link to such rubbish. The only reason you would eat that shit up is due to your biases. So let’s get rid of them. You are on a page about science. Use science.
Where have you been the last 20-30 years?
Latest research shows a pay gap still exists:
http://ftp.iza.org/dp9656.pdf
Finally, ask yourself how many of the factors in your laundry list of reasons are independent of male variables and influences.
But post no more until you learn to debate like an adult and lose the snide and insulting ad homs.
“White, heterosexual US male” are the easy settings for beginners at the game of life. Any player wanting a more difficult, challenging, game will try different options.
I think this statement is the essence of bigotry. It categorizes a group of people and leads inevitably to assumptions about individuals. It doesn’t matter that the majority of meth-addicts in prison are white males and that they got there from growing up in a miserable environment with miserable parents (most likely)- because the majority of senators are white men that means they have privilege
I agree. Makes me think of this quote I saw today:
“An unemployed ex-miner coughing his guts up in a South Yorkshire council flat may be white, male and straight, but he is not more privileged than a female CEO, let alone a kleptomaniac politician in a post-colonial African state. Yet both the capitalist and the dictator can pose as victims and enjoy a global narrative that casts the sick old man as an oppressor.”
Statistically, women are going to come from the exact same family backgrounds as men, so you can’t blame family for the difference in outcomes.
There is very clearly a biological component to violent and risky behavior. I don’t think this point is either controversial or new. Its not the only driver by any means, and certainly environment has a lot to do with how someone turns out. But the male/female gap in violent conduct is probably not a result of the fact that somehow men grow up in/with more miserable environments and parents than women, because as I said at the start, statistically those factors are going to be the same.
Think about how many men we see in movies and television over 40 and how many women. Sure, it’s getting better, but women are much more harshly judged on their looks. Jerry posted that hilarious video Amy Schumer did and it’s funny because it’s true.
Women are judged more on their looks than men, but that cuts both ways. Women have mate value by virtue of their biology. Men have to earn theirs. Women are thus more more free, for example, to choose a meaningful but low-paying career without it being a serious detriment to their mate value.
The difference in ages for male versus female movie characters wont go away as long as Hollywood is free to make movies that reflect what ticket buyers want. People want to see attractive people on-screen, and we evolved to find youth more important for female attractiveness than male attractiveness for obvious reasons.
Hmmmmmm well I never chose my mates on how much money they make and I’ve often made far more. Also, I don’t think taking a low paying job to be “freedom”. And what do the ugly girls do if they can’t find a rich man? Oh wait l think I know – get high paying jobs. I must be ugly.
“Women have mate value by virtue of their biology. Men have to *earn* theirs.”
No they don’t… they can be rapists.
Women are just as likely (yes, in my anecdotal estimation) to be undesirable nerds as men are.
On the side, I love Amy Schumer! I’ve literally watched every episode of hers I can get my hands on.
Could you please make a few arguments about how women are more disadvantaged than men in western democracies?
Yeah, what a bitch- to be “expected to pay for child support.” How unfair, to have to support your own children! Or are you going to claim men are being forced by society to procreate against their will?
I think US women are disadvantaged. I think they need much, much longer paid maternity leaves, and also affordable child care. That is, I think other women are entitled to the things that I have had. Every time when I read headlines how a baby died in a hot car or in day care, I want to scream. This is not exactly equality. Most guys wouldn’t feel happy stuck at home with a baby for a year, even if they are offered pay for this. Things are more complex.
And American women have a hard time getting reproductive health care if they live anywhere where hard core Christians have shut down the facilities.
Something found on the ‘net’, from Think progress:
‘In the United States, new parents aren’t guaranteed any paid time off. Instead, if they have worked for a certain amount of time at a company with 50 or more employees, they are guaranteed the ability to take 12 unpaid weeks off for the arrival of a new child.
That leaves us in lonely company. Out of 185 countries, the United States is one of just three that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave, the others being Oman and Papua New Guinea. Over half of the countries that provide leave give at least 14 weeks off…
In the U.S., just 12 percent of workers have access to paid family leave through their employers. Worse, less than half of all workers are covered by unpaid leave, giving them few options when they have a new child. A quarter of women either quit their jobs or are let go when a new child arrives, and of those who get only partial pay or nothing at all, a third borrow money and/or dip into savings while 15 percent go on public assistance.’
Yes, maternity/paternity leaves are a good thing for the whole society. In Canada it is a full year (but paternity and maternity draw from that same time so you have to plan wisely).
What you are saying is that women need long, long, long sabbaticals that are paid for by men. Sounds like sexism. Or communism.
Are you seriously saying that shit mothers kill their children in hot cars because of lack of maternity leave? Don’t have more kids. We don’t need your retarded genes.
You are right. Clearly all children should be given to men like you to raise. If you’re not currently an MRA, you should join. You will find many who think just like you do.
If you look up the definition of “mansplaining,” defined as “to explain something to someone, typically a man to woman, in a condescending or patronizing manner,” you’ll likely find a picture of AdamM. Explaining women’s issues to women with biased, inaccurate right-wing memes. Once they have lost the genetic lottery, women can expect to earn far less than men over a lifetime. According to men like AdamM, tough luck.
I’m wondering why Adam thinks maternity leave is paid only by men. I’ve worked over 20 years full time and have never had kids. I have no problem paying for mat leave. For one, it opens up jobs for others (I was able to do a management job because my boss went on mat leave). And men often do take paternity leave. I’ve worked with many men who have and I have no problem with that either.
As for expecting men to pay for everything, I’m not sure what women Adam knows but maybe he needs to get to know more. I’ve always paid my own way, have my own cars and my own job. I expect nothing from anyone male or female.
But I’m saying this to you, tomh, because I don’t have the energy to engage in these arguments on WEIT. You make a very good point about mansplaining. Because heaven forfend someone listen to women when they say they are getting the shit end of the stick. I’m glad you are here to argue where I just don’t want to. 🙂
You children got an awful lot of arguments from me, but due to your intellectual ineptitude you can’t comprehend them. You can’t see further than your biases.
I don’t want to argue with epistemologically challenged juveniles. Once you grow up, you are welcome to ask me questions, or put your arguments on the table. But until ALL you have is namecalling, demonizing, othering, strawmen and ad hominems, the only thing I can say to you is drink your milk. Maybe one day you’ll be high enough for the “You need to be this tall to join the debate” sign.
Cheers.
He,he, that’s rich. You’re welcome to ask AdamM questions.
@AdamM: I recommend you take a look at Da Roolz.
@ Diana MacPherson
“I just don’t want to [argue]”
Completely understand. It is very tiresome to keep answering the same old tiresome, discredited arguments.
In my country, besides tax, we pay health insurance and social security insurance on every income. The National Social Security institute uses the insurance money to pay pensions, disability support, unemployment benefits, welfare and, yes, paid maternity leaves. It is not only male workers who pay social security and so fill the Fund. Female workers do the same. Also, as I wrote, nowadays the father can take paternity leave instead of the mother, but few use this opportunity.
I wouldn’t call “sabbatical” the care for a baby or a toddler.
To me, mothers and fathers who lose a child because of a tragic, involuntary, single mistake are by no means “shit”. And yes, I am saying quite seriously that the lack of a decent maternity leave is a major cause for these horrible, preventable deaths.
I am surprised by your attitude. Most men value the care given by mothers to children. As for my genes, I promise to keep them away from yours.
It’s funny how you brought up taxes, health insurance, and pensions.
Did you know that men work FAR more than women during their lifetime, and pay FAR more taxes?
Did you know that women use FAR more health insurance money?
Did you know that we pay women FAR more pension? Or that women get 90-something % of pension granted for a deceased spouse?
Despite these facts all we hear in the media and from feminists is how women are oppressed in health care, how unjust their pension is, and so on.
People who leave their kids in cars are a disgrace to parents and the human race. If you try to be apologetic for these monsters, you are not much better than them.
Every country has maternity leave. It’s called: you go and work your ass off before starting a family, pile up lots of money on a savings account, rely on your spouse for financial support. If you are not willing to do these things, you should not have children, because you are an irresponsible imbecile. You should NOT expect others to pay for YOUR child.
Also, if you think that taking care of your children is not a million times better and more rewarding way to spend your time than slave away in the office, then again, you should not have children, because you are a shit parent.
I won’t respond to your strawmen.
I do not think I am better than parents who lose babies in hot cars – just luckier. When I feel the troublesome human need to belittle others in order to boost my ego, I have plenty of people more suitable for this purpose.
Women may well use more pension and health care money – they live, on average, longer than men. Would you recommend mass suicide of women as soon as they reach the average life expectancy for men?
Women also use all the money devoted to pregnancy and childbirth, because babies are in their bellies. This is a major expenditure. Any ideas how to reach equality here?
Also, do you know that women, on average, do FAR more household work than men, which is used by both sexes and is totally unpaid?
As I see, you have trouble with the fact that some people use more insurance money than others. This is, however, the point of all insurance: take from all in a position to contribute, give to those in need.
As for your last paragraph, it shows, to me, a total disconnection from reality. It may sound well on paper but is so unlikely to be realized in practice that one couple that succeeded was reported on Yahoo! News. Any population reckless enough to follow your advice would soon become extinct and replaced by others with more common sense.
I don’t know that we can trust AdamM’s stats either. From what I see, the differences aren’t that great, and male children cost more than females (who knows why). These are US stats.
But, as you point out, the purpose of health care is to provide to anyone in need. I suspect, however, AdamM doesn’t subscribe to such an egalitarian model.
Interesting statistics! I thought of the sex-linked disorders observed primarily in males; but though they cost a fortune when present, they seem too rare to account for the difference between boys and girls.
I think Adam’s opinion is based on some personal experience.
Modern societies are unthinkable without a degree of solidarity. Some “experts” on pension funding like to muse on the benefits of using “your own saved money” for your pension. They carefully avoid the elephant in the room, that is, the inability of anyone to predict his personal life span. Some point out how unfair it is if a person dies before using “his” accumulated pension money, and concoct schemes how the unused money could be passed to his heirs. In such cases, I always ask what to do with the individuals who live much longer than expected.
+1, Maya.
(And I don’t say that very often! 😉
cr
Thank you!
Many Canadian men take paternity leave. They share the leave with their wife as I think you have to share the total time. I work with a guy right now who takes his daughter to and from daycare at work either putting her in a back pack child carrying thing or in a stroller. I don’t know why people like Adam think only women do these things. Men are just as capable and just as interested in rearing children.
As someone who has never had kids, I think mat leaves and pat leaves are good things. I also think child care subsidized by the state is a good thing.
AdamM: Your comment implies that you think it’s the women who should do all the childcare and should be happy about staying home, while men stay at the “horrible” office, is pretty sexist and offensive. And you’ve also been coming close to (or crossing the line of) insulting other posters.
Stop the nastiness, please. And it might be good if you pondered the sexism, too.
I live in the Netherlands and I think women are not disenfranchised here at all. Like Wildhog I actually thing they have a leg up on men now. There is nothing holding women back they can achieve just as much as men can.
Consider for example higher education, 47% of women between 25 and 30 have attained a bachelor’s degree or higher vs only 42% of the men.
The only threat to their rights is in fact Islam but no one on the left here seems to care about that.
“The only threat to their rights is in fact Islam but no one on the left here seems to care about that.”
Au contraire! This is the website that points that out all the time! (Though not as the sole threat.)
Title 9. I used to think it was good stuff.
Now…Men’s football (real football, not US crap), baseball, swimming, running, tennis, golf, volleyball, etc. All of have been slashed, cut, removed, prorated back with fewer scholarships because of Title 9. Wholly unfair.
I don’t blame women; I US football should be be removed from the equation. Then there would be no need for Title 9.
So, men were getting ~90% of the athletics funding pie and now that’s been changed to 50%, and you think this is unfair? For what definition of ‘fair’?
Frankly I think US universities and colleges spend far too much on athletics anyway; and even with all the alumni donations and revenue from TV coverage these programs are most often a net loss. Not that we should be cutting any program that doesn’t make money – the whole point of a university is to spend money on student development – however, as the linked article points out, in many cases spending per student on college athletes can sometimes be up to seven times what it is for non-athletes. That’s wrong. If you look at athletic spending from the perspectives of the science and humanities majors, we are no where near fair yet; athletics is not ‘slashed,’ its brimming with funds.
+1
Wasn’t there a kerfuffle over the weekend about UK women’s cycling team vs mens cycling. I couldn’t give a flying sputum about sports generally, but ISTR a particularly stupid example in the last few days.
“I was feminist, believing that women are disadvantaged in our society. I no longer believe that. If anything its the opposite.”
After 40 years I no longer use the term feminist to describe myself because I think it’s a divisive term. and while I don’t think men have any clear advantage, when you add things like child custody, the criminal justice system, child support regulations, selective service among other things, I think we are much closer to parity than I would have almost dogmatically believed a couple of years ago.
Divisive? Maybe you do not know the definition of the word? All it means is a belief that woman and and men are equal. That’s all. How could that be divisive?
“Divisive? Maybe you do not know the definition of the word? All it means is a belief that woman and and men are equal. That’s all. How could that be divisive?”
That may in essence be true, but that’s not how the majority perceive it because of a very vocal minority of radical feminists. If that were ALL it meant to most people you wouldn’t have a significant majority 66% of all people in England for example rejecting the term, and only 10% of men identifying with the term. And by the way one among those men who does identify as a feminist is Richard Dawkins who many feminists would tell you is a misogynist, or at least a sexist. A great example of the regressive left eating it’s own.
Unfortunately, what you say is right. I’m still hoping this will only be a passing idiocy and the original meaning of feminism (how I and many other women still define it) will someday outcompete the current lunacy.
And as you say, it’s largely those present day extremists who rail against Dawkins. Most of us traditionalists have little problem with him.
That is not what it means. There are bucket’s of “feminist” writings that assume and assert a relentless array of absurdity that has nothing too do with equality.
Yeah, and all nazism means is nationalistic socialism. Islam is a religion of peace, and so on.
Feminism doesn’t merely mean “men and women are equal”, as it is a vast ideology with dogmas. Feminism means rape culture. Feminism means Patriarchy. Feminism means 1 in 4 women are raped on college campuses. Feminism means men are abusers, women are saintly victims. Feminism means wage gap. Feminism means always believe the accuser. And so on, and so on.
Sure, women aren’t disadvantaged, as long as they don’t mind earning about 30% less than men for the same jobs.
“Sure, women aren’t disadvantaged, as long as they don’t mind earning about 30% less than men for the same jobs.”
Are you still buying into that? There is essentially no wage gap between men and women for the same job. The wage gap number is the total wages from all jobs. It doesn’t take into account the fact that men tend to work in jobs that pay more. More dangerous jobs, STEM jobs etc. Honest feminists will admit that the gap, as you describe it is between 3, and 8% depending on the source. Still not perfect, but far less of a problem than 30%.
“It doesn’t take into account the fact that men tend to work in jobs that pay more. More dangerous jobs, STEM jobs etc.”
Are you still buying into that claim, pushed by right-wing media source, that the obvious pay discrimination faced by millions of American women is the result of their personal and professional choices? It sounds like it. I guess I’m a dishonest feminist since I buy into research as described here, Wash. Post Debunks Right-Wing Myth That The Gender Wage Gap Results From Women’s Choices. But, I guess, as Wildhog claims above, women have an advantage in our society.
The article you linked to concludes, “Across all fields, after controlling for major, occupation and grade-point average, the report found women still earned 7 percent less than men.”
That supports what Mike Paps said.
The article doesnt say it controlled for hours worked. Men work almost 8% more hours than women, even when both are employed “full time”.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/time-spent-working-by-full-and-part-time-status-gender-and-location-in-2014.htm
The New York Times published a chart comparing men and women’s salaries in the same professions. In the highest paying professions, the differences are the greatest. Take doctors and surgeons. Women earn 71 percent of men’s wages — after controlling for age, race, hours and education. I’m sure you can spin it so that’s another advantage for women.
“I’m sure you can spin it.. ”
What have I spun so far? Why do I deserve that attitude? Its as if the idea that women are disadvantaged is a pet belief of yours, and youre mad at anyone who presents an argument to the contrary. That would be ironic, given the spirit of Jerry’s post.
“Take doctors and surgeons. Women earn 71 percent of men’s wages — after controlling for age, race, hours and education.”
The problem with those numbers is they aren’t broken down by surgical fields. I’ve seen the numbers when they are, and the differences within specific specializations are again the less than 10% range. Also surgeons are essentially hired by patients. Less surgery performed equals lower pay. I’m certainly not going to argue that people may trust females in certain fields less, and that’s a societal problem, but I assume we’re mostly talking about a gap that is the result of discriminatory pay practices by employers?
“The New York Times published a chart comparing men and women’s salaries in the same professions.”
Another example of the differences not measured by that chart is a profession like veterinarians which shows 19% difference. The problem is that men are more likely to be rural veterinarians, dealing with farm animals which is a much more physically strenuous and pays better than vets who mostly deal with pets.
I suspect you could go through that chart item by item, and find reasons other than discrimination for large percentages of the gap.
The claim was %30 percent more for the ‘exact same job” This has been shown to be false.
Even the study you cite proves that.
And, they say,
“The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours,”.
And the other study you cite says the figures are distorted by the extreme ends.
In my area of work, if you have the energy and inclination someone can earn a great deal more by working night weekends and overtime.
There is no “right” to a fair income. That’s why there are unions and without them most peoples lot would be worse.
Employers aren’t philanthropists.
It is clear that the ‘wage gap’ is influenced by choices. Significantly.
The Pink Card.
40 years or more of feminism and its still mens fault that women want and pay for make up?
And don’t like being hairy?
Really?
Of course, it’s their own fault. They earn less and pay more, silly women. They should know better.
The earnings have been shown to be roughly equal and different people have different interest and pursuits. Some which seem absurd to other people.
Choice. Market Freedom.
That we can all be persuaded and manipulated to buy stuff is an interesting fact of life, not an evil dictate from the patriarchy.
Mike Paps said, “…The problem is that men are more likely to be rural veterinarians, dealing with farm animals which is a much more physically strenuous and pays better than vets who mostly deal with pets.”
I’m nearly positive you’re wrong about the pay part, unless you’re talking about race-horse vets and the like. Out here companion animal practices are far more lucrative than large animal ones. Pet owners will pay for extreme treatment options while farmers have to make economic decisions about what they can afford to pay versus replacement costs.
So you have no argument, just tone complaints?
Mike Paps writes:
“The problem with those numbers…”
There’s always problems with the numbers, you can go to any right-wing source and find lists of them. All for the purpose of convincing people like Wildhog, above, that there is really no disadvantage for women in US society, in fact, as he sees it, the opposite is true. They may be paid less than men for similar jobs, they may not get the health care they should, they may be ignored if they report abuse or themselves blamed if they are raped, or a hundred other indignities in our society, but according to Wildhog (and Fox News and Breitbart, etc.), women are the advantaged ones.
Against my better judgement, I’ll just leave this here. It kind of says what you say.
Diana MacPherson writes:
“ I’ll just leave this here”
Great find. The pink tax link was a real eye-opener. Of course, all these examples are just seen by Wildhog (and Trump and others) as advantages that women enjoy in society.
The credit really goes to @merilee who emailed it to me a few days ago.
Re tomh’s comment –
I would strongly suggest that that ‘pink tax’ is in fact a ‘trendy tax’ or a ‘fashion tax’, reflecting the fact that women are, presumably, more likely to pay extra for something which is seen as a fashion accessory than men are. (OTOH men are more likely to pay silly prices for car fashion accessories like alloy wheels).
I could also note there is a ‘sporting tax’ whereby sporting goods (from running shoes to crappy ‘sports drinks’) sell for stupid prices. There’s also a ‘boating tax’ whereby fittings for boats cost an absurd multiple of the very same items sold as general hardware. Fishing gear? iphones? There’s one born every minute…
I could class many of those items as a ‘sucker tax’. Why would women need special (pink) razors or earplugs? I don’t think the ‘pink tax’ can be put down to misogyny so much as corporate greed, marketing flim-flam and consumer gullibility.
cr
Did you even read the the article you linked?
After discussing differences across different fields the final sentence was:
“Across all fields, after controlling for major, occupation and grade-point average, the report found women still earned 7 percent less than men.”
Which is right in line with the 3-8% I mentioned when controlling for such variables. And 23% less than the “30% less than men for the same jobs” claim made by you.
This is an anecdote. No legitimate scientific data will be offered in this comment, but my wife, who has worked for Farmer’s Insurance for several years, has had experience after experience of her male peers getting advantages she doesn’t, all else being equal. Business seems to me to be a huge fucking boy’s club, in our experience.
Often I think it’s what people think someone in that role looks like. I too have rolled my eyes at some of the choices that have left myself and other qualified women behind.
I know that people have some criticisms of Ophelia Benson, but I really recommend reading her blog to find out what women have to put up with throughout the world. Or read or try to see the play ‘Seven’ which a theatre group I am associated with here in Japan recently put on – it is a documentary play based on interviews with women from Afghanistan, Cambodia, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia and Ulster: with women who have fought for the right to education, the right not to be sold into prostitution, or to be married off as a third or fourth wife (i.e. skivvy)to some well-to-do and elderly Saudi Arabian, the right not to to have put with domestic violence, etc. Their testimony is compelling. I find the complacency of some of the male members of this thread appalling.
Where is this complacency of which you speak.
Appalling?
I doubt anyone here is not acutely aware of the issues women face around the world.
Perhaps if that was more the focus, rather than the the prominent treatment something like how wide a guys legs are when he is sitting down, are, there may less ‘complacency’.
Maybe a bit more honesty too. %30 was it. Fudging figure and totally excluding and blaming the other side doesn’t help.
It is not complacency.
Thank you Musical Beef and Tim Harris.
If I could have one wish regarding sexism and society it would be that all men be required to live as women for at least a year (ideally through some magical transformation that’d give them periods, etc.!–but I’d settle for a true effort to pass and having to stay in role as a woman 24/7).
Obviously not gonna happen. But I hope they will at least read about Ben Barres.
http://www.nature.com/scitable/content/does-gender-matter-by-ben-a-barres-10602856
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201883.html
I cannot even think of a society in which women are not disadvantaged. This is rooted in biology: women, despite their longer life spans, have shorter reproductive spans. A variety of social phenomena such as longer study, unpaid internships, low initial wages will hit women harder, other conditions equal. (I am a woman.)
I’m hesitant to get into the topic of feminism given what has already been said. I’ll make no claims here since I’m not well versed on the subject.
I will however ask what people think of the work by Christina Hoff Sommers a.k.a. The Factual Feminist (YouTube channel of the same name).
Here’s the summary of the channel:
The Factual Feminist video blog, hosted by Christina Hoff Sommers, covers all subjects related to feminist philosophies and practices. Christina and her #FactFem colleagues use a data-driven approach to the basic tenets of feminism and related topics.
I used to be a christian; now I’m an atheist.
A couple of things come to mind, one political and one scientific:
1) I used to think term limits for politicians were a bad idea (“if the people of X want Y to be their representative, let Y stay in office indefinitely”), but I now think term limits are probably a good idea, to (hopefully) alleviate corruption;
2) My views on the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe have changed from a near certainty that life is unique to our planet, to a rather strong suspicion that simple life is probably abundant in the universe (though intelligent life is probably extremely rare). The hardiness of ‘extremophiles’ and the discovery of other temperate planets gradually changed my mind on this issue.
Also, I used to admire PZ Myers.
I am with you on just about every respect. On #1 I wonder if it would help things if we could on occasion force a new (but quick) election of our government if Washington fails, as some other countries can do.
For #3, my feeling is more mixed. I still find him valuable in certain areas.
“Also, I used to admire PZ Myers.”
I used to regularly post there (even got an OM), and would defend both the attitude in the comments but the people who commented on other blogs. Took me years to see what a nasty place it was, and what a nasty person I was when I joined in.
I used to be a moral realist and held to utilitarianism (having read Mill and Bentham as a teenager). Then I switched entirely to moral anti-realism.
*hi-five*
That really should say *high-five*. I should never post in the mornings before I have my coffee.
I was always an atheist, but I used to think that there was a kernel of truth to the gospel stories. Then I read Adam Lee’s essay Choking on the Camel. Mind: changed!
That’s not the only thing I ever read on the topic, of course, but that’s what got me started looking objectively at the evidence, and how we draw conclusions about history.
I used to love conspiracy theories, no one believes in just one. My favourite was the Ancient Aliens Theory, I was very excited when it was announced that a regular tv series was being made about, and it was on History channel so of course it must all be good stuff. I had been a believer for most of my teenage years, hooked when I first heard about it. I was never religious and I love sci-fi, so hearing gods were aliens was perfect.
I was 20 years old when it first aired in 2010 and I had made plans to go to the Nazca desert for December 21 2012, to see what would happen. In May 2011, I had travelled to Texas (I live in England) and there I first learned that creationism was real and people thought a young earth was a normal idea. So I took A-level physics again at 21 years old, spoke/argued with a few creationists online, this lead me to this website. From Jerry Coyne I started reading Carl Sagan and Bertrand Russell. By the time December 2012 came around I was spending all my money on science books and paying for my A-levels.
Now I’m the snobbish sheep my 16 year old self would hate, and I’m ok with that because that kid needed to be slapped with a few hardbacks. And yesterday I had enough books to create a rainbow with Jerry Coyne and Hitchens leading the yellow stripe.
When young I had some forays into conspiracy theories. I became obsessed with theories behind the JFK assassination in particular. But that began to change when I and a friend got a tape of the Zapruder film, and we watched it over and over.
When the events simply did not comport with the conspiracists, then I began to wise up about conspiracists. It was a very important moment for me.
“I used to love conspiracy theories”
In my late teens early 20’s I went through a phase where I believed in ancient aliens, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy, big foot, the Lock Ness monster, and more. I chalk that all up to my atheism. After no longer believing in God I was desperate to believe the fantastical existed in some way. A reality without fantasy seemed just too boring. The atheism also I think motivated my love of science fictions, and science, things that I still love.
I certainly used to believe in the *possibility* of Nessie existing. It is, after all, a huge loch. (Though I was contemptuous of almost all other conspiracy / alien / wooish theories).
I’m a little sad to admit that, with all the unsuccessful searches, that possibility is fading.
It’s a pity, I’m sure every biologist would be all over Nessie like a rash if (s)he actually turned up.
cr
But it would be sad if Nessie existed, all alone! There is a short story – I think by Bradbury – about a sea monster, the last member of an extinct species, that hears a siren and swims up, mistaking it for the call of a mate.
I suppose for ‘Nessie’ one has to read ‘a breeding population of Nessies’.
I agree there’s always something very sad about the last of the line.
cr
Yay! Books are cool. Books, or whatever the futures version of a book may be, are the key to a better world.
And, it’s so much fun.
There is so much ‘stuff’.
Fun topic. Let’s see.
-I was one of the crazy type of armchair animal rights activists (the type believing that animals are only good, all people are bad) and wanted to be a veterinarian. Then I learned a little about animals (finding out that other animals rape and murder as well), worked on farms, and found out that not all farmers treat their animals horribly and that, at least in my country, the slaughter is quite humane. I also found that many of the other crazy activists were psycopaths who wanted to kill people.
I also found out that I really like people even though I’m a introverted neurotic.
So I became a doctor. 🙂
-I thought domestic violence was almost exclusively a crime done by men. Then I realised that children are often beaten by their mothers, and that some women beat their spouses as well. I do consider myself a feminist in every respect still, but I’m annoyed by the feminists that claim only women can be victims.
– Everyone in my family have always been somewhat anti-immigration. I have always been the same, but I have gotten a more nuanced view over the years.
When you believed “all people are bad” did you include yourself in that?
Hehe. I dont think I really thought it through. I was a stupid teenager after all. It’s a cognitive dissonance of sorts that exists in many of those people.
When reading the comment sections pertaining to animal rights a lot of people would suggest releasing a virus to kill all mankind, or that they would rescue a mouse before they would rescue a bus of schoolchildren.
I don’t think they include themselves in it. They just think of themselves as separate from the rest of humanity. It’s a religion of sorts.
On the whole, I still like most animals that I interact with more than the people though. 🙂
It’s not like I’ve gone to the complete opposite view and hate animals now. I just find that they’re not good at keeping up a conversation. 🙂
At the risk of becoming a little sentimental, I mut say that I find pretty much all people I meet to be nice. When lurking on the internet I can get the feeling that everyone are psychopathic bigots, but when working with people and seeing patients in the real world, I realise that most people behave nicely. They may have horrible thoughts in their heads, but at least they don’t seem to be acting out on them.
I’ve in fact had very few “difficult” patients. I’ve only had a few uncomfortable experiences in the time I’ve been working. Even the drunks are quite nice and polite. And most patients are so filled with gratitude, even when I have nothing to offer.
And I love hearing all the stories people have to tell. I remember an old woman coming for a check up that had no physical complaints, but simply wanted to talk. She spent the entire appointment talking about her daughter with ALS, the new bakery opening up on her street etc. She also told me a sweet story about the time she slipped on the ice and fractured her femur. While a couple of adults were calling for an ambulance, a little boy came up to her, put something soft under her head and held her hand until the ambulance arrived. She said that hand was her lifeline. I always want to hug patients like that.
Enough sentimentality from me. I’m actually choosing a speciality that involves more lab work and less patient work because I’m more interested in it. I will still miss meeting all those wonderful people though.
Oh,as an aside to Alex Shuffel, I also didn’t include my family in the whole “all people are bad” routine. My family have always been wonderful and I recognised that as a kid as well, it was all those strangers that my underdeveloped teenage brain considered bad. 🙂
I enjoyed reading that, Linn. 🙂
Snakes. I used to fear them until taking the time to get to know them for the beautiful and necessary creatures that they are. Fear is at its core ignorance, which overcoming can prove to be a fascinating journey. Not being a fool though, I do retain a healthy respect for venomous reptiles. The Chicago Herpetological Society’s annual Reptile Fest is a great way to experience these wonderful critters.
I once believed in totally free speech. I now believe knowingly lying to the public, that is using technology to reach a greater audience, should be illegal.
That’s a quite interesting topic actually. I do consider myself as a pretty fanatical proponent of free speech, but I do understand your argument. When I see right wing nutters and Islamists using the technology to stir up hatred for groups of people, I do wonder if an absolutist view on free speech is truly beneficial to society. Also considering how f.ex hatred during the rwandian genocide was stirred through radio speeches.
I do see your point, even though I still will disagree that it should be illegal.
My concern is that a healthy society/democracy is dependent on an educated public/electorate. Unfortunately too many people have neither the time or the know how to filter the reliable sources from the noise. I now consider protecting lying to the public, a version of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
In my country, authorities in early to mid-20th century lied this way to some villagers at risk of iodine deficiency. There were no accessible supplements. Villagers had to take drinkwater from a low spring, but if they knew that the closely located high spring had a deficient nutrient, they would find an excuse to use it most times nevertheless. Therefore, experts lied: “This spring of your village has germs causing goiter. To avoid them, drink water only from the low spring, though it is far away.”
Sounds to me like the lie was entirely justifiable, in terms of public good, and not entirely a lie. Far more likely to bring about the right result (preventing goitre) than trying to give the real explanation which would have been less effective.
cr
Absolutism may not always be good, but it is better than the alternative. As someone said: There are books in the library which should be banned. But we can’t seem to agree on which ones.
The power to censor will ulitimately become controlled by those who shouldn’t have that power.
This also relates to your earlier post on the beauty of math. I once found a theorem that unified lots of littler theorems and led to what I thought was a really nice general theory. It worked in all the special cases I tried, though I could not prove the general case. I submitted an article about it (one of my first article submissions).
Then one night I was playing with numbers and I accidentally found a particular combination of numbers that falsified my theorem. I went pale as a ghost. I couldn’t think straight. Must be rounding error. Must be programming error. Must be dreaming/nightmaring.
No, the next day it was still falsifying my beautiful and almost-true (in other words, false) theorem.
The journal never noticed that but rejected it anyway for falling outside their subject matter. If they had published it I would never have lived it down. I learned a lesson.
And speaking of math, I used to accept that the Gompertz equation defined the growth kinetics of tumors. Then our group tried to use the equation to model the growth of real human cancers – fail. When tumors are growing, Gompertzian growth is reasonable; however, many tumors have long periods of quiescence, and thus their growth is quite irregular.
As a longtime pure mathematician, I really hate to turn out to be wrong, and I think many of us are like that. My choice of that subject over physics for a career likely had that ‘fear’ s part of the motivation, since mathematical proof is studied much as ptoducing qualitatively greater certainty than empirical science—I realize that’s a simplistic way to put it!
Anyway, starting as a 3 year old son of staunch (Irish-style Canadian) Catholics I gradually, from then till maybe 23 or 24, turned into an atheist, a change many others here have mentioned of course, maybe not so gradual.
As for other stuff, I’ve moved politically from rightish to leftish to the middle, again simplistically expressed, but where those tags are more like the western Europe/Canada versions (USian would be middle to extreme left, to less extreme.)
Had they decided to publish it would you have retracted it?
Yes, I would have had to retract it.
Happy to say I have always been an atheist and that I got something right.
Use to believe we all had free will but no more.
Being 11 years old when Nixon v Kennedy was going on, I can’t recall being for either but Kennedy took a far better picture.
In the early days of Vietnam I thought it was okay but that mistake did not last long. Have been against all of our incursions since, accept Croatia.
I once thought being retired would mean lots of free time – wrong again.
I grew in to their first selves and bulldozed out three children initiated from the wrong Sperm Source.
The kiddos are okay; yeah, they are. Sure. From my using that Source, however, I was not.
Without free will of my own brain and destined as it was to have happened, I made this mistake fully on my own.
Blue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR7i8PfWK68
Blue
Perfect song! Can’t beat Waylon
Mind change 1: On involvement with the religious
Sophisticated theologians like to talk about changing one’s mind as μετάνοια (metanoia). Originally trained in linguistics, I involved myself in the thicket of religion by allowing myself to be sent to a Lutheran divinity school. In my head, this was an intellectual endeavor, part social justice, part framing of the now through the lens of the Greeks (I took Greek), and part sociology. I thought I might be able to help people. But I was wrong. It was a misguided step in my journey, though not completely regrettable. What changed me, decided me, out of being ordained was seeing that however well intended the religious may be, their systems of ethics were pernicious. This peaked when I learned that I had had to vow not to preside over same-sex ceremonies. The Lutheran church (ELCA) later changed their policy on this, but at the time I was there, it was an ordination requirement to publicly point to the sinfulness of homosexuality. I found this ethically vile. So my mind changed, I metanoia’d out of faith circles (I never believed in god, not entirely, not really). I don’t think that everything about divinity is abhorrent, though. I learned how to channel– playfully involve myself in the fictions of others. But I stand by my learning that the use of empathy in faith cultures is not benign. It’s manipulative and selectively given and used like in family systems to control behavior. I see the same processes occurring in science-unfriendly academic disciplines surrounding free speech and social justice.
Mind change 2: On scientific hypotheses and skepticism
A few years ago my mentor published a methylation paper in which he found >16k CpG loci differentially hypomethylated among those who work the nightshift compared to the dayshift. We’ve subsequently increased our sample size and have changed our bioinformatics preprocessing of the methylation data, owing to knowing more now about things that can cause spurious associations. We recently analyzed this larger dataset and observed strikingly different results. Down from >16k, we have only 1 significant finding. Clearly, the meaning that is to be made here is that how the data are pre-processed make a huge difference in terms of results. We still don’t know what is biologically real. If nothing else, this increases my skepticism and has made me seek out researchers who have data that can be analyzed causally, which mine cannot (cross-sectional). So, I don’t know if this is a change of mind as much as it is a change in disposition towards what’s real.
Theologians are another abuser of ancient languages.
Here is my list so far:
1) Catholic Churce (Church Latin with soft c’s)
2) Theologians
3) Dentists (bruxism – just say grinding!)
4) Accountants (escheatment)
Not sure if this qualifies as a change of mind or simply a growing awareness. It’s prompted by the story above re: GC island methylation patterns. It is remarkable to me that, once it is written, many data sources become as if written in stone and the potential weaknesses in the original data and methods become lost in time. I see this most often in the field of genomics, where there are a growing number of genome assemblies available for comparative analyses, but rarely any ready means to evaluate the quality of a given sequence assembly. Perhaps my “Saul on the Road to Damascus” take-home lesson is a stern reminder to accept all data and models of the world as provisional constructs. To quote Dirty Harry: A man’s got to know his limitations.
Astute observation!
When I was a teenage schoolboy I was immensely proud to be British and have a mighty empire. Then I grew up.
An adult I was a quasi communist Russia lover from a quasi communist family, until I was finally taken with anarchism. Then I saw the delusion of all political isms. I’m a sceptical liberal now – European definition not US.
⏳
So, you’re up to pendulum clocks, now?
I’m getting in the swing, yes.
/@
😀
No comeback, I’m afraid. But I did just spend a few minutes at the Wikipedia pendulum clock page–really fascinating! 🙂
I was once vehemently against non-human euthanasia (I’ve always been a proponent for a human’s right to choose euthanasia). Choice, for me, is where the hang up was (or at least the perception of choice if you want to get into a free will discussion). And I actually entered veterinary school (and made it through) without really changing my mind. However, once I was in actual practice I had a whopping reality check. Just like humans, animals develop horrific, painful, and lethal diseases. It only took a few of these cases for me to realize that being hung up on the animal not verbally communicating to me that they wanted to die was not an adequate excuse; I was obligated to help end their suffering. Some people are easily able to compartmentalize and go about their days recognizing the necessity of euthanasia, and they just move on. I came to recognize the need for it, but had to pursue further education to get into a specialty where euthanasia doesn’t apply. Just couldn’t handle the emotional turmoil of death day after day. Bottom line, a view I held for nearly 15 years changed with just a few cases.
My husband recently died of cancer that metastasized to a significant number of his bones. He valued the life of the mind and wanted to stay mentally alert to the end. When the pain got so bad that large doses of opioids were necessary to control pain, it was difficult to balance that against retention of mental function. At that point, he followed through with his choice of euthanasia. Fortunately, we live in Oregon where this option is legal. My husband was able to live as long as he wanted and to die when he he deemed it best for him. Of the various deaths I’ve seen, he was in control of his life to the end, his death was the least painful and the most peaceful I have ever witnessed.
Rowena, I wish there were words to soothe the grief that comes from losing someone that was such an integral part of your life. Thank you for sharing his story, and for highlighting the compassionate side of euthanasia. I’m so sorry for your loss.
I, too, am sorry for your loss. My father passed away last month from a general wearing out of his brain (he had dementia) but at the end it was basically euthanasia via starvation, as he was not being fed and was on an increasing dosage of morphine. I don’t think he suffered, but the process lasted about 10 days, maybe 9 days longer than was really necessary. I’m not sure what could have been done differently, as he was no longer able to make such decisions himself, and we live in California, as well.
What could have been done differently (though I presume not legally) would have been to crank up the morphine to lethal levels when feeding was withdrawn. (And I see no difference, for practical or moral purposes, between euthanasing someone that way and starving them to death. Just a huge difference in suffering. If you treated a dying animal like that, you’d be lynched.)
My mother died of cancer. She had always believed in voluntary euthanasia, and she demanded it, repeatedly. Didn’t get it. Bloody pro-lifers. I’d like to think that, after days of suffering, someone quietly turned up the morphine supply, but I felt it better not to ask.
cr
I have been a radical determinist for a while, until I realized that a radically (which is 100%) determined world would in no way be different from a probabilistic world. Hence it seems to be just a matter of taste. I now prefer the probabilistic view of the world. And I do not see why one should need determinism to deny free will.
I used to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Yes, I shed that one too, before turning 70.
At least we can blame our parents for that ruse. I thought you might try that one – I made a mistake once by believing I had got it wrong but I had not.
I enjoyed the Santa and Tooth Fairy fictions as a kid, but I recall being of the age of five and in kindergarten when another girl burst into tears after someone informed her that Santa wasn’t real. I recall marveling at her immature emotionality and could scarcely believe she wasn’t already fully apprised of the situation. How ridiculous, I thought. Of course, I greatly looked forward to the orchestrated game, the Easter baskets and the Christmas gifts, and mused that my parents engaged with me in a joint imaginary endeavor. But to be upset that it wasn’t real? I was simply shocked that she felt so duped.
That’s exactly how I felt about Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, etc. Just cultural folk tales to enliven the holidays. My parents neither promoted nor denied the traditions…I felt they were just going along with the game as well.
My son turned out the same way, but my daughter fervently believed in Santa into, oh, 2nd or 3rd grade, IIRC. Not the only way she’s wired differently than her brother and I are, either.
Nonsense! Everyone knows that Santa Claus is indeed real.
The one that stands out clearly in my mind is about evolution itself. I didn’t know what to think about it. I was raised Christian but always had philosophical problems with the teachings. Problems of evil or the concept of Hell. I was confused. I don’t know that I was an atheist, but I couldn’t stand religion of any kind and viewed it as a sort of cult. I didn’t see a big difference between mainstream Catholicism and Heavens Gate for example. But again, the issues I had were philosophical and I was completely oblivious to the science. I suppose I thought there must be SOMETHING out there… Maybe what I fell more in line with at the time was Deism without really being aware of the term.
For years I was challenged by family and it wasn’t uncommon to get into heated theological debates. At a certain point near the end of the discussion, I would get a mocking sarcastic type of question thrown at me: “You’re not one of those crazy evolutionists, are you?!”. I didn’t know what to reply with. I was beyond ignorant. I wanted to keep an open mind and give evolutionists, whoever they were, the benefit of the doubt, but then I was made to feel naive and stupid for asking questions about what this “evolution thing” was all about.
I now know that it’s a huge mistake to ever ask creationists about evolution. You will not get a proper answer because they largely misunderstand it and have the totally wrong idea about it — but they THINK they understand it very well. Also, this is not even taking into consideration their huge bias against evolution. I’m being very generous when I disclude their personal bias in the equation and that, bias or not, they actually have gotten a lot of bad information themselves.
I’d get thrown questions that seemed tough at the time due to my complete ignorance of the subject. Why are monkeys still here if they evolved into humans? Why don’t we see a crocoduck creature…or a half cat half chicken?
The final finishing blow was when they would tell me that these stupid evolutionists think that whales once lived on land.
The whole thing sounds insane when you are ignorant and don’t know a thing about it.
After years of this, I finally decided that I wanted to know why some people think we evolved. I was interested in learning. I wanted to give it a fair shot. I had already given up religion and was well on my way to becoming an atheist, but I needed to know about our origins. Was Adam and Eve the first two people?
I’m so happy that I wasn’t misguided into purchasing a creationists book on evolution. That could have really messed me up. I bought Richard Dawkins “The Greatest Show On Earth” and finished it in a week. It was so fascinating, I needed more. I saw some great Amazon reviews of WEIT, so I bought it and I’ve been hooked ever since. I feel the two make excellent companion pieces.
This post is getting long so I’ll try to just wrap this up. These books changed my life in an important way. Watching Youtube videos of these great scientists and others, and reading their work had a profound effect on me in many facets. It’s made me a better, more rational, and more moral person. I was sort of on a bad path for awhile, and after reading Sam Harris, Coyne, Dawkins, Krauss, etc.. it just led me to a much better place and changed me in ways that they’ll never realize. They are some of the best teachers I’ve (n)ever had! So thank you for that.
I’m now a student again and hoping to go into Biology field.
With the help of this website and all the wonderful books by the above mentioned scientists, I’ve been able to persuade my mother, a life long christian, into an atheist who accepts evolution. She loves Dr Coyne and Dawkins and all of these people now and was simply never exposed to anything but pseudoscience. But she now grasps the beautiful theory and embraces it. I’m sure seeing the big positive changes in my life through exploring science, determinism, philosophy, etc.. has also given her much joy and relief
I know this may not have been the proper forum for story telling but I felt some context might be good. So I hope you enjoyed my evolution.
Lastly, PCC(E) mentioned sympatric speciation, and I wondered if any of you might know of any good books on it. I’m not sure I’ve seen much evidence for it and I’d love to become more informed. I’m also interested in books about the endosymbiotic theory of the origins of eukaryotic cells. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
I very much enjoyed your “evolution!” 🙂
Just when I needed an uplifting story, too.
Interesting question.
Most of my life I have been involved in reading, holding conversations with anyone wanting to talk,always pursuing education (in the humanities. I’m a mathematical dunce!) As long as I am open to new ideas or new interpretations of old ideas, I’m subject to change. In no way am I the same person I started out as, nor am I the same person I was a few years ago. Experiences change us.
Like some of you, I started out as a fundamentalist Christian in a fundamentalist Christian family. My freshman year of college was at a fundamentalist Christian college. I have been a secularist/humanist/agnostic/atheist now for almost 50 years. The change took me through a lot of transitional steps
trying to find a religion I could live with. I didn’t succeed. Although I can no longer live that old life, I try to not be “holier than thou” or “smarter than thou” with my religious family and friends. I can still love them as long as they don’t become heavy duty proselytizers who insist that all must live as they do.
Sub
My biggest journey has been political, I would say. When I was a teenager I became a communist, and remained such until I was perhaps 19. After a full year of debating, almost every evening, with a friend in my college dorm, I decided that he was right, and I converted to a libertarian. Over the years, I have mellowed considerably in that stance, and now consider myself to be a liberaltarian. I have also come to realize, though, that there are two kinds of disagreement in the political world. Many people from all points on the spectrum actually agree on the goal, and just disagree on the best method to reach the goal. Since economics and politics are (unfortunately) not really empirical sciences in so many ways, I can understand that, and I don’t tend to hold such differences against people; having travelled across the whole spectrum, I can see the appeal of everything from communism to libertarianism. The other kind of disagreement, though, is when people actually don’t agree on what the goal is. This is, for example, why Ted Cruz is a truly evil human being. His goals are not sane, human goals.
In science, a big change of mind I experienced was on group selection. As an undergraduate, I wanted so badly to believe that it was true and important and central. It had an immense emotional and intellectual appeal for me. As I studied and read during my PhD, however, I came to realize that it was (in general, with possible exceptions) a pipe dream. That was, I think, a real step forward intellectually for me. I was reminded of this when I read PCC’s earlier post about beauty and mathematics and physics. I was lured into thinking that group selection had to be a central part of evolution, because I found the idea so beautiful. Nope. :->
Socially, my big journey has been towards independence and self-sufficiency, I think. When I was young, I wanted – like so many young people – to be popular. The older I get, the less I care about that, and the more inclined I am to speak my mind even if it makes people angry or loses me friends. I have come to value truth far, far above popularity. Perhaps that is because I have come to realize that if you never compromise your ideals, and always speak what you believe to be truth, you may have fewer friends – but the friends you do have will be the best kind of friends.
I used to be right wing fiscally, and now I could not be more left. The change was spurred by learning about human nature through evolutionary psychology. This also changed my mind about patriotism, culture and race relations. I used to believe that pride in one’s race and heritage was a good thing, now I see how silly it is to be proud of an accident of birth.
I have changed opinions a lot. But I have been an atheist since I was 5 years old and have remained so ever since! I thank the kid who asked me when I was 5 if I believed in God? If he hadn’t asked me that question, and force me to make a choice, I’m not sure how long it would have been before I realized that. Thanks, curious kid!
I use to think the average voter was reasonable and rational and took some amount of effort to inform themselves.
Well said. Ditto on that one. I also used to think that most people were reasonably critical thinkers when it came to matters involving their own self-interest. Boy was I wrong on that count as well.
Romney proved beyond any shadow of doubt that nearly 50% of the electorate was ready to pawn their best interests for a shiny, shiny new nickle. It’ll be very interesting to see what the balance is like this time around.
I believed that once also. But, for several reasons, a large segment of the masses wallow in ignorance and can easily be influenced by demagogues such as Trump and Cruz. This same ignorance and unwillingness to face reality is reflected in the fact that so many people blithely accept without thought the fairy tales spun to them by their prelates.
Before I went to college I naively believed that the United States in foreign affairs could do no wrong. By the time I graduated I realized that the United States, as any other country, tries to act in its national interest but often mistakes what its national interest really is. And in pursuing its perceived national interest catastrophes can ensue. How many Vietnamese were killed in a war that should never have been fought? No longer was I a naive super-patriot.
I do not see a way to avoid the Vietnam War, provided that the USSR and China were not content with having North Vietnam under communism and decided to put there South Vietnam as well.
Despite the US entry into the war, with 58,209 American military deaths and 1,313,000 total deaths in North and South Vietnam during the period 1965–1974; North Vietnam won and Vietnam is today a “Communist” country. What happened as a result of the North Vietnamese victory that was worse for U.S interests than the deaths and displacement that took place during that war?
I agree. I’d note that, as “communist” countries go, it seems to be pretty open to the outside world. Encouraging tourism, for example. I think ideologies adapt (or get adapted) to suit the country they’re in.
cr
I do not wish to rehash the debates of why the U.S. got involved in Vietnam. I will only refer to the words of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and often referred to as the “architect of the Vietnam War,” who in this video states unequivocally that U.S. entry into this unwinnable war (short of a catastrophic expenditure in lives and treasure) was a mistake.
Sorry, I didn’t realize the video would be embedded. I thought I only gave the link.
How do you think, if the war was unwinnable for the USA, why was it so? Why was it winnable for the USSR, also a foreign power? Would you make any extrapolation to today’s wars? I start to suspect that underdevelopment is a necessary and sufficient condition for winning a war against the USA.
All you have to do to win against the USA is be prepared to take more casualties.
In the Vietnam war, the USSR didn’t have troops on the ground, they weren’t taking casualties.
The US has this mythical view that its superior technology will allow them to defeat any enemy with minimal casualties. This works in the Iraq desert. It doesn’t work in a jungle or a city.
It spectacularly doesn’t work where the US’s ‘allies’ and its ‘enemies’ look just alike, but the Americans are obviously foreign interlopers. Who’s going to side with foreign invaders who can’t even speak your language? The Russians found the same sort of thing in Afghanistan.
Oh, and the USA wasn’t fighting for its own country. The Vietnamese were.
And the South Vietnamese government had lost so much support (by the time the French pulled out) that it was losing badly to the Viet Cong – which of course is why the USA got sucked into it. If it wasn’t for the pernicious ‘domino theory’, the US might have kept well out of it. Would have saved huge numbers of lives.
That’s just a few reasons off the top of my head.
cr
I think you are right. I meant the same when I wrote that being backward is the necessary and sufficient condition to win a war against the USA. Recently, the war decisively won by the USA was against Serbia. The Serbs, whatever can be said against them, had what I regard as a hallmark of development, that is, they had passed the demographic transition. After that point, you truly value life – your own life, at least. (Also, Serbs could not count on support by US public opinion because they were white Christians; but I do not think this was so important.)
Diawl! (Welsh for ‘the devil’) Have you had a pinker or two too much?
This domino theory was pumped by the right wing in Australia too.
Australia supported and wanted the US to do what it did and they helped, to our shame.
“Diawl! (Welsh for ‘the devil’) Have you had a pinker or two too much?”
Not sure if you were replying to me or Maya, or quite what you’re getting at?
cr
To mayamarkov – I suggest, infinite, you read Pinker’s take on the Vietnamese in ‘Better Angels’, which mm seems to be close to parrotting.
As to the ‘backwardness’ of the Vietnamese, it is difficult not to see in the charge the complacent assumption of superiority to non-European peoples of the ignorant Westerner, not to say simple racism. A corrective to this sort of attitude is, among many other things (such as learning a bit of history), the book ‘A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Laos, Cambodia & Vietnam’, by perhaps the greatest travel writer of the last century, Norman Lewis. It was originally published in 1951.
I looked at the Wikipedia page of the Korean War, there is an image worth a thousand words:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/KoreaAtNight20121205_NASA.png
South Korea in lights, because the USA won the war, maybe against all odds.
The USSR did not win it.
It depends on the viewpoint. USSR / Russia is steadily sunk in misery and feels secure only when other countries are in the same or worse misery, preferably the same type of misery, i.e. socialism. From this viewpoint, the Vietnam war was a total victory for the USSR, and so it was advertised in my country, though the comrades never admitted more than moral support and symbolic humanitarian help for North Vietnam. How did the war end? The entire Vietnam was made communist and so stuck to misery, with many of its best citizens killed, incarcerated, made pariahs or driven out of the country. A potential Asian “tiger” was smashed before it had a chance. In the 1980s, we even had Vietnamese guest workers. However, they were sent back very soon after the political changes in late 1989.
About the “Better angels” – some commenter on this blog recommended it to me, and I intend to read it, but I haven’t yet found it and so haven’t read a single page of it. So the similarity of opinions must be due to similar thought patterns found independently by two vile minds.
There are some universal markers of underdevelopment, such as low per capita GDP, low productivity of labor, low urbanization, large number of children per family (the “barefoot & pregnant” pattern), usually combined with high infant and childhood mortality. A society with these characteristics, be it Asian or European or African or whatever, is backward and invariably has problems to establish and develop market economy, democracy and rule of law. As for racism, I find more racist the idea that the Vietnamese did not deserve capitalism and democracy, did not want it and could not handle it. I am sure that Vietnam had many good and intelligent people, but tragically they were overwhelmed by power-craving terrorist thugs and their brainwashed followers, as has happened many times in history with nations of different skin color, some at much higher level of development than Vietnam.
I think you’re obsessed with your bogeyman the USSR, maya. The Vietnam war started as a nationalist uprising against French colonial rule and their corrupt Vietnamese puppet government. Such movements always look for support to whoever will back them – whether it’s the USSR or the CIA.
“the view that the Vietnamese did not deserve capitalism and democracy, did not want it and could not handle it.” Who suggested that? They wanted democracy, that’s why they rebelled in the first place! (Why do you think so many Communist countries called themselves ‘People’s Democratic Republic’? It may not be what communism turned out to be but it’s what they were trying for).
What they did not deserve was the horrors of being ‘defended’ by the USA.
Your photo of South and North Korea is completely irrelevant to this. You will note that even the backwoods arse end of Russia is more lit up than North Korea. Did you think to include (Communist!) China in the shot? Or, more relevantly, North and South Vietnam? If not, why not?
cr
It’s a long list.
Positive beliefs:
– I believed in religion on and off for years. I am proud that I first stopped believing at 6, a year after riddling that Yule Santa was fake but only because my Grandma insisted it was real. I am less proud that the last time was at 15.
– I believed in communism, popular among adolescents ate the time, for half a year at 10. I distinctly remember that the insistence on a revolution, that were mostly violent, put me off.
– I believed in idealism, philosophy, and mathematical platonism for the longest time before adopting empirical realism quite recently. What you can get away with if you have the wherewithal to fool yourself, and lack Feynman’s clarity!
Negative beliefs:
– I did *not* believe in dark energy expansion, nor AGW, for a year after they were announced; slow adopter.
– I have changed my mind on free speech due to Jerry. I did *not* believe in the freer US version but adopted the Swedish hate speech formulation for a while.
Coda:
And I have flirted with a lot of concepts through the years, before dropping them as useless toys. But I can’t say I believed strongly and/or exclusively in any of them.
I’ll added below that I used to have problems with LBQT gender fluency, but that changed when I dropped idealism. (Never had much homophobic views though, had a childhood friend that grew up gay.)
I was also reminded below that I have a much more balanced and educated view on Israel vs Palestine thanks to Jerry. Not that I despised Israel of anything, but I thought they were militaristic. No longer.
I have wondered about idealism and materialism a lot. Neither with a deity, just as to ‘what stuff is
?”
I am, and have been a materialist for a long time. But some sort of idealism may be true.
As a child I held homophobic views and would tease/torment (never physically) my “affeminant” schoolmates. I’ve long since shed those foolish, distructive views and I am now ashamed of my actions.
I don’t think I’m as smart as I did when I was 18.
I agree. When I graduated from high school I thought I knew everything. Now I realize I know almost nothing.
I think that age 15 was the peak of my know-it-allism. It’s been downhill the many years since.
Life is the process of overcoming the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Darn near everything. I grew up in a conservative, evangelical household.
1) Guns. I don’t think we need them and I think they are a danger now.
2) Climate Change. I actually began to agree with climate change science when I researched it to refute it.
3) Evolution. I was young and stupid.
4) GLBT, Once I accepted evolution, I figured that put the end to GLBT. Wrong about that too.
I used to be libertarian. I revised my position upon realising that the contemporary society is complex enough that it is unrealistic to expect that the majority of people are able to take care of themselves by themselves the way libertarians expect them to. Everyday life would have to include too many decisions most people are simply not knowledgeable/informed enough to make. Insisting on libertarian society would in all likelihood make everybody worse off as a result of failures of people to function without a safety net and the actions they would take as a consequence.
I used to hold the belief that Gender dysphoria was purely a mental illness , however I now consider certain causes to be the results of e.g. someones sex chromosomes (like XO and XXY) and also perhaps other genetic factors.
But I still think that some gender dysphoria can be the result of something else (non biological). For example the situation where two lesbians that raise a boy who wants to become a women through a sex change operation. I am highly skeptical about that case because it seems extremely ‘convenient’.
The Brexit. One or two years ago I agreed with those in the UK saying that they shouldn’t put up with the Brussels bureaucracy and restrictive (and protective) business and employment laws. But I changed my mind. Just the 1 billion Euro European Quantum Technology project now just announced in Europe makes it clear that UK research will miss out in rising research funding in that area and also it may miss out in securing a market share in quantum technology products, especially with the creation of the Internet of Things, where quantum technology will form an important backbone. This is true for other industries as well, such as Airbus, where the UK has an important stake. And students will miss out in the European exchange schemes, such as Erasmus. And Obama is right, it will take the UK a long time to recover from a possible Brexit. The UK should stay with Europe, and fight for the changes they would like to see.
And now, with Russia behaving badly, a strong European political union is more important than ever.
EU is of little help there. If anything NATO is far more of a resource than the mostly useless EU.
Dismantling the EU is a first step to dismantling NATO
I do not think they are related. I think NATO will be dismantled when the USA leaves.
+ 1
It’s taken years but I no longer think cilantro is evil.
But it is!!!
Perhaps I was hasty.
Cilantro rocks‼️
Hahahaha! Jerry will disagree with you, but he hangs his toilet paper wrong so he’s probably wrong about this too.
That’s interesting. I thought that whether or not one liked cilantro/coriander was a genetic thing. I don’t know the details but some people have a variant of a gene that makes them perceive cilantro as having an unpleasant soapy taste. People without the gene perceive a more pleasant taste. Your experience obviously doesn’t square with that so maybe you don’t actually have the ‘cilantro-dislike’ gene but just started out disliking the taste of cilantro anyway and then acquired the taste later?
With regards to acquired tastes, I disliked avocado and olives (amongst other things) as a child but can’t get enough of them now! I have never disliked cilantro.
1) I was a Catholic. Then, at age of 21, I suddenly realized religion doesn’t make sense.
2) I thought Communism was terrific. Slowly I noticed it really meant poverty and a police state.
Yes, very interesting, made me think. Interesting comments above, too. For me:
1) Was christian, now atheist.
2) Like many others, probably, I was brought up by parents and family with a range of mostly unexamined, mostly conservative, assumptions and prejudices. About things like race, culture, what counts as proper behaviour, etc. It has taken a long time, but I have now got round to facing up to a lot of these prejudices and testing whether they can really be justified in the here and now. It’s not always straightforward.
3) Free will: used to believe in it, now inclining much more towards PCC(E)’s view.
I used to think that most people would abandon unsupported beliefs when presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. However, based on the evidence, I no longer believe that. ‘Twas silly of me to think that. But that’s because….
I used to be Christian and all around gullible for stuff like ghosts. Now I’m atheist and all around skeptical. Never been happier.
I used to be a forced birther. Now I’m pro-choice. I used to be a food fascist. Now I’m not.
I used to be quite the authoritarian asshole actually. I’m so glad I quit thinking I was always right.
I used to be a Republican. In my defense, I grew up in the 60’s near Chicago and my go-to reference for a ‘Democrat’ was Mayor Richard J Daley. I once considered Republicans to be on the sensible, reasonable, caring side of the divide.
I have been a Transcendentalist, and thought the Romantic Period had made great progress from the views and values of the 18th century Enlightenment. I liked the Quakers primarily because of their mysticism.
I once believed I wrote deep and meaningful poetry — and this would be my special life talent.
I used to think it was the height of rudeness and bigotry to tell or even suggest that someone’s religious beliefs weren’t true. After all, that’s fundamentalism.
At one point I was enthusiastic about atheists reclaiming the terms “religion” and “spirituality.”
Wrong, wrong, really wrong, wrong, and wrong.
Oh, and when I was a kid I believed cotton candy tasted wonderful.
Maybe your poetry is deep and meaningful after all.
I used to think poetry , especially mine, was sublime.
I can’t comment on your poems but some poetry IS sublime!
I used to believe that racism was not an issue in the US. Now I know that is not the case.
I used to be against gay marriage even though I was still figuring out basic concepts like what sexuality is. As I became more educated, I became pro LGBTQ.
I was a devout Catholic, then I was in limbo for a while trying to figure out what I believed, and finally it clicked: I’m an atheist.
I thought that women did not experience any sexism in this country even though I had experienced it myself, but as I became more educated I started to recognize the sexism in my own upbringing and community and I have to acknowledge that we do have some issues when it comes to women’s rights, which brings me to abortion.
I used to be vehemently pro-life and active in the pro-life movement. One day I learned that the morning after pill is not an abortificent, and neither is the birth control pill, and suddenly I began to wonder whether other “facts” I believed spread by the pro-life movement were true, and one by one they fell. Abortion is not horribly dangerous. It doesn’t lead to breast cancer. A lot of the footage pro-life organizations have been putting out has been altered in some way to incriminate pro-choice organizations. The more I learned the more I realized while I don’t like abortion, it should be legal. I deserve to have autonomy over my body.
When you were in limbo, did you come across a lot of unbaptized infants and aborted fetuses? 😉
Bahaha figurative limbo of course. I love your comment though.
I used to have a negative attitude towards LGBT people due to ignorance.
I thought it was so wrong for me to be forgetful, now I think it is one of the reasons I am a happy person. 🙂
Right, I forgot that. I was lucky in that one of my close childhood friends grew up as a homosexual. But I had problems with the whole gender fluency stuff for quite a while.
I think I dropped that too as I turned from idealism to all-out-empiricism. (I was quite good at grokking science and doing experiments in school, but for some reason that was the extent of it.)
I’m far less of a liberal (in it’s current US sense) than I am now, realizing that too many of them have gone too far into their own echo chamber to deal with reality.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that not all that was radical and new was good. That it’s a bad idea to throw away centuries of experience unless you have a damned better way of doing things.
I no longer see liberals (as I once did) as altogether right, nor do I see conservatives (not talking about religious stuff here, but the philosophy that change needs to be carefully and skeptically considered) as being all wrong. In hot button issues like abortion, death penalty, gun controls etc. I understand what differing sides have to say, and that thinking people on both sides can have valid opinions.
Unfortunately, my typing skills have not kept pace. Sorry about the typos.
“I’m far less of a liberal (in it’s current US sense) than I am now”
Should that ‘am’ be ‘was’ ? As it stands, the sentence isn’t comprehensible.
cr
Try: “I’m now far less a liberal (in its current US sense) than I used to be.”
OK that clarifies it.
cr
I used to be a Republican. True, a liberal Republican, back when that was a minority position, not an oxymoron.
I used to believe in God.
I used to assume I was straight.
All these were long, slow changes. Mostly, I don’t change my mind, but can eventually, if enough evidence builds up and I think about it long enough.
Like so many of you above have written.
Religious now atheist. Republican then Democrat. And I also thought that the Democrats would never nominate someone who seemed to feel so entitled. Now I am not sure I am a Democrat. Dems seem to be as much sheep as the Republicans.
No time to elaborate at the moment, but I used to be a theist, more by default than anything else, and I used to think compatibilism was a useless way of looking at the free will issue.
I was born in Soviet Union, with all the massive propaganda influences coming with that. Needless to say, I had to change my mind on a lot of things.
One my earlier stand I am most ashamed of relates to the Israeli-Palestinian problem: as most in the USSR I was on the Palestinian side, believing that Israel was in the wrong, if not evil, then close to it. Now I think that Israel is the only bright spot in that region of the globe, and does mostly what they have to do to survive.
I used to think that in a democratic society there should be some limits on free speech, and almost no limits on government transparency. Now I believe that there should be almost no limits to free speech, but full government transparency is often not helpful.
I also thought that people on the left are generally better, kinder, than people on the right. Not so sure about that any more.
As an aside, as you mentioned Nixon, I find that some immigrants from Russia, myself included, have a very different view on Him than liberals born in the west. For us from the ussr Nixon is associated with detente, which opened a small window to the west and to the US in particular, to an average Russian. i believe that Nixon’s detente might have played a bigger role in Perestroika and the end of “communism” in Russia than whatever Reagan did 15-20 years later.
That’s an interesting take on Nixon. In the US he’s mostly remembered for Watergate, of course, and next for his arguably criminal pursuit of the Vietnam War (the Secret Plan). His diplomatic openings to China and the Soviet Union are nearly forgotten.
I used to be wrong. But now I always argue the correct side.
😉
No you don’t 😉
I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
I once believed
1: that the rate of expansion of the universe is slowing down,
2: that mother Teresa was a good person,
3: that Donald Trump has no viable path to 1237 delegates.
Some big ones:
1. The idea of objective morality – after years of trying to find some sort of grounding for morality, eventually reading J.L. Mackie convinced me of the non-realist position regarding moral values.
2. The ultra left-wing politics of my youth – I realised after years of simply thinking that most people were ignorant or stupid when it came to politics, that perhaps the problem was actually the strength to which I had assigned those values validity in the first place.
3. The validity and value of philosophy – I was very much of the “let science sort it out” opinion until I started reading more philosophy and seeing what the discipline had to offer. Turns out a lot.
Some smaller ones:
* Memes – originally thought the idea had a lot of merit. But the more I looked into the topic, the less merit I could see. Finally, a disanalogy between genes and memes took away the explanatory power of genes applied to memes.
* Flirted with conspiracy theories – I see this as a subset of my youth politics, but was something that definitely changed.
* Psychic powers – never fully embraced them, but they did seem a serious possibility for me long after they should have been given my other beliefs about how the world works.
* Utilitarianism as how to make ethical decisions – very drawn to it initially. Sam Harris’ terrible justification of the trolley problem on utilitarian grounds was the final nail in the coffin on that for me.
* Fargo – first time I watched, couldn’t see what the fuss was about. By the third time, I could!
I was always more a fox – not that invested strongly in most things. You can call this opportunistic. I am militant about few things only.
I hate to say it, but I have no good memory of previous other opinions for most of the time. I know countless of examples where I went “Ah, I didn’t know that!” or “Ah, I thought this was different”. That happens all the time, but not necessarily in those big pro-contra matters.
{1} My view on different periods rotated around perhaps five times. Here are two examples: At one time or another I thought the past was crude and primitive, people wore brown and weren’t that inventive. I pictuered times when the black death was haunting the streets and everyone would pour their yield of the night’s business onto the streets from above. Everyone was almost always drunk, because alcohol was safer than water. People were also always dirty, because they knew the water wasn’t good for them (as germ infested as it was). Then again, I learned that people even in the darkest middle ages were clothed in colourful attire and almost certainly took pride in their belongings and kept them well. They were also very inventive in many small things, and came up with practical solutions all the time that worked for them. In a similar vein, I once thought Greek’s temples and statues were mostly white. I learned at one point that they were actually very colourful, but the paint didn’t survive the times.
{2} I thought the Saphir-Whorf theory was preposterous nonsense. I now think a soft version is likely true.
{3} I thought humans have specific faculties that aid them in learning language and other things. I no longer believe this. I now think there is a more general association-making module that is like a record keeper of perceptions that are stored away in mental categories. Our mind is trying to sync what it perceives in the world and quasi keeps a probabalistic record of what occurs when together, which I now believe is what we mean by “meaning” (dark cloud mean it’s going to rain; a smiling person means someone is relaxed and happy; when people say “cat” they mean a certain creature). I think graded categorisation are instances of this, too (they reflect what occurs more often). I also now think that words are treated like other perceptions, i.e. I see this creature has a tail, which I notice, I hear it making a certain “meow” sound which I associate with it, and when people call it “cat” I likewise put this into the mental category box of “cat”. “Cat” and “Katze” are variations of properties like black cats or striped-cats, I simply learn that there are different ways to refer to them. I probably change my views on this again – maybe by tomorrow.
{4} Three years ago, I thought atheists and skeptics were committed to critical thinking and would avoid the most common pitfalls. I don’t mean any unreasonable standard: just very basic “checking out a link and see what it says” kind of thing. I also generally thought, quite naively, that people are – give and take – generally intellectually honest and nice. Lying for strategical reasons and such things are still alien to me, but I know now that this is very common in the secular movement. I was certain that more atheism would be great for the USA. I no longer believe it. The “post-evangelical mindset” seems to be rather dangerous.
{5} I changed my views about GMOs. I used to emphasise the dangers and risks of unleashing altered organisms to the world, and didn’t like that politicians and corporations don’t want to label such products. I still have a dim view on this, for when people don’t want something, they have every right to not buy it. I now think that GMO have some legitimate applications, in particular for feeding the poor, or such things as combating Zika. Though I am still critical of patenting organisms, or engineering them in such a way that poor people become even more dependent from corporations.
Jerry, you should change your mind about one more thing: You need to come join Team Compatiblist™. You claimed in your whole writing that you “changed your mind” and like everyone else, you wrote as if you had free will. You should therefore accept that the concept, in praxis, exists and is useful and that we could not meaningfully communicate without the notion of free will, even when it – jootsing outside of everything – doesn’t exist.
I don’t buy that Humanities is not evidence driven. The evidence is often just not as objective in some areas (literature) but definitely very objective in others (archaeology).
What I’ve slowly changed my mind about is that you can and should criticize religion. I was brought up not to make fun of someone’s beliefs. Now, I consider them ideas like any other ideas and I have the New Atheists to thank for that.
List of things I got wrong or changed my mind about:
1) Used to think that reforms could make the death penalty acceptable.
2) Was an NRA member.
3) Thought marriage equality wouldn’t be plausible in the US (and advocating them was counterproductive) and that civil partnerships should be the goal.
4) Did not like onions.
5) Was close to an absolutist about free speech.
6) Had an unhealthy flirtation with logical positivism.
7) Was opposed to physician aid in dying.
8) Thought the Israel-Palestine situation had a clear baddie.
9) Thought the Dark Crystal was a good movie.
I once believed that Gyoza were just deep-fried potstickers. I recently tried deep frying potstickers. Not the same thing.
I used to think that Aeneas was an asshat for leaving Dido but as I grew older, I thought it did the right thing. Still would have been nice if he kept is penis in his toga though.
I still laugh at the scene where Dido snubs him in the underworld. I know it’s not supposed to be funny but I’m not exactly the target audience for the work so I bring my own cynicism to the epic.
Why do you think he did the right thing?
He had to go found Rome. He had obligations and the Carthaginians would be Rome’s future enemy so best leave Carthage and get on with it. He shouldn’t have lingured as long as he did.
Would you wish Carthage to have survived? I have mixed feelings. I am disgusted by their child sacrifices (well, Romans are not impartial chroniclers, but there is archeological evidence as well, plus Jewish reports about the same religion in its homeland).
If Carthage had endured the onslaught of Pagan Rome, Christianity and Islam, what place would it have in today’s world? I can imagine news headlines:
“Human rights groups criticize the agreement with Carthage about return of migrants.”
“Carthaginian theologian: The few who sacrifice children misunderstand our religion.”
“Anti-Carthaginian bigotry reveals the arrogance of New Atheists.”
“Pro-life group: Child sacrifices of fundamentalist Carthaginians no worse than abortion.”
And so on.
Carthago delenda est!
I’m actually only speaking in Roman fictional terms WRT to Aeneas and his duty. Aeneas had an obligation and he needed to fulfill that obligation. If part of it was to get the hell out of dodge (or Carthage) and set up the future Roman race for conquering them, well that’s what he has to do.
It would be a long list but here’s one of my favorite stories that sort of follows the question:
I was chatting with my major professor during one of my last days at college. I remarked that it was funny: I wanted to attend college my entire life because there were so many things I wanted to know. Now, on the eve of leaving, it dawned on me that everything I though I knew, I now questioned. And I was leaving with a whole new set of questions.
Without a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed my hand and shook it and said “Your welcome, Sir. We have educated you!”
So, I tried to come up with an answer to this one, but it lead me into a problem, that will at least allow me to provide a different response, while still being in theme.
You see, I have a bad memory. Really bad. It’s not at the level of a disability, but as a high school boy, I helped a girl that sat next to me in study hall every other day with her science homework for a year. Despite her name being on the top of the homework assignments, I never actually learned her name. Which is to say I’m sure I learned it several times, it just never stuck.
This means I’m having a hard time remembering anything substantial I really found myself recanting. I can think of one instance that I would dub an ‘epiphany’ wherein my brother and me were fighting over use of the computer. I said it wasn’t fair, but my mom said it didn’t matter. Later that day, at lunch, I was fuming over the incident, and to prove my point to myself, I started looking at it from my brothers point of view. At which point I immediately realized that I was wrong. It made me learn about empathy, and how sometimes bad shit happens, but that doesn’t mean it’s other peoples responsibility to take in on themselves to deal with.
IIRC, the ‘unfairness’ was that the power had gone out and I lost most of my computer time for it. Sure it’s unfair, but how would just giving me my brothers computer time eliminate the unfairness? It’d just shove the burden onto him.
But that’s pretty much the only time, and it wasn’t about a previously held belief, it was just a really strong lesson in empathy. Because, going back to my bad memory, I don’t really form strong beliefs. I know my memory is bad, I’ve known it my whole life. I doubt everything I believe not because I’m a dedicated skeptic, but because experience has taught me I have very good reason to think I might be wrong, simply due to me forgetting important details.
Skepticism comes naturally to me, but only in the sense that a person missing a leg always has a chair handy.
When I converted to atheism? Pretty much heard a few atheist arguments, and said “Yah, that about sounds right.” I swung from the left to the right and then back again (not quite as far right, but still, more libertarian than liberal) but at no point did I really feel I had changed my mind in any substantial “I have been wrong this whole time” way. I’m so used to doubting myself that “I was wrong” has no impact unless being wrong cause me to hurt someone. As such, even when I do have a large change of mind, after a while, I’ll keep the lesson, but forget the experience.
So while I can’t say I’ve had any moments like Dawkins professor, I’m reasonably confident I’ll never stick strongly to any belief without having quintuple checked the facts (This number will only raise over time, as I keep re-checking facts I’ve forgotten). Of course, the same self-doubt does make me question that notion, but I believe I have the right to claim the wisdom of Socrates, at least.
A bit rambling and out of the way, but I’ve written it, so no point letting it go to waste.
About the second Iraq War – same as Prof. Coyne. About the Mideast conflict – I used to support the Palestinians, then I gradually changed my mind to support Israel (change completed by late 2001).
In science: I initially did not believe in the success of somatic cell nuclear transfer, a.k.a. animal cloning (the Dolly sheep). I still think that the initial article was published without enough evidence, and I was delighted to see a published letter by two scientists expressing my thoughts – namely, that comparing nuclear to mitochondrial DNA was needed to prove that Dolly was indeed a clone.
In parenting (most serious): I was indoctrinated in lactivism, partly by child care literature such as Dr. Spock and partly by scientific articles claiming that bovine albumin was to blame for childhood diabetes, that I had read without critical thinking. As a result, my first child was malnourished in the first weeks of his life, before I started supplementing. I have written of this mistake publicly in my Bulgarian blog, to warn others against the same mistake.
Now, I do not believe that “artificial additives” (whatever this means) cause attention deficit – hyperactivity disorder, I do not believe that bumetanide can treat autism, and I do not believe that environmental influence can influence the phenotype of grandchildren by epigenetic modification. Maybe I am wrong again, we’ll see.
Dr Spock messed up a lot of kids in the 70s. Didn’t he also advocate letting your infant “cry it out”?
Crying it out may not be such a bad idea. Because some infants, mine included, will cry until you take them to your bed. Which is quite understandable for young mammals, but I did a mistake by capitulating to them – it risked their lives.
I once thought my first marriage would work out. It didn’t. The second one did, though. So far at least.
That’s funny.
I used to be against the draft. I now think everyone should serve one or two years right after high school. It might cut down on the wars.
Ditto to both your first and third sentences. Of the second…I guess I hadn’t given that aspect much thought. Your proposal sounds plausible.
Sticking to science, I once bought in to “for the good of the species” arguments (e.g., territoriality helped maintain a population in balance with resources). Then I read George Williams and, later, Richard Dawkins and it was like having a blindfold removed. I remain a committed devotee of the “gene’s eye view” and am constantly puzzled by those who just don’t get it.
I’ve been wrong or changed my mind about many things over the years, and I’m sure that will continue to happen. I’ll just give two examples, one scientific and one socioeconomic:
1) I used to think that there were “pure” areas of biological research, such as questions about normal development, genetics, evolution, etc. As a postdoc I began working on an inherited cancer syndrome, and through collaborations developed projects related to DNA damage and repair. In that context, I now work on mutagenesis in the contexts of aging and environmental exposures, which involves methods and subdisciplines that I once considered not to be “pure.” What does that mean, anyway? I don’t know what I was thinking – probably too influenced by my PhD mentor and others around me at the time.
2) For several years I played a sport that put me in contact with very wealthy people. I grew up in a middle class suburban environment (and I am still solidly middle class), and initially these wealthy people seemed fascinating – their lifestyles were so different from mine. Looking back, I really can’t understand why I found them to be interesting, or why I even wanted to socialize with them. With one notable exception, they are all quite intellectually and politically different from me, and in most cases opposed: conservative Republicans, religious, climate change deniers, conspicuous mega-consumers, etc. A few of them were genuinely nice to me, but a couple of them were really screwed up. Sometimes you believe you can fix people, and in most cases you can’t. Anyway, although most of my current friends and colleagues are better off financially than I am, they aren’t in that category of “very wealthy,” and I don’t interact with such individuals any longer. It’s a relief, to be honest.
1. In c. 1960, influenced by schoolfriends, I thought that Nixon was the right choice and was annoyed that Kennedy won.
Later, with the Vietnam War ongoing, I thought Nixon was the ultimate evil (e.g. bombing Cambodia). I found it ironic he was unseated for a pissy little trick like spying on rival politicians.
On looking back, though, he was a lot more complex than that, and opinion of him has softened a lot.
2. I took compulsory French lessons in school in UK, which I thought were a complete waste of time since ‘everybody speaks English anyway’. That stance softened a bit when I was in Rarotonga and tried (unsuccessfully) learning Rarotongan, which made me realise how much language is a reflection of its society and worldview and that ‘our way’ is not the only way of looking at things. Though I was still French-phobic because of their nuclear testing at Mururoa. This evaporated when the French refused to invade Iraq, I had to approve of anyone who told Dubya to get stuffed.
Then 3 years ago I was invited by friends to drive with them through southern France and I found I could actually remember quite a lot of written French. Now I’m taking French lessons and I’m halfway through reading my first roman d’espionnage, with the aid of Google Translate.
3. People. I’ve changed my mind about certain individuals. Most notably, a senior engineer who, newly arrived, tore me off a fearsome strip at work (partly misunderstanding, I hadn’t heard the instruction so my air of bemused bafflement probably looked like cheekiness to him). He did have a formidable reputation. I grimly resolved that I was going to outlast him in the company. Later, at a job interview for promotion, I realised he was feeding me helpful questions – so, not all evil. Well, he moved up the ranks, left, came back later on contract and had a desk near mine, and we ended up on good enough terms that he would ask my opinion on technical matters and we went for a few beers after work. I was pleased about that.
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I was never a Xian. I have little understanding what that must feel like even though I went to parochial schools most of my life.
Like Jerry, I have never had to change my mind in science. No ideas are set in granite.
Music. I used to think a lot of music really sucked and was the worst stuff I ever heard in my life. Not any more. That list is far too long of those I despised and now love: Wagner, Charpentier, Stravinsky, Ives, Cage, Zappa, M. Davis, Sound Garden, Bill Monroe, Joni, and Bjork, and way way way too many others to list.
Never believes in anyone in politics, so never had to change my mind.
When I was younger, I feared I was a bit of a racist because I had negative opinions about some people around the world, but then I realised that it was only the men I didn’t like. So I guess I’m a sexist.
I’ll leave off the obvious, becoming an atheist.
I suppose two serious changes, mainly over the last decade or so, both space exploration related.
1. I think we are going to find that life in the universe is very rare. That the conditions that caused or allowed life to develop on earth will turn out to be so fortuitous and contingent that they are unlikely to be commonly repeated. In fact if this rareness is the case then we may never know if there is life elsewhere or not because of the enormous distances.
2. At present the exploration of space would be best accomplished by unhumanned probes and based on our current technology humanned spaceflight is simply not cost effective. I think bases on the Moon or Mars, for example, would be a huge waste of money.
It follows from these two opinions that for the foreseeable future I think our cultural energies should be focused on creating a sustainable world civilization. Our future is here. Our fate is intimately tied up with the fate of the Earth. Fantasies of “escape” are frankly immoral.
I was politically conservative as a teenager. My views were strongly influenced by my mother and the church. In my freshman year I once wrote a pathetic, misspelled letter to William F. Buckley and he replied courteously. I was for Goldwater (who was considerably better than the current crop). The Vietnam War seemed perfectly reasonable, until I became exposed to the draft, then things changed and I became radical. Self interest is a strong motivator. Now I’m a liberal Democrat. Probably a familiar story.
I used to think gay men shall not be allowed to be in the army. I had quite an argument with a friend 20 years ago. Now I changed my mind.
I used to think blood donation was a big damage to the body. I got this idea without thinking — I was just a little girl, accepted ideas from the people whom I thought trustworthy. Now, of cause I don’t think so.
I’ve changed my mind on many things, some of them pretty big; for example, I started out Catholic, and after a long journey ended up an atheist and a secular humanist.
I think the biggest change of mind might just be considered growing up. My parents put me through college and I started a career in engineering; after a few years of actually being good at it, I got very full of myself and started believing that anyone who wanted to could take up a lucrative field and the people who chose not to do so were losers. (I wince as I write this now.) Then I had some life experiences that took the wind out of my sails, and started to meet a lot of good, smart, hard-working people who weren’t making good salaries… but they sure as heck weren’t losers, in fact they were people I wanted to emulate because they taught me important things about empathy and compassion.
Then I had more life experiences that taught me about my own fragility and my connectedness with other people, and I finally lost that horrible attitude. I think that was the most important change of mind I’ve had.
When I moved from being just an atheist (something I’ve been as long as I can remember) to a full on skeptic, I was forced to confront a lot of beliefs that clearly had no merit. They tended to be of the variety that ended up in old ‘In Search Of’ episodes. The most painful to let go of was alien visitation and U.F.O.’s. It was just such a fun thing to believe in.
As a teen, I was fascinated by the occult and other pseudo-science: the Bermuda Triangle, flying saucers, astral projection, thinking plants, Uri Gellar, astrology, auras, Bigfoot, ESP, ancient astronauts, you name it. I didn’t realize that these were beliefs–I thought that they were science. My 7th-grade science teacher taught us a lot of this stuff; he used to complain that the USSR was way ahead of the US in studying parapsychology and we needed to catch up. There were books on these subjects in the school library. (It was the ’70s.) I regarded people who didn’t believe in this stuff as ridiculously closed-minded and ignorant; I thought that not believing in astrology was like not believing in evolution.
What changed my mind was reading James Randi’s book “Flim Flam.” I started reading and could not put it down. I found it very persuasive and gave up most of my irrational beliefs, although I was disappointed to see most of them go. It was definitely the single most influential book I ever read.
I loved reading books about Atlantis, Mu, the Bermuda Triangle, etc. when I was in middle school. My dad carpooled with another scientist (who should have known better!) who was happy to lend me all sorts of Edgar Cayce books and other crapstones of woo-literature. I’d also read books by Heyerdahl and von Daniken, and one of my undergrad archaeology professors set me straight on those authors/topics.
I used to think that rational thought could solve the world’s problems. Or one’s own. I was under the influence of the Enlightenment, which I still revere in many ways as a huge advance for humankind.
Then, when got exposed to Existentialism, and what I took to be the view that humans are basically irrational, driven by non-rational motivations, etc., I began to think that many of our seemingly logical arguments are inherently directed by preconceived notions that may not even be known to our conscious minds. This is not to say that rationality is bogus, or isn’t the best tool we have, but that often what we view as logical is deeply colored by our experiences and hidden motives.
“After all, evidence is evidence, and humanities is not so evidence-driven.”
I’d object to this meaning that changing your mind in humanities is less of a virtue. After all evidence doesn’t change very readily so in science changing your mind might not be as virtuous. With less evidence the humanities might require less stubbornness to understand other people’s opinions (and that might require changing your mind a little more often then in science).
My Romantic Poetry professor used to say, “never trust a person who hasn’t changed his/her mind in the last 10 years”. I was taught by my Humanities professors to re-evaluate evidence and to challenge conventional thinking.
I was born and grew up in the USA. Without being overly fervent about things like the flag, I still bought into the idea that “America” (excluding Canada, and anything south of Texas or California) was g*d’s gift to mankind — even after I had got over the idea of g*d (another change of mind). The USA was exceptional. Period.
When I was 29, I moved to France, where — except for one year — I have stayed. I remember the first time a colleague pointed out to me an incident in which the USA’s role was clearly reprehensible. I was shocked, felt cold shivers and fear. Part of my being was being put in doubt.
My colleague’s remark occurred at the right moment, when I was already doubting and therefore particularly fearful. I, like Jerry, already had grown disillusioned with the Viet Nam war. Many years later, I was with friends in the street to protest the planned invasion of Iraq. To no avail…
In brief, I’ve got over it. I was wrong. “America” is exceptional only perhaps in the extent of its meddling in other countries’ affairs and its arrogance in attempting to impose its own way on the world. But there are others that are just as bad — or would be, if they could.
That was my biggest change of mind.
You should have just asked a Canukistanian. We know you the best yet are not you so we have a good handle on when you do bad things and when you do good things and when you’ve collaborated with us to do both. 🙂
Most recently, my attitudes towards GMO’s has moved to accepting the science. Golden rice is difficult to oppose, or say, crops able to fix their own nitrogen.
Most life changing was my deconversion from Christianity. Being atheist put me at odds with all things supernatural and I became a Naturalist.
At the moment I am considering free will and scientific determinism. As it stands, my view on these ideas is changing.
So many things.
I used to be strongly against nuclear power, now just as strongly for it, for purely environmental reasons. My preconceived notions got scienced, hard.
Last week I even found myself defending fracking (in a way), because I read scientific studies saying that it’s cleaner than the mining and burning of coal (even after counting methane leaks), and that an increase in natural gas production helped reduce the amount of coal we’ve been burning. I’d rather see all CO2 emitting fuels gone, sure, but an short term improvement is still a short term improvement. That’s a big reversal from the me of just one year ago.
I used to believe that, while we certainly evolved over millions of years, random chance can’t possibly account for it. Random mutations cause cancer and all that. A great biology professor put that one to rest, and the math and statistics classes I was taking helped too.
I once believed the Bible was meant metaphorically, explaining things in the words a pre-scientific sheep herder might understand. Then one day as I was mining Genesis for verses to oppose all those literalist cherry-packers taking it so clearly out of context, it suddenly dawned on me that here I was, cherry-picking things out of context. I then made myself reread Genesis (aided by the Hebrew and a dictionary) while imagining I’m that pre-scientific sheep herder, and sure enough I was wrong. It’s composed in a poetic verse, but it would have given anyone from its time the impression that the Earth was created in six days, that daylight doesn’t come from the Sun, and that plants were growing before the Sun was even created. And it therefore was just plain incorrect. (Also, I realized that pre-scientific sheep herders weren’t raving idiots; you could have told them factually accurate things without their heads exploding.)
In high school I loved me a good conspiracy theory about faces and pyramids on Mars or spaceships landing in Roswell. I’ve since decided to base my ideas on facts.
I once thought Nostradamus was awesome, then bought a book of his ramblings and read them for myself. Myth, gone.
> I used to be strongly against nuclear power, now just as strongly for it, for purely environmental reasons. My preconceived notions got scienced, hard.
YES. It is so hard to convince people of this, though. People with an environmentalist slant (like myself) usually have a huge, huge anti-nuclear bias. They were raised as children to think that nuclear anything is bad, and overcoming that indoctrination is – like overcoming any childhood indoctrination – extraordinarily difficult.
> Last week I even found myself defending fracking (in a way)
This one is tricky. Yes, natural gas is cleaner and less CO2-producing than coal, in general. Once you take methane into account, the picture gets fuzzier, because methane leakage is much higher in some places than in others, and because it is difficult to weigh CO2 versus methane objectively, because they have effects over different time periods, so their relative weight depends on whether you’re looking 5 years out, or 20, or 100, or 500. Measurements of methane emissions done in the past have often been way too low, according to recent studies, and the EPA has recently publicly admitted that their methane emission estimates are far too low and need to be revised upward. Natural gas may not, in fact, be better than coal, depending on such factors (http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/howarth/publications/Howarth_2014_ESE_methane_emissions.pdf). Fracked natural gas, in particular, gets more fuzzy still, because then you have risks like groundwater pollution and an increase in earthquake frequency/magnitude, and we don’t yet know enough about those risks to evaluate them very well. The big problem with natural gas, though, is that our massive build-out of natural gas infrastructure is a huge investment in what will, ultimately, be the wrong technology for the future. We need to be building out solar, wind, and nuclear, and we need to be doing it now. Instead, to an alarming degree, we are building out natural gas. That does lead to a decrease in emissions, to the extent that it gets us off of coal; but studies indicate that it actually dooms us to missing our targets (2°C warming) in the long run. The idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” just doesn’t really work. I think the Howarth paper I linked above also discusses that a bit (and his lab has lots of other good papers on related topics); lots of other sources out there, too. Natural gas as a “bridge fuel” used to be a popular idea, partly because if we had done it 20 years ago it might have even made sense. It is falling into disrepute now, as time for such a “bridge” gets shorter and the problem of methane emissions looms larger.
I’d be with y-all on nuclear power if we had permanently and safely disposed of any of the waste. That is yet to occur for the first time.
There are two answers to that objection. One is that, simply put, we have bigger fish to fry. We are doing fine so far with the relatively short-term storage solutions have come up with; nuclear waste has killed exactly zero people after more than sixty years of nuclear power. Climate change is simply a vastly more important and urgent problem. The other answer is that it is a problem that appears very likely to go away anyway. It looks very likely that advanced nuclear reactor designs will be able to process the large majority of waste, and even use what we presently consider to be waste as fuel instead. The physics of this is well understood (you can read about it on Wikipedia); the only real bar to it is the political opposition to nuclear power. This is, as Richard C noted above, one of those areas where if you actually set aside your bias and preconceived notions and look at the science, you will find that the evidence is overwhelming, and you will change your mind – precisely the sort of evidence-based transformation we’re celebrating on this thread.
I have a one word response to this: Chernobyl.
One thing to consider: how many people died in Chernobyl, versus how many people are killed every year by other risks, from air pollution due to coal burning, to heat waves already being exacerbated by climate change? Chernobyl was a single incident, caused by a very poor plant design that is decades behind the state of the art now; condemning all future nuclear power “because Chernobyl” is pretty much equivalent to condemning automobiles because people were killed in accidents involving Roman chariots. If you do the math – and people have, and it is easy to find on the ol’ intertubes – the mortality risk, in deaths per kilowatt-hour, is actually lower for nuclear power than it is for coal, for oil, for natural gas, for wind, and even for solar (turns out being a solar installer is somewhat dangerous work, because people fall off roofs and die). That is including the deaths in Chernobyl, and also Fukushima. Nuclear power is incredibly safe. People are just really, really bad at evaluating risk. Once again: put your preconceptions aside and actually do some research.
And the next person who is thinking of posting on this thread with something else, like “Oh, but what about Fukushima?” or “Oh, but what about Three Mile Island?” – take a deep breath, and go and *read* about it before you make that post. You might be surprised by what you learn!
That’s called moving the goalposts.
Oh, and more directly in response to your post: Chernobyl has nothing to do with people killed by nuclear waste. Read what you quoted again. “Nuclear waste has killed exactly zero people after more than sixty years of nuclear power.” That is a true statement.
“That’s called moving the goalposts.” No, *you* moved the goalposts. The quote that you excerpted in your post was: “nuclear waste has killed exactly zero people after more than sixty years of nuclear power”. That is a true statement. Nobody died in Chernobyl as a result of nuclear waste. The claim was not that nobody had ever died due to radioactivity; obviously that claim would be idiotic (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for starters). The claim regarding nuclear waste was made in specific response to a previous post objecting that disposal of nuclear waste was a problem with nuclear power. *You* moved the goalposts by pretending that the meltdown of a nuclear reactor is the same thing as nuclear waste, which, of course, it is not. Come on, look at yourself here.
Come on, bchaller. Safety of nuclear power has to include measures of plant meltdowns. The fact that nobody has yet died from a waste storage failure is little comfort when the scale of a rare failure is so huge. Something similar to Fukushima at a plant on Lake Michigan would be enormously more consequential than Fukushima because the water body is so much smaller.
“Come on, bchaller. Safety of nuclear power has to include measures of plant meltdowns.” I will take that as an admission that you have abandoned your claim that I “moved the goalposts”, and have admitted that you were in error. Thank you for that admission.
And yes, of course the overall safety of nuclear power has to include plant meltdowns. And it does. What I wrote above – that nuclear power is safer than even wind and solar, in deaths per kilowatt-hour – *does* include plant meltdowns, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, as I noted in that text, in fact. Perhaps you are not aware of the fact that coal pollution causes roughly 100,000 premature deaths per year. Where is your hysteria about that?
“The fact that nobody has yet died from a waste storage failure is little comfort when the scale of a rare failure is so huge.” Actually, the risk posed by a waste storage failure is pretty small. The fact that we’ve had quite a large number of nuclear plants running worldwide for decades now, with precisely zero deaths from waste storage failures, is pretty obvious evidence of that. If you want to argue that somehow that very large sample is not representative, and that nuclear waste in fact poses some huge threat to humanity, you need more than hand-waving to support that argument.
“Something similar to Fukushima at a plant on Lake Michigan would be enormously more consequential than Fukushima because the water body is so much smaller.” Wow, you’re really reaching. So now, a hypothetical nuclear power plant on Lake Michigan that somehow gets hypothetically hit by both a big earthquake and a tidal wave – despite the fact that neither phenomenon occurs in the vicinity of Lake Michigan – is the bogeyman that is supposed to persuade us not to use a cheap, clean, safe, zero-carbon energy source to prevent climate change, a known global crisis?
Hysteria?
Please.
Your case simply ignores the scale of failures. They may be rare. But they can be huge when they happen. And the consequences can last far into the future.
I don’t recall suggesting that an earthquake and tidal wave would strike the Point Beach or Palisades power plant. You added that.
The nature of accidents is that you don’t see them coming. The guys who planned the Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island plants no doubt were convinced that none of them would experience what they did.
And please don’t pretend that unwillingness to welcome nuclear power somehow equates to climate change denial or advocacy for burning coal.
“Hysteria? Please.” Um, you’re the one who wrote: “I have a one word response to this: Chernobyl.” When the actual risk is lower than the risk posed by falling off roofs installing solar panels, “hysteria” seems a perfectly fair characterization.
“Your case simply ignores the scale of failures. They may be rare. But they can be huge when they happen. And the consequences can last far into the future.” Chernobyl was, in fact, about as big as a nuclear accident is likely to ever be (you can read quite a bit of analysis defending that claim, if you trouble yourself to google it). And in the grand scheme of things – averaged over all the years and all the plants in operation – it represents quite an acceptable level of risk, lower than the risks posed by the alternatives. The numbers illustrating this are readily available, yours for the price of a Google search.
“I don’t recall suggesting that an earthquake and tidal wave would strike the Point Beach or Palisades power plant. You added that.” No, *you* wrote: “Something similar to Fukushima at a plant on Lake Michigan”. What is “similar to Fukushima”? That accident happened specifically because of the unforeseen combination of an earthquake and a tidal wave, and all of the post-accident analysis indicates that had either of those two events not occurred, the accident would not have occurred. So… if not an earthquake combined with a tidal wave, precisely what hypothetical event “similar to Fukushima” are you imagining, and why should anyone take your imaginings seriously? If you can actually come up with a realistic scenario for a catastrophic meltdown of a modern nuclear power plant, then you ought to apply for a job at GE; I’m sure they would be interested in your expertise. Perhaps the shores of Lake Michigan are a particularly unwise place to build a nuclear power plant; perhaps the particular plants you name are a bad idea because of that. I have no idea; I’m quite willing to concede that possibility. But even if so, that has nothing really to do with the well-known overall risk of nuclear power.
“The nature of accidents is that you don’t see them coming. The guys who planned the Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island plants no doubt were convinced that none of them would experience what they did.” Well, actually, I don’t think they were stupid, so they were probably quite aware that there is such a thing as an unforeseen accident; you are not the only person in the world to possess that wisdom :->. And yet, the death rate from nuclear power, *including* all of those unforeseen accidents, is lower than the rate for even solar power. You keep avoiding coming to grips with that basic fact. Because, as I said, hysteria. Just because accidents are unforeseen does not mean that one cannot account for their risk with a sufficiently large dataset. With more than sixty years of using nuclear power at a pretty large scale, we *have* that dataset. It tells us that nuclear power is extremely safe. You have presented nothing but paranoid, hysterical hand-waving about events “similar to” (and yet apparently completely dissimilar to) Fukushima, to counter the weight of that evidence.
“And please don’t pretend that unwillingness to welcome nuclear power somehow equates to climate change denial or advocacy for burning coal.” No; but it does, in my opinion, equate to an unwillingness to embrace the necessary solution to those problems. Which is, in the end, just about as counterproductive as denying that the problems exist in the first place.
Look, it’s quite clear to me that your mind is not presently open. Nothing I can possibly say will penetrate your wall of denial at present. When you decide to actually examine the evidence rationally, you won’t need me to help you do it; it’s all quite readily available. In the spirit of this thread, I hope you decide to take that plunge eventually. I used to think exactly the way that you do now. I used to trot out all the same arguments. I changed my mind, because of the facts and the evidence. Perhaps eventually you will do so as well. Until then, sayonara.
And in the past, I’ve trotted out yours.
What is wrong about your position is not that there is necessarily NO role for nuclear power. It is that you completely discount risks and use facile tricks (“no deaths from nuclear waste”) to make the case. We’ll have a real conversation when you stop that sort of thing. That’s the sort of whistling past the graveyard that leads to catastrophes.
“Facile tricks”??? *You* came in, in the middle of a conversation that was *specifically* *about* nuclear waste (*not* about risks of meltdown etc.), and *you* misunderstood that context and started talking about Chernobyl. And now you call it a “facile trick”, because I apparently used my Jedi mind powers to force you to incorrectly read the context on the thread? I am speechless.
So, let me get this straight. The fact that part of the conversation is about nuclear waste (brought up by jbillie several steps down from the top) makes discussing overall safety of nuclear power a “misread” of the actual conversation?
Richard C began this thread with a comment about having changed his mind about nuclear power. In general. Not because of waste.
You are easily made “speechless”. So easily, in fact, that I’ll make this my last comment to you in case you are out of smelling salts.
JAC’s invitation was: “Your turn. What have you been wrong about, or changed your mind about?” Seems as though you two have gone well beyond what this post was about.
@Douglas E: I’ve made note of things I’ve changed my mind about elsewhere on the page. Some were intended as humor.
OK, GBJames, let’s review the history of the thread. As you can read above:
1. Richard C started the thread off with a comment about nuclear power.
2. I agreed with him.
3. jblilie posted a comment saying “I’d be with y-all on nuclear power if we had permanently and safely disposed of any of the waste. That is yet to occur for the first time.”
4. I posted a response, directly to jblilie’s comment, starting off with the words “There are two answers to that objection”. The context was therefore very clearly *nuclear waste*. In that context, just a couple of sentences later, I wrote “nuclear waste has killed exactly zero people after more than sixty years of nuclear power”. Again the words “nuclear waste” occur. It is clearly a claim about deaths due to nuclear waste specifically, in the context of jblilie’s objection.
5. You blunder in, misunderstand the context (and the actual quote itself), think I have made a claim about overall deaths due to nuclear power being zero, and accuse me of “facile tricks”.
I think you owe me an apology for that very rude ad hominem. I think you realize that, though, because conveniently, you have declared yourself to be done with the conversation. So in summary, your behavior: (1) misunderstand, (2) blunder around in confusion, (3) make false ad hominems, and (4) drop the mic. Well, nice talking to you.
Douglas E is correct in that this has gone far beyond the point of our host’s original post.
My exit from the tread is not some sort of recognition of an apology due. It is simply out of general respect for Da Roolz and the obvious fact that was no progress is being made. Your interpretation is your own.
Thank you, and well said, GB James.
bchaller, I used to criticize nuclear power from the waste-disposal angle, not so much any more. What I still worry about is the fact that nuclear power plants are run by people, particularly people comprising profit-oriented corporations. GB mentioned the Palisades plant on Lake Michigan. I live just a couple of counties away from that (and counties in MI are small!). Seems that nearly every year, sometimes more than once a year, the plant fails inspections for one reason or another. Then there are usually weeks to months of investigations, accusations, hard-to-believe reassurances, etc., till the plant can claim that the problem has been solved.
The MI public health agency recommends and will provide free of charge potassium iodide tablets to anyone within a 10-mile radius of Palisades. See this article when the safety breech after much investigation was ultimately blamed on “a decline in the safety culture of plan employees.”
http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2012/07/michigan_health_departments_ur.html
Always the human factor!
…the safety culture of plant employees.”
Re: fracking, my (tentative) defense of it is based on studies measuring methane leakage and finding that, while higher than previous estimates, still isn’t high enough to match the greenhouse potential of coal plants. That is, of course, open to change.
We need to build up our rooftop solar, wind, and industrial nuclear infrastructure. That won’t happen in only a day, however. We have coal plants spewing CO2 today, and we have gas plants that can offset some of that already built if we provide them with the necessary fuel. I am strongly against natural gas if it takes money away from greener technologies, but for it if it gets our emissions lower in the meantime while we spend our taxpayer dollars building out the right solution. (That doesn’t even mention the other ecological dangers; the massive groundwater contamination around coal ash dumps is far worse than fracking-related groundwater pollution.)
Both solar and wind power development is going strong despite being hampered by resistance by regulators under the sway of the fossil fuel industry.
This story about wind power in Minnesota crossed my mailbox this morning. Here in Wisconsin we’ve been lagging on solar, 30th out of 50 states for installed solar capacity. I’ve got an array of 16 panels on my roof and could install more except for disincentives imposed imposed by the utility. There’s huge potential for solar that mostly just takes policy commitment to make happen.
Richard C, well, check out the paper I linked to above. I think it might change your mind regarding fracking. It is worth the read.
I wonder if the beauty of math, or in general, of scientific theories that is so often spoken of, might be a function of their simplicity and their explanatory power. From some slight personal experience, I can imagine that hitting upon an idea, or a mathematical formulation that seems to “just work” in any given context, can cause one to feel a certain mix of exultation, relief and joy. Realizing that an idea one has just had, has explanatory power (if any), can be a very heady feeling.
>the Left showed distressingly little sympathy for the horrible evils Saddam Hussein and the Baath party inflicted on the people of Iraq.
This reminds me of something I read recently by Scott Alexander (who I just discovered). An example he gives is Russell Brand attacking Fox News, saying that “Fox is worse than ISIS.”
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
The problem seems to be that left-wingers can’t attack Saddam because those on the right like to attack Saddam. So if they did it would send mixed signals about which group/tribe they belong to.
I would consider myself to be a left of centre liberal. I have no problem at all in calling Saddam Hussein a monster.
Diawl, Teng, one grows tired of the simplistic binary thinking indulged in by such as yourself. In all honesty, grow up, learn that there are not too poles to every issue and that there is a certain complexity to the world. Can you tell us who these purported ‘left-wingers’ were who were all gung-ho for that monster Saddam Hussein, and what power and influence they wielded? I suggest that your last paragraph is, in reverse, a very apt description of yourself and your attitudes.
there are not JUST TWO poles…’
Is WordPress working properly these days? I’m having trouble posting comments.
Haven’t read the comments, but here are the things I used to believe. Unlike Jerry, I’m going to stick with things I believed as an adult (18+), as I think kid beliefs don’t really count as ‘changing your mind’ so much as ‘learning and growing out of your original ignorance.’
1. JAC’s #3: like Jerry, I was initially in favor of the second Iraq war. I trusted Powell and didn’t think the administration would outright lie about something like bioweapons.
2. Human speciation. Probably like everyone born before the 2000s, I grew up thinking neanderthals were not human (but closely related), and that was the extent of recent hominid varieties. Looks like we were wrong on both counts: there are several other variants of homo sapiens, and neanderthal was one of them.
3. Inflation. Another modern theory. I grew up with the standard BBT but when inflation came around it seemed a bit weird. However it appears to be the best available theory for the evidence now.
4. Political liberaliztion. Had you asked me in my 20s to describe the arc of US history, I would’ve predicted a slow but smooth and steady increase in the acceptance of western democratic and modern scientific values. I would’ve said science will become more accepted, people will grow more liberal, countries will become more democratic, etc., etc. But history over the last 20 years has not been any sort of smooth liberalization; there has been a number of backwards steps and creationism is barely a few percent points down from where it was 20 or 30 years ago.
That’s all for now! Looking froward to reading everyone else’s when I get more time.
Along sort of the same lines as your last point–I used to expect that Enlightenment values would become universal in my lifetime. Ha! In retrospect, that sounds rather hubristic of me…if it hasn’t happened over the past three-plus centuries…
I used to believe many things that I no longer believe. Sometimes because those things were not true after all, sometimes because I changed my thinking and sometimes because the facts changed. Sometimes my thinking has changed more than once. Here are a few places where my thinking has changed (these in random order):
– realized at 14 that religion made no sense and no deity would actually organize the world the way Glooskap/Quetzalcoatl/Rama or Jehovah supposedly did.
– used to believe that NATO was a defence organisation now I believe it’s a danger to us and the world and we (Canada)should leave
– used to believe in objective morality; now believe it’s largely cultural though a sense of fairness seems to be innate
– used to think there might be something to philosophy now I think if you want to learn to think study mathematics
– thought the trolley problem was totally bogus; still think so
– used to think TED had something important to contribute
– used to dismiss all conspiracy theories now I think a few may have something to them
– used to believe in CAGW now just in AGW
– used to believe the west won WW2, then believed it was the Soviet Union, now realize it was Germany over the long haul
– used to believe the NY Times now I believe nothing they print (same for WAPO)
– used to read PZ and FTB; not for a long time now thanks!
– used to be liberal, then conservative, then liberal, then conservative, then libertarian then realized I’m all of those and it’s mostly political kabuki anyway
– used to think PNAC was so over the top it would never be taken seriously; events in the ME and Ukraine have convinced me differently
– used to hate math
I could go on and on (as I have) but the point is that in my 76 years a lot has changed including me.
I’d be interested in your thoughts about NATO.
Too much for me to comment on. Basically, science and statistics have really changed how I see things.
+1
Though as Richard Horton (Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet) points out much remains to be improved in the way scientific research is conducted: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. […] The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale.”
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext?rss%3Dyes
And he didn’t even touch upon pressure to publish.
Another common annoyance these days is just how many papers are framed as–not to be too trite, here :roll:–paradigm-overturning, or at the least, conventional-thinking overturning, when in fact they turn out to be just slight modifications of or additions to what’s previously been held to be true. If that.
Experiment: was that unintentional hyphen after the code what screwed up the smilie?
🙄
To whomever above asked if anyone else was having trouble with Word Press: yes.
I’m late to the party, but I have changed positions on things over the years:
1. Was a believer in god. Now I’m not.
2. I leaned Republican in my early voting years. Now I lean very far to the left (go Bernie!).
3. I used to be a Yankee fan, back when I was young and didn’t know anything about baseball. Now I’m a rabid Red Sox fan.
4. I used to have a low opinion of Leonardo DiCaprio as an actor. Now I respect him.
5. I used to think draft evaders from the Vietnam era were cowards. Now I think most of them were brave — not all of them.
Most of these changes came when I was young. Not sure if I’m likely to change my opinion much now, mostly because I fee like I’m smarter and learned more. Less likely to find alternative arguments convincing.
Your #5 is interesting. I was a young adult during that period and used to think soldiers were villains. I learned that they are in fact victims of politicians, for the most part.
On the other hand, I used to think that John McCain was an honorable person. But then he gave us Sarah Palin and became a Tea Party pawn. I changed my mind about him.
Well, it seems like McCain really was a decent person for a long time, and then he changed. Maybe that means he was never really a decent person to begin with, I don’t know. But I think sometimes people really do change – often in a good direction, as this thread is about, but sometimes in a bad direction, too…
Agreed on McCain. As I told a friend (who votes Republican): “McCain 2008 is not the same person as McCain 2000.”
I liked McCain too and thought he would have made a good choice instead of Bush but it all went badly.
With you on numbers 2 and 3.
I used to watch TV, never do anymore (since 1987).
I used to have a soft spot for religious belief )in others). No more.
I started out life indoctrinated by my father to be conservative politically. That didn’t last out high school. I think the change was about in 10th grade.
I used to think there was stuff besides matter (you know, that spriritually-stuff, ESP). No more.
I used to think consciousness would survive death (even after I gave up religion at a young age). No more.
There are plenty of things I was ignorant of and learned educated myself about and came to a position or understanding on. Not sure if that qualifies as changing my mind.
I used to like super-hopped American brew. I traveled extensively (time and space) in Europe and changed my tastes. (Same with heavily oaked wine.)
I used to think it was likely that the character Jesus had been a real person (though not a supernatural being). Reading Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ convinced me otherwise (the exact opposite of his intent!)
I used to strongly believe Leicester would be relegated, now I’m agnostic on the subject.
I used to believe the subjectivist misinterpretations of quantum mechanics, then didn’t know what to make of the controversy, then read vol. 7 part 1 of Bunge’s _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_ and was convinced that these interpretations are provably wrong.
I used to think there was room to doubt the Church-Turing thesis (taken as a hypothesis about the universe). Now I’m really skeptical there could be reasonable room. This came out as a result of my MS thesis and my 2012 paper in _Computing Nature_.
I used to think classical logic was the only way to go logically, but now I would say in principle we could reconstruct our reasoning, particularly in mathematics (where it “joins”), to use another system. This came from reading about the recent successes in non-classical logic.
I used to think one can program AI. Now I think it would to grow and be trained. (This after working as a programmer, not in AI.)
Used to think:
Reproductive skew theory would be the key to understanding the evolution of cooperation. Proved to be wrong and eventually said so in print.
Then. Group or multilevel selection was an abstract exercise with little application in the natural world. Now. Very helpful in understanding the full dynamic of evolutionary processes.
Once. There is a best way to raise your kids. Wiser. No two kids are the same, you need to adjust to the differences!
I used to think Noam Chomsky was a great intellectual. Gradually, however, I realized that his ongoing critique of US foreign policy was not based in reality (because he’s an anarcho-syndicalist) and that his thinking has not changed since Vietnam (unlike US foreign policy).
For quite a while I entertained the thought that we atheists are all vastly more rational, less partisan, less prone to dogmatism, and ideological fallacies, but with time it gradually dawned on me that many of us still cling to fantasies of one kind or another.
Yes, we do not believe in the invisible man in the sky, but many of us still believe in the all-healing power of the invisible hand of the market. Yes, some people are Christians, but others are Marxistians. The tendency to follow quite blindly and dogmatically is still in many of us.
And so, today, when someone says to me that he or she is an atheist, I tend not to make any automatic assumptions about the supposed rationality of that person’s social / moral / political / economic opinions.
And you forgot to mention that some of them are po-mo/SJW idiots.
I used to think that Europe (and the world in general) was making some progress regarding anti-semitism and that Jews didn’t need to worry about history repeating itself with popular hatred and large scale violence against Jews.
I’ve changed my mind.
Agree! Which is ineffably sad…not to mention scary.
1) free will.
2) presidential candidate John Edwards.
Oh gawd, Edwards! Forgot about him and could have lived with never remembering. Yeah, at one time I thought the ideal Democrat/populist walked among us.
1. I thought global warming would not be an issue. It was my thought that there would be increased cloud cover would reflect enough light to obviate the problem. I thought this since I first read the theory back in 1988
2. I used to be a Republican.
Thought money was bad; now know it is one of the best things ever happened to humanity.
Thought that we could learn from history, now I know that isn’t possible.
I think I’ve changed my mind about quite a few things over the years. Some of the more interesting ones are the following:
(1) Used to be quite a teetotaler, and very judgmental towards people who regularly imbibed or enjoyed other substances. In retrospect, this was a position from ignorance, not at all understanding the variety of reasons people use these things, including just simple enjoyment.
(2) I briefly flirted with 9/11 conspiracy theories in my early 20’s. This didn’t last very long though.
(3) As an undergraduate, I hated Cauchy’s classic formalism of real variable calculus. I thought it was arcane and unnecessary. Later, in grad school, I came to understand both its necessity and power.
I was following you there, till (3)…
😀
I voted for Edouard Balladur. And I did believe in Kryon for some time.
I thought that people were mostly like the English like to think of themselves – rational and sober, and that the world would slowly become a more sober and rational place… And though I think Pinker’s thesis in ‘The Better Angels’, is, for all of John Gray’s fury, to a considerable degree correct, I worry about the future, and wonder what horrors and hatreds over-population and global warming are going to bring about.
I honestly think evolution’s equipped us with a certain proportion of the population being basically unable to think critically–that we as a species need a certain percentage of born followers to function as social animals.
And add demagogues to your list of future worries, in relation to the factors you do mention.
Catholic -> Spiritual -> Atheist
UFOs are silly -> UFOs are real -> I may have been abducted -> UFOs could be real -> UFOs are either made up or misidentified. Oh and I have very vivid dreams.
Aliens are among us -> Aliens are watching from a distance -> Intelligent alien life is possible -> We are probably going to go extinct before discovering the signs of intelligent life in the universe (but I choose to believe they exist).
I voted for the Progressive Conservative Party -> Reform Party of Canada -> Liberal Party of Canada -> Conservative Party of Canada -> Green Party -> Liberal Party of Canada (It may be a combination of the parties changing a lot and me having a fickle mind)
I’ve always been a Toronto Maple Leafs fan and at the beginning of each season I believe they will win and then by December I change my mind. This year will be different though.
LOL!
Not sure what the Red Wings will do next season, but confident my Detroit Tigers will sweep the Blue Jays. 🙂
1 Corinthians 13:11 seems appropriate here. Abandoning what I had never chosen was only the beginning for me at a young age. I also rejected my mother’s homemade bread and yogurt because it did not look like the airy whiter than paper stuff everyone else had at school. As an adult I ended up realizing how many years I wasted eating junk just to fit in better at lunchtime. She was still wrong about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I really miss that bread. I have become more thoughtful about recycling/using less fuel and try my best to limit the amount of impact my actions have on the environment. I try to send out more letters and cards to people instead of emails. I would have laughed myself silly to think anyone would buy a cold cup of coffee years ago. I now buy iced coffee frequently. To be fair, I don’t spend premium prices for it. I wait to get the dollar special after three at the lowbrow dunkin doughnuts franchise. I went from not giving a hoot about evolution to caring quite a bit after having a child so I could make sure I did not lead her down the path of misinformation. I did some investigating and found a local expert to help me with the very first time the topic was introduced. I used to think it was tantamount to being a traitor to our country (USA) to buy a car made outside of the country. Now I think globally. Germans need car sales too.
What have I changed my mind on? Well, firstly one can discount things I was indoctrinated in. With all due respect to Dad, and that he tried to leave religion open as an option to 7/8 y.o. me, the scepticism was obvious. I jumped.
Matters of evidence …. well I get (got) paid to tell people that their prospect was a duster. They often didn’t want that news, then got the investors to stump up for drilling further. That’s the game. You need to know when to shoot the idea in the back of the head.
I was a student as the Alvarez – Chixulub hypothesis was forging ahead. I drank that Kool-Aid ; I fully accepted it. When (a decade later) I got Internet access … smart people I met advised me to look at *this* and *that* – and I’m more guarded now.
The old Adam… never recovered from Genesis & Leviticus & swollen with self-pity and humourlessness: at least the protagonist of Japan’s very funny ‘Otoko wa tsurai yo’ doesn’t take himself too seriously.
The above was supposed to be appearing beneath one of AdamM’s amusing fulminations yards above…