As for me, I used to post in GD a lot more, years ago. Not so much now. But whenever I make an unsupported statement and this is pointed out to me, I’m usually embarrassed enough to immediately post a retraction. However, I don’t get involved in a debate unless I am firm on my position, so I can’t say I’ve ever changed my position either in a lengthy discussion.
I changed my position on gender-identity issues based on what I read on the SD… not that I was a fervent arguer on my previous position, but I definitely was awakened to not only that I was wrong, but why it was so.
I’ve changed on gun control. Back in the day I was one of the strongest advocates for the second amendment, and I put a lot of energy into arguing that position.
Now, I’m changing, although it’s not a complete flip. I still own a gun, I still think shooting is fun. But something needs to be done about the modern epidemic of mass shootings, and what we’ve been doing (nothing) isn’t working. I’m less concerned now about “fundamental right” and more about “it’s gotta stop.” If that means we have to change the amendment, so be it.
Just because I’ve been convinced doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to “admit error.” That’s just not always appropriate. Often my mind changes well after the fact, and the thread had already moved on or become silent. Also often the change is not that drastic, anyways. It’s a small change where making a big deal out of it would seem weird. In that case, you’ll just see a change in how I argue.
Also, there are plenty of times where my mind changes as I’m reading the thread for the first time, so, by the time I get to the bottom, there is no error to admit. I may have even had a reply all typed up but not sent, just to delete it.
Just recently, my opinion on Neil Degrasse Tyson changed as I read the thread. I was initially going to say that, while I believed the women, I think he made a good case that they misinterpreted his acts. But then someone pointed out how his story differed from one of his accusers’ story, and I changed my mind again.
Oh. and pkbites arguments are dumb, as they are all tu quoque arguments. What frustrates me is that more posters don’t just shut that shit down. When you argue with the position, you tacitly give it legitimacy.
That is, after all, the entire point of such arguments. The second you allow tu quoque, then everything you or your side has ever done is up for scrutiny and will need to be defended. This allows them to deflect from whether or not the original issue is valid.
It’s also likely how pkbites resolves his cognitive dissonance of wanting to support his side while believing what they did is wrong. He has to tell himself that it’s okay because the Democrats did this other thing. And the fact that he knows it is wrong paradoxically makes him less likely to change his mind, since he’d have to admit he has supported something he knows is wrong.
Some times I’ll start a discussion of some topic because I find debate to be a useful means to clarify my own thoughts on the subject. There are plenty of examples you could find on this board in which you’d see the ideas I was expressing at the beginning of a thread are different than the ideas I express later on. This is a sign that my position is evolving through the course of the debate.
Oddly, there was an article in Scientific American recently about how people can be convinced to change their political beliefs. In essence, the article says that people can’t be convinced with any kind of logical arguments. Rather, they have to be tricked into changing their opinions. They have to be made to feel like their new opinions is what they always thought, deep down.
Here is an example they give in a less wrought situation. A woman is deciding what pants to wear. She wants to wear red. Her husband wants her to wear blue. They argue. The more they argue, the more determined she is to wear red and defy her husband.
Instead, the husband could secretly remove the red dress and say absolutely nothing. The wife would be annoyed for a bit but could decide that the blue pants is better than nothing, and actually is pretty good, so ends up wearing it and being pleased with it.
According to the article, tricking people like this actually works to change people’s political beliefs.
There are a few instances of a Doper changing his mind. Bricker is an example — at first staunchly opposed to federal funding for arts he revised this position at least somewhat in a GD(?) thread.
Skimming that thread a little, I’d guess that pkbites has bought into right-wing Stupidism and is delighted when the fraudsters and haters he idolizes play hard-ball. If he can find an example of the D’s doing something similar then he feels the GOP is justified even if the R’s mischief is a hundred times more egregious.
Examples of people, either on the extreme left or America’s corrupted right, holding to political positions despite all fact and reason are plentiful. I’m more concerned with refusal to acknowledge non-political fact, or arguing against a post one doesn’t even bother to read!
Here’s a specific example that irritated me. You needn’t be an historical linguist to understand the distinction between nodes A and B in the following clading diagram. The distinction was essential to the thread content.
time ------------------------------>
----------A--------------------- rest of I-E
|
------------B---------- Italic
|
----------- Celtic
Dr. Drake got himself confused by the distinction, despite that he considers himself an expert on this topic. Tell me if this should have been cleared up by my post #19:
The above quote is from #19 in that thread. I was already surprised that Drake had confused nodes A and B. Yet even after this he repeated the same blunder in #24 and #26. His #26 explicitly made clar he was referring to node B. In hindsight I should have typed a little Ascii diagram for him as above, but I thought my careful English prose should be enough. He never acknowledged his blunder, and never acknowledged the useful points I made in the thread. Instead he blathered on ignorantly, waited for me to get angry, and then possibly whined to the Mods.
Oafs like pkbites are just following in the footsteps of their leader, Donald J. Trump and are a dime-a-dozen in today’s America. It’s pretentious dunces, like Dr. Drake, on scientific topics that annoy me.
I’ve been involved in a few threads on GD, and I don’t see anyone changing their views due to the threads themselves. I’ve also previously been involved in other online communities which are more right-wing than this place, and in those communities, there’s also very little view changing. I think it’s human nature to dig in when arguing.
I have actually changed my view on a few things in the last decade. I used to think that “Global warming” was a pile of BS. I also used to think that we were edging closer to a “government debt crisis” in the US. In both of these, my own views changed, as I read more evidence for the other side and I considered the sources on both sides and what I thought their motivations might be. But I wouldn’t say that online threads in these types of communities “changed my mind”.
I think that instead of changing minds, the best thing you get from these threads is sources of information…some of which confirms what you already think…some of which challenges what you think. Then, you can go off on your own and consider your own views, which evolve over time.
I’ve had my beliefs changed slightly in a thread but I didn’t hold those beliefs tightly anyway. The course of the argument actually strengthened my previously beliefs that were strongly held.
It was about Basic Universal Income, and there was a scientific study of it done, and it turns out that people do work less when they have a guaranteed income. That part is pretty obvious, but the study also “recaptured” the income when the subjects did work, which any rational scheme would do, and took back anywhere from 40% to 80% of what the subjects made.
It turns out that people reduce their hours worked by the same amount regardless of the clawback rate. That actually means that my idea for a 20% “taxation” rate might not be incentive enough to prevent inflation, not due to shoving money people’s way, but due to the difficulty of finding people wanting to work.
However, it totally strengthened my previous belief that high taxes aren’t a disincentive to work that the Mammon-religious Right claims. In fact, it’s a pretty freakin great scientific study on what happens to the impulse to work at various tax rates! Sure, people work less when they don’t need to (DUH!), but how much of “their money” they keep is irrelevant after that! Resolved: high taxes don’t kill the economy.
When my opinion has changed, it tends to be from threads I read rather than participate in. The most obvious issue my views have strongly changed on are trans rights, due mainly to reading on here and other places, because I was pig-ignorant and prejudiced about the issue before.
One of the main reasons I read this board is to have my views challenged. But to successfully challenge them requires far more than just “that’s wrong”, which last time I checked was all that had been offered in the thread linked in the OP. No one had shown that what the Republicans were doing was illegal, just kept claiming that they disagreed with it and so pkbites and others should also disagree with it, otherwise they are nasty racist poopy heads.
I endorse this. You cannot change hearts and minds on social media. It’s a waste of time. For example, just this morning, I thought long and hard about responding to this post with cites and all but after about 10-second reflection, I decided against it. Why waste time? What would be the fucking point? It is my belief that people post on social media sites (like SDMB) not to debate* ideas but as a place to seek gratification and to get validation* of their ideas. This need for extrinsic validation has the tendency to turn what would be “great debates” into psychotherapy sessions or a priest’s confessional. I think it all comes from a place of loneliness and/or helplessness. The former type of loneliness where one would rather engage with strangers than the people they don’t know. It’s sad.
Tell me if this should have been cleared up by