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Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

Culturally ingrained beliefs (especially when related to status symbols) can be really, really hard to unseat.

Similarly, Doctors did not use to wash their hands before surgeries, as they were considered "Gentlemen", and thus "clean". It took a lot of evidence before most surgeons started routinely washing their hands before an operation.

Sadly, the man who first noticed and promoted this practice died before the medical community finally accepted his ideas... Poor Ignaz! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)

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Sadly, the man who first noticed and promoted this practice died before the medical community finally accepted his ideas... Poor Ignaz!

Note the screechy ire with which he was pushed around for his dissent and basically destroyed. This is one of the dark corners of human psychology, which we need to look out for and prevent. This is why Free Speech is vital in spirit, as well as in law. Sometimes it's the unpopular idea which has value.

I am not really sure Free Speech (or lack of Free Speech) had anything to do with what happened to Ignaz. It looks to me that he was allowed to say whatever he wanted to say and was driven insane by people not believing what he was saying.

Because of the "consequences" part. (This is the stupidest thing Randall Munroe has ever said.)

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Because he was so successfully un-personed, and it was basically because he was hurting people's "feels." If that's the way one does "Free Speech," it's just crappy. Get your hands on Manufacturing Consent -- If your press is technically free, but it still fits the propaganda model then it's not really free. If society supports free speech within the law, but huge swathes of private life extract huge consequences, it's not free speech. In that case people are being suppressed, not convinced, and both good and bad ideas are being suppressed.

That kind of society is authoritarian, not liberal.

What seems really interesting is that not only are culturally ingrained beliefs hard to unseat, but it seems that if they are ultimately unseated, if something resembles the old beliefs it will be immediately dismissed by the new ingrained beliefs. Being close minded is ultimately the root cause of the failures in both scenarios.

Care to give some examples?

I can think of a few general counterexamples:

* Fad diets (people flit from fad to fad, not outright reject all fad diets from then on)

* Losing your faith, but then being fascinated by a foreign religion (i.e. The trope of the ex-Christian falling in love with Buddhism)

Regarding fad diets, I can think of times when I've seen people (myself included) act biased toward new fad diets if they resemble older, popularly discredited fad diets in some way (even if it is only a superficial similarity).

I think the same can apply to religion; someone might be completely turned off of Abrahamic religions by their experiences with only one of them, regardless of whether this is a "fair" assessment.

Regarding GP's comment, then... is that type of closed-mindedness actually bad?

If they've finally changed their mind about a deeply seated belief, that means they must have had some pretty compelling reason to do so... why would they backtrack casually?

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