Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyleyeats | Hacker News Reader

It helps if you understand whether the person is defending their own values, or their group's values.

If you talk someone out of their group's values, you might destroy their entire life. Talking someone out of their religion is a "win" until they get shunned and lose everything they have. Are you still in the right then? What does the "objective truth" matter if you're just ruining peoples lives?

Change someone's mind on guns or abortion and you hurt them! It doesn't matter which side they start on or which side you convince them to. You're ripping and tearing at the very fabric of their social life.

Some people are unable to change their minds, but some people can't change their minds due to circumstance. It's really important to understand this before convincing anyone of anything.

View on HN

Certainly you jest...

If we apply this kind of belief to corporations/government/etc. we get the things that most folks at HN spend their non-tech comments complaining about. Entrenched power, inability to pursue effectiveness because "this is how its always been done" and a lot of fluff.

You are not ruining people's lives by sharing reasoning to change someone's values. You are not destroying their lives because simply talking to someone is not forcing them to accept and implement something.

Their community is not flexible enough to incorporate differing beliefs and thus not long destined for this world. Take for example, Christianity. It comes in more flavors than ice cream, and infighting occurs but is rare in the face of conversations that pit Muslims or 'heathen religions' against Christianity. flexibility

Or take Hindu social society which is literally the oldest surviving widespread religion + social group that continuously assimilates different beliefs from different pagan religions bending so far that Hindus now celebrate Valentines and Xmas Day without invalidating a single belief.

The party "destroying lives" is not the party that posits a new way of thinking.

It's a question of moral responsibility. If you cause someone to make a major change in their life, surely you'd agree that you bear at least part of the responsibility for the outcome. It's the same with changing govt. Doesn't necessarily mean the only choice is doing nothing. But that you must weigh outcomes realistically, not idealistically.

I have to disagree with this point in this context. "Changing someone's mind" is a collaborative act. If you change someone's mind about something important, they are more responsible for the change than you are, because they have more power than you over the change. You don't own the beliefs of others.

Share information when you have it. Maximize peoples' opportunities to hold informed beliefs.

It’s sounds like you simply misread the comment you replied to, and the two of you agree.

No. Parent was saying you have to weigh the consequences of changing someone's mind. That's the part I disagree with, unless of course they're children. You shouldn't censor your ideas for fear of harming adults, in the name of "realism" or otherwise.

They said the instigator bears some responsibility, you replied the majority of the responsibility lies with the one whose mind was changed. These views do not seem in opposition to me.

Surely one must weigh the consequences of changing another’s mind. If there are extreme detrimental effects, perhaps it is not proper to do so.

That is inherently paternalistic and sounds reminiscent of colonial attitudes. The claim is that we're protecting the listener from the impact of their own decisions on their own life.

If you believe you can change an adult's mind in a normal situation (for example, we are not including someone isolated through prison, cults, etc. or of diminished mental capacity) then you're claiming the ability to change their mind to their detriment and their inability to see the impact of that change.

In this situation, you have done something to them like the Pied Piper, leading them away from community...except that the pied piper was only able to lead children.

I imagine the line is different for different people, but it could very well impact more than just their life. Say, for example, you have a colleague who is convinced his wife is faithful, but by coincidence you saw her at a bar with a gentleman and quite clearly it was romantic in nature. Do you mention it? When he doesn't believe you, do you try to convince him? What if he is short tempered and known to have a violent side? To be clear, I am not advocating any particular course of action here, just acknowledging there are situations where it is tricky.

The majority of the parent comment is focused on situations where you look to change someone's thinking in an expansive way. New ideas, new philosophies, new ways of thinking...

We could push the boundaries of this and say I am trying to convince a man of something that may or may not be true for his own good.

In the hypothetical you allude to: with just one observation, no matter how compellingly I've stated and restated it, his actions are his own. Otherwise you're suggesting that I told a man I saw his wife at the bar with another man and his actions are attributable to me. At that point how does one even interact in society? Frankly, anyone might be a powder keg given the day.

If we go back to some concerted effort to prove my observation leads to my conclusion which I'm pushing him to believe, I think we've exited "gentler, better" to straight up malicious.

> They said the instigator bears some responsibility, you replied the majority of the responsibility lies with the one whose mind was changed. These views do not seem in opposition to me.

I'm saying you bear no responsibility for the beliefs another develops based on information you offer, provided that said information isn't intended to manipulate or mislead. It is not a scalable perspective no matter the degree. Artists, for instance, can't worry about the mental state of every member of there audience, even to a tiny degree. This is in opposition to the parent's point.

Changing someone's mind is not equivalent to making them take action that will have negative consequences.

Great comment. I suspect that we all are vulnerable to Stockholm syndrome and doing the calculation of what price we will pay for changing our mind. After all, surviving is more important than being right.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benkamin Franklin

Liberty includes the ability to offer convincing arguments to anyone who may listen.

"Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness." - Viktor Frankl

Liberty without responsibility is a big pile of hot garbage. If you exercise the liberty you're talking about, you also need to at the same time exercise the responsibility I'm talking about.

The path to responsibility can't be chains

this quote says nothing about being right or false. totally irrelevant to the point at hand.

I don't know about being "in the right" or not, but I do think this comment is correct in showing why it can be difficult, if not impossible, for some people to change their minds. I experienced this in my own family in regards to covid, which made for some very stressful discussions around masking and behavior when we gathered for the holidays during the pandemic. I live in one part of the country, where certain behaviors and beliefs around that were baseline assumptions, some of my siblings in a different part of the country, with the opposite baselines. To change minds would mean going against what all your friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc believed. It would mean pretty significant social distancing, unrelated to the pandemic.

We all were able to work out some measure of compromise for the duration of the visit, but, well, there's reasons we live where we live and not in the same place.

Or they may even lose their job at WaPo or the Atlantic! ;)

We are all, regardless of the direction of our political leaning, suspended in our beliefs by the community we are part of.

If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to try walking down Main Street in small town America with a BLM flag. It’ll be received about as well as parading a Trump 2024 flag around a coastal city.

I visited a small town recently - Ithaca. As someone from San Francisco I was shocked by the amount of LGBTQ and BLM imagery.

Feels like everyone in SF kinda takes it as the default position, no need to show off.

Ithaca, NY is a college town with a top-tier university and is located in Tompkins county which went 73.5% for Biden in 2020. It happens to be a small town, but I don't know that I'd consider it representative of small town America.

Ah Ithaca is so tremendously close to my heart.

It is also a liberal college town with all of the externalization that can invoke. You only need to head to Oswego, or Genesee county generally to find a lot of upstate NY conservatism, often similarly openly shared.

everyone needs to show off their propaganda posters like in the good old ussr

It's all fine an dandy until objectively false group beliefs start affecting, e.g., political policy that has an effect on everybody, not just believers.

Even if you persuaded them into changing their mind on a topic intertwined with their identity or the group they are part of, can it not be that it is for the better and, ultimately for their own benifit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com