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> This may be intro level material to many people, but not everyone gets to go to a four year college, or gets raised in an open-minded community.

Hopefully if you're a person that analyzes contradictory thoughts you've already realized that a huge portion of society cannot do this. It's always fun at family reunions when attempting to discuss a complex topic has confused their opinion for being a fact and they cannot imagine a point of view that is not their own.

The first hard part of life is learning different views exist.

The second hard part of life is realizing some people have a very hard to near impossible time accepting other views exist.

This still leaves room for believing all your views are the 'right' ones. Perhaps the third hard part is accepting that some of these views are valid.

But perhaps when you say views you are implicitly saying that all views are valid, which is a different kind of acceptance I suppose.

I always liked this idea that you have to realise that others are as convinced of their opinions as you are of yours. It doesn't matter that you are very well informed, because they think they are also very well informed.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-mil...

If you go to high school in France, this will more than ring a bell: it’s the expected essay format.

Often named “dialectic plan”, or “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” [0]

[0]: https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesi...

In Germany they call it "Eröterung".

Not only France, Québec to and I would not be surprised if that practice was common to the Francophonie.

Thèse, antithèse, synthèse... 25 years later I still hate the highschool version of that format because it came with a minimal words count and I suck at taking something that can be said using 3 propositions and turning that into a 5 phrases paragraph.

> 'Be Nice to Spiders' was my first introduction to counter-culture. When everyone else is afraid or uncomfortable or angry about something, you don't have to be.

As a spider enthusiast and photographer, this makes me happy. Thank you for showing these creatures respect :)

Any cool pictures to share?

Not without doxxing myself unfortunately. Maybe I'll create an anonymous account on a photo hosting site and share.

I love this comment. You've packed a lot of snippets of wisdom and good ideas into an "economized" length (# of words). And, you're exactly right - I see a lot of "meat" here, but even a decade ago, I would have seen a lot less and some of this would be more of a starting point ... some outlining and ideas to learn more about.*

Picking up a habit of 'reaching for dialectic' is one of the most valuable things I've ever learned. I've found that it even helps to 'decouple' 'ideas' from 'identity' more completely and thoroughly than quite a lot of learning about and practicing 'mindfulness' in various forms - at least, for someone like me. And, that is about as helpful as anything gets if you want to be able to "see clearly" ... to get more clarity in terms of what is "more actually true" (as opposed to whatever mix of nonsense and shades of truth(s) any of us may have in our heads at any given time).

In that vein, and I may have written this on HN before ... not sure and not bothering to check this second: true 'skepticism'** STARTS with skepticism of one's own thoughts! It's about as inefficacious as 'methods' get to spend all of one's time picking apart ideas and 'information' and the like presented from 'the outside'*** while spending no time subjecting what's presented internally to any amount of scrutiny at all.

* vs. a "parsimonious" solid set of wisdom with some breadth even if tending towards a little "ad hoc" - yet, it all hangs off common thread(s), IMO

** In more of an original [Ancient Greek] sense than modern connotation

*** I.e., NOT "the half behind the eyes", as Terry Pratchett phrases it in one of his books

> Often people just want the best answer, or the truth.

most people want the most convenient, easiest answer that conforms to their own confirmation biases.

Getting confirmation on a confirmation bias releases pleasant hormones and tends to be addictive. (is this true?)

I will say yes, because it makes me feel pleasant.

I don't know if it's necessary to even invoke hormones for this (it may be true, I'm not sure), you can also view confirmation bias as simply more efficient.

It requires less mental energy to slot new information into an existing framework of beliefs than to consider alternative ways for the information to fit.

We don't question our entire belief system with every new piece of information; that would be mentally exhausting.

> I can't write software that will work a year from now. I have no idea what the world will look like in a year. Specifically, patches are applied and versions change.

The key to solving this problem is adhering to published standards, which tend to be long-lived. I have code still in use that I wrote 30+ years ago. Of course, just adhering to standards is only half the battle. There's more to writing long-lived code than just that. But it is a skill that can be learned.