I changed my mind about both religion and abortion in my mid 30s. All it took was more information and me stepping back to acknowledge some of my defenses were just my religion and I moving goal posts.
Still, with many other things that religion i always required repeatable proof, especially when I experienced it personally.
For example, I’m going to go a bit into details about an old online game, Final Fantasy 11. That game had several stats you balanced for nor.al attacks and for special build up attacks called weapon skills.
One Stat needed almost always for normal attacks was Accuracy. Now weapon skills could come in single or multi hit flavors, and people started using tools to figure out optimal stats for both. What they found is that the first hit of any weapon skill had a huge accuracy boost, while remaining hits did not.
So it was more optimal to not use accuracy in single hit weapon skills. Now an important caveat: 100% accuracy was hard coded as impossible. There was always a 5% miss rate, like with a d20 hitting 1. So 1 hit weaponskills missed 5% of the time mo matter what.
If you parsed the data over time, that would be obvious. However, to your own eyeballs and memories, you always remembered the full miss, and it would feel like you needed more accuracy. Data doesn’t lie, but your feelings and memory do.
I learned from that that you can’t just operate on what you feel is correct, you need to review the data to see what it says about the effects of your choices.
I learned how much having access to abortion helped poorer people, helped women,lowered crime, etc. So i changed my mind.
I’ve become much more flexible in my thinking and beliefs the older I’ve gotten, and statistically young people are much more likely to have extreme positions on things.
If anything, you’re probably going to have a worse time convincing young people who think they know everything, than older people who understand that they don’t.
I agree. I changed my mind about a lot of things in my 30s. My views on politics, religion, and social issues all changed.
Same here, and pretty notably I keep getting more left wing instead of more conservative and the same’s been happening to my friends too, so even the idea that you automatically get more conservative as you age is pretty suspect.
Shit, right now in Finland the under 25’s are more conservative than Millennials, at least based on voting patterns
It’s not age that makes you conservative, it’s comfort and success. People on the older end of life tend to have advanced more in their career. In the current era, older people in America and Europe have been part of a period of relative success. People who are doing well in the current society don’t want it to change. People who are struggling, do. The reason most monied interests support conservative agendas is that they are wealthy because they are suited to the current order. If they actually were to support real change, it’d cost them money.
I think that saying comes from an era when that’s what happened to them.
That aside, it really depends on the person. Just because some people get a little more flexible in some ways doesn’t mean that everyone becomes more flexible as they age. It’s very likely that people can get more and more set in their ways as time goes by.
For online discussions, it can be worth it. You might not change the mind of the person you’re talking to, but there are more lurkers than posters. Your discussion is for them.
I think if you aren’t the one debating, you are more open to differing opinions.
Yeah, second hand opinions can be a thing and it’s the main reason I still argue online … but gosh can it be exhausting arguing with a wall.
Sure, but how do you get them to vote about it?
Turnout at the polls is definitely impacted by:
- knowing something is even being voted on
- being reminded and having expanded how important something is
- just perceiving other people are going to go vote too
and so it’s important to discuss something that’s going to be voted on, even if the audience has already made up their mind.
You are right I did miss word that thank you. Letting people know that there is a vote. That’s important. Trying to convince them to voteone or the other to me is just pointless. They’ve already made up their mind. If it takes a life lesson for them to learn well that’s a harsh life lesson. If they learn from it , great. if they didn’t well, maybe it wasn’t hard enough lesson.
I changed my mind when I caught the s-o-b that tried to steal my car stereo.
Honest question here, what did you change your mind about?
A double down vote for an honest question? Interesting
I changed my mind on the topic when I was 37, but you do you.
Maybe. You might be over estimating a person‘s maturity. I’ve definitely met people in the 20s who are clearly still kids in their mindset.
For some people, life is a hard teacher, and they just don’t understand until situations personally affect them.
I had a roommate in college that had a fucking Ronald Reagan action figure/doll thing…
He was in his 30s when Bernie first ran, and it got him to do a full 180 and get onboard with progressive policy across the board.
I’m from a red state and it really isn’t uncommon for people to have made that switch in 2016.
They can be talked into supporting all types of progressive policy at all stages of life, but that’s not as easy as getting them to vote for a conservative Dem like Biden or Kamala. And it makes voter outreach on a personal level almost impossible. I hated Clinton, Biden, and Kamala. I still held my nose and voted for them, but they just have too many flaws that I can’t defend when talking about politics.
And “they’re not a Republican” isn’t a bonus to someone already ok with voting Republican.
We know what happens when a progressive runs because of 08 Obama, they flip red states all over and carry majorities in the House and Senate
OP thinks they’re “grown up.”
I’m not pro choice, I’m pro-abortion. As in, abortions should be the default. You should have to prove that you’re able to provide a healthy and stable environment to be allowed to have a kid.
blandford says Eugenics didn’t go far enough!
And I’m willing to bet that no matter how long I spend or how hard I try , I’ll never change your mind
I mean, you might be able to. I was mostly joking. I can see how abortion kind of is murder but also it kind of is just a clump of cells at first, that the parents should be able to decide if they want to allow to develop.
I remember when I was this ironic.
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