alt Hacker NewsOne heuristic for spotting when you might be wrong is that you hold a very uncommon belief.
It COULD be that you are correct and the world is crazy, but its far more likely that you are the one who is missing something. It's always worth stopping to double check when this happens.
Perhaps more importantly, if you do happen to be right when everyone else is wrong its important to determine your goals.
Is it more important to be right, or to be happy? If the answer is the latter then its sometimes best to just let people continue being wrong for the sake of being social. Nobody likes to be told they're wrong, so is "correctness" worth more than that person's feelings? Very oten it is not.
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> sometimes best to just let people continue being wrong for the sake of being social
There's almost no time when it's better to try to convince somebody they're wrong. It won't help you, and it won't work anyway, so it won't help them either.
Sure if you're somebody's doctor, and even then you have to pick your battles.
the thing with uncommon beliefs is not that they are likely wrong. but that digging in your heels is surely going to fail, regardless of who is actually right.
so your suggested response is the right approach, but it doesn't end there. you can try find a common belief and build up your argument from there. peoples opinions can be changed if you take the time to learn how their opinions are formed and present them with the opportunity to consider alternative ideas. ideally in such a way that they discover the truth on their own.
a key component is that unity enables change. it is better to be wrong but united, than right and divided. if we are united (and thus stay friends) then we can learn from being wrong and change direction. if we are divided then changing direction is difficult.
I’m going to ignore the whole socially-agreeable aspect.
Take a thousand subjects. I’m going to be wrong about 990 of them. Because I know just enough about it to think I might have a clue.
You could probably read up on something for five hours and have a better opinion on it than most people that you meet.
How many things are just passively received opinion? And what kind of signal is that? Oh no, all the Jacks and Jones disagree with me.
On the other hand there are some cases where you can go down some dark rabbit hole and gain false knowledge and education. Maybe studying political science or something.
>One heuristic for spotting when you might be wrong is that you hold a very uncommon belief.
this is only the case in a 'wisdom of the crowd' world where people hold uncorrelated, authentic, self-formed opinions. If you're in a world of mass opinion and mania where ideas spread virally it ceases to be an indicator. In that environment its not truth that determined popularity of a belief, but how transmittable they are. In a world where gigantic companies produce sociality being anti-social in the most literal sense is a very real survival and truth-finding strategy.
And of course it's more important to be right than happy. Happiness decoupled from truth is nihilism. If that's the goal start doing heroin at ten in the morning and retreat into the VR world of your choice.
As Cormac McCarthy said in his last book: “You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it's a bad bargain.”
I think I can speak for most people with niche subjects of interest when I say that the commonly held beliefs on said niche subject tend to be pretty bad.
> Nobody likes to be told they're wrong
I like to be told I'm wrong. While it is true that I am a nobody it means I'm about to learn something.