I think it’s a healthy thing to do to admit when your wrong as it places importance on truth rather than self image.
Some examples:
I thought pay-per-view was paper-view because you had to fill out a form to watch it.
This morning I insisted there was a noise outside to my partner and it was in fact the refrigerant in the fridge gurgling.
I thought the cat wanted to be pet— it did not.
I’m an engineer. It’s my job to be wrong until I’m right.
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I’m bookmarking this
Yes, but all that schooling helps you to be wrong fewer times consecutively than an average person would be on matters that are within the narrow confines of your field… during regular working hours.
during regular working hours.
And generally after a couple cups of coffee, and before 4, and not during lunch, and not on Fridays.
I thought I was wrong, once. But I was mistaken.
I’m always right, especially when I’m wrong.
My grandfather used to say this all the time. He was such a humble man, too, so it always got a good “dad joke” chuckle. Glad to see it’s still out there.
I picked it up from an episode of Deep Space Nine. Good times.
I’m wrong all the time. My amazing ADHD lets me finish stories in my head when someone starts talking, and it never goes the adventurous amazing way my brain told me it was going to go.
There are a few controversial subjects I’ve changed my mind about recently, and it only happened because someone actually took the time to engage with me instead of just hurling insults and trying to shut down the discussion. I’m not even going to specify what I changed my mind about, because I know I’d just get attacked again - for views I don’t even hold anymore.
Thought isn’t a crime we all deserve the chance to grow
I was wrong about capital punishment up into my twenties. It took someone sitting me down and explaining it’s more expensive to kill people than just jail them for life (along with why). These days I’m a bit ashamed that that was the argument that convinced me but that was among a few key watershed moments that pulled back the veil and got me thinking and noticing that fiscal conservatives somehow didn’t ever seem to pick the most sensible option to achieve their goals—clearly their goals aren’t what they claim. They want to reduce abortion, but not in ways that actually work. They want to reduce crime, but not in ways that actually work. Fuck, they want to balance budgets, but not in ways that actually work.
We’re all on a journey, friend. And sometimes that’s especially hard online because the strides we take are often attacked for being insufficient. People demand total, instant realignment, and you’re still attacked for not believing it all along. I’m glad most of my journey was not made on social media because I’ve certainly held some regrettable positions.
Good luck!
I was super in favor of capital punishment until we had to do an essay on a controversial topic in my senior year of high school and as I was researching for it I was like “wait a minute this actually sucks ass.” Capital punishment kind of only “works” if your underlying assumption is that the justice system gets it right every time, which is not true at all. It also isn’t even a good deterrent- it makes no difference on capital crime rates whether the death penalty is a possibility or not. So the only reason to have it is that your own sense of “justice” requires criminals to be killed, even if it doesn’t actually help anything and even if it doesn’t prevent more crimes. And again, that denies any possibility that the justice system ever gets things wrong and wrongfully convicts someone.
Oh I was way shittier than that when I was younger. I mean I assumed they got it right almost every time and the couple of exceptions would be caught by appeals and such and it was such a vanishingly small number of actually innocent people that would be killed that it was an acceptable number.
That was before I saw stuff like proof people were innocent and DAs still fighting against them being released. It never occurred to me that expecting everyone in the justice system to seek real justice was completely naive of me. Of course police wouldn’t try to arrest someone they knew was innocent, and of course the DA wouldn’t prosecute and if they were ever made aware of a mistake, of course they would correct that immediately.
Turns out the world is largely made up of folks who genuinely don’t care if other people live or die or whether it’s right or wrong, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them at all.
My argument against capital punishment is that no legal system is foolproof and some number of innocent people are going to get locked up no matter what. That is aready unacceptable in itself but the idea of sentencing someone to death who hasn’t done anything wrong is the greatest injustice I can think of.
There’s even a saying about it. “I would rather a thousand guilty men go free than one innocent man be murdered”.
Sure, I’m just saying falling short of perfection is not the argument that swayed me. It took me time to get there.
Kinda sounds like me when seatbelt laws came out.
At first, I was against them, not because I myself didn’t wear a seatbelt because I did, but because I thought it was absurd that we would waste time and money trying to make stupidity illegal.
Like if you make stupidity illegal, then the people making stupidity illegal would be illegal because it’s stupid to try to make stupidity illegal.
My opinion was that if you are stupid enough to drive a two ton death machine without basic protection and it kills you, then that’s your own stupid fault, right?
But my mind got changed about it when somebody mentioned to me that seatbelts don’t just save lives, they also reduce injuries.
And, given that the kind of person that is dumb enough to drive without a seatbelt is also the kind of person that is dumb enough to drive without insurance, the real reason for pushing for seatbelts was to reduce the taxpayer burden of covering the health care financial deficit caused by these stupid idiots.
It was not a life-saving measure, although it does save lives, but rather, it is a money-saving measure.
Protecting taxpayer money from stupid people is a smart move.
Now I am fully behind seatbelt laws.
I was wrong thinking that having access to information would change the world for the better.
My childish self honestly had no idea that so many people would rebel against their fellow man and common sense rather than learn and accept that they had some wrong information about something.
My hopeful naivety kept me blind to the idea that people are fundamentally stupid, and will fight to the bitter end to die like the dogs they are rather than take one step as a human being that has the tiniest little flaw.
And that includes myself.
In 1992 I thought the GOP was being hyperbolic about Bill Clinton’s history of sexual predation. Im not proud of that.
In 1992 I thought the GOP cared about extra marital sexual activity. They do not.
I’m wrong all the time.
Just yesterday I was talking to a friend, mentioning that it is insane how it was only a few years ago that a province in my country removed the rule that all government buildings need to have a christian cross on the wall.
Turns out the conservatives successfully fought that change and it’s still mandatory.
It’s impossible to be correct 100% of the time
I misspelled Denuvo earlier and two people had to be jerks about it.
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I didn’t realize “banal” was pronounced “ban all” and cluelessly described something as “b-anal”
Well that must have been a pain in the butt
Now start pronouncing the word “testicles” like it is an ancient Greek name with a long second e sound. You will NEVER stop.
Both pronunciations are okay :)
It is rather banal to be anal about pronunciation like that.
I didn’t realize “banal” was pronounced “ban all”
😶
I was today years old…
I recently thought geese just ate bugs in the grass and even said so, but apparently they graze on the grass. I admitted my mistake when I found out a couple days later.
I’ve never had a geese-observation opportunity but now I know they eat grass and the bugs in it, so thanks!
Several times as viewable here on the Fediverse; this account, my P.D. account, accidentally posted a comment to the wrong post as viewable in the modlogs😣, CCing lemmy.ca admins and P.D. admins.
Making mistakes all the time is painful; hopefully I’ve repeated less of them as time continues or so I hope anyways…
I’m remodeling a house and I’ve learned that my initial idea is always wrong and it will take me 3 days to accept the right answer.
My ex often got frustrated with me because I spend so much time in the planning phase, like learning about things, researching the various options, and making sure that everything is fully prepped and laid out before I start on a project.
Despite all of that, I have yet to have a project go to plan, Except for the one that I came up with off the top of my head.
I was redoing my flooring, and I have like a half third story that’s open, and there’s a lot of exposed transition space between the straight drop-off and the end of the flooring.
It was gonna look really bad to just put L-shaped brackets down to cover over the transition, So, spur of the moment, I realized that I could put a longer flat piece that had a beveled edge on it, and then the L bracket on top of that, and it is probably one of the nicest features in my house.
I am wrong about almost every major decision I make on my life. I am never wrong about trivia though
I thought the cat wanted to be pet— it did not.
I bet it did want to be petted but its a cat… so those things change pretty quickly and most of the time your gonna be the last to know
I’ve been a short-tempered bitch with people when I really shouldn’t have been. Haven’t been that way in years, but in my youth it happened several times. There’s also been moments I’ve looked back on in my youth and realized I had some views that were the result of institutionalized racism that I didn’t even realize were racist until I’d educated myself years later and realized my poor judgement.
Can you provide examples of your former views?
I’ll step up. I was raised in the south by… well, okay by the kind of racist white people that say they are not racist even though they don’t like people of other colors inside of their field of vision.
I am not white myself, and so I got preferential treatment. I was “one of the good ones”.
Plus, as a Native American, I kind of had like this weird, beneficent racism thing where they were like, oh, he can talk to horses, and he can hear it in the trees, and see it in the wind, all of that stupid shit.
Anyway, I didn’t really mind people of color, black people, I would talk to them and be friendly with them because I didn’t have any reason not to be, right?
But sometime around when I was 18 years old, I suddenly realized that I would change my way of speaking when I was around black people. I would say things like, “yo, dog, what’s up?” Instead of, “hey man, how’s it going?”
And I realized now that that is ingratiating behavior. I wanted the other people I was around to feel more comfortable with me, and so I was imitating what I assumed was their speech pattern.
But I also realized that I was pigeonholing them into acting a particular way. I was maintaining the concept that “Black people talk like black people” instead of “people just talk”.
Once I realized I was doing that, I dropped the act and started continuing to be myself when I was around people of different races.
And you know, I made better friends that way. People liked me more and they responded more favorably to me, which to me feels like justification that I made the right decision.
I guess I should have said my past “ignorance” instead of my past “views”, because it’s really just assumptions I made based on stereotypes and because I was indeed ignorant. I can remember being in high school (a VERY white high school, we legit had no POCs at all) in my teens and one of my classmates went on vacation to China, and when she got back I asked her didn’t everyone there look the same?? Because all Asians look alike, right?? (please note my sarcasm there)
I remember when I first joined the Army, meeting a black girl my age who loved Metallica and this blew my mind because I’d never known any black people who liked any sort of rock, because they only like rap, right?? (/s). Or when I assumed that trying to manage my own very curly hair was somehow relatable to a black person having to manage THEIR curly hair (it isn’t, at all).
It was never anything outwardly damaging, it was just little ignorant thoughts like that, where I was able to look back on them and be like whoa, I was really wrong/ignorant/racist to assume that. But I also think that that’s part of growing up in America, unfortunately, you don’t realize what’s behind thoughts like that, and yes, I think EVERYONE has those moments of ignorance and covert racism. The trick is to recognize them, learn from them, move on, and not make them again.
