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This section is my favorite:
Facts Don’t Change Our Minds. Friendship Does.
Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome.
The way to change people’s minds is to become friends with them, to integrate them into your tribe, to bring them into your circle. Now, they can change their beliefs without the risk of being abandoned socially.
The British philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that we simply share meals with those who disagree with us:
“Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal – something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt – disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted. For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.”
Perhaps it is not difference, but distance that breeds tribalism and hostility. As proximity increases, so does understanding. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s quote, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”
Facts don’t change our minds. Friendship does.
Also, we do this too much (I'm especially guilty of doing this with bitcoin FUD):
Each time you attack a bad idea, you are feeding the very monster you are trying to destroy. As one Twitter employee wrote, “Every time you retweet or quote tweet someone you’re angry with, it helps them. It disseminates their BS. Hell for the ideas you deplore is silence. Have the discipline to give it to them.”
Over the years I've found this to be true. I think bitcoiners can easily fall into the trap of assuming others think in the same ways that we do. The reality is that most people that think like we do will find bitcoin on their own.
I think many bitcoiners have a lot in common, at least in how their brains work to libertarians. I seem to recall "The Righteous Mind" proposing that libertarians have a lower value on group identity than liberals or conservatives. Its been my observation that libertarians underestimate the group dynamic when trying to convince people of a position they hold.
For libertarians facts have a higher weight than they do for most other people. It might be easy to think that makes them superior but does it? There's a reason why humans try to avoid being the odd man out, or an outcast. It historically is a very risky position to be in.
In my 20s I began to realize that I thought in ways that were very different from my friend group. I asked questions they didn't ask. I focused on things they ignored. I used to argue and debate on a daily basis. Over the years I came to realize it was a waste of time with most people for the reasons outlined in this article.
In recent years I have stopped trying to convince people of things. The weird thing is I've seen more success by not trying than trying. Being a friend and just asking questions that lead people to learn more about yourself organically leads to one making their world view known. And when people become your friend, they trust you and actually listen.
You see, most people aren't looking to change their world view or have their minds changed. This is the main barrier to changing someone's mind. They don't want it changed. People wired like myself are the opposite. I am very often seeking out multiple views on a subject. Trying to steel man an argument I disagree with. Its helpful to realize that if you think like this, you are likely very different from those around you. That is, unless all your friends are bitcoiners.
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It historically is a very risky position to be in.
Being stoned to death for heresy and dying of exposure after being banished were also facts of life that people who cared so much about facts had to deal with.
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Indeed
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Now it’s electric vehicles
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Nah, just Teslas. EV's are still OK.
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I've tended to believe this basic view of persuasion. It's very much aligned with Jonathan Haidt's work in The Righteous Mind.
However, it occurs to me that it does a terrible job of accounting for why married couples often differ in their worldviews.
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Ha, you beat me to it. I didn't see your comment but my mind went to the same place.
Are you referring to the "Righteous Mind" accounting for married couples that differ in worldview? IIRC Haidt's ending is that companies and governments need all three minds to meet their potential. I tend to agree though world views shift over time. One can think more like a liberal but not be a democrat. One can think like a conservative and not be a republican. At least that's my view. There was a time when people didn't allow politics to be at the center of their being. I know, sounds crazy. Pretty sure my mom voted democrat and I know my dad voted republican.
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No, I'm saying that The Righteous Mind talks about the importance of getting people to like you, before they're willing to listen to what you have to say.
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I see.
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I think it goes to show that what tribe you're part of is a separate thing than your personal friendships. They're correlated, but different aspects of your life.
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So, "beating them with the power of friendship" is actually real
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Hell for the ideas you deplore is silence. Have the discipline to give it to them.
Maaan, is that powerful
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Inspiring read! Made me think of bitcoin meetups. People get together who have one thing in common: Their interest in bitcoin. But other than that they often hold very different views. I remember a woman who tried to convince me the government dumbing down the population with chemtrails and I was getting really annoyed with her. This article contains some good advice for these kinds of situations.
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Each time you attack a bad idea, you are feeding the very monster you are trying to destroy.
This is sort of true, but it's missing such an important thing that it might as well be false.
The missed thing is that most people don't really give a shit about destroying monsters, whatever they may say about the matter. When people dunk on the cowardly and hated enemy, they're not striking a blow for justice, they're getting a crack rush off the moral superiority that envelopes them like god's love.
That joy, combined with the points they earn from their own tribe, overwhelms by two orders of magnitude any instinct toward truth-seeking.
"Hell for the ideas you deplore is silence. Have the discipline to give it to them.”
They will never find themselves in that hell because the ones who could send them there can't bear the separate hell of doing without them.
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Beliefs are tied to communities. Change happens when we connect, not argue. Want to shift someone’s perspective? Spend time with them. Lincoln said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”
Arguing online often spreads bad ideas. Sometimes silence is the best response.
How can we use this to bring people into Bitcoin?
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and what about experience ?
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