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diff --git a/content/entry/dealing-with-close-minded-people.md b/content/entry/dealing-with-close-minded-people.md index d6ce8c5..0130bf4 100644 --- a/content/entry/dealing-with-close-minded-people.md +++ b/content/entry/dealing-with-close-minded-people.md @@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ Religion is a perfect example of people closing off their minds due to fear. Peo ## Mental Effort Another reason people are close-minded is because changing your mind takes mental effort, especially if you're changing your mind about one of your core beliefs. If you believe for instance that people have free will, as the US justice system is based on, then you'd have to rearrange your entire internal moral framework if you learned people do not have free will. That's a lot of mental effort. Wouldn't it be so much easier to go on believing that people do have free will since your entire understanding of ethics is based on that? -It's not as if you can just change your mind only about free will and leave every other peripheral belief intact. You'd feel [cognitive dissonance](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance) that would demand to be addressed. Holding beliefs that you know to be mutually incompatible is unpleasant. Therefore you're forced to either suffer psychologically or invest mental energy into correcting your other beliefs built on the foundation of free will. +It's not as if you can just change your mind only about free will and leave every other peripheral belief intact. You'd feel [cognitive dissonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance) that would demand to be addressed. Holding beliefs that you know to be mutually incompatible is unpleasant. Therefore you're forced to either suffer psychologically or invest mental energy into correcting your other beliefs built on the foundation of free will. There's also the fear that you might not know what to believe any more. What if you can't figure out how to justify holding people responsible for their actions without free will? There's the worry that any time you change one of your beliefs, you don't exactly know how that might affect the others. You don't know how it might cause you to change your behavior. And that can be scary. @@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ I hope you're starting to see how all these causes each play into one another. A But we have to get over fear, put aside our ego and be honest with ourselves when it comes to what we believe. We have to be open to hearing new evidence and to changing our minds. That's the essence of open-mindedness and that's how we advance the public conversation. # Dealing With Close-Minded People -So let's assume you yourself are open-minded. Provided the right evidence to the contrary, you would change your mind about almost anything. It's like [Anthony Magnabosco](https://anthonymagnabosco.com/) says in his [street epistemology](https://streetepistemologyinternational.org/) (SE) videos, "If I'm wrong, I wanna know it". But how do you deal with people who aren't so open-minded? +So let's assume you yourself are open-minded. Provided the right evidence to the contrary, you would change your mind about almost anything. It's like [Anthony Magnabosco](https://linktr.ee/magnabosco) says in his [street epistemology](https://streetepistemologyinternational.org/) (SE) videos, "If I'm wrong, I wanna know it". But how do you deal with people who aren't so open-minded? ## Determine Close-Mindedness If you're going to approach close-minded people differently from the open-minded, which I suggest you do to preserve your own sanity, you must first determine that the person you're dealing with is actually close-minded. To determine that, here are a couple key questions to ask them: |