2. Embrace humility, since we're always wrong sometimes. Humility to me means: you can have convictions, but you should never assume that people who disagree with you are stupid or evil.

I’d add two other ideas that I try to adhere to, continuing your list.

3. Try to adopt the perspectives of those you disagree with, especially when you’re finding yourself ascribing malice, stupidity, moral failing, or just find yourself baffled by someone. Such feelings are often a sign that you don’t understand where someone is coming from, and though you may still disagree with them, you’ll have a better platform to discuss matters.

4. Try to see yourself and your time through the same lens you use to look back on history. We’re not special or unique, we’re goinf to be seen as primitives eventually, and it can be helpful to imagine in which ways that perception might be levied.

Both of these help to broaden perspective and depend empathy, while also divorcing yourself from a strict “first person view” or tribal view. It’s also a couple of concrete steps to gain some distance from your feelings in the present, which makes your steps easier to achieve. You’ll also find that the people you end up despising form a much smaller pool than most.

How so? I find it interesting to see how people frame and rationalize ideas that I dislike or disagree with.

And I’ve been very stubborn in the past. The biggest struggle was being able to accept being wrong in public. It’s much easier to have a ‘holy shit’ moment in private!

- we are not talking about a blank slate, we are talking specifically about position X in this very specific path from an animal to.... something

we cannot judge others without remembering their entire upbringing and the fact that to operate we need to use rules of thumb as there is not enough processing power in the universe to do it any other way.

Really trying to accept this helps me take number 4 there to a very real place where i absolve myself of being "right" and focus on "trying to improve things and give an honest account of the results to help us all move forward".

Thinking of this in terms of others ideologies - we cannot logically think through what is right or wrong, so we NEED people to believe "wrong" things as we develop / evolve to ensure we are correct. negative testing is tedious but very very important.

I this value in trying "provably" wrong things is a real part of what causes us to be who we are (e.g. it could be partially responsible for stubbornness and counter culture for example)

On the other hand, ideas are in a competition. If you put most of your energy into falsifying yours, they will lose out against ideas that are ruthlessly championed regardless of merit. (I think we can agree that the best ideas don't automatically win).

So it's a bit of a pickle.

However, as I said, I have come to the conclusion, alas only recently, that that may not be such a good idea.

To answer your question: the world will tell you.

I've also found it useful to think about it this way: I don't want to be wrong a second longer than necessary. (credit to Sam Harris)

That's gold. Thank you.

Strongly agree with this. Let's try a specific example on HN:

Seek the best form of the view that the anti-vaccine people may have a point.

And that could be putting yourself into the position of someone with very particular experiences the health system (e.g. you where very vulnerable and doctors treated you like a piece of meat) on top of other circumstances (you have never been that ill that modern medicine saved your ass, most of your very real health problems have psychosomatic roots and the neighbour wife with magical esotheric healing abilities was the only one wbo really talked to you about it).

This is about understanding who these people are and where they come from and what lead them to their (at times utterly wrong) beliefs. Doing that will not somehow stain your belief (unless you built them on similar shaky grounds). Most people/nations/companies think they are the center of the universe and that they are doing the right thing, sometimes for the simple reason because they see themselves as “The Good” side

They developed some sort of culture, rituals or superstition that backs their behaviour. Of course this gets harder and harder to decipher with each iteration they take downwards the devils spiral into irrationality, until you look onto them from the outside and you tell yourself: no way on earth I understand where they come from with their &)$&)!&@) beliefs.

But if you want to effectively criticise, you need to know how to dismantle these beliefs, and in order to do that, you have to understand (not agree to!) their position.

If you feel like you are giving someone too much power simply by trying to take their perspective, this might have its roots in your own culture, rituals and beliefs.

So in the case of some antivaxxers the best alid ideas that come from their standpoint is probably a criticism of capitalistic medicine (incentive: make money, not heal) and (from their subjective position) untrustworthy medical professionals. On top of that, they suddenly can google every illness on the internet and they feel like they know more than the expert in the field (this is by the way a sentiment of our times, which again has its roots somewhere).

Of course antivaxxers are irrational lunatics, but if don’t just want to yell at them, but use rational arguments, then understanding their background will help tremendously.

Why is that "of course"?

It looks to me you haven't got the point of what #ReedX wrote at all:

>Remind yourself of the times you were confident about X and turned out to be wrong.

Or #haberman:

>Embrace humility, since we're always wrong sometimes.

After some time it turns out he belives the earth is flat. You know he is factually wrong and he will lead the whole group in circles till you starve. So you could embrace humility.. but on the other hand there are facts about the world that you don't really have to seriously debate, unless good points of doubt are raised that you can check. There are situations where not pointing out somebody's wrong believes and demand a rational explaination from them is the ethically wrong thing to do.

The odds in this story are starvation, the odds in the vaccination fad are: either killing people by damaging vaccines, or killing people by not vaccinating them. The thing is – this is not just some oppinion, the outcome of this will (independent of who is right) kill people.

I am not a person who vaccinates a lot, but I do and of course I was curious if there is something behind the claims of the supposed side effects of vaccination. And what I did was to embracing humility. I decided not to take a stance on this until I informed myself and talked to people who were convinced about the damaging nature of vaccines. The claims made here would be revolutionary if these people were right. So you check out where the idea comes from and you find that one study with multiple metholodical failures which comes to a weak conclusion that there is a link between autism and vaccines. And then you find a flood of studies who can't find that link. Then you talk with anti-vaxxers about it and suddenly you are the devil for even considering there is a doubt. But remember the stakes – in both cases innocent people die! What I discovered then is that this is not about truth or what is really to be observed in reality, but it rather is a belief rooted in a general "clean eating" ideology where detoxing is the law of the land (all of which seems to be based on a vague gut feeling about the own body and how it must be only be fed with certain substances). For others it was a part of a general conspiracy, that after questioning turned out so kookoo that I thaught I was talking to a schizophrenic patient at a mental facility. So even if it turns out they were right and vaccines have a net-negative effect on humanity, they just were right by accident and not because they really had a rational point that anyone could take seriously and follow.

But given the odds I considered they could be right, checked for myself, reached a the conclusion they very certainly are not right, also reached the conclusion that this idea will in a net result produce more harm than good and decided to speak out against it.

None of the anti-vaxxers I had contact with ever atempted to show this kind of humility or consideration themselves, despite this beeing a situation like the one in the desert: you weigh your belief against the lifes of other people. If I where in these shoes I'd try my best to disproof myself, because the consequences in both directions are not a joke. That is why I am interested in where these believes come from and why people so strongly stand behind this. And in my definition this is humility. I'd take back the "of course" as it displays the certainty I had after doing that research. There are obviously people for whom it isn't nearly as clear.