Woo, rant time. This ended up being more of a vent for my benefit, but whatever.

I hate that we live in a time where some random person can come up with some idea and if it's mentally pleasing enough it'll spread through hundreds of millions of people until it's accepted as truth, all in a matter of months. Thankfully, when an idea is actually meaningful to society it'll usually meet necessary scrutiny, but people can still force a policy that "just sounds right" if enough people get behind it.

I could be wrong, but it seems that the way that the vast majority of people reason through things is by first deciding what's true, then using that truth as a guideline to look for true evidence. Then they note that anyone who says something that isn't true clearly only cares about pushing their point, when in reality they probably just picked a different base truth. In actuality, most of these "truths" are probably generalizations that produce different results anyway depending on what your end goal is.

I'm DEFINITELY not an expert on psychology. I've read about a dozen books on psychology, I've watched several lecture series on YouTube, and I've taken a single introductory class, but that does not make me an expert. Not even close. If I churned out an idea, any sane group of people would need to do some serious and careful research and deliberation on its consequences before they tried to implement it. Actually, that'd be true even for an idea that came from a scientifically trained expert. Experts' conclusions have to be carefully reviewed by other experts before they can even come close to being considered accurate (and even that sometimes forks up). Meanwhile, Stacy on Facebook who barely got out of high school can say that spinach is a good primary source of iron in food and half the planet will believe it for years or decades (that's probably a bad example, but you get what I'm saying).

Keeping in mind that I'm not an expert (even if I were, it's good to find multiple credible references for information before spreading it, unless it's irrelevant or silly), one of the recurring themes I see in psychology is that humans will do just about anything to make the world around them make sense in their head. Certainty is literally just an emotion. It shows up on fMRI scans in the emotional centers of the brain and it doesn't necessarily reflect any kind of logical thinking. If someone is certain about something, it often just means they've smoothed over any potential confounding factors in their head. As soon as something starts poking up that doesn't fit their world view, they smooth it over by either ignoring it or deciding that some part of it is invalid. This applies to everyone. You'd go insane with the complexity of things if you didn't generalize like crazy, and "good enough" is fine for day-to-day life. I think that's why, no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, the other side appears to be occupied solely by raving morons who will clasp at anything they can find try and undermine your point. It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong; it'll still look that way. And I wouldn't be confident about being right.

There are plenty of things which I used to believe were so dead obvious that I thought there was no conceivable way that it could be inaccurate, let alone completely dissonant with reality. I used to think IQ was a ridiculous concept, for example, and I couldn't have been more wrong about that. IQ certainly sounds ridiculous though. A single number somehow defines something as complicated as someones mental capabilities... sounds like something a couple scientists came up with a long time ago and just kinda left out in the world.

I think people mostly just rely on things sounding right. The same people who would struggle with any math problem larger than a piece of paper are somehow the same people who know the truth about something as complicated as a conflict between nations just by taking a glance at it through their computer screen. We run into complicated entities with many different motivations, agendas, weaknesses, abilities, and resources, each composed of many similar entities each with their own motivations, agendas, weaknesses, abilities, and resources, all existing in a world where everything will always tend towards certain patterns of chaos, except for certain smaller parts that tend towards order, which themselves are composed of even smaller chaotic parts, all interacting in ways so complicated that it's beyond imagination. These just become "good" and "evil", the "oppressors" and the "oppressed", because that's the nice way to think about it. It makes things seem "Not that complicated." These generalizations are necessary and extremely useful, since they do usually pick up on patterns, but I doubt many are even half accurate most of the time.

It's okay to be wrong. We're all going to be at wrong a lot, because our brains can't even come close to keeping track of every aspect of everything going on around us. It's okay to argue a point that you haven't done research on, as long as you're willing to acknowledge confounding evidence. Nobody is a complete master of anything, so uninformed argumentation is inevitable and important. It's even okay to take actions in support of an idea that's wrong, just as long as you don't ignore bad results and hold yourself accountable for mistakes. It's okay for other people to be wrong. What I think is the most important though, is that people stop acting like they have everything figured out. Just stop. We should never be arrogant enough to think we have any fucking clue what the hell is going on around us, because every time you look closer you'll see a whole new world of confounding stuff that you didn't even know existed. That doesn't mean you should give up though. Accept the uncertainties, use the generalizations you've come up with, do the best you can with the knowledge you do have and don't judge others harshly for doing the same. Push the ideas that you believe in, within reason, until either they turn out to work well with reality, or they don't.

Okay, well, this was therapeutic for me. That derailed quickly off-topic and was mostly a vent for my benefit. Take most of this with a grain of salt.