One of the problems in this context (social media) is that people who know or don’t know each other have come to think that they can change the minds, opinions or behavior of others by posting opinions, rants, perspectives or statistics.

That’s not how people change each others’ minds. And part of what is going on here has almost nothing to do with minds, it has to do with ideological religions that determine who is US and who is THEM. Understanding this is crucial, otherwise we can easily become confused between something resembling tribal identity and something else resembling the capacity to understand a topic or situation rationally.

My point is this: if we want to transform perspectives (ours or others, particularly if those others are random people on the internet) we have to realize the problem isn’t rationality or ideas. It’s clade membership. It’s us vs themism. So in order to actually have a chance of changing someone’s perspective on, for example, if the coronavirus is a hoax of if President Trump is a deadly idiot or if people should or shouldn’t wear masks… posting crap on social media doesn’t fly. It actually causes the opposite effect of that we are hoping for and expecting: people just anchor further into their delusions, opinions and beliefs.

How do we change »that?

It starts with something we’re not yet doing here: a specific form of pre-unification that happens in an actual context where people »first agree that they have come together for the purpose of learning, communicating, and clarifying their perspectives and reasons for believing things. If this agreement is not established? Posting perspectives, statistics, charts and articles in favor or against some position… generally just inclines those reading them to further concretize… often angrily… their pet positions.

Evidence is only useful when the agreement to learn together has first been established as a priority, »and we have the tools to discern the difference between actually reliable evidence and material that masquerades as such for purposes we can together identify and make transparent.

# I almost never »request that people share something, but this post is important enough that I would appreciate it if those who understand it would consider sharing it.