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What's something you were wrong about?
An idea, a perception, a feeling, an understanding, a concept, a framework, a belief, a response, a decision, etc.
What were you wrong about?
What changed your perception?
What has been gained/lost from your new understanding?
Important: It takes a lot of courage and self-reflection for someone to admit when they're wrong. Please honor that in this topic.
I do not want this topic to be a place where people have their previous wrongs used against them. I want this to be a place of honest, empathetic growth rather than a score-keeping battleground. Give hugs, not hurt.
Oh, so many.
A food bank will not turn away people if they live in the area that they are serving. And as for the donations, please, DO NOT donate your old, expired canned food that you won't eat because the food bank/pantry will just throw it out. If you do want to make a donation to your local food bank, and food isn't an option or you don't know what food to donate, money is a good fallback option because that way the bank can get food that people will eat. Or if you can't donate money, then volunteer, donate your time. And if you don't know if your community has a food bank, Feeding America has a food bank locator for the US to find the food bank that serves your area, and using that you can find your local food pantry because those are the actual places that hands out the food for the people.
Thank you! Yes please don't give us your unwanted food :p also in general it's really hard to stock and give away your one unique can. Please just give us your time or a few dollars, our dollars go much further since we can buy at tax credit prices wholesale. Do NOT donate money at the check out at your grocer, but that's a whole other rant
I was wrong in believing that “being the smartest” was the path to success in life outside of school. I always got perfect grades all the way through high school, got a full-ride scholarship to college but I ignored the social parts of life pretty much the whole way through. Friends always came last and I treated people who wanted to be friends as an annoyance more than anything and never put in any effort to form or maintain connections with other people.
A perfect resume will not get you to the places a good reputation with the right people will. People want to work with people they like more than they want to work with the “smartest guy in the room”. People with worse hard skills than you will do better than you and get jobs you want because all organizations are made of people and if you don’t know how to interact positively with other people, you’re going to have a bad time, even in tech.
Yes you need skills and smarts, but other people will only think you’re as skillful and smart as your social skills let shine through.
Fellow learner-of-that-lesson here! Adam Savage said it best (but I'm gonna paraphrase because I can't find the specific reference): It's better to be easy to work with than to be good. I did the being good thing, and I wore myself out trying to be the best and right all the time. I recently changed careers and had a few weeks off between jobs, and spent some of that time thinking about who and what I wanted to be when I got to the new one. I decided to focus on being easy to work with and not on trying to save the company's leadership from itself (as if I know better than them anyway). I'm not doing a perfect job at this mindset, but I'm working at it and people seem to be responding well to it, so that's nice. And it's very freeing.
I've managed tech employees for a while, and from my perspective, this absolutely rings true. I've managed brilliant people who couldn't work as part of a team or take direction, and I've managed middle of the road people who had positive attitudes, were able to work with others, and were eager to learn. It's kind of obvious which of the two were not only easier to manage, but actually produced tangible results.
I kind of think of a large organization like an ant colony. If you have the strongest, smartest ant in the world, there's no benefit if that ant isn't working on moving the same piece of food as the other ants. The 100 smaller, weaker ants will be contributing to doing useful work, and the strong ant will just be hammering against the void. I've had really smart engineers just go off the reservation and spend months on work that turned out to be absolutely useless because they thought they knew best.
Attitude, sociability, friendliness matters way, way more than a lot of people in technical fields think.
The question of "What have you changed your mind on" appears in a longitudinal study on religious belief that I participate in and my inability to answer it with specific examples has made me mull it over in the back of the mind. I keep meaning to make an actual list to refer to.
A few things I've been able to recognize:
At age ~13, I disliked another girl in my peer group. I had an epiphany: I didn't hate her. I was jealous of her. She was fine (it's not like she was ever mean to me; we actually didn't even directly interact much). She just had the qualities I wanted. She was pretty, blonde, liked by other kids, and able to talk to boys. This led me to be able to manage my own feelings about her much more effectively. I recognized she was just living her own life and it had nothing to do with me, and was able to let go of those feelings.
I don't like dresses. As a kid/tween/teen/young adult, I felt stifled in dresses. They were stupid, and floppy, and you couldn't move well in them. They were uncomfortable and made you look dumb. Eventually in my 30s I finally realized that actually, they're pretty nice if you find the right one that suits your style and body type. Part of this was just with experience and developing my own sense of style. Part of it was that I recognized the internalized misogyny. Dresses are for girls, and girls are dumb, so therefore dresses are dumb. Wearing pants is masculine, and men are great, so therefore pants are great. Part of it also stemmed from insecurity. Dresses were for pretty people, and I wasn't a pretty person, so therefore dresses aren't for me. Better just stick to my pants/tshirts because if I tried to look pretty, I would fail, so just don't try. Actually, it's the other way around - dresses make you feel pretty. Now I have some great ones in constant rotation in my wardrobe and not only do I not mind that they make me look like Miss Frizzle, I consider it a great benefit. (Shout out to Princess Awesome and Svaha for great dresses with pockets.)
Weightlifting is not for women. A few years ago I realized I needed to do some sort of exercise. Running is free so I started doing that a little bit. I joined the xxfitness group on reddit to see what other people were doing. Women there posted about weightlifting. I kept scrolling past those topics because ugh, why are they posting about weightlifting, that's not something women do, and focusing on the other topics. Eventually I realized the doublethink inherent in that: women were posting about it, but it's not something women do??? Obviously they do it, because they're posting about it. I ended up joining my local Y and started powerlifting. I was the only women in the weights area 90% of the time, but that was fine. I was a woman, and I was doing it, so it was something women did.
Adding pronouns to email signatures or other areas is useless for cis people. I was never against it for trans people and of course used whatever pronouns people want, but didn't recognize the reasoning for everyone to do it. My name is obviously gendered, so adding a pronoun line didn't have an apparent use. This change of mind was much more direct and exteriorly-influenced: I read an article explaining the reasons why it's useful for cis people to do so as well (e.g., if only trans people do it, then it automatically outs anyone doing it as trans; cis people can have names that don't align with the dominant culture's name-gender rules and therefore it can be helpful to explicitly mention it; etc). I basically went "oh, that makes sense" and changed my Outlook signature.
Those are some very powerful realizations, starting with recognition of jealousy, wow, good for you!
I felt this. I distinctly remember liking glittery shiny things as a small child, and then there was a series of mockery from my mother and older sister about me being "gold digger wife" one day. They probably didn't mean for it to be this damaging, but the result was that I internalised a lot of misogyny and became a sort of Pick Me Girl.
Gendered email always made sense to me because I remember having to send emails to potential employers and wrestling with whether the non Anglo-Saxon names are for a man or woman, living in a very cultural diverse city. Also Chinese names can be very commonly not gendered. It was such a handy thing I don't know why we haven't always been doing it lol. Anyway, I'm Chocobean (she/her) :) nice to meet you.
You'd probably like this movie, "The Codes of Gender", which is about advertising and masculinity/femininity.
I'm glad you came around on a lot of your internal struggles! It sounds like you had a lot of moments of insight.
You may also be interested in reading about "male-flight". I use the word "interested", but that is...a choice lol since the conclusions are pretty dim. Male-flight is the concept that describes the flight of men from an industry, for example, once it becomes perceived as a woman-dominated industry, because of the inherent thought that women are inferior/less valuable. Women must dominate in a field that is not valuable, that is the only way it would be women dominated, etc. So the whole field is now less valuable. Teaching is a prime example, but people also are using this concept to describe why men are decreasing in college enrollment (this is not my belief, but it is a belief that others have).
I don’t add pronouns because I don’t think it matters in the slightest. My name is “obviously” feminine but that’s only due to some amusing quasi-ESL issues with my parents and I’m actually male. As a result 100% of people that I only know through work email are surprised when they meet me.
I had actual homophobia until I was like 30 years old. And by that I don't mean that I hated them, I mean they actually scared me. It was very uncomfortable being in the same room with men I knew to be gay. And it isn't a big mystery why that was -- I had let's say a pretty bad experience when I was a child.
It took a long time for me to connect those things together though, and after I did, it started to dissipate somewhat. The kind of positive thing I gained from all this is that I don't have to use imagination to understand pretty well the women who are complaining about men acting badly towards them.
Powerful statement.
I was never really super clued into politics as a teen or young adult, but like many people online I went through a brief libertarian phase. I didn't know much about economics, taxation, how policy affects society, labor or income distribution or any of that. I just had a really simple model of how the world worked. You go to work, you provide labor, your employer pays you in exchange for that labor, and if you don't like that deal, you're free to get a different job.
Markets figure out which employers are bad to work for, and they go out of business, and the ones that are good to work for thrive. Same goes for the consumer side; the employers that produce food products and services are successful, the ones who don't are unsuccessful.
It seemed obvious to me that that simplified system is how the world would work if only the meddling governments and activists got out of the way.
Thankfully this was pretty brief after my sister (a really brilliant person who worked in international relations doing cool spy stuff) sort of dressed me down one day and told me that's not how things work in the real world. I did a lot more research over the next few years and started actually paying attention and realized how silly my mental model of the world economy is. Obviously a system involving 8 or so billion intelligent, conscious agents is going to be far, far more complicated than something a 17 year old kid had in his head.
Since then I drifted gradually more to the left, which was a natural conclusion of realizing that I really don't know what I'm talking about in many (most) cases when it comes to economics.
I remember the moment when I was talking for the Nth time to a young libertarian and it finally clicked. He was talking about how individuals can hire bodyguards instead of relying on protection from the State, how productive members of society can obviously afford therefore to hire protection. I said, okay cool, fair, but I'm someone who is completely without merit and all I do is talk your bodyguards into murdering you then we split your wealth 50/50, with more down the road if he joins my team of growing robbing thugs. He said, you can't do that! I said, what are you gonna do, call the police?
Next time we met he had thought more about it and the topic never came up again, and he never championed libertarianism again.
I initially read "libertarian" as "librarian" and I was so confused by the attitude of the librarian. Now that I read it correctly, that was an effective argument that really pulls the rug out from these libertarians. Nice work.
I had the same run in, it briefly sounded like a good idea until I realized my college tuition was funded by Pell grants.
My real moment was when I went and watched Rand Paul give a speech, and he stood up there in front of a whole room full of college students and explained to us how every single bill that passes through the senate he just votes no on it because bills == more government control. The whole room cheered.
I think my jaw actually dropped open at the sheer stupidity of it.
A lot of people suffer from living in the wrong part of the XY Problem
"How can I use the government to reduce government control?"
Although, in a meta turn of events, I'm now wondering if I don't understand the XY problem lol or if it doesn't fit here.
I'm a 90's kid, I grew up watching the internet getting ever more accessible to the people, ever more cheaper, ever more convenient when it started working on 3g and then 4g.
I used to read books/magazines about futurology in my school's library. I was easily impressed by how technology will revolutionize different things. One of them was, how the internet was full of knowledge. (yeah you probably already know where this is going)
I started believing that the world would become a better place in my lifetime. People would get more educated, we would all learn to get along by reading other people's experiences all over the globe, have a lot less crime as we got better living conditions and hated others for looking different. I didn't think that wars would end necessarily, but that there would be a lot less of them, and that we developed countries would help the developing countries get better.
Well, my kid self made a crucial mistake: people lie on the internet (😮, I know). And they can lie a lot. Like, a lot. A LOT. To the point that we now, today, have to deal with political movements influenced and instigated by these lies.
What a fairytale that was... I got a lot of things wrong, but this one is the one that stings more, for some reason. I remember being a lot more optimist in general when I was young, maybe that's why.
I'm curious, if you really thought we would end up in the unicorns and rainbows territory or if you always just hoped we would be there? (my tone here is genuine curiosity, not sarcasm).
It's curious to me that tech has a rich background of communicating at a world scale (Hello, World). Since the 1970's at least, they thought we would use this to communicate with everyone, at scales we hadn't before, in an asynchronous manner.
I never thought that tech would bring the world together, I only thought it would let weirdoes find each other (myself included), which would make the weirdoes feel less alone (which it did), and then those weirdoes would fuck off and let other people live their lives (Which some of us did), so that was personally where my err and folly was.
close to unicorns and rainbows.
I don't remember for sure if this was what happened, but I think my thinking was along these lines:
I don't think that I literally thought that we would all be "hippies" and live hapilly ever after, I still understood that some thing were more complicated and couldn't be resolved in our lifetimes, but still, I thought that we would get a lot of steps in that direction
The logic seems sound to me. I genuinely credit Reddit with helping me build my empathy for the exact reasons you stated. I wasn't cruel or bad, but I grew up in a genuinely amazing supportive and loving family, so seeing all the different experiences on there really opened my mind.
Unfortunately, the internet allowing people to share their stories so easily also lets them find echo chambers for more toxic mindsets. It's a double-edged sword.
The #metoo movement changed my perspective gradually. I don't hope, or think, that I have done any metoo-like behaviour, but I was clearly very ignorant and dismissive about many issued raised by that and feminism in general. Like how constant, despite how small and minor, sexualisation and objectification can drain everyone, and that you are not necessarily a "good guy" just because you don't directly assault anyone. Unwanted sexual attention, comments, remarks, certain expectations are part of it too. Death by a thousand cuts.
In the wake of that, I also got a better understanding of the deal with diverse representation in media mean for minorities. It matters if 8 out of 10 times a black person is portrayed in movies are some sort of criminal for example. I would previously have tossed that away as just fiction and not something to worry about, because I thought that there were plenty of white criminal people in movies, but of course there are plenty of white people in all kinds of roles. We are not typecasted or stereotyped the same way.
Same goes for how straight romantic/sexual relationships were traditionally portrayed in many movies, where women were often a prize to be won or in some way "persuaded" to give in. It may be fiction, and fiction should be allowed to portray problematic behaviour, but I would now recognize that is at least worth debating and acknowledging if it is the only way these kind of situations are portrayed in media. We are influenced by them growing up either way, and can't just dismiss it all as "just harmless fiction".
I thought writing a novel would be easier than writing a short-story collection because you only have one reasearch and worldbuilding to do instead of restarting for every story. It turns out, the difficult is about the same for me. Writing is just hard.
This is probably really trivial compared to others’ responses, but I totally thought the iPad would be a failure.
It wasn’t the device itself fully I thought was dumb, it was also just the naming of it as well. I really felt strongly, at the time, there was no market for it.
Well obviously I was very wrong about this. It helped humble me and make me aware of my own arrogance; [it helped me] To understand that I could feel so superiorily correct about my understanding of the tech market that I felt I could even predict something like this.
Also that consumer trends are weird and unpredictable.
If it's any solace to you, I have always hated the interface for the iPad and started me towards basically hating every Apple device thereafter. It's hard to come to terms with the fact that the majority of the world isn't like oneself, though, eh? :)
Not the world, but yea in the US.
I chalk it up to the poor educational standards in the US. ;)
haha, I just mostly shake my fist at the clouds these days when I realize I am not the target audience.
My god, that was an eye-opener. It was a one-liner from a Reddit thread about people not liking Beyonce, and some redditor was like, "have you ever considered you are not the target audience?" and Boom, it was like being hit with a box of bricks.
I felt (and feel) the same. In all fairness, it's still not useful to me -- I have no use for a big, clunky, awkward interface for a browser and email and video machine. My laptop is better in every way for me, especially since Apple Silicon pushed laptop battery life into the stratosphere. With no terminal or root access, I'm simply not interested. Don't even get me started on the complete lack of a browser extensible with proper adblock support or any OS-level extensions like I use for clipboard history, a menu bar calendar widget, etc on macOS and Linux. And the bricked state of old hardware that you can't even run Linux on once Apple stops supporting it.
Anyway, there's an important lesson to learn here, and one I'm trying to avoid making with 'AI' today: just because I am not the target audience does not make a product bad or a failure. Plenty of products defy this -- giant trucks (the most popular car in America), macro beer, fast food, streaming services, literally everything Microsoft makes (except the ergo keyboard), Keurigs, carbon bikes, and tons more. But there's millions upon millions of users for all of those things.
With AI, I suspect we'll eventually get to the point where a lot of mediocre (or people briefly dabbling in a task) writers and coders and image editors use AI to generate good-enough text and code and images and eventually videos. That alone is a massive market because most people are mostly bad at most things, and AI that's even a little below average at a lot of things can do better. That's not even tapping into potential assistance for people who are truly great at a task, to automate little bits and bobs with quality oversight from a pro.
I'm still not fully convinced but at least I'm overcoming my retrogrouch tendencies.
Once I realized the iPad was a consumption device, not a production advice (not meant to diss any producers on iOS), it made sense to me. In that way, its form factor and convenience make it a useful travel accessory, but like you, I'd rather just have a laptop. Or, really, I just went for a phone with a gigantic screen. That is my consumption device.
I like your later takes:
I'd argue that some of those products are bad lol, but not failures.
This sounds like something from Adventure Time, "sucking at something is the first step towards being good at something". Could even be a Homer quotation tbh.
Finally, "retrogrouch"
10/10 would read again.
LOL, you take the cake. I really thought I was alone like, "I even like Apple things, but the iPad, my god...why?!?" But to hear you did this for like several products for so long makes me laugh (not at your expense, hopefully).
I like to pretend this means Apple just designs for Apple's sake and not other people, but I know that is deluded.
I'd say another fringe product that also made no sense to me was: the iPod Touch?!?! Whatever was happening between death of the iPod and advent of the iPhone. The plastic iPhone as another one. When they made all the buttons a touchscreen on the Macbook? Weird things sometimes...
I was always a fan of the iPod series (up to the merger I just discussed), but I also remember lots of people just not at all understanding why someone would want to have the screenless shuffle lol. I wish the USA had adopted the minidisc player for so many reasons. The mechanical touch alone is so satisfying!
Because of this "Apple Effect", I keep wondering what is going to happen with their VisionPro, like is it going to iPad me?!?! Will it be the thing at some point?!
Extended Cut
I had also already seen something called the tactapad before the iPad had come out and saw how that had failed so I was like, "what's the iPad gonna do that the tactapad couldn't?!"
Other way round for me, I thought VR was actually going to be popular at some point lol
I don't think it's dead yet, but there are 2 big problems with it. High cost of decent equipment, and motion sickness that affects a fair number of people. I think there are many amazing VR experiences out there that are just hard to imagine until you've experienced them. I think it could take another 5-20 years, but I think it will come back at some point. I think an AR experience might help address the motion sickness for people, and as/if manufacturing processes improve it should get more affordable. I still might be wrong, but I don't want to give up on VR yet.
Agreed, even though the ability to admit you are wrong about something is very powerful for self development and growth. I think that the sunk cost fallacy is applied most often on ourselves, our own beliefs and viewpoint of things.
This doesn't just apply to big things. It might even have a bigger impact on smaller things. For example, here on Tildes I have had conversations where I came back, read the argument again and realized I was wrong initially. When realizing that I try to actually acknowledge that in my reply.
More generally it also means I have been wrong about many things and probably will be wrong about many other things in the future. Which is okay, it is incredibly difficult to be right about everything all the time because it is impossible to have all information available to you from the start.
I had the clichéd deal of not understanding how pervasive and subtle racism could be in this country (UK) until it affected someone I cared about. I never thought I lived in a pardise of equality or anything, but it took a (mixed-race, could be mistaken for middle-eastern) boyfriend pointing out how the security guard was vaguely following us around the supermarket for me to notice.
I also stopped asking people where their surnames are from after I learned what a microaggression was. I have a foreign surname, so to me it felt like camaraderie along the lines of "I bet no one can spell your name right either!" and interest in them as a person, but that's probably not how others receive it. To be honest I'm still pretty bummed about it, I like learning where names come from.
I was wrong about giving up on getting a college education. I used to think that it wasn’t necessary.
Well, maybe it isn’t “necessary”, but some kind of marketable skill is necessary (I think), and it’s “easier” to get that in college.
I’m 34 now and my circumstances make it impossible for me to get one, solidifying my perpetual poverty.
Oh noes! There was a post here easier about Sophia / Modern States / U of the People being quite affordable options. They're several hundred to start or only pay for exams etc.
Oh boy.
The one that I am more comfortable with sharing, is my past beliefs with the LGBTQ+ community and the fucking "jokes" that I would make back in high school, especially during the day that LGBTQ+ people and their allies would go through the day without talking to signify their closeted past. Thankfully I don't have these beliefs anymore.
I was wrong about how desktop computers would remain the dominant way to browse the web. To me, the browser experience on desktop is so much better than on a smartphone, yet since the introduction of the smartphone, it has slowly shifted. Looking today, mobile browser usage is higher than desktop browse usage, which is not something I ever would even have thought to happen. It's not like I ever claimed browser usage on mobile devices will forever be less than desktop usage, but I had that idea in my head without ever putting much thought into it.
I was CONVINCED VR would change gaming in a huge way.
I tried a Oculus DK2 back in 2015/2016 and thought it was pretty cool, but it wasn't quite there yet. When I tried the HTC Vive with actual positional + hand tracking it blew me away. Like I played skyrim on that thing and my jaw was on the floor, I was like this is it, gaming has gone next level, we've done it.
And there's been a lot of great novel experiences, also some great hardware, but it's really not caught onto the mass market even with Facebook pushing it so hard.
I think the problem is exactly why I don't play much VR any more, it's just a pain to setup and play. The headsets are still too clunky and heavy to make it easy, I can't just boot up a game and jump in, I gotta get ready for it and like jesus man, the game has got to be good for that.
That said, I saw the Big screen 2 getting announced and I was so close to buying one, that thing looks sick!
The big ones for me - well, to be honest the fun ones - have been food related. I've had enough doomerism this week so I'm keeping it light today!
Spring rolls - Stick with me here, but when I was younger I always thought they had the mouth feel of a condom with almost no flavor. I had only ever had them at really white grocery stores and really didn't like them. It was a disappointing discovery because their sexy cousin, the egg roll, was so, so good. But then I made homemade ones with a few friends of mine a few years ago and fell in love with them. The sauces we so good, the rice paper rolls were much less chewy and more delicate, the fillings were to die for. So yeah, I was definitely wrong about those.
Kale - I first bought Kale when it came into vogue a la 2009 (maybe it was earlier for other folks, but that's when it entered my purview). I was on a health kick and eating lots of very, very bad salads. Like green + vinegar. I didn't look up how to prep it, I just treated it like spinach, and the first time I ate it I literally took a bite of a leaf holding it like a bouquet. It felt like I was eating a eucalyptus leaf. I didn't touch it again for years. That is until the same friends who converted me to spring rolls made me a kale salad. They had cut out the stems and crushed the chopped leaves in lemon juice ahead of time and added a killer dressing. It was crunchy but tender, so so tasty. Again, you just have to learn how to prep it. I eat it about twice a week now.
Gnocchi - I never understood why you would eat gnocchi when there were so many better ways to eat potatoes and so many better pastas. Like, why fuck up 2 great things at once? Again, until I ate gnocchi at a friends house who had made them by hand and did a basic olive oil/sage/rosemary/thyme combo. Holy shit were they delicious. They sucked up all of those flavors and each piece was a little floral bomb. 10/10
Seeded Breads - I'm a bread boy. My partner and I joke that my priority and love list is 1. Bread, 2. Her, 3. Ocean. Bread is king. But up until about 3 years ago seeds on my bread was a total no go. The texture kind of ruins the crunchiness of a fresh loaf. The seed flavor masks the subtle underlying bread notes. And often folks put toasted sesame seeds on it which make everything they touch taste like sesame (same with sesame oil - though I do love that when done right). But one day the local bakery had sold out of everything except their seeded loaf and I conceded that bread w/ seeds was preferable to no bread, so I bought it. While I still don't think it goes with everything - and keep it away from my sandwiches - it can bring a really nice nutty texture to soft/crumbly cheese and jams. I'd say it's a great charcuterie loaf.
The ones I'm confident I will have my mind changed on, buuut still haven't yet.