Even more sobering for me is how a lot of people in my circle of friends had pretty strong opinions on various issues at the height of the pandemic, from masks and lockdowns over vaccines to the origins of the virus and so on, but today, when I (gently) probe them on how those views have held up, what caused them to change their opinion on, say, whether closing down schools and making young children wear masks was really such a good idea, they act like they have always believed what’s common sense now.
And these aren’t people who generally ‘go with the flow’ of public opinion, they usually have a model of how their opinions evolve over time. But with this a lot of people don’t seem to be willing to acknowledge to themselves what kinds of positions they argued even two years ago.
Conversely, I’ve noticed some people who had the correct opinions before, but have since changed their opinions to conform with what is now (erroneously) seen as “common sense”.
Oh, for sure. My point is more that the incredibly strong social pressure that characterized the dialogue around all questions concerning COVID completely overrode individual reflective capacity to the point where people don’t even have a self-image of how their positions shifted over time and based on what new information/circumstances.
Sure—what I had in mind was mostly stuff like “lockdowns / mask mandates / etc. are good/necessary” → “lockdowns / mask mandates / etc. are bad/harmful/etc.”. People have drawn entirely the wrong conclusions about these things from observations of the last two years. (Robyn Dawes, in Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, writes about this mistake, wherein people learn from experience when they really shouldn’t; this seems like a good real-life example.)
Even more sobering for me is how a lot of people in my circle of friends had pretty strong opinions on various issues at the height of the pandemic, from masks and lockdowns over vaccines to the origins of the virus and so on, but today, when I (gently) probe them on how those views have held up, what caused them to change their opinion on, say, whether closing down schools and making young children wear masks was really such a good idea, they act like they have always believed what’s common sense now.
And these aren’t people who generally ‘go with the flow’ of public opinion, they usually have a model of how their opinions evolve over time. But with this a lot of people don’t seem to be willing to acknowledge to themselves what kinds of positions they argued even two years ago.
Conversely, I’ve noticed some people who had the correct opinions before, but have since changed their opinions to conform with what is now (erroneously) seen as “common sense”.
Oh, for sure. My point is more that the incredibly strong social pressure that characterized the dialogue around all questions concerning COVID completely overrode individual reflective capacity to the point where people don’t even have a self-image of how their positions shifted over time and based on what new information/circumstances.
Can you provide an example (without naming people)?
Sure—what I had in mind was mostly stuff like “lockdowns / mask mandates / etc. are good/necessary” → “lockdowns / mask mandates / etc. are bad/harmful/etc.”. People have drawn entirely the wrong conclusions about these things from observations of the last two years. (Robyn Dawes, in Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, writes about this mistake, wherein people learn from experience when they really shouldn’t; this seems like a good real-life example.)