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How often do you admit you were wrong? (startrek.website)

submitted 2 days ago by jtrek@startrek.website to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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As the title says, how often do you admit you're wrong? Is it different when it's a factual dispute versus something more subjective?

I make an effort to concede early if I'm in error. I think because my mother almost never admits fault. She'll fall back to "that's not what I meant" or similar deflections first, and that's really annoying.

The last big factual error I made was about the distance of walking, and that's where I learned about Taxicab Geometry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry ).

I think some people believe admitting fault is a sign of weakness, but I find it's more of a power move. It takes strength to do it, and people can tell when you're sweating and desperate. Usually it leads to resolving the conflict faster and cheaper, too.

(I expect some people will feel the urge to reply they're never wrong. I'll file that under never admits fault.)

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[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 20 hours ago

I think that it's natural for people to think they admit when they're wrong, but it's also natural to not admit it. As humans we don't make decisions based on logic, we do it based on emotions. We then instead explain our decisions with logic. I think the usual way people's minds change is that they'll effectively be convinced of something but won't really admit or accept it (or even be consciously aware of it), but then the next time the topic comes up they'll have the new opinion.

[-] jtrek@startrek.website 2 points 16 hours ago

I read an article once about how people change their minds. It cited a long term study that found people who changed their stance on big issues (eg: abortion) often didn't remember they had ever held the opposite opinion. Not only do people not like to admit changing their minds, sometimes they can't even consciously realize.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 12 hours ago

You may like this VSauce video about this topic called The Future of Reasoning. I spent a lot of time in 2020 and 2021 arguing with people online about covid and election fraud. I was under the impression that if someone just calmly, gently, respectfully laid out why they were wrong they'd accept it. I mean, for goodness's sake, one of the claims I responded to was someone saying something about X number of people voted in some county but there aren't that many people registered there. I told them it's easy to debunk and that I just searched Google for the county's official website and voter registration numbers and, as expected, they were different and higher than the number of people who voted. You wanna know what their response was? "Google is biased." Even though the information wasn't from Google, that's just how I found the site. (And I probably even used duckduckgo but didn't want to explain that lmao, point still stands.)

This video came to me after I'd already made the conscious decision to just stop doing it for my own mental health. It was really impactful.

https://youtu.be/_ArVh3Cj9rw

Perhaps the most ironic (or unironic) thing is that had I seen this before I had that experience, I may have disagreed with the video.

this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026

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