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Its probably a bad sign, but I don't feel I've been wrong about much. Probably because many of my views are hedged in the first place. I expect tradeoffs for policies, so I'm less surprised by the downsides. I'm also deeply uncertain about many things. I only hold a few opinions super strongly, and those opinions tend to be values statements rather than policy prescriptions.
The last time I remember having a seismic shift in my views was about a decade and a half ago when I was in college. I suppose I'd bought into the sexual revolution hype that women could be carefree and open about sex, and I thought as a guy I just wanted a lot of sex with different women. After I started actually having sex with real women I quickly came to feel that this was all wrong. Women care about sex, and can't help but become emotionally invested in it and their partners. And I wanted a steady and loving relationship more than I wanted a parade of new women. I came to view women that don't have the emotional attachment to sex as emotionally broken and likely abuse victims. And men that haven't figured out the benefits of a relationship over casual sex as just immature.
My positive views on drug legalization, open immigration, open trade, and free markets have remained almost entirely unchanged. If anything I feel more certain in these views because I have witnessed the negative tradeoffs of them and have found that they are tolerable and not as bad as I feared.
My negative views on government power and foreign intervention have also remained unchanged. I feel that some of my fears of these things have been borne out. The failures in Iraq and Afghanistan were things I thought would happen. If they had instead been huge success stories I would have had to shift my views. State surveillance and power over the internet led to some very ugly things during the Covid era.
I'm mostly the same as you, almost no changes in my beliefs since my early teens, only evidence that I was correct all along. However, there's some classes of very unintuitive insights, like the following:
I was wrong about the value of freedom. It's still valuable to me, but I believe that many people are better off with less, and know I know that restriction helps creativity (writers block, analysis paralysis, indecisiveness, being lost in life etc) seem to be consequences of excess choices. Furthermore, excess freedom often lead people to ruin themselves.
Like Dag said, people who meditate aren't perfect. I think this is because people who meditate the most are those who need it the most. Those who go to psychiatrists also aren't the most mentally healthy, right? It's the opposite.
Suffering isn't really a bad thing. You're meant to act as if it's bad, but it's good for you (but only if you fight against it as if it weren't!).
I used to think that intelligence was the answer to everything. Raise the average IQ by 15 points, and we'd get 100 times more people like Hawkings, right? But now I don't look for friends in intellectual circles anymore, I'm having a much better time around people with IQs in the 115s. I've liked very few of the 145+ IQ people I've met.
I used to dislike vagueness, but now I love it. If you don't label things, you allow them to be what they are, and when you label things, you restrict them. Socially, this can work like magic, you can flirt with somebody, and they get to decide how seriously you were being when you said what you did.
I now consider information to have serious downsides. Knowing less is often better. I even avoid environments in which the legibility is too high. In Ribbonfarm terms, I stick to Warrens and avoid Plazas. I sometimes intentionally keep myself from understanding others, and (selectively) keep them from understanding things about me. Physical cash has a much lower legibility than credit cards, which is why I think it would be a terrible idea to get rid of it.
In the past I thought egoism was bad, now I think it's good. Gatekeeping is good too. Discrimination? Invaluable (choosing a romantic partner is like the ultimate discriminatory behaviour). I used to think I was a good person, but it turns out I was a coward. By the way, while I dislike Muslims, I believe that their lack of self-doubt is very much a sign of health. Human beings aren't mean to suffer from their conscience to the degree that we now do in the west. I'm inferior to Genghis Khan because I will never be as true to live as he was.
Anyway, the pattern here, which I likely didn't show very well, is "Sometimes the truth is the complete opposite of what's intuitive". When you take something to the extreme, it tends to flip onto the opposite extreme (like atheist scientists becoming religious), and I did this to myself in many areas
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I think I’m similar for the same reasons. If I ever leaned toward libertarianism, it was only for a very brief period. I always found the idea of "Everything the government does is the worst, and everything would be better if it ceased to exist" to be cringeworthy. For example, yes, I’m willing to tolerate school shootings so I can have easier access to guns. I was told this perspective would change when I had a kid… but nope. Legalization of drugs? The opioid epidemic has had zero effect on my stance, and people getting lazier on marijuana doesn’t change my opinion either.
I don’t argue for straight anarcho-capitalism much anymore; instead, I try to engage within the mindset of the person I’m speaking with. For instance, I’m against foreign intervention across the board, but if someone who voted for George W. Bush criticizes U.S. support for Ukraine, I’ll argue that it’s probably the best deal in foreign policy in decades.
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