Disagreeing with people for the sake of being disagreeable is pathological.
Willful ignorance is definitionally closed minded. If every scientist immediately disagreed with every whitepaper that every other scientist published no ideas would spread. Open mindedness is important but so is discernment. Prejudicial dismissal of ideas is dumb.
I love talking about why I'm disagreeable, thank you for bringing it up. I can elaborate if you have anything specific you want to ask, but to keep things simple, I believe that disagreeing and arguing with someone is the fastest way to form a deeper understanding of their thought process. You are disagreeing with me right now, and I see it as a great compliment.
I see, so it sounds like you believe that willful ignorance and prejudicial dismissal of ideas are always closedminded. What about non-prejudicial dismissal of ideas? What if someone had actual reasoning and criteria for dismissing ideas? For example, would it be closedminded for a scientist to refuse to read papers depending on whether the scientist accepts the standard assumptions and methodology that the paper is built on top of?
And since willful ignorance is relevant to your understanding of closedmindedness, I would like to ask you some questions about your understanding and usage of that term as well. I believe that there is an awful lot of information available within the world's collective knowledge. I don't believe it would ever be possible to examine all of it. Do you consider it willful ignorance if someone intentionally chooses to avoid spending their time on certain topics that they have determined not to be worth the time? Is it willful ignorance for example if someone avoids spending their time learning about celebrity drama?
People don't typically try to tell you about the salt on crackers or the color of the sidewalk. They're generally telling you highlights and to dismiss their attempt to share what they consider to be significant with you is the same thing as judging their ability to determine what is and what is not significant. Most people are not good judges of what is significant. Bear in mind people took experimental gene therapy shots for free donuts.
If someone tells me something is significant, I will give them the benefit of the doubt and do some initial exploration of that thing.
It starts to become a problem when we incorporate timelines into play. If it is something I've already explored, they wouldn't know that I've already explored it so, even though I might know that my dismissal is not prejudicial, the other party does not know that. All they experience is rejection.
Such a person might be prone to falsely equate what they experienced with willful ignorance on my part, however their accusation is based upon ignorant assumptions.
Speaking from my perspective, I've canvassed a LOT of people on the subjects I talk about. Almost nobody has ever heard of these topics. This means they are not in the position I described above where they've already studied this thing I'm showing them and have the ability to intelligently converse upon that subject and countervail any arguments for that thing's significance. So when they dismiss these things, they are dismissing them out of ignorance.
Well spoken and relevant points there. I would like to caution you however with the other side of your last point. The fact that there are so few who can speak with knowledge on those points means you have very few people to keep you balanced. Many people are not in a good position to move into the unknown and can find little value in the first reports they hear from an explorer. Being an explorer is also a very risky business.
That's 100% true. If I haven't argued with someone about a particular topic, then my beliefs on that topic are pretty much useless. There are a great many topics I have thought about that I am very patiently waiting for someone to talk about them with.
Buddy how many liberal memes deep are we into this conversation from both of us and you break out the line that people are generally telling you the HIGHLIGHTS? I shudder to imagine what the whole cannoli looks like!
But no, that's completely bullshit. A person with a great ability to articulate their point and a confidence in their understanding of the other person's thought process will be concise, but that is the exception, not the rule. God damn, I'm having PTSD flashbacks to that one Christian I talked with who would literally talk for multiple hours spanning across half a dozen different topics when I asked him a simple religious question and not even end up answering the damn question. It was our third conversation before he reluctantly admitted that he could stand to ask me a question or two, and even that was only after someone explicitly told him as much.
You are 100% correct that I am judging their ability to determine what is and what is not significant. A person cannot know what is significant in a conversation with me unless they have asked me many questions about my beliefs and know my position well. Listen, I'm not going to stop talking with someone just because they told me something that would have literally zero affect on my beliefs regardless of if it was true. But that doesn't mean I'm going to accept hours and hours of homework from someone who refuses to take the time to ask about my own position and listen to it for just a few minutes.
