I'm an engineer. It's my job to be wrong until I'm right.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
73 points (97.4% liked)
Ask Lemmy
32500 readers
1675 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Fantastic description of engineering.
I'm bookmarking this
Yes, but all that schooling helps you to be wrong fewer times consecutively than an average person would be on matters that are within the narrow confines of your field... during regular working hours.
during regular working hours.
And generally after a couple cups of coffee, and before 4, and not during lunch, and not on Fridays.
I thought I was wrong, once. But I was mistaken.
I'm always right, especially when I'm wrong.
I'm wrong all the time. My amazing ADHD lets me finish stories in my head when someone starts talking, and it never goes the adventurous amazing way my brain told me it was going to go.
I was wrong thinking that having access to information would change the world for the better.
My childish self honestly had no idea that so many people would rebel against their fellow man and common sense rather than learn and accept that they had some wrong information about something.
My hopeful naivety kept me blind to the idea that people are fundamentally stupid, and will fight to the bitter end to die like the dogs they are rather than take one step as a human being that has the tiniest little flaw.
And that includes myself.
There are a few controversial subjects I’ve changed my mind about recently, and it only happened because someone actually took the time to engage with me instead of just hurling insults and trying to shut down the discussion. I’m not even going to specify what I changed my mind about, because I know I’d just get attacked again - for views I don’t even hold anymore.
Thought isn’t a crime we all deserve the chance to grow
I was wrong about capital punishment up into my twenties. It took someone sitting me down and explaining it's more expensive to kill people than just jail them for life (along with why). These days I'm a bit ashamed that that was the argument that convinced me but that was among a few key watershed moments that pulled back the veil and got me thinking and noticing that fiscal conservatives somehow didn't ever seem to pick the most sensible option to achieve their goals—clearly their goals aren't what they claim. They want to reduce abortion, but not in ways that actually work. They want to reduce crime, but not in ways that actually work. Fuck, they want to balance budgets, but not in ways that actually work.
We're all on a journey, friend. And sometimes that's especially hard online because the strides we take are often attacked for being insufficient. People demand total, instant realignment, and you're still attacked for not believing it all along. I'm glad most of my journey was not made on social media because I've certainly held some regrettable positions.
Good luck!
My argument against capital punishment is that no legal system is foolproof and some number of innocent people are going to get locked up no matter what. That is aready unacceptable in itself but the idea of sentencing someone to death who hasn't done anything wrong is the greatest injustice I can think of.
There's even a saying about it. "I would rather a thousand guilty men go free than one innocent man be murdered".
Sure, I'm just saying falling short of perfection is not the argument that swayed me. It took me time to get there.
I was super in favor of capital punishment until we had to do an essay on a controversial topic in my senior year of high school and as I was researching for it I was like "wait a minute this actually sucks ass." Capital punishment kind of only "works" if your underlying assumption is that the justice system gets it right every time, which is not true at all. It also isn't even a good deterrent- it makes no difference on capital crime rates whether the death penalty is a possibility or not. So the only reason to have it is that your own sense of "justice" requires criminals to be killed, even if it doesn't actually help anything and even if it doesn't prevent more crimes. And again, that denies any possibility that the justice system ever gets things wrong and wrongfully convicts someone.
Oh I was way shittier than that when I was younger. I mean I assumed they got it right almost every time and the couple of exceptions would be caught by appeals and such and it was such a vanishingly small number of actually innocent people that would be killed that it was an acceptable number.
That was before I saw stuff like proof people were innocent and DAs still fighting against them being released. It never occurred to me that expecting everyone in the justice system to seek real justice was completely naive of me. Of course police wouldn't try to arrest someone they knew was innocent, and of course the DA wouldn't prosecute and if they were ever made aware of a mistake, of course they would correct that immediately.
Turns out the world is largely made up of folks who genuinely don't care if other people live or die or whether it's right or wrong, as long as it doesn't inconvenience them at all.
load more comments
(1 replies)
In 1992 I thought the GOP was being hyperbolic about Bill Clinton's history of sexual predation. Im not proud of that.
In 1992 I thought the GOP cared about extra marital sexual activity. They do not.
I'm wrong all the time.
Just yesterday I was talking to a friend, mentioning that it is insane how it was only a few years ago that a province in my country removed the rule that all government buildings need to have a christian cross on the wall.
Turns out the conservatives successfully fought that change and it's still mandatory.
It's impossible to be correct 100% of the time
This sounds like Bavaria :D
Correct!
I didn't realize "banal" was pronounced "ban all" and cluelessly described something as "b-anal"
It is rather banal to be anal about pronunciation like that.
I didn’t realize “banal” was pronounced “ban all”
😶
I was today years old...
I misspelled Denuvo earlier and two people had to be jerks about it.
That's ok.
It doesn't deserve to be spelled correctly.
I'm remodeling a house and I've learned that my initial idea is always wrong and it will take me 3 days to accept the right answer.
My ex often got frustrated with me because I spend so much time in the planning phase, like learning about things, researching the various options, and making sure that everything is fully prepped and laid out before I start on a project.
Despite all of that, I have yet to have a project go to plan, Except for the one that I came up with off the top of my head.
I was redoing my flooring, and I have like a half third story that's open, and there's a lot of exposed transition space between the straight drop-off and the end of the flooring.
It was gonna look really bad to just put L-shaped brackets down to cover over the transition, So, spur of the moment, I realized that I could put a longer flat piece that had a beveled edge on it, and then the L bracket on top of that, and it is probably one of the nicest features in my house.
I recently thought geese just ate bugs in the grass and even said so, but apparently they graze on the grass. I admitted my mistake when I found out a couple days later.
I've never had a geese-observation opportunity but now I know they eat grass and the bugs in it, so thanks!
Oh goodness, 24 years ago I was uninformed, narrowminded and had been brought up sheltered and rather conservative. So I used to be hugely trans- and homophobic. I wasn't actively hurting or confronting anyone, but I was definitely a big part of the problem.
It actually was webcomics that deprogrammed me. That showed me a world I simply did not know but quickly felt empathy for. Those were normal, lovely people who simply existed differently from me, they weren't a threat and they had so many struggles pushed on them only for being different.
Today I'm far-left, progressive, super empathetic, happy that a lesbian friend calls me "one of the good ones" and that I, as a huuuuuge white cis guy, can be an ally and create a safe space around me for everyone who needs it.
I thought the cat wanted to be pet— it did not.
I bet it did want to be petted but its a cat... so those things change pretty quickly and most of the time your gonna be the last to know
Several times as viewable here on the Fediverse; this account, my P.D. account, accidentally posted a comment to the wrong post as viewable in the modlogs😣, CCing lemmy.ca admins and P.D. admins.
Making mistakes all the time is painful; hopefully I've repeated less of them as time continues or so I hope anyways...
I am wrong about almost every major decision I make on my life. I am never wrong about trivia though
Omg last night at pool league. 9-ball playoffs. I, possibly the best player on our team, called a timeout to “help” the worst player on our team, and gave solid advice on what shot to take, but failed to understand her skill level and failed to give additional helpful details (like how hard to hit it). She missed the shot and set up her opponent for an easy win and we ultimately lost the tournament by one point. Sigh. Big ole goof and totally my fault.
Practice makes perfect I bet she’ll remember the shot next time and come at it with a higher skill level ^^
I thought hillary was going to win the 2016 election.
Same, and I also thought Kamala would win because our voters couldn't possibly be dumb enough to elect the dipshit fascist again after how badly it went the first time and how he was talking about all the awful shit he'd do.
I was wrong to put any faith in my fellow citizens, clearly.
I thought trumps handler wouldn’t let him actually do tariffs
I....
...oh God..
..assumed some salvia divinorum extract (20x ~~fuck~~) was weak, as I had vaped it, with minimal effect. I was instructed to use a torch lighter to properly get it to temperature. I predicted a moderate boost in strength.
...
Alright, here's a rhetorical question. Have you ever closed a door multiple times without opening it? I have. I also saw 3D space below 3D space, and multiple time points at once.
My room mates said I was banging on things loudly.
Oops.
Anyways, I'd 100% do it again. I was scared out of my mind, and thought I was sober at that (you literally can't imagine), but it was absolute comedy gold in retrospect. I also kind of went in blind. That's what I get for being negligent--a good memory.
I now smoke plain leaf bowls pretty regularly.
I am an unethically resilient force to be reckoned with and I didn't ask for this. I'm not complaining, though. I love the funny chaos leaf.
I also used to be an orange man endorser. Ew.
A link to my salvia post. It's missing details. I had a bit of amnesia.
It got me, even after I knew how strong it was. It still got me.
It's "Revved up like a deuce."
Not "Wrapped like a dou..." well you know.
First heard that song in 1981... Learned the correct lyrics in 2020. 39 years of being wrong, but I think I'm in good company.
Also learned that the version that most people know is actually a cover done by Manfred Mann in 1976. The original artist is Bruce Springsteen and he recorded it in 1973.
I've been a short-tempered bitch with people when I really shouldn't have been. Haven't been that way in years, but in my youth it happened several times. There's also been moments I've looked back on in my youth and realized I had some views that were the result of institutionalized racism that I didn't even realize were racist until I'd educated myself years later and realized my poor judgement.
Can you provide examples of your former views?
I guess I should have said my past "ignorance" instead of my past "views", because it's really just assumptions I made based on stereotypes and because I was indeed ignorant. I can remember being in high school (a VERY white high school, we legit had no POCs at all) in my teens and one of my classmates went on vacation to China, and when she got back I asked her didn't everyone there look the same?? Because all Asians look alike, right?? (please note my sarcasm there)
I remember when I first joined the Army, meeting a black girl my age who loved Metallica and this blew my mind because I'd never known any black people who liked any sort of rock, because they only like rap, right?? (/s). Or when I assumed that trying to manage my own very curly hair was somehow relatable to a black person having to manage THEIR curly hair (it isn't, at all).
It was never anything outwardly damaging, it was just little ignorant thoughts like that, where I was able to look back on them and be like whoa, I was really wrong/ignorant/racist to assume that. But I also think that that's part of growing up in America, unfortunately, you don't realize what's behind thoughts like that, and yes, I think EVERYONE has those moments of ignorance and covert racism. The trick is to recognize them, learn from them, move on, and not make them again.
I'll step up. I was raised in the south by... well, okay by the kind of racist white people that say they are not racist even though they don't like people of other colors inside of their field of vision.
I am not white myself, and so I got preferential treatment. I was "one of the good ones".
Plus, as a Native American, I kind of had like this weird, beneficent racism thing where they were like, oh, he can talk to horses, and he can hear it in the trees, and see it in the wind, all of that stupid shit.
Anyway, I didn't really mind people of color, black people, I would talk to them and be friendly with them because I didn't have any reason not to be, right?
But sometime around when I was 18 years old, I suddenly realized that I would change my way of speaking when I was around black people. I would say things like, "yo, dog, what's up?" Instead of, "hey man, how's it going?"
And I realized now that that is ingratiating behavior. I wanted the other people I was around to feel more comfortable with me, and so I was imitating what I assumed was their speech pattern.
But I also realized that I was pigeonholing them into acting a particular way. I was maintaining the concept that "Black people talk like black people" instead of "people just talk".
Once I realized I was doing that, I dropped the act and started continuing to be myself when I was around people of different races.
And you know, I made better friends that way. People liked me more and they responded more favorably to me, which to me feels like justification that I made the right decision.
Part of keeping an open mind is realizing when you were wrong. Most recently, I have realized that liberalism, at least as practiced in the USA has no future, no possible way to defeat the rise of far right politics, and no real plan to even try. It's an inherently unstable system that only worked because of the post-World War 2 economic boom and the ripple effects of that boom. Now that things are evening out again, American liberals are just sticking their heads in the sand imagining that it's the 1990s and that all things can be fixed with a healthy stock market, when that wasn't even really the case back then and it's becoming more and more obviously false as time goes on.
We need something drastic to change and fast, or we're just completely fucked with Trumpism. Socialists and other left-leaning groups are the only ones that realize we need to fight hard and fight now, and establish alternative centers of power to corporations and the government, instead of just hoping that the corporations will be good or that the government will stop itself from doing bad things. I don't even think a fully socialist economy will even work at least in the short term(not opposed to it in principle, I just think we need hybrid economies short term to ease into it), but if I have to pick between that and whatever the fuck the Trumpists are trying to make, it's an easy choice.
I used to think the lyrics in The Go Gos "Our Lips are Sealed" were "Honest Lucille."
view more: next ›