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There are two types of people: People who are open to receiving new information about the world, including information about people they are interacting with. Their reaction is something along the lines of, "Oh, that's cool, I didn't know that. I'm going to go with the assumption that you're not just lying to my face or just wrong about everything, or something along those lines, an assumption I would have arrived at for no reason at all."
Then there's the other type of person, who regards new information as an attack, against which a defense must be mustered.
I wish I met more people who were the first type. I’m so used to keeping info to myself around new people because I don’t wish to make enemies since most people I meet are the second type.
There was a point in martial arts training when I started to be the upper belt to my partners more frequently, and for the first time I started to be the one answering questions rather than asking them.
The best lesson I learned from this is that I usually learned more while I was teaching. People would ask me “why do we do X” and even though I basically knew the answer I wouldn’t be able to articulate it, and the quest for that articulation would force me to really think about the answer in ways that I hadn’t before.
Long story short there: I learned that there is always an opportunity to learn, and that I never knew as much as I thought I did. These were so damn useful to me in not being that second kind of person. I wish everyone could have that experience.
It's a pretty common saying that the best way to learn is to teach, so this anecdote can definitely apply across the board.
- Watch someone do it.
- Then do it.
- Then teach someone else to do it.
I think it stems from the "I have to be the boss" mentality. If someone tells you something, and you learn from them, then they are the master and you are the learner, and to some people that is intolerable no matter how accurate it is, or how trivial the scenario.
That’s a strange way of going about life in my opinion. Very authoritarian and hierarchical sounding to me. No one has all the information so no one can be the boss. If someone has new info that you don’t have, that doesn’t make them an authority over the other person.
It’s very one dimensional thinking. Can’t stand it.
It usually stems from insecurity. People who actually are the boss are perfectly comfortable with someone who knows more than them about some particular area (like for example the life details of their own life).
I read a pretty sad article by a person who was trying to run educational seminars, and was running into an issue where almost everyone from this one particular culture was apparently so caught up in macho-thinking that they were more or less impossible to teach. The teacher would ask a question, and if someone was wrong they would tell them and tell them the right answer, and from that day forward that student would be the enemy. They would glower at the teacher, talk to them after class about how they embarrassed him in front of everyone, never answer questions again. Or maybe they would refuse to accept the answer the teacher was giving, and start arguments about it where they had to be right. Stuff like that. The end conclusion was "I am really trying not to be prejudiced about this, but it really feels like trying to run seminars in this locality is just a waste of time because they are almost universally hostile to the idea of ever learning anything, even from a clearly identified and accepted authority figure."
This sounds like where I live haha. Why I don’t really tell anyone anything anymore.
most people I meet are the second type.
yeah right theres no way thats true prove it
How would you propose someone online proves their lived experience to another random person online?
I’m all ears.
sorry sometimes i get defensive in response to new information
Worryingly we may all be both types. The problem is that we’re typically the first when the new information aligns with the world as we think we understand it, and the second when it conflicts. Information that calls into question our understanding of the world around us makes us feel threatened and through that threat activates our fight or flight instincts. Since we can’t run from information we’ve already heard the only choice is to fight back against it either publicly or in our own minds.