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I'm committing a major faux-pas by posting a second consecutive top-level comment, but it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)
What's something that you were wrong about?
I'll start. I was wrong about marijuana legalization. It was a bad idea and we never should have done it. Marijuana is, contra urban legend, actually pretty addictive. And it makes productive people into unproductive people. The benefits, such as they are, are best enjoyed in moderation. But legalization has resulted in a whole new class of junkies that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, weed culture is gross.
Scott, as always, says it best:
In any case, what were you wrong about?
I used to be a blank-slateist, both about race and gender. Fully believed that absent racism and childhood inequality in education and nutrition, etc., we'd see proportional representation of black and white and Asian and Australian Aboriginal Nobel prize winners.
I have since come around to the HBD position, though not the ethnostatist "hard" HBD position that says, essentially, that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together.
Likewise, I mostly believed the second wave feminist idea that men and women would all be more or less equal and share roles and aptitudes equally if not for sexism. I started seeing the holes in this sooner, but didn't get completely redpilled* until I was past college age.
I definitely believed "It's just some crazy kids on college campuses who will grow up once they hit the real world" for too long.
Like some of the others below, I used to be pro-marijuana legalization and even considered that it might be better to legalize hard drugs. I think marijuana is kind of a disaster, and like alcohol, if I could magically make it disappear I would, but it's too late now. But experiences where harder drugs have been decriminalized and everything we are seeing in meth country convinces me that drugs are just fucking bad and while I don't want to go all police state and I recognize the failures of the War On Drugs, miss me with libertarian bullshit.
* redpill probably implies too strong a shift, since I still think most redpill guys are outright misogynists - literally, as in they really don't like women and resent the fact that they still want to have sex with them and need their permission to do so. However, I think it's an apt term in the sense that I really did come to an "awakening" about sex differences that I had been in denial about for most of my life.
What changed your mind? Life experiences? Books (if there are any, I'd appreciate if you could list them)? Something else?
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