when belief is stronger than truth
 

i kinda knew this guy. one day he was wearing a baseball cap with the korean letter "m" (looks like a square) embroidered on it. since it was a square, i asked him about his hat.

he told me it was a korean "b" for "Bep-da." his korean freinds game him the nickname "spicy"

i said "oh, you mean "mep-da." that's an "m."

"no, BEP-da."

i asked him if he spoke korean, he said no, but his friends would say bep-da. i explained to him i spoke, read, and wrote korean, having lived there a year and gone briefly to Yonsei University. i told him the korean word for spicy is "mep-da" and that was an "m" on his hat.

he insisted it was a "b" for beb-da.

a third friend joined in, explaining that i actually spoke korean, he didn't not, he should probably believe me. he would not.

this stuck with me over the years, it fascinates me. his belief was so strong, the fact that he had no idea what he was talking about, and the fact that i actually did, didn't matter to him. he knew i went to korea, he knew i studied the korean language, he knew i spoke, read, wrote it. but he would not believe me.

without this getting into a discussion on religion...belief and faith vs. science.....

have you ever dealt with people like that? have you ever known something for a fact and had to argue with someone who admitted they didn't know the subject as well as you but you were wrong and they were right? have you ever had overwhelming proof and evidence to suggest one thing, and the other person through sheer will of personal belief argue with you?

what makes someone do that? how does that happen? how can someone looking at the truth deny it?

Willful ignorance is generally a sign of a weak mind, in my opinion.

He couldn't accept being wrong. It's more about egotism than anything else.

Not really much more to say about it. Like anyone, I encounter people like this from time to time. My response is simply to avoid them, if possible. Beating my head against a wall is painful and doesn't accomplish anything.

...um, according to what you've written,
these are the truths i extrapolated from it:

1. he says "b" IS for bep-da
2. you say "m" IS for mep-da
3. his name is "spicy"
4. he never said the first letter of the korean word for "spicy" is on his cap

...did you ever ask him what a bep-da was?

When there's no amount of verifiable data that can convince someone of something, it's time to ignore them.

My boss insists that the moon landings were faked, and any evidence provided to support the existence of the Apollo programme causes him to say that the evidence of success is just as fake as the landings.

I'm still not totally sure whether he believes this, or just says it to wind me up.

he was saying the korean word for spicy was beb-da, and the letter on his hat was a b.

i was telling him the korean word for spicy was mep-da, and the letter on his hat was an m.

he told me i was wrong.

Of course I've encountered stubborn people...

In fact, what you're talking about describes every woman in my family perfectly. There's no telling them they're wrong. Even if you prove they are beyond all doubt, they still claim to be right.

I grew up with that shit...

...okay, just needed to clarify things because miscommunication is often the cause of disagreement

I can so identify with this statement of growing up with that shit. I would have homework, and really do a extra good job of finding the right answers, and my dad would check it, and say I was wrong on a certain thing, I would show him my research, even showing him the dictionary or encyclopedia I got the information from, and he would still say it was wrong........drove me absolutely to tears. He was right and the encyclopedia was wrong....

I had a friend for the longest time who thought that the oil spill on the ground were pieces of the rainbow that had broken off and fallen down!!

:lol:

Changing one's beliefs can be hard for everyone.

Could it be that his friends use a local dialect and you use standard usage? Also, kudos on the Korean ability. That's cool.

Sometimes you just have to ask, "Does the fish know that it's in water."

My inlaws believe microwaved food will give them cancer, and that vaccines give babies autism. They won't ever question it, either. Belief is practically unmovable in some people.

That's because they're right!

no, it's not like arabic or other languages with dialects. its pretty standard.

thanks for the kudos, but its not a major accomplishment.

B and M are both bilabial sounds in English, and in many forms of transliteration between languages get reversed.

I don't know for certain, but is there a now obsolete method of tranliteration that renders the B where you would render the M now?

For example, in Chinese transliterations, I grew up being taught about "Peking", the capital used by "Mao Tse Tung", and now I teach my daughter about "Beijing" the former capital of "Mao Xedong". Did Korean do something similar?

If you're talking about autism, you're in for a fight.

Come on, punky boy! Oi'll fakkin' 'av ya!

*cough*

no, not as far as i know.

My faux family motto . . . "Sometimes wrong, never uncertain."

I know someone like this. It appears to be related to his need to always be right, regardless of the proof, knowledge or circumstances in front of him.

It's like once he opens his mouth and says something, he's going to be committed to that statement to the end and nothing will change his mind. There are some instances where I feel he has to know he's wrong. He never acknowledges that he may be wrong, he assumes he's right.

It's actually quite annoying.

Welcome to family reunions 101. You can print off a snopes.com: Urban Legends Reference Pages page to prove their bullshit story they heard false and they will still believe in it.

This is quite common in politicians, some of them even consider it a virtue.


It could be related to the coddling of an entire generation, due to the endless praise people are forgetting how to be wrong, how to lose, how to be good sports even when they come up on the short end of the stick.

Don't be so passive-agressive. Take a laptop and/or PDA with you and refute Uncle Chris' insistence that Neiman Marcus charged some lady $500 for their chocolate chip cookie recipe in realtime. Either that or drink heavily with your cousins. Both have worked for me.

A lesson I've come to learn, OP, and one I hold very dearly now:

It is not your job to educate them.

Once again..

Not your job.

There are plenty of willfully ignorant people. Even those of us harkening from some superior moral and intellectual plane are ignorant of something that someone else considers factual. If someone does not request your superior knowledge of the topic, it's a good sign that they're not interested in hearing your facts. I'm full of useful knowledge, but I've stopped giving it unless requested or unless I know the company will be amiable to it. It saves you a lot of frustration ("Why is he being so willfully stupid?") and a lot of lost opportunities.

Plato's Allegory of The Cave fits this well.

I can't make my life's purpose helping people out of there own caves because I'm in my own. But I think you can inform. It's that person's choice to accept it.

I fucking hate that. It drives me insane. But that's life.

What about religion?

Uhh.. what about it, indeed?

Also, OP:

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/tilted-...ing-right.html

This was my situation four years ago. You might find an uncanny similarity, and I can tell you that the lesson you have to learn is that 'correcting' the errors of others is a surefire way to burn bridges and an absolutely ineffective way to actually educate them. Offer when asked, or offer when you know them well enough that they'll take your position with the credibility of your relationship to them. I'd be skeptical of a stranger telling me what my hat meant, too.

This is actually exactly it from a clinical point of view. I don't entirely subscribe to Freud's models, but it literally is subconscious rationalization by the ego as a defense mechanism. See the Wikipedia article.

He probably subconsciously knows you're right, but his mind, unable to cope with being wrong, is creating some reason for why he did what he did; in this case buy a hat with the wrong letter. We all do it, but over something dumb like that, he's probably pretty insecure about himself.

Sometimes it is better to just let people exercise their right to be wrong. Especially with something like what's on a baseball cap. I once had a music teacher with a sign on his wall (I don't remember the exact wording) to the effect that you should never try to teach a pig to sing, because all it did was waste your time, and annoy the pig.:)


Lindy

Don't forget about the Dunning Kruger effect: people that reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.
Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

That's gotta suck.

I've dealt with dozens of people that would still declare the 2nd Amendment refers to the national guard, even if James Madison were to rise from the grave himself and say it doesn't.

we knew each other, he wasn't a stranger. it was a casual conversation, i asked about his hat, he told me something factually incorrect, i didn't' think it was a huge issue to tell him what it meant, especially since he didn't speak korean. it was a simple correction. as far as burning bridges, thats not a bad thing, there are some places not worth going back to.

Where religion contradicts science, I'll debate it. While the idea of a supreme being is absolute nonsense in my mind, it's a nonfalsifiable claim and I don't bother with it.
When it comes to ideology, people start with a conclusion and build premises to support it.
At least it was just a hat and not this guy, who wanted a tattoo of "Strength" in Japanese.
http://content.imagesocket.com/thumb...a49c1abb0f.jpg

the problem with debating religion is, for me, it's a faith thing, and you cannot prove or disprove the existence of god. i believe in god, even though i often question it myself and don't see any reason to believe in god, at the end of the day, i believe in god. even when you can scientifically prove something religious wrong, there is still that whole "mystery of faith and god and he can do anything" argument, which while it may be a cop out, is still viable if you believe in god. cause he is omnipotent and can do anything and can break the laws of physics and time and space.

MSD - i don't have my kanji dictionary. i know the bottom one is exit, don't know the top one.

Honestly, I don't know enough about the subject to properly take on that argument...

My comment was actually meant to be made with very facetious undertones. That's hard to convey over the internet, though...

Let's just say that the whole beginning of the suspicion regarding the MMR jab and autism was completely fraudulent, which has now been proven. There have been numerous studies trying to find any link whatsoever between autism and MMR and there's been no link found whatsoever.

As a pretty conclusive example, Japan removed the MMR vaccine from it's program as a response to the hysteria and the incidence of autism went.... up!

Conclusion: Anyone who doesn't vaccinate their child is putting not only their child, but all the other children their child is in contact with in danger.

It's disgusting.

The incidence of autism is increasing in developed countries, quite a lot of that, possibly all, can be put down to better diagnosis of the condition. The rest... could be anything we have in our industrial society.

My first place to look would be plastics that mimic hormones.

There are many that do.

Spoiler: Sell + Out This makes me happy about studying. :)

nice Randerolf, thanks.

Doesn't that translate roughly to uridashi - "sale"?

Yup, うりだし, my bad. While I like my interpenetration better, I have lost face and now we must fight to the death.

Or, I could just go back to studying Chinese and stop dabbling in Japanese. :)

Heh, I'm just going on what a native Japanese speaker said when someone posted that in a tattoo megathread, I have no idea.