Welcome to humanity. People form opinions based on many sources, often using badly flawed methods. It’s inherent in our evolutionary psychology to give excessive weight to the things we directly experience while minimizing the importance of contradictory evidence, especially if we don’t experience it ourselves.
This built-in bias had a strong survival advantage for hundreds of thousands of years (we’re here, after all).
For example, if you were a member of a tribe that lived in a valley lush with vegetation but plagued by bears, you’d hardly believe a visitor who came from the next valley when they said that bears weren’t so bad, the real problem was deadly snakes.
Snakes? You’ve heard of them, but you’ve never even seen one. Naw, snakes aren’t much of a problem.
Little do you know, however, that yours is the last valley in the entire region that has not yet been infested with them, but that they are coming. Soon.
The net result is, your visitor disagrees with you.
Scroll forward to today…
A person who grew into and through adulthood experiencing only a free and democratic society might not assign much risk to things like mass surveillance, whereas a person who grew up in a brutal dictatorship might not assign much value to freedom.
To arrive at the truth we must find a method that can remove our experiential bias as much as possible. Fortunately, just such a thing has been devised: It’s called the scientific method. When properly applied, it works stunning well.
The scientific method is what underlies the fantastic progress humankind has made in medical care, pharmacology, communications, food production, energy management and virtually every other form of human endeavor.
The goal is to base decisions on evidence, not opinion. Evidence comes from research and experiments. This is costly and slow, but it produces better results than any other approach ever tried.
So when someone disagrees with you, don’t automatically assume you are right, or that they are right. Instead, set your ego and cherished beliefs on the side, and research the question. Discover proofs. Analyze. And then use logic to help you decide.