Unpopular Opinion

Sure, but how do you get them to vote about it?

Turnout at the polls is definitely impacted by:

• knowing something is even being voted on
• being reminded and having expanded how important something is
• just perceiving other people are going to go vote too

and so it's important to discuss something that's going to be voted on, even if the audience has already made up their mind.

For online discussions, it can be worth it. You might not change the mind of the person you're talking to, but there are more lurkers than posters. Your discussion is for them.

I think if you aren't the one debating, you are more open to differing opinions.

I changed my mind about both religion and abortion in my mid 30s. All it took was more information and me stepping back to acknowledge some of my defenses were just my religion and I moving goal posts.

Still, with many other things that religion i always required repeatable proof, especially when I experienced it personally.

For example, I'm going to go a bit into details about an old online game, Final Fantasy 11. That game had several stats you balanced for nor.al attacks and for special build up attacks called weapon skills.

One Stat needed almost always for normal attacks was Accuracy. Now weapon skills could come in single or multi hit flavors, and people started using tools to figure out optimal stats for both. What they found is that the first hit of any weapon skill had a huge accuracy boost, while remaining hits did not.

So it was more optimal to not use accuracy in single hit weapon skills. Now an important caveat: 100% accuracy was hard coded as impossible. There was always a 5% miss rate, like with a d20 hitting 1. So 1 hit weaponskills missed 5% of the time mo matter what.

If you parsed the data over time, that would be obvious. However, to your own eyeballs and memories, you always remembered the full miss, and it would feel like you needed more accuracy. Data doesn't lie, but your feelings and memory do.

I learned from that that you can't just operate on what you feel is correct, you need to review the data to see what it says about the effects of your choices.

I learned how much having access to abortion helped poorer people, helped women,lowered crime, etc. So i changed my mind.

Maybe. You might be over estimating a person‘s maturity. I’ve definitely met people in the 20s who are clearly still kids in their mindset.

For some people, life is a hard teacher, and they just don’t understand until situations personally affect them.

OP thinks they're "grown up."

I changed my mind on the topic when I was 37, but you do you.

I changed my mind when I caught the s-o-b that tried to steal my car stereo.

I've always been pro-abortion, but I've definitely become more open-minded as I got older, even though I'm still in my 20s. Maybe it's because I developed empathy. Maybe it's because I started listening and reading diverse perspectives on Reddit and now Lemmy that I don't see in my real life bubble.

Separating the population into two groups based on arbitrary criteria then making blanket statements about the groups is prejudice. I don't think prejudicial thinking is really what you want to be supporting, is it?

I remember when I was this ironic.

I'm not pro choice, I'm pro-abortion. As in, abortions should be the default. You should have to prove that you're able to provide a healthy and stable environment to be allowed to have a kid.

I'm over 25 and absolutely see abortion as a necessary thing under the right circumstances. Not so much in others.

I'd argue there's a bunch of 25 and younger folks that think getting an abortion is simply more convenient.

That's my problem.