Imo these people are not smart, they are just intelligent. When you are intelligent you can be good at winning debates even if you are wrong and good at convincing yourself that you are right even when you are wrong. Smart people have feedback mechanism, they adjust their beliefs by making internal predictions and when things happen different they update their beliefs. When more people change their beliefs they lower their confidence levels and get curious. Intelligent people will convince themselves that everyone else is wrong and they with their superior intelligence were correct all along. They will do mental acrobatics all the way until they hit what their intelligence can handle before they finally give in, but they will resent everyone for it as their image of themselves has been shattered.Today something happened that I didn't think it was possible
Found one of those that spew every single FUD point about EVs in real life, and as it happens, it's one of my best friend that we know each other close to 15 years now and we see each other almost weekly
Every, single, one.
That EVs haven't proven that they can replace ICE yet
That the grid won't handle EVs if everybody has one, didn't matter that I showed him on the spot the grid demand curve and that at night when most people would be charging there is tons of spare demand
That he couldn't charge one in his house because it takes too much power. When I asked how much he drives daily and calculate how much power/energy it would take to charge that back, and that he could do in a regular outlet, still didn't accept
That he knows that EVs are worse than ICE for the environment, no matter what he wouldn't believe, that the data Tesla shows can't be trusted because he saw people saying it so
That once the batteries dies, it gets send to South East Asia for it to be disposed, completely ignoring that a dead battery is the most valuable ore for someone making new batteries
That the life of a EV is short and the battery dies soon, much quicker than ICE, by this point I stopped refuting and just nodded
Shame, because I though he was a smart guy knowing him all this time
Everyone is victim to this in different degrees. Some good resources that helped me:
Superforecasting
Laws of Human Nature
How to live in a world we don't understand