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1. A topic that I am definitely having to have some Epistemically humility with is the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake. Everything in the news is very doomsday on the topic, but as I have talked with people who are in the natural resource industry, their feelings aren’t quite concrete. It has led to more research and talking on my part. My opinion is still up in the air but definitely more in the middle than before.

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2. When I was in 5th grade, my teacher taught us that blood is blue, and it turns red when exposed to oxygen, but recently I learned that it is red the whole way through, it just looks blue because of how light works.

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3. In a college religion course the professor lectured on faith one day. He said we often think we know what something looks like, such as the front of a house. Front door, windows, porch, peaked roof etc. But houses are three dimensional, so someone else may have a better understanding of the side of the house or the back of the house, or maybe they are inside the house. Just because I had never seen the back of the house didn’t mean it wasn’t real. I think about that house often when I want to hold on to a narrow preconceived idea. My example is a little silly and not the most recent, but a friend and I agreed while talking about married couple’s age gaps, 5 years was a big gap and 10 years was the absolute max. But a couple years later I dated and married someone 15 years older than I am. Eighteen wonderful years later, I cringe to think if I had held on to my original idea and chose not to get to know him better only because of a preconceived idea.

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4. My Uncle was a teacher at a large city highschool with a diverse student body. He told me that if you were, when not in a person’s presence, able to recall a person’s race, color, ethnicity, or national origin then that meant you were prejudice and that prejudiced people were horrible people. He was important in my life so I just accepted and believed what he said, as if he was telling me that it’s important to eat your vegetables. I felt terrible for a very long time because I was able to recall these things about people I knew. I talked to other people, did some reading and studying, and a lot of thinking. Finally, much later, I told him that I disagreed with him. If one can notice and remember that someone wears glasses, or the color of their hair or eyes, is in a wheelchair, or wears a wedding ring, has pierced ears, or their sex, that is not a evidence of being prejudiced to be able to recall those details, and neither is being able to recall race, color, ethnicity, or national origin. I thought that the issue was whether you prejudged a person’s character, physical ability, intelligence, or other factor, based on those or other traits. My Uncle did not like my challenging him and told me I was just ignorant and I should not question my elders. This was, I think, the first time I challenged what I was told by an authority figure, and changed my belief, but it certainly wasn’t the last.

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