similar to the "political stance" thread but on specific things that you believed when you were young until you were exposed to things that changed your mind
I'll start
-academia is filled with intelligent people
-more diversity results in less racism
-the news is supposed to inform people
All three of those are correct, though some clarification could help.
The average intelligence of university professors is far higher than the general population, and their level of knowledge in their fields on average is also far, far higher than that of the average person. I suspect you're trying to make some kind of anti-intellectual point that may or may not be valid (very likely not, though) but wouldn't dispute those statements.
Diversity seems to affect racism or xenophobia (which could be described as a form of it) differently with different amounts. As Noah Smith puts it (paraphrasing), one person in your neighborhood who looks different is a guest, 100 is an invasion, and 1,000 is just your neighbors. To get deeper, the rate of change seems to matter more than the level, and there can be different forms of racism that are affected differently. Note that in America, more diverse states were more resistant to Trumpism.
And of course the news is supposed to inform people, though the process is complicated. Profit and prestige are the primary motive of most of the successful individual companies, though, but the public determines what brings those things. Right now, a lot of the audience just wants the news to confirm their priors, and a company that is trying to inform will run afoul of them, as many mainstream outlets have, which puts pressure on them to avoid controversy more than really try to get the truth.
My three would be:
1. An independent thinker considers each issue on an individual basis and thus is equally likely to be "right" or "left" on any particular issue. Used to be surprised to hear someone I respected attach any label to themselves.
But really, your underlying intellectual approach will inevitably have you on the same "side" as people who think like you and against people who don't. Works far beyond politics, too. If you're the kind of person who believes in evaluating pitchers by "wins" and batters by "RBIs" and doesn't believe in "WAR" or even making park or era adjustments, you're also going to be the kind of person who believes poverty is just caused by people not working hard enough, and the gov't has to stop coddling them, etc. Or on a moral level, if you think that we as a society have a responsibility to help people who can't afford medical care get it (and not be ruined financially), you're also likely to think that we should prevent kids from going hungry, etc. Generally, I think empiricism, respect for Truth and various proven methods for attaining it, and broad empathy lead you in one direction, and tribalism, gut feelings, and hatred lead you another way.
2. You make your own luck, and people get what they deserve.
There's no way a normal-functioning person who knows people and has life experience can believe this. Lots of people are born with little chance of making a good income, and lots of people who make great incomes were incredibly lucky to do so. You can pile out counter examples, just as you can pile on examples of short basketball players being better than individual tall players, but overall, there's no way to credibly argue that we even have incomes and economic productivity lined up well, much less income and other things that we as a society wish to value. And as I've pointed out many times before, the gov't imposes a market-based society on us, which creates unemployment (that is, without a gov't, anyone can live off the land), and groups that are mostly unable to work--kids, the disabled, the elderly, students, etc. inevitably rely on workers to survive, and thus given a market-based distribution system, those workers need far above median incomes to have median lifestyles. It's a basic logical issue that first-world nations deal with through safety nets, and almost all of them deal with it better than we do.
3. Politicians are scum and dishonest as a class.
Very wrong, and people falsely believing it cause it to be more true because it leads to a reduction in standards, especially by the people on your "side" (the people who you should be demanding higher standards from). We rightly have very high standards for politicians, and they mostly fail to live up to them, and there's no problem with calling them to account for that, but we should remember the first half there. Trump is the first major presidential candidate who I think is worse at his job, more dishonest, and crueler than the average person.