The prerequisite for "mental liquidity" is articulated by Aristotle: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." If you entertain the thought, this gives you the chance to try out a new belief network. If you find your belief network would be strengthened by its inclusion, then you adopt it. Otherwise, you reject it. In this way, ones interconnected set of beliefs grows monotonically stronger. And this is right and good.
EDIT: got downvoted! I would love love love to know why! Not offended, just curious.
There's a common issue in philosophy and epistemology over how we come to know things. We wanted to know what 'knowledge' was, and settled upon the concept of a 'justified true belief' for a fairly long period of time.
However, one day, a philosopher found a situation in which a justified true belief was incorrect. This is the Gettier problem.
What you describe is something akin to a network of baysian conditionals attached to certain proposition, which upon confrontation with new information update their relative weights. We know with certainty that this process has significant benefits in general (it's certainly better than most systems not internalizing new information), but can and does create false reasoning.
In short, it's good but not sufficient to create knowledge. The problem of individuals creating ideological filter bubbles around themselves is very related to the idea that their evidentiary priors become more and more rigid as they note confirmatory evidence over time that justifies their views over time. The issue isn't that they stop intaking new information, but that their priors and the new information are interpreted based upon that belief network.
Thankfully, as a super-organism, we have a great solution for that mental ossification. We die. New people who have less evidentiary accumulation can address the issue with new priors and often that's all that's needed for huge breakthroughs.
The question is "what is knowledge?", not "do we know that we know p?". And I see no issue with the definition of knowledge as justified, true belief. Now, if I believe p, and you ask me whether I know p, I may say yes. But whether I actually know p will depend on whether my justification is valid (that it really is a justification and a sufficient one) and whether it is true, which has nothing to do with whether anyone knows whether the justification is valid and the belief is true. It's a separate question, and conflating the two questions leads to an infinite regress of skepticism. So the definition of knowledge qua knowledge still stands.
I would also suggest you try to apply your general approach to the very theory you are proposing. I see an opportunity for retorsion arguments.
I approach it with words using the idea that everyone has the foreknowledge of the Merriam Webster dictionary definition of the words they choose to say in conversation... and something often taken for granted when it shouldn't be.
I know what I mean when I'm explaining things - the definition of the word in context, with some Grammer etc.
What is being interpreted tho? What thoughts come to your mind when I type "Planet Earth" and you read it? Whenever I see the words Planet Earth I recall a memory of an HD DVD BBC Documentary titled "Planet Earth" sitting on the lowest shelf on the endcap display at my local Best Buy - I noticed that many years ago and I've told a few people that, so now it's likely my forever. Lowkey nostalgic almost.
Say I'm having a conversation with a friend that shows a headline about "Planet Earth Be Doomed" how could they ever anticipate my nostalgic correlation with that headline? Am I actually listening if I finish an entire conversation while reliving a childhood trip to best buy?
This only seems like a tangent - knowledge and truth are exactly the same.
I know what I know. I know what I expect you to know. I know what I'm trying to convey and so I use words I know the definition of and feel appropriate in the moment, sometimes I even try my best.
I never know how someone will react/respond/understand.
Death forces our species wide belief set to go through the constrained channel of education and communication, the same way that our bodily attributes go through the constrained channel of our germ-line genes.
This process lossily compresses the signals, which allows for drift or attenuation when the next generation reconstructs the beliefs and associated behaviors. Transmission also applies stress that acts as a filter to weed out beliefs that are no longer adaptive.
Pfft, death isn't necessary to evolution in the sense your implying.
Transmission of ideas and wealth - even societal restructuring doesn't require all the old people to first die.
Adapt or die. We cease to adapt and so we die. We're we as a species to overcome death individually, we would still collectively be bound by the same mantra.
Not that our evolution would stop - rather I think the opposite.
Assuming cellular commission is similar to a 30 year old and as healthy/mentally capable as a 30 something; so truly overcoming those obstacles - a 300 year old version of me would be better than the me now.
Taxi drivers brain composition changed by driving around London - I'll bet an extra 200 years will do something.
As long as our populace remain "Mentally Liquid" we will be fine - something 300 years of seeing and living constant changes should all but guarantee. Can't be yelling at the kids on the lawn for 200 years right?
I think elongation human life will be necessary in the not so distant future and I expect it to happen.
I disagree (without down-voting). This is basically 1-man echo chamber, you take what you like (it doesn't matter how many eloquent words you use to describe this, result is same), reject what would challenge your beliefs and would make them weaker. That's the opposite of critical thinking so needed in real world, and prime source why the current world, particularly west, is so torn to pieces about shit like russia, trump, guns, migrants and so on.
Stuff in life is complex, always, almost at fractal level. You keep learning, if you actually want, about new viewpoints that will challenge your current ones, every effin' day. Maybe at the end conclusion is don't trust anybody, people are generally a-holes etc. That's still fine as long as it represents truth.
It seems like you misread what I was saying. I am not advocating a "1-man echo chamber" - that would be a person who never changes their beliefs. When I say "weaker" and "stronger" I am referring to the whole of the belief network, not individual beliefs. This means, generally, that every change reduces inconsistency and increases cohesion of the entire network. The ignorant people in the world pay no attention to consistency, only to feeling, which makes their network intrinsically weak, and they become emotional and ultimately resort to violence rather than resolve to improve their beliefs. (The internet makes this kind of interaction more common, even encouraged, since it drives "engagement" - one of the great tragedies of our time.)
Stuff in life is complex, people are assholes, but even assholes have good ideas sometimes. I recommend listening to everyone who speaks for themselves in good faith. Anyone can cook!
I think you're making assumptions about people and their capability to judge consistency over large chunks of information, when that information is at least internally consistent and common in their experience.
If I believe the Clinton's are pedophiles and murderers and are part of a ring of like minded people, and I'm inundated with information from people and organizations which support this (or at least carefully don't refute it), then when I'm presented with information about a pizza parlor that is supposedly holding children in the basement, is that consistent with my beliefs?
I think what you're presenting is just what everyone already does. Instead of assessing thi gs based on how well they fit our beliefs, we should assess them based on a consistent objective standard, and then alter our beliefs if it meets that standard but conflicts with our beliefs.
This may in fact be what you belief, because you belive in facts and the importance of the truth. The problem is that you get wildly different results when someone that values different things applies the same system.
>This means, generally, that every change reduces inconsistency and increases cohesion of the entire network
This is analog to growing the tree, the page talks about cutting it down.
One could give many examples but the good ones are unlikely to resonate with others.
To give a poor one. There was a time when I understood human decision making as a hierarchy of people in increasingly greater positions of power with access to better information and to people with greater skill. Then one day it struck me how they too are just going though the motions with their freedom for creativity limited to a single potentially career ending move. The machine happily grinds on without anyone behind the wheel.
> reject what would challenge your beliefs and would make them weaker.
Most unresolved disagreements I know of are because the groups disagree on some unprovable underlying assumption. Switching positions on it doesn't make the beliefs stronger or weaker
Being able to believe something and stick to it, regardless of challenges from competing interests or forms of coercion: that's more valuable in practice than being more reconciliatory
> Most unresolved disagreements I know of are because the groups disagree on some unprovable underlying assumption. Switching positions on it doesn't make the beliefs stronger or weaker, just different
In my experience, that assumption isn't in principle "unprovable" - the parties to the disagreement usually don't realize they're making such assumption in the first place! Switching positions can make the existence of that assumption apparent to all, and if people involved are intellectually honest and discussing in good faith, it's pretty much impossible for their disagreement to remain as strong as it was before.
> Personally, I prefer having convictions and sticking to them.
Good point about competing interests and "reducing to something manageable". I prefer "strong opinions weakly held", but in practice, I embrace the natural inertia of beliefs. I.e. I don't consider me already believing something to be strong evidence the belief is true (i.e. "having convictions") - but the stronger a belief is, or more high-impact changing it would be (e.g. suddenly feeling a moral compulsion to upend my entire life), the more evidence and time I need to change my mind.
This may be also a dumber and less admirable strategy, but it's effectively a low-pass filter on evidence: it saves me from changing my mind every other day, and suffering the costs (including cognitive dissonance if I plain override my beliefs for sake of quality of life).
Binary people are funny. Everything is always 1 or 0, nothing is ever undefined and the idea to have different levels of certainty never occurs to them.
It is a rather offensive way to portray the world. All the questions, all the puzzles, all the mystery, everything has been answered and further investigation frowned upon. They would have to again defend their chosen "truth", they would have to question everything!
> Binary people are funny. Everything is always 1 or 0, nothing is ever undefined and the idea to have different levels of certainty never occurs to them.
Not what I was conveying. There's a place for nuance, but from my experience in practice, being able to be decisive is more useful than contemplating and questioning. Not to say I avoid the latter (what are we doing right now?) or that it isn't useful, but the times at which it's really needed are few and far between
That seems a bit trite. I was thinking it was a misclick, but hopefully whoever did it will chime in, and they will NOT themselves get down-voted, whatever their reason.
What is a belief it not the highest-ranked hypothesis of all possible options? Obviously beliefs are more complex than that, since we have a default set installed in us as children, and only a subset of humans are taught the rational methods of improving those beliefs over time. I consider myself a member of that subset.
(Quoting Aristotle always puts me in the mood to rank things.)
I do believe a hypothesis to be different than a belief. A belief performs a different function than a hypothesis.
A hypothesis can be defined as a “proposition made as a basis for reasoning, without any assumption of its truth” (Oxford Languages definition). Typically a function you perform to unearth a truth.
A belief on the other hand holds some position on the spectrum of truth. To believe is to make an assertion about truth. A hypothesis is somewhat of a precursor to that.
But hey, regardless of our stance on the definitions of these words, I heavily jive with the idea that we should improve our beliefs over time and I have mad respect for Aristotle.
I don't think we disagree. A hypothesis is upgraded to "belief" and therefore to the "spectrum of truth" only because it's the best you know of, not because it's the only one. It's a matter of degree, not kind. And a belief's position as the best one is always precarious; it can be unseated at any time by a better hypothesis.
Axioms are different, but over time I've found that even those weaken and become "merely" strong beliefs (or, more usually, only True within the context you're working in, e.g. mathematics). Even "I think therefore I am" is not axiomatic, I have come to believe. In fact I doubt it's important to identify some sort of root cause, which is rationalist heresy. Oh well.
One of the biggest beliefs I keep struggling with is the need to be perfect. I've been jamming away for many many weekends on a side project that literally was done. I just kept adding tiny tweaks left and right, until I literally just now launched it (https://amee.la).
Nothing ground breaking, and in the end nothing that needed to have so much perfectionism around.
The belief of having to need something perfect is one of the strongest I see among founders here on HN and elsewhere. It's almost always bad. I have zero examples where that ended up being good. Yet, even though the facts are clear, it's extremely hard to overcome.
* 'Refresh' neither looks like a refresh icon, nor has a label
* The fade on the right of the gallery implies you can scroll, but this isn't possible
* The generated logo + icon pair wasn't immediately noticeable (the first image is the icon without text, and the first icon isn't guaranteed to be noticeable), possibly generate image with text + logo on a transparent background and put it above the 4 sample images.
Haha, that's a bit of a cruel response to someone who just wrote he had a "perfection" problem.
You probably had OP to waste the entire week now.
WebDesign is a total time sink
This is good feedback though, as I had the same issues. It shows the value of launching and iterating quickly with user feedback, rather than building in the dark in the guise of perfection.
There's no kill like overkill. I've been overdoing a project for the last 5 years and I thoroughly enjoy it. The site is live and pays my bills so why not?
That being said, this comment feels more like self-promotion than conversation. Don't do that.
FYI the whole "lets type out some text" style is really, REALLY annoying. please just give the plain, non animated text on the screen. use whatever fonts or colors you want, BUT DON'T make the text type itself or jump around the screen.
If you actually shipped the extra weeks was probably worthwhile. My side project effort can be measured in decades with little real progress yet. I really think this year might see some movement.
Haha, what was happening to you the past couple weekends is just part of the whole process - now that you've experienced that, and beyond to releasing your side project, you won't allow yourself to that as easily next time.
I get really OCD at times and to avoid that I started focusing on "most basic functionality" and forced myself to launch when that experience was possible - from there everything I get caught up in is still an improvement.
I've done exactly that tho and I well overcooked a project holding it back til I had it just right.
Hopefully you didn't hate the experience and your better for it.
I liked the idea of the site immediately - logos can really suck and this site is perfect when a logo doesn't really matter enough to spend time on.
I'm sure your very limited in scope by trademarks and copyrights but a little more variety would be great. Colors would be awesome - choosing 2-3 would be better, that's with everything the same.
More background images or use my own option. Seriously tho - not a bad start at all. Fantastic side project.
I had no issues with the UI and was plugging away almost immediately.
Yeah, we are all susceptible to this. The tweaks were not worth the time because they didn't move the needle on the core offering. At the end of the day, this succeeds or fails based on how good the logos are. In my few minutes of trying this out, the generated logos were random, seemingly unrelated to the names, and just generally very unoriginal and low quality. I don't want to sound discouraging because this is a cool project, but just to say that spending time perfecting pixels and whatever else that doesn't have to do with the underlying functionality is probably not time well spent at this point.
This has been a mental barrier for me as well. I’m not sure if it’s in the realm of belief or rather fear of failure. Personally more inclined to say it’s the latter.
I’d argue that the fear of failure still boils down to underlying beliefs about:
- What it actually means to fail
- That failure is inherently bad
- What will happen next after failure occurs
- What it says about me when fail
- What others will think about me when I fail
- That I can’t recover from failure
etc.
If you grow up hearing that failure is bad/wrong/implies something about you as a person, it might never occur to you that another framing is that life is a series of experiments, and failure can be one of the best ways to zero in on success (in some cases, this may be the only possible way).
As far as I can tell, it’s beliefs all the way down, and adjusting certain beliefs can fundamentally transform experience relative to all downstream implications of that belief.
I just finished the Einstein biography by Walter I. and found Einsteins stubbornness quite entertaining. He knew about this trait, accepted it as an effect of ageing and even was making jokes about it. He simply disliked some facts about quantum m. and allowed himself to pursue a rather fruitless endeavour for many years. He knew that this kind of stubbornness would kill the career of a younger scientist but he could afford to do so. In that sense he contributed to science.
You're quite right. Science requires the skepticism to apply the stress to theories needed to make them strong. I'm assuming Einstein tried to raise objections using evidence to the contrary and alternative explanations.
It’s easy to forget how difficult learning is, for us as individuals and as flocks in formation. Pick any topic and it’s likely it took you years to learn well. So simply switching out beliefs embedded in that topic requires overwriting years of patterns and synapses in sync.
Where Kuhn is so helpful in understanding that even scientists have immense difficulty, if not vigorous myopia, stuck with wrong beliefs. Paradigm shifts with funerals is easier over decades than getting scientists to evolve their models.
The geologists that died disbelieving in plate tectonics weren’t free of intelligence. The very systems that allow us to find patterns are also liable to get stuck with seeing certain patterns.
Not only is it impossible with current human knowledge to construct an infallible theory that predicts everything we encounter, it is also impossible with current human physiology never to cling to wrong ideas in the face of counter evidence. When examining our rationality, we must not only admit our data are incomplete and our theories flawed, but we ourselves might be thinking foolishly.
> It might sound crazy, but I think a good rule of thumb is that your strongest convictions have the highest chance of being wrong or incomplete, if only because they are the hardest beliefs to challenge, update, and abandon when necessary.
I strongly disagree with this, unless we are only talking about beliefs that are about facts of the universe.
For example, my strongest belief is that all people have an equal right to exist and pursue their own purpose... this is not a belief about the facts of the universe, but about my own morality. I don't think it has a chance to be 'wrong'
Arguably that's not a belief, not as he's using it. That's an emotional commitment.
Example: I love my wife. This is an emotional commitment. It can't be 'wrong' in a factual sense - that's the wrong rubric for it. So it's not really a belief in that sense either.
A belief should be amenable to facts, evidence, or some sort of feedback. If it isn't it's ultimately not a belief. It's excluded from the kinds of decision-making and reasoning he's describing.
>my strongest belief is that all people have an equal right to exist and pursue their own purpose
Everyone who says this naturally excludes pedophiles, nazis, or any other "undesirables" in their given society, whoever is deemed to be socially unacceptable in the current moral framework.
>Everyone who says this naturally excludes pedophiles, nazis, or any other "undesirables" in their given society, whoever is deemed to be socially unacceptable in the current moral framework.
I get your point, but I disagree.
I won't say (because it isn't true) that "my strongest belief is that all people have an equal right to exist and pursue their own purpose."
However, as you point out there are those who are "deemed to be socially unacceptable in the current moral framework." I agree that subjective standards have no place in the law -- anywhere.
I do believe that all sentient beings have agency. But in a free, open society, such agency needs to be constrained in order to promote social cohesion.
That said, we shouldn't attempt to restrict what someone believes. Rather, we should restrict the actions of others to infringe on the rights of others within a society.
To use your examples, there's nothing "wrong", per se, with being a "pedophile" (that is, a person who is attracted to/sexually desires pre-pubescent children), but actually abusing children to satisfy those desires infringes on the rights of those children and should be (and in most places already is) restricted/criminalized.
As far as "nazis" are concerned, again holding beliefs in accord with nazi-ism/white supremacy isn't "wrong", but taking action in support of such beliefs may well be wrong (e.g., shooting up a church full of African-Americans or a synagogue full of Jews, etc.) when it infringes on the rights of others.
To put a fine point on this, there's nothing inherently wrong/evil/bad about believing that sex with four year-olds or killing jews and people of color is right and good. Personally, I find such beliefs to be repugnant, but that doesn't give me (and shouldn't give the government either) the right to restrict those people from holding/sharing such beliefs.
At the same time, should someone act on those beliefs (e.g., abusing children, killing Jews or blacks, etc.), the government should absolutely at least attempt to stop (and/or detain/incarcerate) folks who are actually infringing on the rights of others.
I believe that knowing and believe are two different things ;)
Belief is far stronger - that's why people do things all the time they themselves at one point "knew" they couldn't do.
If you start with a flawed belief - things won't improve from there. You'll ending "knowing" a whole lot of stuff that reinforces your flawed belief - simply glossing/ignoring/downplaying the facts that don't support... this becomes a bit of feedback loop after awhile.
So either learn to let go of your beliefs and adapt or at least don't firmly establish beliefs until after you know enough stuff to decide for yourself what to believe.
I reevaluate mine all the time and I'm not wrong on of my strong convictions - albeit from my point of view, which I've made as broad as possible but I'm still human.
My highest beliefs today are built upon a foundation of information, learning and mistakes - I may state a belief with a single sentence but I can write books about why I've arrived at that belief.
I don't that's morality - I sometimes do things I "know" to be immoral, when the justification warrants it, I've never knowingly decided to believe something I know is wrong - even if I was forced, I'd only pretend to believe at best.
In college I'd cheat on a test tho if I thought it the only way I'd pass - bc I believed passing was more important than the test... maybe it's a bad example of immorality.
Anyways, I completely agree with Cortesoft - I'm settling on the understanding that all people everywhere are fundamentally important, collectively and individually.
Allowing and empowering all people to live their best lives is in all of our best interest.
I've gone further even than equal right to existence and yet I'm supremely confident.
I think this rant also rather effectively demonstrates exactly what the OP was saying about our strongest convictions.
An incorrect fundamental belief - like say I believed the earth was flat, that belief would be implicit in all that I believe after that, just part of my world view and muddling up everything I think about anything - I wouldn't even be aware of that.
Mental liquidity. Fantastic.
Otherwise knowledge can be an immovable trap that becomes harder to avoid/escape the more stuff you know.
Scientists are great examples of this - if it can't be scientifically methoidized it doesn't exist and therefore must be explainable within the framework they already know, bc that's always right ;)
The best way to test your "mental liquidity" is to think about some hypotheses that are outside the "Overton window" or even outright taboo.
"What if ***** were true? Surely it can't be true. If it were, that would be terrible."
That's motivated reasoning. Remember that the truth of any hypothesis is not influenced by how much you want it to be true, or false. Some hypotheses are deeply uncomfortable, but you should nonetheless strive to believe the truth. Or rather, what is best supported by the evidence. Even if it hurts.
Actually, most people shouldn't do that in most cases, because they aren't qualified to understand the evidence presented to them. Nor are the hypotheses they're testing their own. Valuable hypotheses arise from evidence - not vice versa. This is why juries in complex cases need so much time to be walked through subject matter by expert witnesses, and why standards of evidence are applied to what they are and aren't allowed to hear, and why the conclusions they may or may not draw are circumscribed to the cases being made by lawyers as allowed by judges. When people search the internet for evidence to support their most uncomfortable hypotheses, they'll always find it. That's how we get masses of people who believe in conspiracy theories and satanic panics, with the certainty of those who incorrectly believe they've done their own "research".
Taking up the most uncomfortable (i.e. "forbidden") hypothesis and giving it the weight required to attempt to prove it to yourself is not a systematic way of finding truth; it's a way of deceiving yourself into believing in the simplistic frameworks of other people's paranoid conspiracy theories.
The above was only a case against wishful thinking and rationalization. Of course expert testimony is still some form of evidence. The point is not to willfully ignore or reinterpret the evidence because you don't like the direction it is pointing at.
It is worth citing the Litany of Gendlin:
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
I disagree, I just heard this phrase from you the first time just now, and I don't think it's self-explanatory.
It's unclear to me in what respect the opinions are "strong" if not one's conviction in them. To my mind a strong opinion is an opinion one is confident in.
Also it's unclear to me if/how/why this is better than "less opinions". Like is it better to have a "strong opinion weakly held" on topic X versus "My opinion is pending scientific research will answer this"?
A nitpick -- I actually have a pretty big distaste for maxims that have some cutesy rhyming/wordplay to them (in this case it's X y, !X z, X = strong).
I agree it's not self-explanatory. All such pithy statements are only insightful based on hard-won experience behind them—the map is not the territory, after all ;)
As far as "strong opinions, weakly held", this is one of my favorites at work in a large scale product engineering environment. It goes beyond "mental liquidity" as described in the OA (which is really just about the "weakly held" part). The "strong opinions" part is that often times groups will succumb to analysis paralysis or unwillingness to make a decision due to group dynamics. Having a strong opinion (ideally backed by knowledge and expertise) is a way to push through and bring clarity. The risk is there is a personality type prone to blustering overconfidence that will push a group in a certain direction without reasonable justification. Ideally what you want is a critical mass of smart, decisive, but open-minded people who are quick to assimilate new evidence into their viewpoint.
I'm not interested in delving into pedantry, so I'll stop after this. My intuitive understanding of this phrase is that strong or weak opinions are generally a measure of magnitude more than stability, while strongly or weakly held opinions are a matter of stability rather than magnitude. Someone might have a milder opinion of something, like "Pepperoni pizza is fine" vs. a stronger stance, such as "Pepperoni pizza is the BEST pizza." How easily that opinion is changed does not necessarily correlate. Perhaps the person who thinks pepperoni pizza is the best has never tried salami pizza and will be an instant convert. Maybe they're the worlds BIGGEST pepperoni fan. Maybe the person with the weaker opinion on pepperoni might be very very unlikely to change it because they don't care enough about pizza in general to consider it much. Maybe they love pizza, but are one bite of pepperoni pizza away from saying "bleh, hand me a slice of mushroom."
> To my mind a strong opinion is an opinion one is confident in.
That's the correct interpretation of "strong opinions", as I understand the phrase.
The "weakly held" part means that you are willing to adjust your opinion in the face of contradictory evidence, which is difficult to do for deeply held beliefs.
Take a die with six to twenty sides and assign a belief system/worldview to each number.
Roll the dice twice, first for the belief system/worldview, the other for the number of months you live by it.
Of course, you can vary the parameter according to your taste and courage.
But it is important to persevere, so you better start small.
I call it Rhinehartian chaotic paradigm shift.
Dice Man goes chaos magic.
I think this article is a little too overzealous with trying to simplify a topic like beliefs and ideas.
A lot of it also sounds like common sense to me, the people capable of grasping this:
> Be careful what beliefs you let become part of your identity.
Are quite capable of adjusting themselves.
Everything else falls into either Ego, or people being self-(un)aware, and for the latter - you can only change "their" belief system if they themselves are willing to change.
> Be careful what beliefs you let become part of your identity.
“I have a tight enough knowledge and grasp of my beliefs to intentionally control my sense of identity” is a fascinating belief to turn into an identity.
According to the Kegan theory, it's possible. I'd be fascinated to see it if anyone knows of a study that demonstrates self authorship in a population of real people.
I’ve yet to hear anything akin to self authorship from someone that didn’t have a book/seminar/consultancy to sell.
It’s a somewhat amusing thought that there is this human phenomenon wherein we can transcend nature, nurture, the id, the ego, the superego, biology and chemistry — and overwhelmingly those that achieve this enlightened state coincidentally tend to end up as self-help bloggers and motivational speakers.
One approach to preserving mental fluidity is to not get emotionally attached to ideas. This was expressed by Richard Feynman in his 1979 lectures on quantum electrodynamics, available here:
> Q: "Do you like the idea that our picture of the world has to be based on a calculation which involves probability?"
> A: "...if I get right down to it, I don't say I like it and I don't say I don't like it. I got very highly trained over the years to be a scientist and there's a certain way you have to look at things. When I give a talk I simplify a little bit, I cheat a little bit to make it sound like I don't like it. What I mean is it's peculiar. But I never think, this is what I like and this is what I don't like, I think this is what it is and this is what it isn't. And whether I like it or I don't like it is really irrelevant and believe it or not I have extracted it out of my mind. I do not even ask myself whether I like it or I don't like it because it's a complete irrelevance."
I think that's critical, because if you become emotionally involved with promoting an abstract idea, it becomes part of your personal identity or self-image, and then changing your mind about it in the face of new evidence becomes very difficult if not impossible.
In another lecture, Feynman also said something about not telling Nature how it should behave, as that would be an act of hubris or words to that effect, you just have to accept what the evidence points to, like it or not.
(Changing your mind about what's morally acceptable, socially taboo, aesthetically pleasing etc. is an entirely different subject, science can't really help much with such questions.)
> A question I love to ask people is, “What have you changed your mind about in the last decade?” I use “decade” because it pushes you into thinking about big things, not who you think will win the Super Bowl.
This is a great question. And "decade" is a good time frame not only because of size but because it's a long enough time frame there's a better chance people will have good answers.
The Dee Hock quotes (“A belief is not dangerous until it turns absolute” and “We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth”) are great too.
> Changing your mind is hard because it’s easier to fool yourself into believing a falsehood than admit a mistake.
Different angle: it's not simply "fooling" oneself, but it's because ideas are one way or another built on top of an ideological foundation.
Einstein rejecting quantum theory on the basis the universe shouldn't have a random component to it is also rejecting the idea of having to re-examine all philosophy past Descartes and Newton, which aligned so well with society's viewpoint at the time - a deterministic, cause-consequence universe, where things have logical explanations and where hard work is rewarded.
This article matches my own life experience: Rather than what have you changed your mind about in the past decade, I use 'in your whole life'. Speaking personally, there are only two big things I've changed my mind about. I'm working on a third... I wish the article had included something in the vein expressed by Charlie Munger, which is a 'how-to' for intellectual integrity.
"I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't
know the other side's argument better than they do.”
Mental Liquidity is another way of thinking about "Psychological Flexibility," which is the subject of a huge amount of clinical research. There's an entire therapeutic framework called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) which came out of this research.
Check out this article [0] for a description of ACT from a founder's perspective.
> Most fields have lots of rules, theories, ideas, and hunches. But laws – things that are unimpeachable and cannot ever change – are extremely rare.
This sounds like a rehash of Popperian epistemology. We should look forward to disproving existing theories (finding new problems), because it leads to new, better theories.
Brings to mind Robert Pirsig's 'value rigidity' concept: 'an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values.' I don't remember if there was a term for the opposite, but 'flexibility' seems to be right.
I like this nice little text. Einstein is a perfect example for mental liquidity. I think we should be very forgiving about this for two reasons: first, Einstein was one of the people establishing quantum mechanics. He also got the Nobel Price for his work on the photoelectric effect. Second, even the brightest minds have only a narrow time frame until mental ability starts to decline. So we cannot expect a brain to dig deep into general relativity and at the same time something completely different like QM.
Surprisingly, Einstein even contributed to QM in old age by trying to poke holes into the theory that later proved to be true (e.g., spooky effects at a distance).
I grew up under a toxic form of fundamentalist Christianity that left deep scars and made me pretty allergic to religion.
For me, I’ve found success and deep value in exploring non-sectarian Buddhist philosophy, which points directly at the problems caused by attachment to ideas and things, and does a good job of deconstructing thought processes that most of us engage in without realizing.
To me, this is less about choosing to accept certain principles on faith as much as it is about recognizing/acknowledging that this is what we already do in most aspects of our lives.
To anyone who can find value in traditional religious contemplation while avoiding the downsides, more power to you. The point of my comment isn’t to say there’s nothing to be found there, but if the version of religiosity you’re familiar with is the toxic kind, there are other paths to follow that get at some arguably important insights without some of the baggage that can be difficult to avoid.
(I realize Buddhism has religious roots, but there is a long history of exploring the underlying insights in a non-religious context e.g. Zen, and the analytical framework associated with traditions like Dzogchen and Vipassana are applicable without any of the metaphysical underpinnings).
(I am the person you are responding to) I grew up completely ignorant of religion and my first foray into that was the study of yogic tradition. Once I got a taste of what exists, I was very lucky to realize my ancestral faith has incredible depth, beyond that which is even understood by those say they are kinda religious (ie, many people who say they are religion X don't know how much there is to X)
On the toxic part, sorry to hear that. I think anything can be toxic originally to the value of the concept. (ie someone may have a horrible experience with a coach but that doesn't take away from the value of fitness in general) but it sounds like you have a pattern that works well for you.
> I find that thoughtful engagement with religion (Judaism in my case)
I've heard Judaism characterized as very accepting of discourse and reinterpretation of itself. Does this strike you as accurate? If so, it sounds like a kind of mental liquidity...
> When you accept on faith a handful of principles that deal with an unknowable domain
Sounds like mathematics, in which practitioners become used to both the process of relying on a set of axioms and selecting them for the purposes of exploring or constraining systems, which makes one aware that there's a certain degree of choice or even potentially arbitrariness to it...
For example, the study of the Talmud is an example of both mental training in debating an issue from several perspectives, and the installment of the idea that this is part of the religion.
You can also look up "Jewish responsa" on Wikipedia as a diving point into this.
You just might discovered yourself what others did without thinking: Following some given path to stop worring and using it as 'this can't be wrong because its old and others are doing it and enabling me'.
Perhaps community fits even better.
I personally am free enough to design my own life without boundaris.
Your current self-description and opinion of religion is where I was prior to moving onto my current state. Looking backwards, going beyond this represented breaking a boundary for me.
I am not trying to persuade you and I am holding back from expounding on what I mean at length here, just sharing the perspective.
I do thought about a lot and its definitly exhausting to be free but i have been a nihilist since 16. Thought through tons of ideas and concepts (what if the universe is repeating itself, no free will, after life, before life, 'the egg' story, lsd, mdma, ...)
I'm now quite happy and content and still curious with my life. Havent' felt better than this and going the next step: getting a farm and transforming my environment how i want it to be.
> Albert Einstein hated the idea of quantum physics.
Einstein came up with most of what physicists now recognize as the essential features of quantum physics. He was not anti quantum, he just believed randomness could not be a fundamental feature of nature.
Einstein also had a bunch of real, substantial objections.
One of the big ones had to do with whether the "fields" formulation was valid and primary. One of the issues is that if you follow the fields formulations that Einstein believed in out to conclusion you get things like "atomic oribtals never decay".
Which, of course, is obviously wrong. And an example of one of the reasons why Bohr is considered to have won his debates with Einstein.
Except
Einstein was right! We now know that when you isolate an atom, it's atomic orbital decay gets slower and slower the more you isolate it.
The problem at the time was that all of the experiments that could be run were statistical aggregations and obscured the nature of single state quantum systems.
N.b.. Rob Koon's book[0] may be of interest to some of the more philosophically inclined. He argues that the proper interpretation of QM is in light of hylomorphic dualism.
In my experience, This attribute is an absolutely critical part of successfully building culture at an early stage startup, and you have to be ruthless about culling those who are not willing to give it a try nevermind master it.
I think about these questions very often, but I don't feel like going on a long rant about it from a philosophical perspective. I will instead give an anecdote:
I think from my teens to my early 20s my political stance changed dramatically, and at any one point in time I would think that whatever I held to be true I would continue to in the future. But what always changed my belief system was not encountering some new piece of information that changed my idea or made me "update my priors" (in the crude Bayesian system, a most despicable philosophy of our era). It was always something that radically changed how it was that I understood the world around me, something that made my way of thinking about things shift so dramatically that I had to abandon my old ideas. I think everyone should read Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud for that reason, even if you think they are heinous and evil, because they radically question the logic and order of society and knowledge, and their writings are deeply disturbing to many for that reason.
What changes people's perspectives is generally what people want to avoid (to the author's point). And the more you want to avoid something or "prove it wrong," oftentimes the more it changes the way you think about the world.
Interesting. May I ask why you consider Bayesian updates a “despicable philosophy” ?
> It was always something that radically changed how it was that I understood the world around me, something that made my way of thinking about things shift so dramatically that I had to abandon my old ideas.
If you have examples, I would much appreciate it, although I do not mean to pry.
>May I ask why you consider Bayesian updates a “despicable philosophy”?
For the reason I said in that quote: Bayesian updates require upholding the same structure and considering things in networks of pre-established probabilities. This is very useful for say sportsbetting, or the weather, but in ones day to day life, especially in political circumstances, things often happen that are completely unpredictable because the socially normative prediction algorithms are always set to re-enforce the normative operations of society, making any radical change inconceivably impossible.
>If you have examples, I would much appreciate it, although I do not mean to pry.
I moved towards the Left because it seemed to me that the basis of so called "reasonable" ideologies like libertarianism and general laissez-fare market conditions always held within them notions of "fairness" and that people would "get what they deserved." It seemed to me that this is language more appropriate for disciplining a child, than ordering our society. In a sense, what was conceived of as "rational" by those who supported the systems of power was revealed to me to be nothing more than ideology which justified that power.
I understand now, thanks!
You have identified a weakness of Bayesian thinking in daily life i.e. choosing the priors. Since infinite belief updates are not feasible in the real world, two Bayesian thinkers can have completely different beliefs based on their starting priors.
EDIT: got downvoted! I would love love love to know why! Not offended, just curious.