"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world."
– Marcel Proust
What have you changed your mind about? That was the question posed to dozens of scientists and intellectuals at the endlessly stimulating web site Edge.org. Paul Kedrosky took a stab at the question, too.
I love the question because it implicitly rejects inertia-powered living: believing something because you have always believed it, doing something because you have always done it, living today like you lived yesterday without stopping to ask why.
Questioning entrenched habits or beliefs is hard. It can result in uncertainty or self-doubt. But ultimately I think makes you a more rigorous and respectable thinker. Contra those who glorify "consistency" and pounce on any shift in opinion as "flip-flopping" or hypocritical, I pay attention to those who have clear uncertainties, those who have changed their political party affiliation in their lifetime, those who have a long list of sentences which begin: "In light of new evidence or new reflections I now believe…."
Since it's Inauguration Day and politics is on my mind, I believe inertia was the reason many smart conservatives (and I have many smart conservative friends) voted for McCain / Palin on November 4th. It was easier to hold onto old beliefs — around McCain's maverick-ness, around the Republican Party's so-called commitment to limited government — than confront new facts as they came in. Namely, McCain's pandering and politics-as-usual, his party's big-government ideas, the recklessness of Sarah Palin both as a person and in what his picking her says about him. No, close your eyes and chant in unison, "Personal responsibility! [What does that even mean?] Limited government! Fierce independent thinker! Democracy!" I don't mean to impugn the critical thinking skills of the tens of millions who voted for that ticket – many of them had rational, good reasons for their vote. But other conservative intellectuals who supported McCain / Palin showed a remarkable disinterest in reality as it was unfolding and instead clung to the facts of yesterday or abstract philosophical ideals no longer embodied by the candidate on the ground.
Hail the lifelong Republican who donated and volunteered for past Republican campaigns who voted for Obama. Hail the Obama supporter who voted for "progressive" policies and is now expressing anger at Obama's very-centrist appointments and statements to-date. Hail the person who's willing to base current beliefs off current facts, even at the cost of identity confusion.
Like so many of the ideas on this blog, I write about this aspirationally! I am as susceptible to inertia as the next guy. I get seduced by pursuing what's familiar without asking myself whether it's also right – sometimes it is sometimes it's not, but either way actively asking myself the question would go a long way to making better decisions.
Bottom Line: Have you changed your mind about something recently?
"The person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him." – Ayn Rand
The best two paragraphs I read today via Robin Hanson:
Our relations with each other are very important to us, and they vary in a great many important ways. Why then do we use the word "love" so often to describe our relations, as in the famous three words "I love you." Why not instead use a variety of more precise words that convey more detailed meaning? Why not say "I wistfully-romantically-heart you" or "I hopefully-lustfully-want you" or "I wearily-unwillingly-stick-to you"?
The answer comes, I think from realizing that if we described our relations in more detail, we would have to acknowledge finer changes in our relations. Our current "I love you" approach lets us use the same descriptor at all stages in our relation, and at all points in our mood cycles. We don't have to announce when our relation moves from hopeful lust to wild passion to tender comfort to favorite-old-shirt familiarity. Such announcements could be quite awkward, especially if our perceptions are not exactly in sync.
Very true. Robin asks for other examples of vague words and what would go wrong if we used more precise concepts.
“To take control of their lives, people tell themselves stories about the person they want to be.” – Jonathan Franzen
Intelligent people have a remarkable ability to rationalize irrational past actions, to re-interpret history to fit their preferred narrative. I’ve noticed this happens most when the actions in question contradict a person’s internal vision of who they want to be: when the action represents a contradiction to a long-standing identity conception, and this contradiction represents an unacceptable burden of guilt or confusion (“If I’m not being the person I always say I am, then who am I?“), so they deny or rationalize it to make to compatible.
The man who has long considered himself an ethical person will find a way to contort an unethical misstep into the realm of moral acceptability. The woman who has long considered herself emotionally mature will find a way to contort an act of emotional immaturity into that identity.
For lying to yourself about specific actions is easier than re-defining the bounds of your imagined identity so that it’s newly inclusive of the contradictory actions. When I see once-ethical men devolve into moral grey, they still identify as upstanding even though their behavior (which they have denied or rationalized) has eclipsed the label.
Who’s susceptible to doing this? Not folks on the extremes of the rationality spectrum. At one end, the most meta-rational are so damn grounded in reality that they will not allow themselves self-delusion and cannot bear an incongruity between the story they tell themselves about who they are and the story an objective outsider would tell based on their actions. For this rare breed their identity and actions are mostly consistent. On the other side of the scale, the truly stupid are not capable of performing the kind of mental jujitsu that facilitate a self-serving re-remembering of events.
It’s the rest of us, who are smart but by no means have arrived at rationality nirvana, who I think are most proficient at lying to ourselves about our actions to shoehorn them into a preconceived identity. (Note the phrasing “lying to ourselves” – it’s the internal conversation I’m referring to.)
“Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles,” says Eliezer Yudkowky. We could add: Confront the reality of your actions, even if it means your identity will have to evolve to accommodate them.
Bottom Line: Very smart, rational people still do not often let the truth get in the way of their current and aspirational identity. It’s much easier to rationalize or deny behavior at odds with your self-identification than to confront your own self-delusion.
Related Posts: