The most important question we confront in this age

In an age of opinions how do you change your mind?

I have been working on a new side project which I hope to announce soon. It’s been an interesting experience as I have been utilizing Claude Code and it has been a Schrödinger’s Cat kind of experience, I am simultaneously amazed and awed and the same time I think it is flawed and overblown. That tells me that any gut impressions I have are likely to be wrong and I need to make sure I evaluate carefully and also understand how I am evaluating.

This brings me to the topic that has been troubling me. Right now people are so polarized and incredibly certain in their world views. That is fine, much of our education is teaching us modes of evaluation. But one thing I see missing when we are taught how to make a decision is to go one step further and consider this question “what would it take for you to change your mind?” Most of our decisions are based on formulating conclusions on “facts” that we have in the world. And those facts are generally based on sensory data or secondary data (i.e. something someone else has told us like a survey or study result). As such those data items are necessarily flawed, going back to my quantum emotion set, I know that measurements will get Heinsenberged at some point.

This is in contrast to mathematical notions, where we work from axioms, and build from there. This is why we learn basic algebra and proof, not to prove congruence of triangles but instead to understand how one formulates an argument or proof. When we study higher level mathematics, we realize that we can choose (or invent?) new sets of axioms that can lead to different conclusions but similar arguments. This is what we call developing reasoning.

However, most of our reasoning is based on a shared set of facts that may or may not be fully representative of the world as we know it. A misunderstanding of science is that something is factual and it is used as a shibboleth in argument in the way that we say “trust the science” to win an argument. Good science knows that theories are provisional, but ask what would change the theory or render the theory incomplete.

We live mostly in a Newtonian world, where our speeds mean high school physics is enough. But for those rare pioneers working at velocities approaching the speed of light, we see that Newtonian physics breaks down. Einstein and others were able to amend and update those laws to make it compatible with the universe as we see it.

There are numerous examples of these amendments to our theories, quantum mechanics and catalytic RNA are other examples.

So the question I wrestle with in these political times is what would change my mind. I am not a big fan of the current administration, but to be honest I was not a fan of the last administration. My sense were both sides were wrong, just which side was less wrong influenced my vote. However, in my decision, I always ask what might make me say that maybe this is something more sophisticated than I expected. Is Trump’s actually playing a mad man strategy to break things to rebuild in a better form? In the same way that some martial artists break bones to rebuild them to be stronger. Or are we just a bull in the china shop and all we are going to have left is a mess. I believe the latter, but I am asking myself what would I see in the world that would change my mind. I need to be able to entertain that possibility in order to demonstrate true analysis rigor. What data if correctly measured changes your mind. If you are unable to articulate what conditions will change your mind, you are operating on faith.

This is not an easy exercise, I am not an atheist, but I am not a believer either of any faith. I ask myself what would make me one or the other. I lean to the former because that is what the measured evidence tells me, but what would put me to the other side. I don’t have an answer, so I must remain in doubt. However, like in real life, you have to function with incomplete information. But you must be prepared to adjust.

In an age of certainty, it’s good to re-evaluate what makes you reconsider your beliefs. It’s possible and your life or your child’s may depend on it. We live in an age of too much certainty, maybe it’s time to be more doubtful.

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One of the most provocative ideas about the way we process information is advocated by the Odd Lots Podcast co-host Joe Wiesenthal who really advances the rise of orality in our society today. Wiesenthal expounds on Derek Thompson’s podcast in more detail.