[HN Gopher] Mental Liquidity
___________________________________________________________________
Mental Liquidity
Author : bkohlmann
Score : 159 points
Date : 2023-06-11 12:31 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (collabfund.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (collabfund.com)
| hammock wrote:
| Of course we must reference Berlins fable the Fox and the
| Hedgehog here.
|
| A great essay in this area is Venk's Cactus and the Weasel.
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the-wea...
| yowlingcat wrote:
| 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.
| conradev wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| lcuff wrote:
| 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."
| lostdog wrote:
| What kind of deliberate practice can help if morove your mental
| liquidity?
| krm01 wrote:
| 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.
| 2h wrote:
| 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| 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.
| david_allison wrote:
| Unsolicited feedback:
|
| * Your input box doesn't look like a text box
|
| * The 'enter' key doesn't work in the text box
|
| * '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.
| cassepipe wrote:
| 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
|
| On desktop, you can actually scroll right now
| motoxpro wrote:
| Haha totally. I had to keep in mind that my perfect is
| someone else's average.
| Gaessaki wrote:
| 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.
| interlinked wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opbF9Nz_Emg
| detourdog wrote:
| 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.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| 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.
| usefulcat wrote:
| When I do this, rather than thinking of it as some kind of
| mistake or failing, I think of it as an experiment or learning
| experience.
| ben_vueJS wrote:
| 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.
| haswell wrote:
| 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.
| nathants wrote:
| the best attitudes are an acquired taste. losing is fun!
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Am partially convinced that overexposure to the comment section
| can encourage perfectionism in those that are already disposed.
|
| And the comment section is rarely a representative sample of
| your target audience.
| deepzn wrote:
| Reminds of reading what Reid hoffman said...
| https://twitter.com/reidhoffman/status/847142924240379904?la...
| moneywoes wrote:
| Is this project just a funnel for your SaaS as a graphic
| design? Reminds me of that Twitter user who popularized that
| model.
|
| If so does it matter if it's perfect when yore goal is just to
| boost top of funnel for the agency?
| ianbutler wrote:
| I like this, quick suggestion, I'd add an ability to take one
| of the generated logos and refine from that same logo.
| wwweston wrote:
| > 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.
| turnsout wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://every.to/no-small-plans/how-to-do-hard-things
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| Stay humble.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > _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.
| neerajsi wrote:
| This might be relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
| authorship
|
| 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.
| jrflowers wrote:
| 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.
| skilled wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have had to have an open mind.
|
| Long story. Lots of tears. Get your hanky.
|
| It's served me well, in my technical work.
|
| I now do a lot of stuff that I used to scoff at.
| jonasenordin wrote:
| 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.
| Borrible wrote:
| 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.
| moneywoes wrote:
| AI taking away jobs is one. Previously though more jobs would be
| created but now my beliefs have fundamentally shifted
| wayeq wrote:
| > 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.
| bsder wrote:
| 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.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://a.co/d/6eq227u
| javajosh wrote:
| 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.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Your experiment has a confounding variable--it broke the
| penultimate guideline.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| javajosh wrote:
| 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.
| MrPatan wrote:
| The mind that doesn't want to risk entertaining "wrong" truths
| can't stand being reminded of the fact.
| Etrnl_President wrote:
| "One can not learn what one thinks one already knows"
| --Epictetus
| kubanczyk wrote:
| You cannot say _belief_. Say _hypothesis_ while leaving rest of
| your argument intact. If you value that kind of score in your
| life.
| javajosh wrote:
| 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.)
| theredfury wrote:
| 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| 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.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| > And this is right and good.
|
| 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| 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!
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| >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.
| kbenson wrote:
| 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.
| testacct22 wrote:
| > 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
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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).
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| 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!
| byteware wrote:
| I am curious how one would measure if their "belief network
| would be strengthened"
| ABCLAW wrote:
| 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.
| neerajsi wrote:
| Thanks for your point about death.
|
| 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.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| The Gettier problem is overrated.
|
| 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.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Mental flexibility would be a better term but of course finance
| people rarely perceive much outside their own bubble.
| trentnix wrote:
| I've heard it also said "strong opinions, weakly held". Unlike
| "mental liquidity", it doesn't require explanation.
| zug_zug wrote:
| 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).
| dasil003 wrote:
| 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.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| > 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.
| chefandy wrote:
| 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."
| mo_42 wrote:
| 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).
| golemotron wrote:
| It seems like this is a term for the ability to avoid sunk cost
| fallacy ( https://www.scribbr.com/fallacies/sunk-cost-fallacy/ )
|
| The link contains a number of reasons why people get trapped in
| sunk cost fallacy.
| technological wrote:
| I think it is hard to change your beliefs is because of the
| discomfort that is associated with that change.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| 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.
| neerajsi wrote:
| 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.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Along with Podolsky and Rosen he formulated one of the
| original quantum thought experiments to challenge the
| accepted conventions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstei
| n%E2%80%93Podolsky%E2...
|
| This in turn inspired Bell's theorem, and eventually quantum
| information theory.
| zone411 wrote:
| "Mental fluidity," "mental flexibility," or "cognitive
| flexibility" seem like better terms.
| layer8 wrote:
| Creedoplasticity? Pisteuoplasticity?
| gms7777 wrote:
| or "mental/cognitive plasticity"
| nmstoker wrote:
| My thoughts exactly: this is generally referred to in the
| literature as mental/brain plasticity.
|
| Coining a new term when a perfectly good one exists is
| unfortunate but happens, as see with the author here.
|
| Edit: here's a link to neuroplasticity (aka brain
| plasticity):
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity
| cortesoft wrote:
| > 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'
| JakkTrent wrote:
| 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 ;)
| robg wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It's so much so that I would almost define intelligence as the
| ability to "switch out beliefs".
| lanstin wrote:
| 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.
| sedivy94 wrote:
| A term I've come to like more is "cognitive flexibility".
| xyzelement wrote:
| Perhaps unexpectedly, I find that thoughtful engagement with
| religion (Judaism in my case) has helped me become much more
| liquid on other topics.
|
| When you accept on faith a handful of principles that deal with
| an unknowable domain, it becomes much easier to be less attached
| to the other stuff.
| haswell wrote:
| 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).
| xyzelement wrote:
| (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.
| wwweston wrote:
| > 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...
| xyzelement wrote:
| I agree with you on both counts.
|
| 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.
| Mutlut wrote:
| 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.
| xyzelement wrote:
| 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.
| Mutlut wrote:
| i wouldn't mind your 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.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Be a goldfish: Ted Lasso, 2020.
| Etrnl_President wrote:
| [dead]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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:
|
| http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8
|
| > 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.)
| cubefox wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| 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.
|
| Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
|
| People can stand what is true,
|
| for they are already enduring it._
| lanstin wrote:
| What was that old definition of ideology, an unreal
| relation to real facts?
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| > 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.
| tartakovsky wrote:
| Related: https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-
| fram...
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