Honest skepticism
If you disagree with something I post on here, or something you read elsewhere, or with a position that a political candidate holds, that’s great! You shouldn’t (and really can’t) agree with everything out there, so holding your position is very important.
However, what if you later realize that you were wrong? If you said that you disagree with something for a particular reason, and it turns out that your reasoning was inaccurate, then what?
In a recent post, Seth Godin put it like this:
if the data ends up meeting the standard of proof we set for it, we have to change our minds and spend as much energy supporting the idea as we did opposing it.
As I’ve said before, when I find new information to adjust my views, then I change my mind. It should be an easy decision to make, but it’s stunning how many people refuse to do it.
That’s part of the reason I have this blog — it’s a history of where my mind is at various stages of my life. I’ve been wrong quite a bit, and here are just a few of them:
I wrote a lot about how Roam Research was the best tool for note-taking, but I’ve changed my mind on that a few times.
I used to believe iPhone was the best mobile operating system, and now I don’t. That’s likely to to change again at some point in the next few decades as technology changes.
I was a big supporter of Google Stadia, but it didn’t take off like I thought it would.
My specific political views have morphed a good bit over the past few years, though I largely keep those off here, and I suspect they’ll continue to change as time goes on. I don’t know if that’s just me “changing with the times” or if I’m really “disagreeing with my past self”, but either way, it seems that holding on to old political ideas simply because they’re what I used to believe in seems very silly.
If you watch those around you, it’s easy to tell who is truly being an honest skeptic and who is just trying to push some buttons. I love listening to the insights from honest skeptics; even if I disagree with them, their ideas hold a much stronger place in my mind because I know they’re coming from a place of truth.
My most insightful takeaway was Seth Godin’ admonishment that after changing our minds we should “spend as much energy supporting the idea as we did opposing it."