On changing your mind

Reference

Changing your mind in public is treated as a weakness, when it ought to be seen as a sign that you were paying attention. We admire people who hold firm, and we mock those who shift position, even when the shift is a response to better evidence. The result is a strange incentive: once you have stated a view, you are expected to defend it regardless of what you learn afterwards. I have come to think that the honest thing to say, more often than we do, is simply that we thought one thing and now think another, and here is what changed.

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