Changing your Mind

Clinging to beliefs

From the beginning of time until around the 16th century, nobody ever realized that there could be unseen little germs that would cause diseases if you came in contact with them. Nobody tried to “disinfect” their hands before they ate food or touched others or performed surgical operations.

Why did we take so long to figure out germ theory? On the flip side, why did we keep believing that some demon or the other was responsible for disease, poor crop yield, thunder, infertility, and everything else?

We made those mistakes (and still keep making others like them) because we don’t relinquish our ideas when reality contradicts them.

In preliterate times, the main job of wise men seemed to be to remember all the knowledge their teachers had taught them and pass it on to the next generation. “Aristotle said so; it must be true” - that seems to have been the crux of their thought process. Not many seem to have questioned his wrong predictions. Fewer still seem to have asked “How can I improve this idea?”.

Religions placed the same burdens on their followers - the ancient saints and prophets had already figured everything out, your job was only to obey their commands. The Earth is flat, the Moon is farther than the Sun, it will rain if you sacrifice a goat, and so on. Why didn’t the ancients outright drop their beliefs after the fifth goat sacrifice failed to reverse the drought?

Falsifiable

The notion of asking reality to judge an idea is not an obvious one. The concept of having falsifiable beliefs is not a trivial one. If you say that it will rain when I sacrifice this goat, then if it doesn’t rain, your theory is wrong. By saying that one thing will happen, you are necessarily saying that the other things won’t happen. And yet, we walk around all day with beliefs that can explain anything that happens. Our beliefs cannot be falsified. They are safe from being disproved. They are also safe from being improved.

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change. If we want to have accurate beliefs about the world, we need to be ready to drop our existing beliefs. They are not good enough; if they were, why would we still suck like this? Seeking the truth calls for you to change your mind, which in turn demands that you have falsifiable ideas. And that is the first step towards becoming a scientist.