suecochran comments on We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 October 2007 06:14PM

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Comment author: suecochran 10 April 2011 10:41:08PM *  3 points [-]

I used to have a button that said "If you haven't changed your mind lately, how do you know you've still got one?" I really liked that sentiment.

It's very easy to get comfortable with our opinions and beliefs, and uncomfortable about any challenge to them. As I've posted elsewhere, we often identify our "selves" with our "beliefs", as if they "were" us. Once we can separate our idea of "self" as different from "that which our self currently believes", it becomes easier to entertain other thoughts, and challenges from others, to our beliefs and opinions. If we are comfortable and secure in our own selves, then we can discuss dispassionately the ideas that contradict what we have previously held to be true. It is the only way that we can learn, that we can take in new and different ideas without that being a blow to our ego. Identifying our selves with our thoughts, opinions, beliefs, blocks us, threatens us, so that we get stuck with our old ways of doing things and framing things, and we don't grow and change with ease.