Not that he said, but I guess it was a status thing. Another curious feature of his discourse was that on mailing lists he would never post a direct reply to anything, with a "Re:" in the subject line. He engaged with the conversations, but always framed his postings as if they were entirely new contributions -- as if one were to participate here by only posting top level articles. I assume this was also about status.

FWIW, I always struggle to embrace it when I change my mind ("Yay, I'm less wrong!")

But I admit, I find it hard, "advocating a new point of view" is a lot easier than "admitting I was wrong about a previous point of view", so maybe striving to do #1 whether or not you've done #2 would help change my mind in response to new information a lot quicker?