Feel Free to Change Your Mind

The funny irony in life: it is seen as a virtue to be open minded, but to change your mind as seen as bad.

I say, the most wise and you can do is be stubborn with things you really truly believe in, but once you have found certain evidence that says otherwise, change your opinion and mind. To not change your mind in spite of new and contradictory evidence is foolish, and irrational.

Maybe it is a good thing to be contradictory

if our ultimate goal as thinkers and philosophers is to discover a deeper truth, then on a long enough time scale, you will discover that sooner or later you will contradict yourself. And one of my theories on why philosophers of the past didn’t contradict themselves as much is that they just didn’t live as long as we do nowadays.

“I changed my mind”

Perhaps this is a new phrase we should say more often: being open and proud that you did in fact change your mind and change your opinion.

The sad truth is that in order to be popular in politics, one should never contradict themselves, or flip-flop their opinion, even if they are found that they are wrong. The reason why Donald Trump is so popular was because he had a consistent message in a consistent opinion, and never doubted himself, without resorting to facts or other things.

To be skeptical and unsure is not popular

if somebody asks you a question, and you tell them you’re not 100% certain, they will not trust you. Unfortunately when people are seeking consultants for external advice, they want a clear-cut answer, even though it may be wrong.

For example, bureaucracy just wants to cover their butt. Therefore when they hire external consultants, it is essentially just outsourcing their risk assessment. For example let’s say that you are a fund manager, and you seek a risk number from an outside risk analyst, just in case you lose all of your clients money, you can just blame the analyst or the risk number, not yourself.

For example, when the housing crash first happened, it was seen as a “six sigma event”— an apparent statistical anomaly an impossibility, or an extreme outlier. But just because something has never happened before doesn’t mean that it cannot happen. For example, it is the thought that a lot of reckless drivers have: “I have not yet died in a car crash, therefore I cannot.”