Accepting New Data

[dr_tectonic]

A couple people's recent posts about encounters with close-mindedness in one form or another got me thinking about the subject.

I'm not talking about refusing to change your mind, here, or labelling information 'bad' and tossing it out after only a casual inspection, but full-on rejection of any new data as not worth consideration because it conflicts with what you already believe.

It's something that really bothers me. A LOT. I'm sure it bothers everyone, because it's deeply disrespectful, but it probably bugs me more than most people. I suspect it comes from being smart as a kid and getting dismissed just because of age, not because I didn't actually know what I was talking about.

Anyway, because it bugs me so much, I worry about being close-minded myself. There's a fine line between filtering out junky information (and there's an awful lot of bad data out there) and closing yourself off from anything that might challenge your views. I'm pretty comfortable saying "I was wrong", but I also know that I have a lot of mental constructs that I regard as pretty solid and hard to dent.

But I read an essay yesterday that made me reconsider some of my conclusions about How The World Ought To Work. I still haven't quite absorbed it, but it's gone into the stewpot at the back of my brain to get incorporated.

So I guess I'm doing okay.

Comments

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Color me completely unsurprised.

One of the reasons politics makes me cranky is that so much of it is focused on winning and losing instead of figuring out the best thing to do.

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

Amen.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

What's the essay about?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Economics, roughly.

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming the essay isn't public because otherwise this would be way too teasing of you to not share it.

I definitely worry about being closed-minded myself, because I have strong opinions and well-established methods of defending those opinions. But I do attempt to see other ways of seeing things. Especially if an opposing viewpoint has a good reason for believing as they do. It's when people assert a position without being able to back it up that I tend to dismiss them.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

One of Paul Graham's. Public, I'm just still mulling it over and not quite ready to discuss it yet...

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

There is actually a phycological term for what you are describing. I just spend an hour looking for an article I read that described it, but couldn't find it. The article talks about how common it is for people to hold onto different beliefs, often quite contridictory, and reject out of hand any new information that might cause them to change or revise those beliefs. I think though, once you see that dynamic, you may still get stuck in a rut of belief, but you stop rejecting alternate points of view out of hand. Change and growth become possilbe, if slowly depending on how closely held the belief is. It is people who believe they are not only right, but rightous, that can't change because, obviously, they are right.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Is "cognitive dissonance" the term you're groping for?

[tdjohnsn.livejournal.com]

Ding ding ding ding ding

You win the prize! That's it! :-)

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I have spent quite a bit of the last few years teaching one of my students that cognitive dissonance is not a character flaw, but an essential part of being human. It hasn't worked all that well...

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

It's a very human thing. The question is, is it a good human thing?

Shattering one's illusions is hard. It sometimes breaks other things.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I think it's certainly essential in the field for which I was training my student, which is mathematical research. But it seems to me to be remarkably useful in other areas of human life, too.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

I think you gave me the wrong blunt tool.

I would agree that shattering your illusions is really good for mathematicians and to some extent programmers. Unfortunately, the really good mathematicians I've met are often Quite Mad. :-)

I suppose this begs a longer discussion about madness and genius, but I'm certainly not qualified to talk about it.

On the other hand, I'm reminded of a quote from the first Men in Black movie. It went something along the lines of people wanting their quiet lives. They don't want their comfortable universe shattered. People want the comfort in feeling that Everything is Normal. For someone who has shattered their illusions, there's always the moment of looking into the abyss and seeing that the world is a whirling stew of chaos where everything is perpetually teetering at the edge of the cliff. It takes a very big person to see such a thing and realize that everything usually will work out anyway.

The frightening people are the ones who see the patterns in the chaos and know how to give things that slight nudge. That nudge will have a disproportionately large impact on the system - and it be the one that they want.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I actually think it's a lot simpler than you're describing, and perhaps I was a bit too compromising in my previous comment.

I think people have to be able to keep contrasting stories in their head; to do otherwise is to lose the potential for empathy. (It's also bad for research, which is why it's my business with my student...)

I agree that cognitive dissonance is a place that's scary to be at, but I expect we all get to it. I'd guess that falling out of love is probably the most quotidian version. ("I love you, but I don't love you.")

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Ah, I think we're thinking of slightly different things.

I think it's very important to be able to hold multiple viewpoints in your head and be able to accept "this is what someone else thinks of believes". The outright dissonance I'm thinking of is when you're believing completely contradictory things when viewed against each other.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

That's why I mentioned the experience of simultaneously loving and not loving someone. [Which is at least something I've done...]

Similarly, I think most religious people (which is a category that includes me) have simultaneously hated and loved God, and probably (I know I have) simultaneously believed in and not believed in God.

Lote of more gentle things come to mind for me, such as in economics...

[zalena.livejournal.com]

You are speaking so much in generalities I can't speak to the particular subject. However, when you told your landlord that you were over the limit for adults in the apartment because you were in a relationship absolutely blew my mind. I would have never had the courage to do that because I would have ASSUMED that the landlord's bias would prevent us from renewing the lease.

I was impressed by your allowing the other guy to see your point of view. It's something I rarely attempt to do.

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

Oh, my rant about the Consumer Reports ad set you off, eh?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

Not actually. But it was a good rant!

Late entry

[ng-nighthawk.livejournal.com]

It's tough, I think, because clearly once I've worked something out, I don't want to go through that process again every time the issue comes up. Like, for example, is it okay to read and comment on blog posts when I'm at work? My conclusion has been so long as I work at home, I am avoiding the whole co-worker small talk thing, which is a time suck at the office. So this just replaces that--and having some time to be making my brain work in different directions increases my overall productivity.

So somebody then questions me, and asks if it really makes sense for me to be commenting on this post while I'm supposed to be at work. Now, I have to find a way to decide whether they have a valid point that I should process, dig into, and possibly respond to, or whether their arguments just go over the stuff I've already processed.

How do you make that call? I think that the answer to that question is the difference between being closed-minded and reasonable. A person who is open to any point anyone makes about anything at any time is probably someone who doesn't have a lot of time for much else. A person who rules it all out is probably someone who has a lot of wrong answers that will never get challenged. The middle ground, however, is tricky to do fairly.