Some advice from Jeff Bezos

I suspect the racist tag was applied because stereotypically white men are slower runners than black men. But as far as racism goes that's... not to mention that it's a white guy talking about himself.

The whole concept of "flip flopping" being a bad thing is something from the political arena that spilled out into a broader social context.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with changing your mind as your understanding evolves.

I would argue that this is the defining factor in what makes someone intelligent or not. If you're always revising your ways of thinking about a problem, your probability of converging on a solution is vastly greater than someone with a narrow, one-track focus. In fact, another article on the HN homepage (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/streams-of-consciousness...) elaborates on this point of trying multiple "solution paths" to arrive at an answer to a problem.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people get it in their head that they've discovered the "right way" and dismiss every other idea. This problem is particularly notorious in subjects like quantum mechanics. The field is so confusing that people find some kind of local comprehension maximum that they get stuck in and refuse to budge from that sort of ideology (which is often the wrong ideology by the way since QM is such a deep subject. Throw some quantum field theory or standard model physics at a quantum chemistry professor or TA and they won't know what to make of it).

To give a more concrete example: did you know that a spinning ball weighs more than the same ball when it is stationary? Tell this to someone decently knowledgable in physics and there's a good chance they'll argue vehemently against you based on their misunderstanding (or misinformation) of what they've learned in the past. Sometimes the effort to convince someone of an idea like this isn't worth the time; these people are locked into one way of thinking and take it as an affront to their ego. There's limited intelligence here. Don't want to be like this? Don't get angry when someone challenges you. That's the best way to start. I've never understood why so many people get upset if you try to point out a flaw in their reasoning. I've noticed this sort of anger much less frequently on HN (on the other hand, there's significantly more "you're wrong" posts than a normal discussion board).

In fact, do a little experiment if you wish. Look through HN stories and find places where people challenge each other in the comments. If you notice someone who says "you know what -- you're correct" or "yeah, that makes more sense", there's a good chance they make a lot of intelligent posts on here. If you find someone that never concedes to anyone else, it's likely they are locked into one and only one way of thinking and are unlikely to ever do anything considered "genius".

I understand it in a similar way...

People like security and therefore stability, it's one of our basic needs. We like stable environment, including people's opinions. Imagine everyone changes their opinion all the time, it could be fun but not everyone would like that :)

Also, people who often change opinions may look dishonest, opportunistic and unpredictable.

> The problem with this, is that most opinions are applied to most circumstances in highly contextual ways. What's the best database? It's one thing to talk about it in abstract and another entirely to talk about it for a specific project.

That doesn't prevent someone from being right 100% of the time. It may prevent them from saying "x is the best database", but not from saying "x is the best for y use, z is the best for... etc"

The problem is with the fact that no-one is capable of always being right, not that the hypothetical person couldn't always be right.