Adversarial Collaboration

> To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters.

I love the model of adversarial collaboration, and I don't dispute the extremely strong influence of social bonds on knowledge formation, but Kahneman is just wrong about this. I know he's wrong because I change my mind relatively frequently, about things of at least some consequence.

For a recent example, I was fairly sure that at the beginning of the pandemic, in the US, widespread, cheap testing would enable us to drive COVID cases near zero, and I wasn't shy about telling everyone I met. Obviously, I was wrong, for a variety of reasons - so I updated.

That intimate experience with uncertainty and updating my own beliefs makes me wonder about Kahneman's research methods. It makes me doubt whether this question is even tractable or whether people are even legible enough to researchers to draw conclusions about this.

Interestingly (and disarmingly) Khaneman is very forthright about the role his own experiences have played in convincing him that people in general don't change their minds. He writes:

> I was also impressed by the fact that Anne and I didn't change our minds. I had read Kuhn and Lakatos about the robustness of paradigms, but I didn't expect that minor theories would also be impervious to evidence.

also:

> I will now share a personal experience of belief perseverance that I cannot shake ... However, it turns out that I only changed my mind about the evidence. My view of how the mind works didn't change at all. The evidence is gone, but the beliefs are still standing. Indeed, I cannot think of a single important opinion that I have changed as a result of losing my faith in the studies of behavioral priming, although they seemed quite important to me at the time.

I think the most likely explanation for this is 1) social desirability bias has a dramatic influence on what information people make accessible about their cognition and 2) Kahneman is unusually stubborn, and his generalization from his own personality to all humankind is a manifestation of the typical mind fallacy. [0]

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy

You're right, it's about ideas, but the original article handles the interesting case where we fail to form or handle our ideas using "reason."

> The power of reasons is an illusion. The belief will not change when the reasons are defeated.

So privilege plays an interesting role. Unaware privilege - failing to see ones own circumstances, failing to assess how we fit in the world - is almost the same thing as non-reason. I suppose there could be a class of people who are like, "I am totally privileged, and somehow I delude myself and don't notice, but in every OTHER way I am totally reasonable." That could be a subgroup. But probably not a big one?

> We did not manage to solve even one none technical problem since we came down the trees. But that's nothing unexpected actually given we're a horde of apes. I'm old enough to know that nothing will ever change as we had already more than enough time to easily mange at least some "humanity scale" issues by now. But we as a species are seemingly bound to our ape nature.

Counter-example: The use of slavery as an energy source replaced by the use of electricity as an energy source.

When you want to listen to music, you open up Youtube (or Spotify, or your carefully curated collection of FLAC files, or whatever) and press play.

When Romans wanted to listen to music, they would tell the slaves to pick up the instrument and start playing.

That's a significant change, IMO.

EDIT: also, written language went from non-existant to 8 billion humans and 86% of them can read in a few thousand years.

> My theory is that physics is stuck in a local minima where it's not sufficient to change just one, or even two or three fundamental things to get unstuck. That's too big a leap via traditional incremental publishing of new theories. Any one change to the status quo won't work, and is rejected.

Makes me think of Stephen Wolframs current work. Guy's a genius, who's current stuff kind of reads like he's a crank. But at the same time I'm kind of rooting for a revolutionary paradigm that's gonna totally upend things.

Crazy -- just brought up Wolfram in response to a sibling comment before I saw this. Happy to see I'm not the only one.